Topic 3 - Secularisation Flashcards
Crockett - 1851 Census of Religious Worship
40% adults went to ⛪ on Sunday
Major changes in UK religion:
- Decline in population going to ⛪
- ⬆️ in average age of churchgoers
- ⬇️baptism, ⛪ weddings
- ⬆️diversity of religions
Wilson - Western long-term secularisation
‘The process whereby religious beliefs, practices and institutions lose social significance’
Wilson - evidence
40% ⛪ attendance 1850s
10-15% ⛪ attendance 1960’s
Sunday 🚸, baptism, 💒 ⬇️
How much of the adult population attended church by 2020?
4%
What organisations have⬇️ and which have⬆️?
Large orgs decline - Catholic Church
Small orgs grow
⬇️💒 evidence
1971 - 59% 💍♥️💒
2018 - 20% 💍♥️💒
Bogus Baptisms:
⬆️older children baptised, entry ticket into good schools ❌sign of ✝ devotion
Catholic Baptism decline:
Today is under half those in 1964
Religious affiliation trend
Continuous decline
Religious affiliation meaning
Membership/identification w/ a religion
Religious affiliation decline evidence:
Between 1983 - 2018 % adults with no religion ⬆ under 1/3 to over 1/2
Anglicans ⬇️3/4
Christians ✝⬇⬇ 40%
Why did the number of Catholics increase slightly?
East European immigration
What other religion increased due to immigration (and higher birth rates)?
Islam
What is declining along with ⛪ attendance?
Religious belief (in afterlife, God, etc)
What has declined due to the decrease of religious practice?
The influence of religion as a social institution (on public life)
Why does the church have little influence on public life?
State has taken over many of the functions the ⛪ used to perform, used to be pervasive. Increasingly confined to private individual sphere
Give some examples of roles the church had that have been taken over by the state:
Education, welfare, law
BBC 2005 survey
Schools failed the requirement of providing one daily collective act of worship of ‘broadly Christian character’
Woodhead - Clergy
'’To put it bluntly, there are no longer enough troupers left to keep the show on the road’’
⛪ Day to day activities reduced
Declining Clergy
45,000–> ⬇️–> 34,000 20th Century
Should have been 80,000 in line w/ population📈
Clergy🧓🏻
Ageing workforce
2020 - average age = 52🧓🏻
Catholic ordinations for new priests = 1/10 of 1965 figure
Bruce ✅Wilson
‘Steady and unremitting 📉’
Methodist Church fold 2030
Church of England - small voluntary org, lots of heritage property
What is Weber’s (overall) theory?
Rationalisation
What is rationalisation?
The process why which rational ways of thinking and acting come to replace religious ones.
What is the impact of rationalisation?
Undermines religious worldview of Middle Ages an replaces it w/ rational scientific outlook found in modern society
When does Weber argue that Western society began to undergo rationalisation of life?
Since the Protestant Reformation by Matin Luther in 16th Century
What does Weber argue dominated Europe pre-rationalisation?
Medieval Catholic Worldview
What does Weber argue the medieval Catholic worldview saw the world as?
An ‘enchanted/magical garden’
What does Weber mean by the ‘enchanted/magical garden’ view of the 🗺?
(Interventionist) God and other spiritual beings believed to be present, active, changing course of events through supernatural powers/miraculous interventions
How did humans believe they could influence these forces during medieval times?
Prayers, spells, fasts, pilgrimage, charms
What kind of worldview did the Protestant Reformation bring?
Saw God as transcendent - existing outside this world, created the 🌍but did not intervene, run according to laws of nature
How is the Protestant worldview different to the Catholic one?
Events no longer explained by unpredictable supernatural beings but predictable workings of natural forces.
What needs to be understood in Protestant worldview?
Rationality - power of reason
What is there no longer a need for in Protestant worldview?
Religious explanations
What is the explanation of events by science + nature called?
Disenchantment of the 🌍
Bruce
Technological worldview replaces/ leaves little room for supernatural explanations
What does the disenchantment of the world lead to?
Gets rid of religious discourse ➡Rationalisation process ➡Dominance of rational mode of 💭enables 🧬🔗🧪🩺💊thrive and provide basis for tech advances that give humans more power to control things in the world ➡Undermines religion
Where do religious explanations survive?
In areas where technology is least effective or unexplainable.
What is Brice’s conclusion regarding the technological worldview?
Scientific explanations don’t challenge religion directly, greatly reducing the scope for religious explanations.
What is Parsons’ secularisation theory?
Structural differentiation.
What is structural differentiation?
Process of specialization that occurs with the development of industrial society.
What happens to functions in structural differentiation?
Separate, specialized institutions develop to carry out functions that were previously performed by a single institution.
When did religion dominate?
Pre-industrial society.
What has religion become, according to Parsons, because of the industrial revolution?
A smaller and more specialized institution.
According to Parsons, what does structural differentiation lead to?
Disengagement of religion.
What do sacred symbols represent, in Durkheim’s view?
Society’s collective conscience.
Define collective conscience.
Shared norms, values, beliefs, and knowledge that make social life and cooperation between individuals possible.
What does Durkheim argue that regular shared religious rituals reinforce?
The collective conscience and maintain social integration.
Explain the functional view of shared rituals
Bind individuals. Remind them of the single community to which they owe their loyalty
Remind people of power of society to which they owe everything, and are nothing without
What is the disengagement of religion (Parsons)?
Its functions are transferred to other institutions + it becomes disconnected from wider society (loses influence)
What does Bruce say has happened to religion in relation to disengagement?
It has become privatised - religious beliefs matter of personal choice and traditional symbols/rituals lost meaning
Give an example of religion having to conform to secular state requirements
Teachers in faith schools must hold qualifications recognised by the state.
How have church and state become separated in modern society?
Modern states increasingly accept religion as personal choice, state should not be identified w/ one faith
Wilson - social/cultural diversity
Decline of (pre-industrial) community - previously shared values expressed though collective religious rituals integrating into close knit community.
Bruce - Industrialisation
Undermines religious consensus in small, rural communities. These give way to diverse urban areas. Social and geographic mobility breaks up small communities, but also creates diversity.
Bruce - Diversity of jobs/cultures/lifestyles undermining religion?
- Plausibility undermined by alternatives of others around them, even if one is religious
- Individualism undermines practicing community of believers
Criticisms: Aldridge
Community doesn’t have to be particular area
Religion = source of identity for ☪️-✡️-🪯
Religious communities = Imagined - interact through global media
Pentecostal - flourish ‘impersonal’ urban areas
According to Berger, what trend is the most important factor contributing to secularisation?
Religious diversity
What is religious diversity?
Instead of there being only one religious organisation and only one interpretation of the faith, there are many
What is the ‘sacred canopy’?
Monopoly held by the Catholic Church over religion. No competition, everyone lived under the a single set of shared beliefs, giving Catholicism greater plausibility because they were unquestioned and unchallenged.
When did the ‘sacred canopy’ exist?
In the Middle Ages
When did the ‘sacred canopy’ seize to unite society?
During the Protestant Reformation - no longer claim unchallenged monopoly over truth
What does religious diversity create?
A plurality of life worlds
Explain the undermining of the ‘plausibility structure’
Lots of alternatives ➡️❓all religion ➡️erodes certainties of traditional religion ➡️ becomes personal POV ➡️creates possibility of opting out altogether
What does religious diversity undermine, according to Berger?
Religion’s plausibility structure (crisis of credibility)
What is a plurality of life worlds?
Where people’s perceptions of the world vary + have different interpretations of truth
What did Berger change his view to argue?
Diversity + choice stimulate interest/participation in religion
Give examples to show continuing vitality of religion - (Berger)
Growth of evangelicalism in Latin America
New Christian Right in USA
Beckford: Religious diversity
Can lead to ❓/ abandoning religion ➡️ NOT inevitable
Can strengthen existing commitment ☓ undermine
What are the counter-trends/functions of religion Bruce identifies?
- Cultural defence
- Transition
What is ‘cultural defence’?
Religion provides focal point for defence of national, ethnic, local identity in a struggle against external force.
Give some examples of cultural defence
- Popularity of Catholicism in Poland before communism’s fall.
- Resurgence of Islam pre-revolution in Iran in 1979
- Popularity of Catholicism in Poland before communism’s fall.
Resurgence of Islam pre-revolution in Iran in 1979
Religion provides sense of community + support for ethnic groups (e.g. migrants) to a different country/culture.
Give some examples of religions role in cultural ‘transition’
- Herberg - religion, immigration USA
- Irish, African Caribbean, Muslim, Hindu migrants to UK
What does Bruce argue about religions relevance in these situations (defence and transition)?
Only survives because it is the focus for group identity
Does cultural defence and transition disprove secularisation? Why?
No. Shows religion is most likely to survive where it performs functions other than relating people to the supernatural
Evidence to show that CD + T does not disprove secularisation?
⛪ attendance declined in Poland after communism fell
Evidence shows religion loses importance after migrants integrate
1962 - Wilson - ⛪
45% Americans attended on Sunday
Wilson - ⛪ going
Expression of ‘American way of life’ ❌ religious zeal
USA = secular = religion had become superficial
Bruce ✅Wilson - 3 sources of evidence
- Declining ⛪ attendance
- ‘Secularisation from within’
- Trend of religious diversity/relativism
Hadaway - Ohio ⛪
👩🏻count at ⛪ VS interviewing about attendance
Attendance claimed to be 83% higher in interviews
⛪ Hadaway
Opinion poll - Constant attendance 40% since 1940
Exaggerated figure, ⛪ would be full
What does Bruce say amounts to ‘secularisation from within’?
The way US religion has adjusted to the modern world. Emphasis on traditional Christian beliefs has declined and religion has become ‘psychologised’ into a form of therapy.
Study of Catholic Mass - San Francisco
1972 - 47% exaggeration
1996 - 101% exaggeration
Explain the difference in numbers
Socially desirable/normative to attend, people who don’t lie in surveys
What has the purpose of religion in the USA changed?
From seeking salvation in heaven to seeking personal improvement in this world
How has US religion remained popular?
By becoming less religious
How can the decline of traditional beliefs be seen in American people?
Churchgoers much less strict in adherence to traditional religious morality (Hunter)
What is practical relativism, the trend Bruce identifies in US Christians?
Acceptance of the view that others are entitles to hold beliefs that are different to one’s own
Lynd and Lynd - Practical relativism
1924 - 94% agreed ‘All people should be converted to Christianity’
1977 - 41% agreed
Criticism 3
⛪ attendance figures ignores people who believe but don’t go to church
What is the counterpart to practical relativism?
Erosion of absolutism - diversity of views undermines our assumption that one’s own views are 100% true.
Criticism 1
Religion not declining - changing form
Criticism 4
Eurocentric - religion has not declined globally so secularisation is not universal
Criticism 5
Past ❌ ‘Golden Age’ faith
Future❌ Age of atheism
Criticism 6
RD ⬆️ participation by offering choice
No overall downward trend
What are the overall reasons for secularisation?
