Abstract
This chapter discusses the concept of secularity in all of its complexity. Secularity is situated along a continuum and discussed in terms of belief, behavior, belonging and benefitting. The chapter then turns to a review of major theorists of secularization and what they have in common. The chapter closes with a proposed interdisciplinary and integrative theory of secularization which emphasizes subcultural tightening and self-dimensionality.
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Notes
- 1.
For those interested in learning more about the history of secular philosophy, I recommend three texts. The first is sociologist Randall Collins’ The Sociology of Philosophies (2000), the second is historian Jennifer Hecht’s Doubt (2004) and the third is historian Tim Whitmarsh’s (2016) Battling the Gods.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
Naturalistic, scientific philosophy can easily be found prior to Renaissance and Enlightenment-era Europe. It can be found in Ancient Greece with, for example, the rationalism of Heraclitus or the atomism of Democritus. Likewise, the “Islamic Golden Age,” of math and astronomy, which flourished while Europe descended into the Dark Ages, was also a period of widespread natural philosophy. Indeed, this Islamic Golden Age produced perhaps the first non-Western school of scientific sociology with the work of Ibn Khaldun. So, we must say that Comte was roughly, if not precisely, correct about his theory of the evolution of human knowledge. His “Law of the Three Stages” is, in the end, needlessly linear and Eurocentric.
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- 6.
This is not true, of course. Church-based social networks tend to be tight and dense, and such networks may be ideal for providing assistance with the calamities of lifelike unemployment. Not only do such networks provide emotional and financial support, they can also be a pipeline to future job interviews (see Putnam and Campbell 2010).
- 7.
Specifically, Thomas Luckmann, Peter Berger, Bryan Wilson, David Martin, Richard Fenn, Talcott Parsons and Robert Bellah.
- 8.
In our modern globalized world—and in this age of social media—threat perception, and tightening, is destined to begin picking up speed.
- 9.
Other than the three works of Elias cited, I recommend reading both the 1987 Theory, Culture and Society issue dedicated to Elias’ work (volume 4, issue 2, edited by Mike Featherstone) and Steven Pinker’s (2011) use of Elias’ theory to explain large-scale declines in violence over the last 500 or so years. See also Linklater and Mennell (2010).
- 10.
Elias would add top-down expectations for mannerly comportment that result from the centralization of authority, which is itself a sign of cultural tightening. To simplify, as regards multidimensionality of the self, I focus here just on the impact of a growing division of labor and the geographic mobility and network diversity this entails.
- 11.
There is also evidence that, under perceived duress and threat, insecurely attached people will succumb to god belief in order to compensate and find relief for the psychological turmoil (Granqvist and Hagekull 1999; Granqvist and Kirkpatrick 2013). Thus, though peoples’ general attachment style will correspond to the internal working model developed in childhood, this model may be flexible enough to accommodate attachment to God or spirits under distressing conditions in adulthood.
- 12.
This doesn’t mean that political elites in the earliest human societies weren’t self-interested and Machiavellian—they undoubtedly were at least to some degree; see Hayden and Gargett (1990).
- 13.
A not-insignificant problem for this thesis is the historical prevalence of female shamans and medicinal practitioners (e.g., Tedlock 2005). I suppose the counterclaim would be that shamans, medical practitioners and early political elites were relatively more likely to be men. If this is the case, what accounts for this relative likelihood? Some will insist that males co-opted these tribal roles coercively because they were physically larger and more dispositionally aggressive due to higher baseline levels of testosterone, and though this is plausible, as far as I am aware, nobody knows for certain.
- 14.
Retrieved on 7/18/2016 from Barash’s online editorial “Is God a Silverback?” in the online cultural magazine aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/how-monotheists-modelled-god-on-a-harem-keeping-alpha-male
- 15.
Bengtson and his collaborators (2013) also found that grandparents aid in the intergenerational transmission of religion. When grandparents replace parents’ attempts at religious socialization of children (in the case of religiously disinterested, or deceased, parents) and especially when grandparents reinforce parents’ preexisting efforts at religious socialization, beliefs are more likely to be transmitted from one generation to the next. However, if grandparents critique or subvert parents’ attempts at religious socialization, or if grandparents simply ignore parents’ attempts to socialize their children, the effectiveness of religious transmission declines.
- 16.
Twenty percent converted to some denomination of Protestantism, and five percent converted to Catholicism.
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McCaffree, K. (2017). Shades of the Secular. In: The Secular Landscape. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50262-5_4
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