58 ‘Secularisation’: Religion in the Modern World

Bryan Wilson

From the perspective of religion, the single most important feature of the modern world is its secularity. Sociologists of contemporary affairs regularly refer to ‘this secular age’; ‘secular society’ and ‘the process of secularisation’, and the Christian clergy and Jewish rabbinate (as the religious professionals of the dominant religious traditions of advanced Western countries) frequently acknowledge the prevailing secularity which has depleted their congregations and diminished their social influence.

The term ‘secularisation’ is, however, unspecific, and the very width of its application has given rise to controversy and uncertainty. It may allude to religious practice (which, in such matters as congregational attendance, is perhaps the most easily available and apparently objective indicator). It may refer to religious institutions and the changes that have occurred in the internal character of their ideology, ritual and organisation. It may allude to the place of religion within the social system taken as a whole. There are other possible applications. The evidence with respect to the relative vigour of religion is various and not necessarily all one way, and whilst most commentators allude to secularisation as a readily assumed matter of fact of contemporary Western society, some apparently contrary indicators can be invoked and need to be taken into account.

One source of confusion arises from the confusion of secularisation with secularism. Secularisation is a sociological concept which refers to an aspect of processes of structural change in society. By way of illustration, we may take the structural change that occurs as work techniques develop. More extensive division of labour and increase in productivity follow. In turn, these developments historically facilitated urban growth. One consequence was the decline of the influence of the local community and the growth of a more impersonal society (the replacement of the Gemeinschaft by the Gesellschaft).

In such a society, the role player (rather than the total person) became the effective operational unit of the social system. This radical process brought consequential changes in other social institutions and in their value-orientations. Thus, to pursue the example further, education in Western countries once accepted religious dogmas as its basis, and was extensively employed to sustain the moral order and to assist the transmission of moral values. Today education has changed its character. The context of education has become—and increasingly becomes—scientific. Detached observation, empirical investigation, rational deduction and pragmatic application have come to characterise all academic disciplines, even including the humanities. These orientations have displaced erstwhile premisses of a supernaturalist, revelatory, or transmundane character, and have even modified where they have not entirely superseded more general humanistic and aesthetic dispositions.

Once secularisation is understood as a process occurring within the social system, as an objective fact denoted by an ethically- neutral term, it can be distinguished from a concept with which, especially in the minds of theologians, it is readily confused: namely secularism. Secularism is an ideology: that is to say, it denotes a negative evaluative attitude towards religion, and might even be appropriately seen as a particular ‘religious’ position, in the sense that secularism adopts certain premisses a priori and canvasses a normative (albeit negative) position about supematuralism. Secularism may, in certain limited respects, have promoted secularisation, but it is more convincing to regard the secularity of modem society as a consequence of structural change (as posited by the secularisation thesis) rather than as a result of the advocacy of secularism. Even in the self-proclaimed secularist Soviet Union, sociologists attribute secularity much more emphatically to processes of structural change than to the state-sponsored advocacy of secularism.

Whilst the concept of secularisation originally referred to the sequestration of church properties by the political authorities, the concept has expanded to take into account the many diverse ways in which religious power and control has passed into non-religious hands. Secularisation may be defined as that process by which religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance, and become marginal to the operation of the social system. In advanced societies, religion has now lost that presidency over social activities which once it exercised, as various institutional orders of social life (the economy, the polity, juridical institutions, education, health, recreation) have ceased to be under religious control, or even to be matters of religious concern. Even in the most intimate areas of social relationship—in marriage, and in family matters—religion has no longer the influence that once it had. The process in which specialised institutions develop—functional differentiation, as it is termed by sociologists—has been a process in which religious ideas and practice have lost their social significance. The evidences are of many kinds, ranging from the dominant values expressed in society to the most personal concerns of everyday life. Thus, whereas the dominant ideal values of society were once formulated as the fulfilment of the will of God, today the transcendent and overarching social values are more likely to canvass the welfare of the people. Whereas once, to turn to personal intimacies, children were welcomed as God’s gifts, and fertility was a primary focus of religious concern, today families are carefully planned, conception prevented, or foetuses aborted in the interests of rational family organisation.

As the social order has itself come to conform to rational precepts of action, so religious intimations respecting values and behaviour have given place to conscious calculation in economic terms of the utilisation of resources and the demand for material evidence of costefficiency, profit and expediency in their use.

The growth of instrumental values, and the diminished potency of supernaturalist or transcendent ideals, affects religious institutions and religious professionals. A simple comparison of the stipends paid to professional groups indicates the relative weakness of the clergy and the diminished evaluation (even in money terms) of their social worth. A comparison of stipends over, say, the past two hundred years, would reveal the steady erosion of the value of clerical incomes in contrast to the experience of other professionals. The proportion of a society’s gross national produce devoted to supernaturalist concerns (support of churches or other religious properties) would reveal the same emphatic trend.

It is clearly much less easy to document changes in the thought-processes of the general public, yet, if a liberal interpretation is made of what constitutes a religious mode of thought (and, in this sense, one may say patterns of thought which invoke superempirical concepts or processes) one may well conclude that modem man has become progressively less disposed to believe that supernatural influences operate in his day-to-day life. Whether the instances are those of pure superstition (which must count as part of the religious dimension when contrasted with rational pragmatic attitudes) or recourse to prayer, supplication, belief in revelation or mystical experience, there has been a dramatic change in the course of the last century. We may note, to consider a more fully institutionalised aspect of official (Christian) religion, that less regard is paid to rites of passage. Baptisms have shown considerable decline in recent decades; confirmations become less usual; marriages have become increasingly secularised: burial alone remains an activity firmly within the control of the churches, but this may be at least in part sustained by superstition and also by the fact that the churches operate a very considerable continuing control over the public facilities for burial in cemeteries and crematoria.

These elements of religious practice tell a broadly similar story to patterns of church attendance, although these patterns vary considerably as between Western societies. The steady decline in attendances in Europe during this century is not matched by the evidence from the United States, where church-going continues to be a popular activity, with something approaching half the population attending church on any given Sunday. However, this particular indicator of religiosity must itself be interpreted in the light of other evidence: church-going does not carry the same cultural meaning in all societies. Clearly, there are many motives for this very conspicuous form of religious activity, and sociologists have suggested that some of these are operative in a vigorous way in the United States which, by other evidences, some have regarded (with Japan) as perhaps the most totally secularised nation. Some of those additional motives are held to be the search for community in a society which has received successive waves of immigration and in which there is a very high incidence of geographic and social mobility. Others have maintained that, in a society without very long traditions and without a mystical and mythic sense of its own origins, church-going is a way of establishing national identity, so much so that it little matters to which church people go—all are equally potent as expressions of Americanness. Clearly, this hypothesis is one which is difficult to test, although here is abundant evidence that Europeans, from the time of de Tocqueville, have found religion in America to lack spiritual content of the kind with which they were familiar in Europe.

This last consideration relates to the internal secularisation of religious institutions. It has been contended that processes of secularisation are not merely patterns of diminishing religious influence over other areas of the social system, but are also evident in the changing quality of religious performances and beliefs.

It is clear that in the case of Christianity there has been a steady erosion of many elements that were once considered central to the thought and practice of the Church. Some of this process of change has been gradual, such as is exemplified in the diminution of votive offerings to the effigies of saints, which has been recorded in, say, Catholicism in France, or in the gradual abandonment of anthropomorphic conceptions of deity which appears to have occurred very generally in Protestantism. Other changes have come as forthright and vigorous challenges to previous ideas and practices. Such have been the rejection by some modem bishops of central Christian truths including the virgin birth, the resurrection and even the Trinity, and by the dramatic liturgical changes introduced in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. Verbal formulas sometimes continue after their content has ceased to express the convictions of those who use them: thus, one may doubt how actively Christians, who weekly affirm belief in the Second Coming of Christ, actually believe this proposition.

All of these diverse evidences may be seen as facets of a secularisation process in advanced societies: they are, however, to be regarded as attendant phenomena rather than as the core manifestations of the process. The loss of religious influence over the major social institutions is the fundamental issue. Thus, the Christian Church once closely regulated economic matters in Western society, specifying dates for agricultural pursuits; regulating the practice of trade, by forbidding such devices as forestalling and ingrating; controlling the operation of craftsmen and stipulating the rules by which they worked. Today, the church has no influence in matters of this kind, nor in the more important and centralised functions of industrial and financial operations. Once, politics was an arena in which major churchmen played a vigorous role and even local clergy were often active: the affairs of the Church continued to occupy the minds of Prime Ministers in Britain up until the time of the First World War. Today, in contrast, church affairs are generally a very quiet bywater of the political mainstream. Less than a century ago, the presence of the Church in education was predominant, and Church Schools were still a majority of all schools, whilst university dons were mainly clergymen. That has all been swept away, as the structural differentiation of the social system has produced specialised agencies for different social functions. These phenomena, and the less formalised but equally apparent diminution of religious and/or church influence in health, recreation and family and moral affairs, represent the core of the secularisation process in advanced nations.

The structural differentiation of the social system is accompanied by the increasing dependence of society on the articulation of distinct roles, particularly in the economic sphere. Role relationships characterise advanced society in which interaction is governed by impersonal criteria: individuals who ‘man’ these social roles set aside their personal attributes and dispositions and confine their role performances to the relevant skills. It is this impersonality of role-articulated social systems which makes them uncongenial to religion. Religion has its natural locale in the small community, and functions best, as Max Weber long ago noticed, in circumstances where people interact as total persons in face-to-face contexts. In such situations, the moral precepts of Christianity have their fullest purchase: these moral injunctions are much less easily applied to the impersonal context and role-performances of the Gesellschaft. As modem society has been reorganised, with increasing tendencies for vital functions to be centralised (and ‘societalised’), so religious influence, always greatest at the level of the local community, wanes, and so occurs the attendant phenomenon of diminished recourse to religious thought and practice. Modem man learns, of necessity, to function in a rational environment, in social situations which are increasingly ‘man-made’. As men, in their role-performances, contribute rationally to the upbuilding of the social context, so the paradox occurs that the man-made environment is itself more rational (more the product of well- co-ordinated role performances) than are the individuals (as sensate human beings) who have created it. Thus, we have the spectacle of irrational man in rational society. The society is the product of role players, but each role player has another dimension to his life—the vibrant, sentient, emotional dispositions of his total humanity. Thus, although the major thrust of contemporary social organisation is to elicit from individuals rational responses to their situation (in the role, as profit-seekers, as negotiators of traffic system, electronic devices, the bureaucracy and the whole apparatus of the modern social system) of necessity, there remains still, in each individual, a fund of personal dispositions which are not satisfied by rational solutions. It is to these that modern expressions of religiosity, to which some have pointed as counter-evidence to the process of secularisation, frequently appeal.

Before turning to these creative religious responses to the current situation it may be instructive to examine one response by which some sought to resist and contain the process of secularisation in some European countries. The religious divisions which have been activated in the last century (between Protestants and Catholics in Holland, for example, and between Catholics and Free-thinkers in Belgium) led to the attempt by the churches to insulate themselves from secularising influences. The churches sought to create for their own following alternative agencies and institutions which fulfilled a variety of institutional functions. This process, known as ‘pillarisation’, saw the development of distinctively Catholic (or less significantly, Protestant) organisations, such as schools, universities, hospitals, insurance companies, trade unions, recreational organisations and even travel agencies. The attempt was to provide something like a state within a state, or at least to provide religious believers with a safe enclave within which the major requirements of modern life could be satisfied. The Catholic child, in Belgium, for example, would be born in a Catholic hospital, go to a Catholic school, on to a Catholic university, join a Catholic union or professional association, take out Catholic insurance and so on. These ‘pillars’, replicated for those of other persuasions, jointly made up the state. The Catholic pillar was a manifest attempt to prevent the influence of secularisation which elsewhere appeared as an autonomatic consequence of structural differentiation in society. But the pillarisation experiment may be said to have largely failed in the face of the impress of rational techniques and organisation. It may, first of all, be less cost-efficient than state systems because of duplication and loss of economies of scale. Beyond this, and more important, is the fact that the skills and competences of each profession (university teachers, doctors, bureaucrats) are increasingly dictated by essentially secular criteria. Studies of ‘Catholic’ hospitals and universities have found that they differ very little from their secular counterparts— professional ethics and advanced techniques dictate the style of these institutions and the personnel who operate within them, and these have been shown to be of greater saliency in determining institutional character than the confessional basis of their foundation and their work-force.

The concept of secularisation does not in any sense imply that the process by which religion loses influence is a regular, uninterrupted decline. Religious phenomena are themselves so diverse, and religion’s influence over society has, in times past, been so pervasive at many levels, that any idea of a unilinear development must be at once rejected. Counter-currents occur, and there are clear reactions to contemporary secu- larity which, if they fall short of full-scale religious revival, indicate the persistence of a will to sustain religion on the part of some sections of the public even in the most secular societies. A review of the diverse contemporary manifestations of religiosity in the world might, indeed, at least superficially, lead to the conclusion that the present day was an age of unprecedented religious vigour. In the face of the overwhelming evidence of the diminution of influence discussed above such a view is untenable, but contemporary expressions of religion cannot be dismissed as merely incidental. Religion responds to certain deep-laid, perhaps atavistic, human needs, and, as such, something which passes for religion, no matter how different it may be from established, traditional and well-institutionalised forms, may well be a permanent phenomenon of human society, even if it prevails only at the margins and in the interstices of an increasingly rational structure.

The most conspicuous evidences of the vibrancy of religion come from societies in which social conflict is expressed in religious terms, in which men are, apparently, prepared to lay down their lives for the sake of religious convictions. The conspicuous cases are the civil strife in Lebanon and Ireland; the religious revolution in Iran; and the passive resistance to the Communist state in Poland. In each case, special factors are at work. In both Lebanon and Ireland it might not be too much to say that religion here functions as a legitimation of what are tantamount to tribal allegiances of populations which Eve on the periphery of the religious confessions to which they claim adherence. In such cases, marginal groups frequently over-identify with the values of the tradition to which they belong: Irish CathoEcs are notoriously ‘backward’ compared to Catholics in Europe, in the sense that they have retained the ultramontane and triumphaEst stance of nineteenth-century Catholicism long after its abandonment in most other CathoEc countries. Similarly, the Ulster Protestants represent an extreme fringe at the margin of Britain, more Protestant than the British, and capable of using this Protestant heritage to assert that they are, indeed, more British than the British. Over-identification is a weU-known ethnic, nationaEst and/or reEgious phenomenon, particularly among culturally deprived or retarded constituencies. AU this being said, it must be recognised that the violent terrorism on both sides, but more pronouncedly on the supposedly CathoEc side, owes nothing to the reEgious traditions in the name of which it acts. The marginality of Lebanon’s mixed population of seventeen divisions of Muslim and Christian conviction might yield to similar analysis: reEgion becomes the symbol in terms of which embattled groups take cognisance of themselves.

The Iranian case is manifestly a case of resurgent reEgiosity, but religion proclaimed in an underdeveloped country in which religion is a rallying-ground against modernisation, or, perhaps more accurately, against the inequalities, corruption and social divisiveness which modernisation produced. Iran, as a less developed country, scarcely exemplifies a reversal of secularisation, although there is no doubt that secularisation—diffused from more advanced countries—might be retarded in contexts where external influences can be resisted, as for instance in pre-war Tibet. How long such self-imposed isolation can persist is a matter for speculation. The Polish case turns on different considerations. The Catholic Church has long been the repository of national identity for a much-conquered and long-occupied people, regularly deprived of their national leaders. Religion is here a surrogate for political expression in a context where such expression is prohibited. Religion regularly takes this role in contexts in which there is, apart from religion, no possibility of freedom of speech or action. The symbolic significance of the Catholic Church for Polish nationalism, and the recurrent recourse of Poles to the Church in search of national leadership (as has occurred also in Ireland and in Greece in times past) is a large part of the explanation of the revitalisation of religion in this instance.

In nations more advanced than any of these, there are also instances of religious revivalism. In these, quite different, circumstances, we may suppose that personal discontents with the increasingly impersonal, large-scale, societally-organised social system, induce a response in which religion—with its emphasis on personal relationships and transcendent values—is a ready-made focus for the expression of contemporary alienation. (This point might, of course, be made in strictly religious terms, expressed as man in search of spiritual values, mystical experience, or ultimate reality.) These examples of renewed religious vigour take many diverse forms, both within and without the existing church structures. Many of them are grassroots movements which emerge to express some generalised consensus of protest against existing social or political arrangements, or to experiment with new forms of religious expression.

The so-called ‘new American Right’ appears as a loosely formed and diffuse agglomeration of people who appear to be principally concerned with the erosion of American moral values which they see as being embodied in fundamentalist religious positions. The influence of television religion (‘the electronic church’) and the impact of television revivalists has been significant in the emergence of this movement, the supporters of which accept the label of‘the moral majority’. This inchoate movement is, however, one of the least well-defined and most unorganised of modem religious constituencies claiming a large following among people who are not formally drawn into separately organised congregations. The influence which this form of religion exercises is difficult to assess, and claims of direct political weight are disputable. Its attempts to resist, for instance, the teaching of evolution in schools, or to demand equal time for creationist theories, have not produced convincing evidence of the movement’s strength.

A more specifically religious reaction to modern society, and perhaps also to the rigidity of church structures, has been the movement known as Charismatic Renewal, which began in California in 1958. Charismatics believe, as has been believed since the beginning of this century by those sects which took the designation ‘Pentecostal’, that the gifts of the Spirit, as described in 1 Corinthians, are still in operation today. Most attention is paid to the gift of speaking to the congregation in ‘unknown tongues’. All the major Christian denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church, have been affected by this movement, and many interdenominational prayer meetings have encouraged individuals to seek the experience of ‘Spirit baptism’ and the (usually subsequent) experience of exercising the gifts of the Spirit. The major churches have generally not resisted this spontaneous manifestation of religious enthusiasm, and some prominent church leaders (including Roman Catholic archbishops) have endorsed charismatic practice: on the other hand, the churches have not come forward to endorse as thoroughly orthodox this style of religious worship. Most of those who have accepted charismatic worship have remained in their church fellowships, and some congregations of main-fine denominations have become well known for their manifestations of this enthusiastic phenomenon. The diffuse nature of the movement makes it impossible to say how many people have been drawn into charismatic practice, or how long they remain committed to this form of religion.

Charismatic renewal is perhaps significant for its incidental comment on both contemporary religion and church structures. The spontaneity, immediacy, emotionalism and, at times, anti-intellectualism, of this form of worship stand in sharp contrast to the formalised, hierarchically organised, solemn and ritualised order of the churches as they had developed into the present century. This movement represented an assertion of democracy, but it also implied a distrust of the mediated relationship to deity. If, as in the exercise of charismatic power, the individual believer can directly receive inspiration from a member of the Godhead, then the need for the church establishment and the ministration of priests may seem to be put in question. In this sense, charismatic renewal represented, whether its votaries were conscious of this or not, a latent and implied assault on the received structures of the churches. In practice, it may be recognised that despite this tacit criticism of religious leadership and the implicit democracy of this enthusiastic form of religion, many charismatic fellowships actually evolved new patterns of (sometimes very authoritarian) leadership: thus, a measure of control was exercised over what might otherwise have been highly volatile and disruptive religious activities.

Although the majority of Charismatics appear to have remained within their original church fellowships, this movement has also spawned new forms of religious organisation of a minimalist kind. Rejecting the formalism of church services, groups have come into being which emphasise the informality of worship by holding their meetings in houses, hence the collective name of‘house churches’. Some of these groups have tended to become at least loosely affiliated and there is evidence of an incipient process of denominationalism, even with the development of the purchase of new properties for religious meetings, so leading away from the idea of the house church. Some of those who have sought this style of religion have left their former churches altogether. In some cases, strong leadership has emerged, and different groups are identified by reference to the particular preacher whose teachings they accept. This movement owes something to earlier Nonconformist organisation and style, particularly that of Baptists and (Plymouth) Brethren.

The general decline in church practice in Europe, and the erosion of denominational differences (particularly in the United States) has seen the development of increased interest in amalgamations. Ecumeni- calism has been part of the advocacy of many churchmen for several decades, but the process of amalgamation has not been especially swift. Some conspicuous examples have occurred, particularly the Church of South India. Generally amalgamations have been more easily effected in mission countries, since in those contexts denominational differences which were (at one time) of real social significance in the homeland more easily lost their particular raison d’etre. Time and distance diminish these distinctions, and several amalgamations have taken place (in Scotland, the United States, Canada and Australia). In America, denominational labels had, by the mid-twentieth century, come often to represent little more than different organisations, the distinctive tenets of which had fallen into desuetude. In Britain, there have been some successful amalgamations among smaller bodies, and the United Reformed Church, composed of Congregationalists and Presbyterians, is the best known among these. Contrary to the expectations of some of those urging such mergers, however, these amalgamated bodies have not grown as a consequence of their new structure, but rather have experienced continuing decline.

Innovation within church communities, or at their fringes, is merely one form of contemporary religious activity, however. The sectarian tradition, in Protestantism, has persisted, albeit leading to the growth of a few sects rather than to a further proliferation of smaller groups. Some nineteenth-century sects and smaller denominations— Christadelphians, Unitarians and Quakers, have shown no capacity for growth in England; Irvingites have virtually died out; and the Exclusive Brethren have suffered a process of serious attrition. On the other hand, Jehovah’s Witnesses, thanks in large part to the vigour of their doorstep evangelism, have continued to grow in England, and in most countries (particularly so in predominantly Catholic countries such as Italy, Portugal and Chile). Although it is well established that this movement has a considerable turnover of membership, perhaps associated with its particular preoccupation with the Second Coming of Christ and the periodic disappointments which the failure of prophecy occasions, none the less, the overall rate of recruitment is such that losses are, in most countries, more than compensated by continued gains.

Pentecostal sects, of which there are a great many, have also experienced considerable growth in recent decades, and particularly so in Third World countries. The Assemblies of God in particular has been successful, and this movement is now a vigorous presence in many parts of the world. It appears that the strength of traditional Pentecostalism has not been in any way vitiated by the development of Charismatic Renewal within the main-line churches, but it also appears that the Pentecostal sects do appeal to a different constituency, mainly of less well-to-do and less well-educated people and to people in less developed countries.

Two other major sects have shown great growth in recent decades, albeit in somewhat different countries. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, with several million members world-wide, succeeds in recruiting principally in Third World countries, the membership in which now considerably exceeds the membership in North America, Australia and Europe, where the movement has not experienced such dramatic patterns of growth. The Church, which maintains a vigorous programme of education and a health system ofits own, finds its resources stretched by its recruitment of increasing numbers of people in poor countries. The Church in Britain has not escaped problems of racial tension because of its mixed composition of indigenous white and immigrant West Indian members.

The Mormons have also enjoyed a period of phenomenal growth with a membership of nearly six million, with continuing success in North America and in Europe, as well as in parts of the Third World. The Church, which organises its membership for social, welfare and recreational purposes as well as for religious practice, has been particularly successful in recruiting young families in European countries. Mormon temples, in which special rites are performed (including baptism for the dead by living proxies), have been built in many parts of the world for a membership which is no longer dependent on Salt Lake City for its facilities, although the church remains powerfully centralised and effectively organised from its American heartland.

A large number of new religious movements have sprung up in Western countries, particularly since the 1960s, but many of these remain relatively small even if well publicised, and it is a common characteristic that they encourage their members to accept work overseas and to engage in proselytising activity there. A number of these movements have drawn on oriental traditions which they have introduced to the West (Krishna Consciousness movement; Bhagwan Rajneesh; the Divine Light Mission; Transcendental Meditation, for example). Some, conspicuously the Children of God (later called Family of Love), grew up in the Christian tradition, although departing considerably from Christian morality in some respects. The Unification Church is conspicuously Christian but incorporates ideas which accommodate the assumptions of its Korean votaries. A different stream of contemporary religiosity flows from ideas that had some early expression in Christian Science and the New Thought movements which, in themselves, have shown little capacity for sustaining their numbers in the modern world: the modern variants of this tradition are represented by Scientology and some other ‘human potential’ movements, which emphasise the opportunity for individuals to increase their health, intellect and success in the world. Unlike the earlier representatives of this so-called gnostic tradition, which mainly recruited middle-aged votaries, most of whom were women, these movements tend to appeal to people in their twenties and early thirties.

Religious innovation is by no means confined to modern Western countries. New movements emerge regularly in other traditions, even if forms of worship and beliefs show less radical departures from the received tradition. The Sai Baba movement and the Swami Narayan movement are indications of the vibrancy of contemporary Hinduism and, unlike earlier variants of that tradition, these movements now seek to proselytise beyond the confines of India, initially among migrants but, in the case of Sai Baba, also among Westerners. Sometimes, too, the secular currents from other countries affect these new movements, as appears to be the case with the Brahma Kumaris in which women have acquired the conspicuous leadership positions in contrast to normal Hindu practice. Since feminism has not yet been significantly represented as a specifically religious intimation, we may suppose that this development owes more to secular ideas than to specifically religious ideas.

Japan is often regarded as one of the world’s most secularised countries, yet it is in that country that some of the most successful and vigorous new religions have developed in the decades since the Second World War. These movements, Buddhist and Shintoist in inspiration, sometimes retain elements of traditional Japanese shamanism, particularly in the experiences claimed by their founders (several of whom were women). Many of these movements have a specific concern with healing practices. Some, such as Reiyukai and Rissho Kosei Kai, strongly counsel members to give all due attention to ancestral spirits and ancestor worship: others, chief among which is Soka Gakkai, entirely reject this aspect of traditional religious practice. Sociologically, the arresting fact about the new Buddhist movements is that, although they have attached themselves to one or another of the monastic sects of Japanese Buddhism, they are themselves entirely lay movements, with lay leadership and control. This process of lay revitalisation of otherwise increasingly ineffective and, at times, almost moribund ecclesiastical systems, is itself an eloquent commentary on one aspect of processes of secularisation.

New religious movements, whether in the Christian, Buddhist, or any other tradition, are not in the strict sense revivals of a tradition: they are more accurately regarded as adaptations of religion to new social circumstances. None of them is capable, given the radical nature of social change, of recreating the dying religions of the past. In their style and in their specific appeal they represent an accommodation to new conditions, and they incorporate many of the assumptions and facilities encouraged in the increasingly rationalised secular sphere. Thus it is that many new movements are themselves testimonies to secularisation: they often utilise highly secular methods in evangelism, financing, publicity and mobilisation of adherents. Very commonly, the traditional symbolism, liturgy and aesthetic concern of traditional religion are abandoned for much more pragmatic attitudes and for systems of control, accountancy, propaganda and even doctrinal content which are closer to the styles of secular enterprise than to traditional religious concerns. The new religions do evidently indicate a· continuing interest in, perhaps a need for, spiritual solace and reassurance on the part of many individuals, but, in the West at least, they are also very much the creations of a secularised society.

An examination of the contemporary religious situation reveals that, at least in advanced countries, refigion has necessarily abandoned many of its former functions. It no longer provides the overarching symbolic structure—the sacred canopy—in terms of which total societies take cognisance of themselves and affirm their supernatural origin. In considerable measure, religion has become a very private affair. In most societies there is a wide variety of religions and no religion is able to claim societal monopoly, nor even to represent the social system. Religion becomes—in a way which was not possible within the orthodoxies of the past—a matter of choice or preference. In consequence of this measure of privatisation, religion in the West ceases to claim a very significant societal position or to fulfil social functions. Religious movements might, of course, mobilise opinion. As voluntary bodies they are still perhaps the largest agencies for the expression of unconstrained opinion (in a way which is not true of trade unions—in which commitment is lower and which, in many countries, can scarcely be considered as truly voluntary organisations). Religious movements may serve primarily as mediating institutions between the individual and the increasingly powerful state, enclaves in which some vestige of communal association may be sustained. This is particularly evident in Japan, where, in this respect, their functions are of great importance. Religion may still have this significant function in societies which are increasingly impersonalised by formal, rational, bureaucratic structures and technological work operations.

In the face of persisting secularisation of the social order, we might expect religious movements, and particularly new forms of religion, to arise, perhaps as recurrent phenomena. Alienation is one source of religious demand, which, more in its associational features than in its doctrinal teachings, religion may serve to counteract. Alternatively, as long as society emphasises competitive success and the struggle for achievement, religions offering short cuts to social mobility, or enhanced personal power (whether intellectual, sexual, social or physical) may be expected to recruit a clientele. We may expect, with the speed of social change, religious expression to become diversified for different constituencies, as specified by age, education, social class and perhaps gender or sexual preferences. Religious diversity is quite consistent with secularised society, testifying in its own way to the limitations of what religion can actually do.

58 ‘Secularisation’: Religion in the Modern World

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