For some while there has been a keen debate in the sociology of religion about whether the future of religion is presaged by the three hundred million or so people of Western Europe (in particular North-Western Europe ) or instead by an equivalent number of people in the United States. The debate involves some major theoretical stances on the subject, and in particular it activates a long-term issue about the presumed effects of modernization on religion, given that both regions have been foremost in the process of modernization. A long time ago I wrote that it all turned on whether or not you thought that France, as the model for the clash between Enlightenment and religion, gave us a preview of the global future, or reserved that honor for Scandinavia, as the model for an internally secularized Protestantism. The oddity is that the United States, in its origins and development, presents an alternative to the French version of the Enlightenment and a quintessential Protestant culture, while being the most religious of modern societies (though there have, of course, been those who have argued it is secularized from within). Inevitably a debate of this kind involves some scholars writing about incipient signs of secularization in the baby boom generation in the United States, and evidence for disaffiliation among young people today, while others canvass what Andrew Greeley has called “Unsecular Europe.” A phenomenon like the amazing spread of Pentecostalism in the developing world does not count because the societies in which it expands are not properly modern. You can even dismiss it as a premonition of secularization if you take Protestantism to be just the first step on the way to the secular future.
The Role of Religion in Modern Societies (Routledge Advances in Sociology)
Routledge
296 pages
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More recently the debate has taken on a seemingly new form with the popularity of the notion of post-secularity. One version hails a return of religion to the public square, even in Europe. The most recent expression of this is a book entitled God Is Back (2009) by Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, which might be paired with Steve Bruce’s God is Dead (2003), but the argument already has a long history. Gilles Kepel’s The Revenge of God appeared in 1994. José Casanova argued against the supposed privatization of religion in his influential Public Religions in the Modern World(1994), and this points up a major oddity of the current debate about post-secularity, given that religion has been a consistent presence in the public life of Europe throughout the postwar period. After all, the church was central to the emergence of Christian Democracy, and the diminution of its influence, say in Spain or Holland, is a continuing process that bears none of the marks of something called the post-secular.
I suspect we are witnessing a largely intellectual return to the consideration of the role of religion, for example in the new book by Jürgen Habermas entitled Between Naturalism and Religion, which is as sociologically naïve as it is philosophically sophisticated. This intellectual interest is not prompted by anything new in the evidence, in Western or even in Eastern Europe, but by the impact of Islam, including the sizeable migrant populations of Muslims in Europe itself, and by the inclusion of highly religious ex-communist countries like Poland, Romania, and Slovakia in the European Union. There has been a religious revival in Russia and Ukraine of major political significance, but that is hardly the center of the debate. Moreover the debate proceeds as if the challenge to secularization theory were quite recent, whereas the present author initiated it as far back as 1965, interestingly enough just at the time when “the death of God” was at the height of its intellectual popularity. In 1969 I also put forward the idea that the course of secularization (understood most plausibly as a process of differentiation whereby major functions like socialization and welfare are transferred from religious to secular agencies) was significantly channelled by national histories (“path-dependency” in recent parlance), in particular by the type of Enlightenment experienced (French, British, German, or American), and by whether religion played a positive role (as in Poland) or a negative role (as in France) in the emergence of the nation.
Whether or not the concept of post-secularity has any purchase outside intellectual debate, the current discussion has genuine interest since it turns on some major theoretical approaches to religion and secularization. These include classic secularization theory, rooted in the relation of religion to modernity, in particular meta-processes like rationalization, or even the advance of reason and science. Then there is the individualization thesis, which is not necessarily incompatible with classic secularization theory, but shows itself in a very partial shift from religion to spirituality and in believing without institutional belonging, even though the proponents of this approach, such as Grace Davie, recognize it has, to some extent, what David Voas in The Role of Religion in Modern Societies labels a transitional character. Then there is rational choice theory, which assumes a steady demand for religion variously manifest according to the supply, notably whether this is provided by “lazy” monopolies or vigorous competition. It is in relation to ideas of a steady demand for religion that an examination of the very variable channels of secularization, as originally set out in my A General Theory of Secularisation (1969 and 1978), becomes crucial. That is precisely why the comparative analysis of these channels which now follows takes the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR, East Germany) as the focus for comparison and a test case for the central role of culture and socialization rather than some assumed steady demand, whether stimulated by the continuous pressure of existential need or postulated by biological theories seemingly reviving the “religious instinct.” Biological theories have been put forward with remarkable confidence, and are constantly extended, even into a supposed instinct for art. Yet such theories have taken very little interest in how a universal instinct, in this case for religion, can show itself with such vigor on the eastern side of the Oder-Neisse line in Poland, where 96 percent believe in God, and so exiguously on the western side in the former East Germany, where 30 percent believe in God. It seems odd that a biologically grounded instinct can so easily be turned off and on by socialization, and even odder that anyone proposing such a biological approach should acknowledge the role of culture by denigrating religious socialization as child-abuse. The usual defense put forward by those few scholars who take the cultural and historical evidence into account leans on the notion of functional equivalence, which in the case of East Germany means communism. However, the “religion” of communism collapsed twenty years ago, if not earlier, and nothing has taken its place, in spite of opportunities for any amount of expansion in the “supply” of religion from several competing sources.
The Unique Secularity of East Germany Compared with West Germany
After the mid-20th century, East and West Germany followed very different paths, politically and religiously. However, there is some evidence of a distinctive form of secularization emerging in East (then Central) Germany well before World War I. The area had been the most Protestant region of Germany and had therefore experienced a greater degree of religious individualization and a weakening of the communal tie still retained in Catholicism. Moreover the union of throne and altar also associated Protestantism with authority, power, and submission to the state. Secularist and anti-clerical movements emerged early in the east of Germany, and many “free-thinking” associations were founded there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition National Socialism was strong in some parts of the region and contributed to a weakening of the ties of denominational culture. As a result East Germany was already semi-secularized even prior to the communist assault. The newly imposed communist government offered an ideological exchange whereby East Germans would be treated as the innocent proletarian victims of Nazism, provided they accepted their assigned role in the progress of communism and its comprehensive worldview. National identity, which provided a base for religious resistance in Poland, could not exercise that role in East Germany because it had been so thoroughly discredited between 1933 and 1945 by the Nazi regime.
This then was the situation in which a rapid state-sponsored secularization took place. It had less to do with modernization, given that modernization moved forward much more quickly in West Germany, and a great deal to do with changes in regime. The situation has been commented on by numerous analysts, such as Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Michael Hainz, and Olaf Müller, Detlef Pollack, and Gert Pickel in The Role of Religion in Modern Societies. Whereas in the 1940s most people in East Germany and in the West had some affiliation with the Church, by the time of the second millennium the differences had become striking. In West Germany, 21 percent accounted themselves highly religious, whereas in the East only 8 percent did so. In the West, 57 percent of those questioned accounted themselves religious and 22 percent irreligious, while the comparable figures in the East were 28 percent and 64 percent. In short, two out of three in West Germany were well-disposed to religion while two out of three in East Germany were indifferent or hostile. Of course the differences might be somewhat less striking were one to compare the Protestant North-West of Germany with the Protestant North-East, or Hamburg with Berlin. That is a constant problem in this type of data: one requires figures taking into account region, migrant status, and ethnicity. Presumably active Christians were over-represented among those millions who fled the DDR. Or again, Catholic Latvia is not as Lutheran Latvia or post-Protestant Groningen in Holland as Nijmegen. But even making proper regional allowances, the West-East contrasts in Germany are dramatic. In 1998, 18 percent of West Germans declared they had “never believed in God” while among East Germans the figure was 58 percent. In East Germany a high degree of active dissociation from either belief or affiliation meant that the various dimensions of irreligion and religion alike were closely related and internally consistent, whereas in West Germany the higher degree of acceptability enjoyed by religion meant that large numbers of people were institutionally detached or semi-detached without counting themselves irreligious.
West Germany is religiously pluralistic with a noticeable penumbra of “spirituality,” though not one so large that it makes up for losses in traditional religiosity. Withdrawals from the church in West Germany peaked in the Sixties and the Nineties. In their discussion of these withdrawals, Pollack and Pickel in The Role of Religion in Modern Societies report that the highly educated are no longer over-represented, a trend which is observable over much of the continent. They also note a pattern among the better educated both of greater identification with the church and of greater alienation. However, the crucial data of secularization in West Germany are that whereas at mid-century half of all Catholics attended regularly, by the millennium this had dropped to a quarter, and the gap between the generations had greatly increased. Among Lutherans, those over 60 who regularly attended outnumbered those between 16 and 29 by four to one. In spite of the high proportion of those who consider themselves “religious,” the implications for commitment to institutional Christianity are obvious.
Comparisons in Northern and Central Europe
Here I extend my comparison between East and West Germany. I do this, first, within the northern secular heartlands, briefly contrasting Lutheran Denmark and post-Protestant Britain, Holland, and Switzerland. Then I take in other extensively secularized countries in the sometime communist bloc, notably Latvia, Estonia, and the (post-Catholic) Czech Republic. These are the core countries of European secularity, with the exception of the highly secular Franco-Belgian region centered on Paris, where the key element is not the Protestant version of the Westphalian church-state system but the war of the Catholic Church in alliance with the forces of the ancien régime with the French version of the Enlightenment in alliance with Republican nationalism.
East Germany was already semi-secularized even prior to the communist assault. The newly imposed communist government offered an ideological exchange whereby East Germans would be treated as the innocent proletarian victims of Nazism.
Denmark is the nearest Lutheran neighbor to the former DDR, and its capital Copenhagen lies roughly at the midpoint of the secular belt running from Birmingham to Amsterdam, Hamburg, Stockholm, Berlin, and Tallinn. The religious condition of Denmark suggests how East Germany might have evolved had it not been part of a much bigger entity at the epicenter of European geopolitical tensions. Denmark exemplifies an astonishingly stable pattern of Scandinavian religion, with high levels of identification with the church and low levels of dogmatic assent and regular practice, as well as a fairly uniform Social Democratic ethos. Danish religion is an accommodating habit of the heart associated with a church in an iconic landscape. Its combination of a folk-church with Social Democracy illustrates the extent to which political culture and religious culture mirror each other throughout Europe.
Danish religio-political homogeneity has geographical as well as historical roots. If one compares Denmark with Britain, the country consists of a small, flat peninsula with adjacent islands occupied solely by Danes, whereas Britain comprises two main islands divided into major ecological niches occupied by five different ethnic groups, each with a distinctive version of Christianity. Denmark lies at the junction of the Baltic and the North Sea, whereas Britain is a relatively secure territory looking toward the Atlantic, able to generate a partial pluralism outside the established churches, which later became complete pluralism when exported to the even greater safety of North America. By European standards Britain is unusually diverse religiously whereas Denmark is unusually homogeneous, though both have a history of (mostly) settled evolutionary change rather than revolution. Moreover regular attendance at the respective state churches is not so very different—say, 2 percent.
At the same time Britain has experienced a rapid secularization affecting Catholics as well as Protestants. Over a quarter of a century, regular Catholic practice has dropped very seriously. As analyzed by Anthony Heath, declining religious identity is associated with a decline in all traditional identities, such as political loyalty, a sense of close solidarity with others of the same class, and a specifically British consciousness. Moreover, increasing numbers have shifted from a working-class to a middle-class identity. In the case of religion, in 1964 just over a quarter either did not claim a religion or said they never attended a religious service. In 2005, over two-thirds did so. In 1964, around three quarters of those who claimed a religion attended services, whereas in 2005 only half did so. On the other hand, where class and party have declined in their capacity to offer normative guidance, religion has retained its hold over the ethical norms of the religious minority. Overall one may conclude that the rather generalized notion of individualization receives some support from this case, which would be consistent with the idea that a dominant Protestant culture weakens the communal tie. When the Irish historian Roy Foster refers to the relative weakening of the Catholic Church in Ireland as “Protestantization,” one intuits what he means.
Further evidence might be supplied by the rapid secularization of post-Protestant Holland that followed the breakup of segregated socio-religious “pillars” in the Sixties, or by the much gentler secularization of Switzerland. In Holland, less than half the population are religiously affiliated and over three-quarters attend less than once a month. The decline in belief in God, now held by six persons in ten, is greater than the decline of belief in the supernatural. Unsurprisingly, belief and affiliation are closely related, especially among Catholics and conservative Protestants. Religion declines as younger cohorts replace older ones, as in Britain. In Switzerland, a country socially segregated by geography, religion has become increasingly pluralistic and has had a decreasing influence on education, media, welfare, and leisure. Between 1900 and 2000, membership in the Reformed churches fell from 57.8 percent to 35.3 percent, while the Catholic church has suffered a decline, though a less severe one, since the 1970s. Belief in God stands at 84 percent, far higher than in Holland.
The final comparison is between East Germany and other countries of the ex-Soviet bloc. Of the three Baltic countries, Estonia, which is very largely Lutheran apart from the considerable Russian minority, is the least religious, with 6 percent attending church in the course of a month; the comparable figure for Latvia, which is of mixed confession, is 15 percent, and for Lithuania, which is Catholic, 32 percent. Estonia is closest to East Germany, with 42 percent believing in God, whereas Latvia and Lithuania are quite similar with about 7 persons in 10 believing. Estonia is distinctive in one crucial feature: religion is associated with German dominance, and national feeling therefore retires to the level of folk culture and even pre-Christian religions. Exactly the same is true of the other highly secularized country of the ex-Eastern bloc, the Czech Republic, in particular Bohemia, which lost its German population in the postwar ethnic cleansing. The re-Catholicization of Czech Lands that took place in the 17th century, after the defeat of the Protestant Czechs, was associated with Hapsburg (German-speaking) dominance. The negative impact of forcible conversion, especially when associated with cultural dominance (for example, the very late semi-forcible conversion of North-Eastern Europe), is long-lasting. Belief in God in the Czech Republic stands at 35 percent, only slightly above East Germany. Interestingly, trust in the church was at its highest in several Eastern Bloc countries—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and East Germany—just at the point of communist collapse. The transfer of political hope to the church was later found unjustified.
This is not the place to reproduce the complex data that allow the late Yves Lambert, in a recent article, to write of “A Turning Point in Religious Evolution in Europe.” I simply note religious stability in Italy, with 40 percent regular church attendance, and in much of Southern and Eastern Europe. Belief in God in Portugal stands at 95 percent and in Italy at 93 percent, while in Croatia, Slovakia, Romania, and Greece it stands at 80 percent, 76 percent, 93 percent, and 91 percent respectively. Even taking into account the rapid post-Franco secularization in Spain, especially among younger people, belief in God there stands at 85 percent.
Lambert identifies the negative effects of radicalization in the Sixties on the churches and on moral ethos generally. He considers that there is a decline in exaggerated expectations of self-realization and permissiveness among the young, and he wonders whether a more pessimistic assessment of modernity might be associated with rising levels of belief in life after death. The great competitors of religion, above all Marxism and certain kinds of rationalism, have gone into decline, and Lambert believes there is a new climate, which he refers to as “pluralistic secularization.” Religion has passed through the filter of individual subjectivity and is firmly non-authoritarian, but it can find a new credibility as a source of meaning, ethics, sociability, and identity.
David Martin is the author of On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory(Ashgate). He was recently elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.
—The is the first part of a two-part article. The second installment will focus on East Germany.
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