Whether we are urban or rural, childless or fecund, conservative or liberal in our outlook, well-credentialed or not, the crucial question, empirically as well as morally, is this: What will we teach our children to associate with the true, the good, and the beautiful during their earliest and most impressionable years? The fate of our social order depends much more on how we answer this question than we seem to realize.
Intuitions are hard to dislodge. Doubly so when they are shared widely across the length and breadth of an entire culture. Whenever a given theory, account, or bundle of convictions about some matter of public importance passes from the realm of contest and conjecture into the realm of inherited folk wisdom, it takes an almighty effort to replace it with something else, even if that something else is something more accurate.
Probably the most culturally widespread intuition influencing our historical self-understanding as a society today has to do with how we think of secularization. Why has the West become less and less religious over recent decades and centuries? The conventional answers given to this question are false, and they are all contained within a controlling 19th-century narrative of modernization.
Simply put, it is widely assumed today that the Western world became less religious because it modernized. For the avoidance of doubt, it’s perhaps best to list here some of the trends that might be grouped under the umbrella term “modernization.” These would include the spread of scientific knowledge and mass education, urbanization, industrialization, capitalism, pluralism, technological advance, increasing prosperity, and better health. The Spanish sociologist José Casanova wrote in 1994 that some version of the theory that these modernizing trends caused the demise of religion was “shared by all the founding fathers” of 19th-century sociology.
For all their disagreements with one another, all of these men, who ranged in thought from Karl Marx to John Stuart Mill, thought that the modernizing trends listed above contributed in one combination or another to religious decline. Their almost universal agreement on this point is probably what moved the causes of secularization from the realm of popular controversy to the realm of received folk wisdom in the first place. We all know that modernization equals secularization, the story goes; it’s just left to us to figure out exactly how we weigh the causal heft of the different factors.
The emphasis is placed in different places by different parties. Hart’s Christian-socialist account of secularization would likely be gainsaid by Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins, either of whom would probably point to a graph showing increasing literacy and numeracy rates and consider their work done. No doubt Freud would say that sex had something to do with it. But no matter the permutation, the basic story stays the same: Religion is thought to be an essentially uneducated, rural, preindustrial, precapitalist phenomenon consisting of poor, ill illiterates who lived their lives under the specter of an imminent and likely painful death. As one moves away from any or all of these things, the culturally regnant thesis of secularization holds that one also moves away from the plausibility of religious belief.
Despite how deeply ingrained in our collective unconscious this association between secularization and progress is, it’s a complete myth and has been known to be such by academics in the relevant fields for decades.
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