Secularization elsewhere: it is more complicated than that
| Autor | Steve Bruce |
| Cargo | Since 1991 Steve Bruce has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland |
| Páginas | 195-211 |
http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7984.2017v16n36p195
195195 – 211
Secularization elsewhere:
it is more complicated than that
Steve Bruce1
Abstract
This paper argues that the modern secularization thesis is in the first place an explanation of
the past of European societies and their colonial offshoots and that, contra its critics, it was not
intended as a universal template. Such momentous historical changes cannot simply be repeated
if only because, while the secularization of Europe was unprecedented, largely secular societies,
that can attract emulation or rejection, now exist. What we might expect, and why, is detailed
before the case of Brazil is considered. The paper concludes that, while it is too early to be certain
that Brazilian changes fit the expectation that modernization weakens religion, we can probably
conclude that they are minimally consistent with that expectation.
Keywords: Secularization. Brazil. Modernization.
Introduction
It is no surprise that ideas are accidentally caricatured by scholars
whose interest in them is slight. What is remarkable about the debate over
the secularization thesis is that it is often caricatured by sociologists of
religion. It is frequently asserted that the secularization thesis predicts the
complete disappearance of religion from Western societies and the inevitable
secularization of the rest of the world – for example, Joppke (2016, p. 43).
e rst is clearly a mistake. Bryan Wilson sensibly denes secularization
as the decline in the social signicance of religion (WILSON, 2016, p. 4).
at should have some reciprocal relationship with popular religiosity: as
religion loses social power, it also loses persuasiveness and as the proportion
of the population that is religious declines, so will its social signicance.
Nonetheless, it is quite possible that, while the majority of the population
1 Since 1991 Steve Bruce has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland). He is the
author of numerous works in the sociology of religion; most recently Secular Beats Spiritual: the Westernization
of the Easternization of the West (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Secularization elsewhere: it is more complicated than that | Steve Bruce
196 195 – 211
of a largely secular society becomes religiously indierent, a small minority
will continue to hold religious or spiritual notions. However, so long as the
operating principle of such societies is the individual’s right to believe what he
or she wishes and so long as there is any signicant degree of social diversity,
then religious or spiritual seeking will be characterised by a high degree of
idiosyncrasy because there is no serious social pressure to shape the beliefs of
individuals into a common faith. But it is the second part of the caricature –
the inevitable secularization of the currently religious parts of the world – that
concerns me in this essay. My theme is the application of the secularization
thesis to what, with rather shaky chronology, used to be called the ird World
and is now, with equally shaky geography, called the Global South. I will
make some tentative suggestions about what can be expected of secularization
“elsewhere” but my primary concern is the rather discipline-focussed one of
making clear that extrapolating from the secularization thesis is considerably
more complicated than the caricatures of its critics would suggest.
1 Clarification of Terms
Before anything else is said it is useful to clarify terms. By “secular”
I mean the absence of the religious. e religious and the secular are not
mirror images; like smoking and not smoking, they complement each other.
By “secularization” I mean the long-run process of societies becoming less
religious. e sociological explanation of secularization sees it as largely a
result of unintended and unanticipated consequences of those social changes
that we gloss as “modernization”. “Secularism” is the philosophical and
political preference for the secular society over that heavily shaped by religion.
‘Secularists’ are people who believe in secularism and who promote the
secular. Although I do not have space here to justify this, sociologists generally
dier from historians of ideas in that they do not think secularists terribly
signicant in the process of secularization. Important shifts in societies from
more to less religious have usually been driven by complex long-run social
forces; secularists join the process late, as cheer leaders for changes that are
already under way. ey are usually symptoms, not causes.
e secularization thesis posits a non-accidental relationship between
modernization and secularization (BRUCE, 2011). By modernization I mean
a complex of most or all of the following related changes: the rationalization
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