“What Really Causes Secularization?”
Mary Eberstadt
Archbishop’s Lecture Series
Archdiocese of Philadelphia
November 17, 2014
Good evening. Thank you for that warm welcome.
It’s a great honor to be here in Philadelphia under the auspices of your great Archbishop
Charles Chaput. Perhaps I should say, your great and elusive Archbishop, since I have
tried several times but not yet managed to meet this intellectual and spiritual hero of mine
and so many others. Two years ago, I went to Denver to give the Chaput Lecture, but he
was not there. Last winter I tried to come to Philadelphia to give another Chaput Lecture
-- but a blizzard intervened. And here I am tonight at a Chaput Lecture – and the
archbishop is in Rome. So I guess I will just keep signing up for Chaput Lectures until
one of them gets me to Archbishop Chaput. Though he does have a pretty good excuse
for missing this one. Congratulations, Philadelphia, on the news from Rome today.
Please allow me just a few more words of introduction. I’m not a professor.
Unlike many people who address you, I’m not a theologian or philosopher or expert in
the history of the church. I’m instead an ambassador of sorts in the world of ideas, a wife
and mother who has found in writing an often depressing but occasionally exhilarating
and annoyingly inescapable avocation.
In a recent a lecture by someone known to some of you, Prof. Russell Hittinger, he
reflected in a most absorbing way on the following notion. Saint John Paul II, he said,
believed the central problem of our age to be anthropological -- in the specific sense that
the years since the Enlightment have handed down to us a negative account of
humankind, one that is crabbed and diminished compared to what it once was and ought
to be again. As part of that negative anthropology, the link between creature and Creator,
which was once vivid to a great many people, appears in modern times to be more
opaque.
We are here tonight to consider what it is about our world that obscures the link between
Creator and creature. We will start by asking a simple yet radical question that can only
be asked in a world where negative anthropology sits in the conceptual drivers seat. That
question is: what causes secularization?
This is, on the surface, a simple question. It is only three words long. It seems on the
surface as if the towering apparatus of modern social science, with its metrics and spread
sheets and innumerable data, ought to be able to answer it. And yet, at the same time,
“What causes secularization?” is also a radical question. Ever since the Enlightenment,
religious believers have been on defense. Ever since the Enlightenment, it has been
supposed in many sophisticated circles that religious belief is the outlier, the weird thing,
the artifact that needs to be “explained.” To turn this question around, and say that it’s not
religion but the lack of it that needs explaining, is both radical and overdue.
Asking instead “what causes secularization?” turns the conceptual tables on the longrunning conversation about religion in the Western world. Put differently, the question,
“What causes secularization?” turns negative anthropology into something else: a patient
that requires diagnosis. As with any diagnosis, if we can just figure out what’s really
ailing the patient, we might even be able to change his condition. That’s another reason
why “what causes secularization?” is a good question to ask.
After all, evidence from all over human history goes to show that humanity, generally
speaking, is theo-tropic, leaning toward God, inclined to believe in transcendence. When
measured against the sweep of human history, it is in fact secularization, not religiosity,
that is the anomaly requiring explanation.
In short, and one way or another, the puzzle of secularization, or how it is that
societies that were once religious have become markedly less so, is one of the most
interesting historical puzzles in the world.
Now let’s look at the question empirically for a moment. What do we mean by
secularization? Here are just a few statistics from Western Europe. Something called the
European Values Survey includes data from four “waves” (1981, 1990, 1999, and 2008).
In nine out of eleven countries, belief in God dropped steadily over that time. In all but
one of them, Church attendance also dropped. All kinds of other numbers could be used
too. Just last year, a report made headline news across Britain, because it showed that
self-professed Christians will be a minority of the population there even sooner than
supposed — in fact, within the decade.
Nor, contrary to what some believe, is this just a Protestant thing. Something like
15 percent of the population of “Catholic” Venice attends Mass every Sunday — which is
particularly emblematic since Catholics are taught that missing it for any but the gravest
of reasons is a mortal sin. “Catholic” Spain doesn’t measure up much better. On it goes
across the Continent and into Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and more — including the
United States, where a steady rise in “none of the above” has been documented,
especially among younger Americans. And beyond just showing up — or not — there are
other measures of secularization to consider too: the commercial success of the new
atheism, the growth in public animosity toward Christianity in many parts of the West,
changing legal norms, and other examples discussed in the book.
For a while it seemed as if secularization might be just a Northern or Western
European thing; but now we know better. In his recent Erasmus Lecture, Archbishop
Chaput discussed the particularly dramatic example of French-speaking Canada, which
like Ireland has gone from being a highly observant society to a largely secular one in just
a couple of generations. Even far more religious Poland, for all its devotion, is not
immune to these trends, either. Poland’s Statistical Institute of the Catholic Church, for
example, reports that weekly attendance at Mass has dropped over ten percentage points
in the past quarter century or so. Similarly, the United States remains considerably more
religious as measured by both belief and attendance than any country in Western Europe.
Yet the United States, too, shows an increase in the number of young people, especially,
who forsake organized religion altogether, who are known as “none of the above” in
surveys when asked for their formal affiliation.
All of this means secularization is a phenomenon that remains to be explained
from which no particular nation or society appears truly immune. So now let’s move on
to ask: what happened here? How did significant swaths of the world, especially but not
only in Europe, go from being societies that widely feared God to societies that in some
places now widely jeer God?
Let’s look briefly but intently at the answers offered to that question by
conventional thinking, insofar as conventional thinking has paused even to consider this
question.
First: a great many people suppose, with varying degrees of sophistication, that
prosperity drives out God. They think that when people get richer and better educated,
they go godless. Christianity, in the minds of many sophisticated secular people, is
Marx’s famous “opiate of the masses” – a consolation prize for the poor and backward.
Even when they’re too polite to say so outright, many people do believe this stereotype. It
was rather flagrantly exhibited, for example, in a somewhat notorious piece in the
Washington Post in 1993 that described the followers of leading American evangelicals
as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.”i
Everyone “knows” these things – yet in actual fact few people, especially those
who use stereotypes like these to explain the weakening of Western Christianity, seem to
know the empirical truth. If the conventional account of secularization were sound -- if it
correctly predicted who was religious, and why -- then we would reasonably expect that
the poorer and less educated people are, the more religious they would be. So the fact that
these stereotypes are not correct, and that the opposite has been the case in some
significant instances, would appear in and of itself to falsify conventional accounts of
what happened to the Christian God.
Let’s start overseas. A British historian named Hugh McLeod has done
painstaking work on historical London between the 1870s and 1914. As documented in
his Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City, for example, among Anglicans in
London during that period, “the poorest districts thus tended to have the lowest rates of
[Church] attendance, [and] those with large upper-middle-class and upper-class
populations the highest.”ii In other words -- and in contrast to the perhaps Dickensian
image of the pious poor morally and otherwise outshining a debauched and irreligious
upper class -- reality among the populace seems to have been the opposite in Victorian
London. “Only a small proportion of working-class adults,” he observes, “attended the
main Sunday church services” (Irish Catholics being the sole exception). British
historian Callum G. Brown, another expert on the numbers, makes the same point about
religiosity in the U.K. during those years: that contrary to common wisdom, “the working
class were irreligious, and that the middle classes were the churchgoing bastions of civil
morality.”iii
Much the same pattern can be found in the United States today. It is one more
pattern subversive of the idea that economic and intellectual sophistication are somehow
the natural enemies of Christian faith -- or that personal enlightenment and sophistication
explain the current condition of Christian practice.
A prominent book published in 2010 by sociologists Robert D. Putnam and David
E. Campbell called American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, for example,
refutes the notion that religiosity in the United States is a lower-class thing. During the
first half of the twentieth century, the authors observe, college-educated people
participated more in churches than did those with less education.iv This pattern changed
during the 1960s, which saw church attendance fall off most among the educated. But
following that “shock” there emerged another pattern, according to which attendance
tended again to rise faster among the educated than it did among the less educated. As the
authors observe, “this trend is clearly contrary to any idea that religion is nowadays
providing solace to the disinherited and dispossessed, or that higher education subverts
religion.”v
The point of these numbers is not to invent some new ugly stereotype according
to which believers area now said to be the best and brightest. It’s rather to observe that
things just aren’t what they seem in these matters, and that this reality calls our whole
accepted idea of secularization into question.
Similarly, in research summarized in another wide-ranging recent book on
American social class called Coming Apart: The State of White America, political
scientist Charles Murray makes a similar point. The upper 20 percent of the American
population, data from the General Social Survey show, are considerably more likely than
the lower 30 percent to believe in God and to go to church. Among the working class, 61
percent – a clear majority – either say they do not go to church or believe in God, or both;
among the upper class, it is 42 percent. “Despite the common belief that the white
working class is the most religious group in white American society,” Murray
summarizes, “the drift from religiosity was far greater in Fishtown [his imaginary
working-class community] than in Belmont [a better-off suburb].” As a headline on
msnbc.com once pithily summarized related work by American sociologists W. Bradford
Wilcox and Andrew Cherlin, “Who is Going to Church? Not Who You Think.” So as
Victorian England and the United States today go to show, prosperity and education
alone do not necessarily drive out God.
All right, let’s try another common explanation. Is secularization then the
inevitable result of increased rationality and enlightenment, as the new atheists and other
theorists claim? Is it the result of widespread literacy and better education?
Here again, the empirical fact that the well-educated Mormon, say, is more likely
to be someone of faith would appear to confound that theory.
All right, let’s try another theory: is secularization then the result of the world
wars, as still other people have supposed? Did Western men and women lose their faith in
a benevolent Creator when faced with the unprecedented horrors and body counts of
World War II, especially – the invasions, the bombing of civilians, the Holocaust? The
idea that the Holocaust drove out God was especially on my mind this summer, when our
oldest child and I visited Auschwitz. It is indeed hard to stare into a pit full of human
ashes, a pit so large that it still exists seventy-plus years later, without thinking about the
problem of evil.
And yet the argument from the world wars also fails as an explanation for
secularization, for two reasons.
One, if that were so, it is hard to see how countries with different experiences of
those wars – neutral Switzerland, vanquished Germany, victorious Great Britain —
should all lose their religions in tandem, let alone why countries untouched by the wars
should follow suit.
Second, and even more to the point: the end of World War II was in fact followed
by a religious boom – one that occurred not only in the United States but across the
religious boomlet much remarked upon by sociologists of the time, and still within living
memory of some Western people today. Those years were such that Will Herberg, the
most prominent sociologist of religion in America, could observe in his classic book
Protestant-Catholic-Jew that the village atheist was a figure of the past, and that even
agnosticism seemed to be waning. That’s how resurgently observant America in the
1950s had become.
And not only America. The religious boomlet following the war was also panWestern in scope, as some British sociologists especially have documented (footnotes in
the book). It applied to the vanquished as well as the victorious, the neutral as well as
everyone else, the economically devastated as well as the prosperous. And in the public
realm, the rhetoric of leaders was pro-Christian in a way that today strikes us as
unbelievable. German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, to take just one example, said in a
famous speech in Cologne that Germany had gone over to the Nazis because its
Christianity hadn’t been strong enough. Imagine any public leader in Europe or even
America making any such connection today. And that’s just one of many examples that
could be cited, including the extraordinary popularity during the 1950s of Christian
themes in – of all places – Hollywood. Many more examples could be offered, but the
point is already obvious: the religious boom of the immediate postwar era in and of itself
refutes two ideas: one, that Christian decline is inevitable; and two, that the world wars in
and of themselves caused secularization.
So here we have three common explanations for secularization that simply don’t
hold up. And on it goes. Modern sociology can tell us many things, but about the
elemental question of why people stop going to church — or for that matter, why they
start — the going theories have all come up short. Contrary to what secular soothsayers
have believed, evidence suggests that secularization is not inevitable. Rather, and
crucially, religion waxes and wanes in the world — strong one moment, weaker the next
— for reasons that still demand to be understood.
The real answer, I believe, has to do with a variable so seemingly humble as to
have been overlooked by the titans of sociology no less than by their many descendants.
That variable is the human family – more specifically, the relationship between the health
of the family and the health of Christianity. To study the historical timeline is to see that
religious vibrancy and family vibrancy go hand in hand. Conversely, so do religious
decline and family decline: where you see one, expect the other.
Titans of sociology such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber understood in their
own ways what most thinkers today, including the new atheists, do not – namely, why
religion might, from a secular perspective, exist in the first place. But they and their
intellectual heirs neglected to give satisfactory attention to this other question: what
causes it to come and go? In all likelihood, most of them did not believe it could wax as
well as wane. Yet the evidence shows that Christianity has done just that.
Let’s return again to those years of postwar religiosity as one test case of this
theory about the family. Strikingly enough, the religious boom overlay perfectly with
another phenomenon of those years that was much-studied in the years since: the Baby
Boom, which in turn was preceded by a boom in marriage. Across the Western world,
and again, including the war was followed by an increase in marriage and babies. Is it not
just common sense to think that the Baby Boom and the religious boom didn’t just go
hand in hand, but fueled one another– that each trend powered and reinforced the other in
a way highly suggestive of what really makes Christianity tick?
What being proposed here is the idea is that something about families (and in all
likelihood, more than one “something”) increases the likelihood that people will go to
church and believe in God. And as the book argues at greater length, this is so for all sorts
of reasons.
One is simply pragmatic -- because mothers and fathers will seek out a likeminded moral community in which to situate their children. Childrearing is hard work
and the enormity of the undertaking weighs heavily on most parents. As a Baptist pastor
said to me recently, almost every new person who enters his pews is a mom or dad with a
baby in arms. In this prosaic way, as in others, the creation of a family literally drives
some people to church – and conversely, what has not been so well studied but is
obviously also true, the lack of a family can be assumed to have the opposite effect.
There’s another way, less prosaic, in which becoming a mother or father appears
to have an effect on religiosity. The very experience of birth, of simply being mothers
and fathers, transports many people into a religious frame of mind because the primal
bond between parent and child is for most people the most powerful they will ever
experience. Its unique force is reflected in some of the masterpieces of human history,
not to put too fine a point on things. That’s why King Lear is nearly universally
recognized as Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, whereas, say, Romeo and Juliet for all its
pathos is not – because the predeceasing of Lear by daughter Cordelia represents the
worst tragedy life can hand a human being, at least as far as the mothers and fathers are
concerned. In these ways as in others, one can argue, communal life within the family
might incline people toward religion generally, and specifically toward Christianity.
We do know from social science that people who are married are more likely to
go to church than not, and that people who are married with children – especially married
men – are far more likely to be found in church than single people. My point is to connect
those dots to explain that these trends are not mere coincidences.
Now let’s consider the theory from the other side of the telescope: What’s the
most secular territory on Western earth today? Scandinavia. Who pioneered the postwar
unmarried Western family and its close ally, the welfare state (whose arguably critical
role in secularization is also part of this picture)? Scandinavia. What is arguably the most
atomized place in the Western world today, as measured by, say, the number of people
who don’t live in a family at all? Scandinavia again. Almost half of Swedish households
are now singletons, for instance, and in Norway it’s something like 40 percent.
That’s just one example of what I dub the “double helix” of family and faith at
work. What’s happened in the Scandinavian family is also affecting the Scandinavian
churches. The causal relationship isn’t only the other way around. Each institution needs
the other to reproduce.
Looking at matters this way makes the “puzzle” of secularization less of a puzzle
— and also casts doubt on the going secular notion that the fall-off in religious
observance is just a matter of people progressively coming to their senses about the God
racket. That caricature is what many secular people believe, but it’s not what the record
shows.
There is also another potent fact that can only be mentioned in passing here but
that is also obviously part of this picture. Christianity as a religion is itself intrinsically
familial, meaning that it both privileges the family and tells its own story via family
metaphors time and again. This is a religion that begins, after all, with a baby and a Holy
Family – a mother who suborns herself to the child completely and a loving, adoptive
father. How could a story like that NOT cause confusion in a time of fractured and
atomized families like our own? How can you even explain a concept like God the
benevolent father to a teenager who’s never known such a figure? That’s just one
example of how changes in the way many of us live today affect the churches for reasons
that have nothing to do with personal belief.
Or take one more example which is common in millions of households now: the
fact of shared custody of children, where many kids spend alternating weekends with
their divorced mom or dad. Here again, just the fact of family life under those modern
circumstances makes it less likely that religion will get passed down. Juggling custody
along with everything else might make the simple logistics of getting to church seem
insurmountable.
In all of these ways, and in others, the changes in family formation that are now
common across the Western world make the Christian religious story seem more
incoherent or remote to many people than it did for many centuries before. It’s like trying
to explain to someone who has only ever lived in apartment buildings what it’s like to
live in a house when he’s never even seen one. The effort isn’t impossible. But it’s more
of an uphill climb than it would otherwise be.
In closing, I’d like to say a few words about one other aspect of secularization that
has gotten no attention at all as yet, but that I hope to be addressing down the road. That
is the relationship between the decline in Western churchgoing – and the rise of a toxic
public force known by shorthand as the new intolerance.
“The New Intolerance” refers to the chilled public atmosphere in which many
religious believers now operate, particularly in the advanced nations of the world. We’re
not talking here about the many Christians elsewhere who are persecuted and martyred
for the faith, and whose plight pierces all civilized people. We’re talking instead about
religious believers in societies from the United States to Europe to other citadels of
Western civilization. These people face unique burdens of their own these days that have
only recently arisen – the burdens of ostracism, of losing the good opinion of their
neighbors, of being trash-talked in the public square. Some Christians even face the loss
of livelihood, or the constant threat and reality of litigation.
These and other penalties for being Christian are arising from the fact that the
sexual revolution and Christianity are now clashing head-on. Anyone concerned about
secularization has got to be concerned about the new intolerance – because the new
intolerance will cause secularization, by making people fear for themselves and for those
they love. Fear of the new intolerance amounts for many people to one more reason not
to go to church.
Consider just one particularly important microcosm: the college campus – not the
religious campus, but the others.
It is well known and well documented by social science that many students,
not only in America but all over, tend to lose their religious belief and loosen their
religious practice in college. The interesting question is why. An atheist might say
it’s because college is where students learn higher reasoning, and higher reasoning
drives out the superstition of faith. Again, as we saw earlier in the speech, something
else is going on; the answer from sophistication just doesn’t hold up under empirical
inspection.
To my knowledge, in fact, no one has ever explained the connection between going
off to college and losing one’s religious faith. So here is a new hypothesis. It is also
well-known, and well-documented, that the campus these days is ground zero of the
new intolerance. Let me quote from a lengthy piece by Mark Bauerlein just
published in the New Criterion. “At this point,” he observes, “to subordinate
literature to socio-political stuff is basic disciplinary etiquette.” By socio-political
stuff, he is referring to what is otherwise known as political correctness, meaning
the stern and unspoken speech codes that govern so much of campus life that
they have been denounced by prominent liberals as well as conservatives, as
Bauerlein writes.
We can extrapolate from his essay to a larger phenomenological point. Not
only the humanities, not only intellectual life itself, is threatened by these codes
that are part of the new intolerance. So too are actual students, in the sense that
the intimidation factor cannot help but get to them.
There is no faster way to get laughed on many modern quads than to
declare oneself a religious believer. Surely that has something to do with the fact
that college students often stop going to church – meaning also that it has
something to do with secularization, as many of them will bring that habit with
them to the wider world.
The decline of Christianity in parts of the advanced nations of the world, in
summary, is not incidental to the change in Western family patterns. It didn’t just happen
randomly alongside the sexual revolution. No, the two are joined at the root and entwined
there in more ways than one.
But the bottom line, for all the bad news, is profoundly optimistic. It’s that
conventional thinking on the subject has gotten rather a big thing wrong: on inspection,
there’s nothing inevitable and foregone about religious decline after all. The good news
for people who care about these things is that the real end to either institution, family or
religious faith, has yet to be written.
Michael Weisskopf, “'Gospel Grapevine’ Displays Strength in Controversy over Military Gay Ban,”
Washington Post, February 1, 1993.
ii
Hugh McLeod, ibid., p. 28.
i
iii
Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, p. 149.
Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New
York NY: Simon and Schuster, 2010), p. 252.
v
Putnam and Campbell, ibid., p. 253.
iv