Weber was a key thinker in the secularisation debate. He came up with four elements in the general trend towards secularisation. The first one is desacrilisation. This is where events are explained more scientifically with less emphasis on the supernatural. An example of this is lack of belief in miracles among society. Disenchantment is similar in that it involves the loss of enchantment from social thought, myth no longer plays a large part. Rationalisation was described as simply social action being based on rational thought rather than magical means. The last trend is the ‘iron cage’. This is what bureaucracy is seen as, limiting human behaviour. This is all very well, but how do we actually go about proving thinker’s such as Weber’s thesis? Shiner came up with six indicators to show if secularisation was taking place. They include: religious symbols become less important, ideas about the sacred decline in significance, and rational ways of thinking takes over from religion. This brings us one step closer to discovering where secularisation occurs but does not explain how we come about these conclusions.
There are many methods of measuring secularisation, each with their own good and bad points. Bryan Wilson chose to base his research on analysis of church membership and attendance statistics. He found that all the available statistics show that there is a decline in membership and attendance in churches. However, this was only seen in the traditional churches. In 1851, 50% of the adult population of England and Wales attended church. This had declined to 9% in 1990. This information comes from Church census data and surveys. There has also been a decline in the number of church marriages, christenings and religious funerals. This all supports the secularisation thesis but there are flaws in this study. The study focuses only on the traditional churches. Other religions such as Baptism have a much slower rate of decline while some ethnic minority religions have actually seen an increase in members in recent years. There are also regional differences. Some areas of England show a low attendance record while other parts have a much higher one. Church attendance is not an entirely reliable source for measuring secularisation. Not all religious people attend church regularly. For many people, religion is a private thing that they like to practice in the comfort of their own homes. This can also work the other way, not all people who attend church are religious. Some may go because other family members like them to, or simply because they like the social side of attending church.
Perhaps a better way of measuring secularisation is by calculating all those people who hold belief. This does not necessarily mean just all the people who go to church, but includes those who practice at home. However, where do you draw the line of being religious? Is someone who simply believes they go somewhere else after they die classified as religious? Again, we come back to the question of what religion is and what it means to be religious. Some sociologists may choose to measure religion by looking at the number of people who pray. This indicated that these people believe in some divine being that can act in the world to help them. The problem with this is that many people pray in hope, in times of need. Most people would say that they have prayed at least once in their life, this does not mean that they hold any long term religious belief. Christening records are also unreliable because it does not show the religion of the child and sometimes not even that of the parents. Some parents like their children to be christened just because they were, therefore for traditional reasons.
Durkheim’s view is that as societies become more complex, the power of religion is less. Religion finds it difficult to represent everyone so becomes less prescriptive to appeal to a wider range of people. This increases the amount of potential followers but makes it look less specifically religious. This is how secularisation originated and is why it occurs from a functionalist perspective. The issue that needs to be looked at now is whether secularisation has actually occurred or is occurring in Britain today and the reasons for it. Brierely used data from a Church census for his study on the religious structure of the population. He divided the Christians and non-Christians into groups and found that change in Britain is relatively slow. The population may be moving away from institutional Christian religion but people are still retaining belief of some kind. He found only a slight increase in atheism and in non-Christian beliefs. Most of the evidence does not necessarily point to a decline in religion as a whole but a decrease in the influence of the traditional churches.
There are many reasons for the apparent decline in religious attitudes. Many of the functions of religion such as education and healthcare have been lost to the welfare state. Schools, the social services and the mass media have all contributed to this. Religion has become less influential in moral terms and has been converted into a more private affair. However, Parsons argues that this withdrawal of the church is evidence of structural differentiation, not secularisation. Traditional ways of perceiving the world included the mystical and spiritual. Scientific and empirical explanations have superseded these as technology has advanced.
Whatever the reasons for secularisation, the ways of measuring and actually proving that it is happening is very difficult for sociologists. Finding the reasons is a fairly simple task as it does not involve extensive research. For all researches to accurately measure secularisation, they need to agree on a single definition. As Shiner says, “The term is swollen with overtones and implications, especially those associated with indifference or hostility to whatever is considered religious”. The best idea is to abandon the word ‘religion’ in favour of concepts such as faith. If a clear definition is not established, then comparison of studies to discover if Britain is moving towards a more secular society is useless.
Vanessa Harris