There is a widespread feeling that something quite
serious and radical has happened to people in the modern world. This feeling has led to a confusing and wide-ranging set of words in an attempt to describe or
interpret just what it is which has been and still is taking place. Our times have been described as enlightened, scientific, technological, secular,
post-Constantinian, non-religious, post-Christian and post-traditional. Each of these, when more fully expounded, conveys some useful insight into the
nature of the modern world. Perhaps one should not expect the many-faceted character of modernity to be wholly contained or fully described in one word.
There is one widely used word, however, which is perhaps more useful than most others, to refer to what has been happening on this side of the watershed of change marked by the Enlightenment. That word is
'secularization'.
The meaning of the word needs to be clarified, however, or else it merely leads to further confusion. First it must be clearly distinguished from
'secularism'. 'Secularization' is a descriptive term. It implies no value judgment and is intended to describe a process of change which is reasonably
discernible to the objective and neutral observer. 'Secularism', on the other hand, refers to an ideology; it is the set of values and convictions held and
promoted by the secularist, such as the belief that education should be divorced from and kept free from ecclesiastical control.
Unfortunately 'secularization' has been so often defined by specific reference to religion that 'secular' has come to be treated as if it were the antonym of
'religious'. For example, Bryan Wilson writes, 'By secularization we mean the process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose their social
significance'. Peter Berger, another sociologist, says 'By secularization we mean the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from
the domination of religious institutions and symbols'. Alisdair Maclntyre, a philosopher, refers to secularization as 'the transition from beliefs and
activities and institutions presupposing beliefs of a traditionally Christian kind to beliefs and activities and institutions of an atheistic kind'.
This practice of defining 'secular' and 'secularization' in terms of 'religion' is unsatisfactory for several reasons. First, it not only assumes that it is relatively
easy to define religion (when in Chapter 1 we noted how difficult this task is) but, into the bargain, it implies a particular definition of religion which we
earlier discarded as being too narrow to be universally applicable. Secondly, where 'secular' is defined in terms of religion, we are given little insight into
what it really is, but learn only what it is not. Thirdly, the relationship between 'religious' and 'secular' is built into the definition so that there is little point in
discussing the effect of secularization on religion since, by definition, secularization must entail the erosion and eventual abolition of all religion.
Terms such as 'secular priests' and 'secular Christianity' are rendered self-contradictory.
Now it is true that when 'secular' first came into English usage it was used in
opposition to 'religious' but the latter term meant something very different in the late medieval context from what it generally means today. For example,
because the parish priest lived and worked in the world he was referred to as 'secular'' in contrast with the 'religious' who lived according to the rules of
their order and often in monastic seclusion from the world. Obviously this does not mean that the parish priest was non-religious in the modern sense of
the term religious. Indeed the first use of the term 'secularization' was in reference to the process by which a 'religious' was granted permission to
leave the monastic order and pursue a vocation (often none the less Christian) in the context of the ordinary world.
This earlier use of the term 'secular' actually provides us with the key to its
basic meaning, and one which will lead us to the most satisfactory definition of 'secularization'. 'Secular' is derived from the Latin saeculum, which originally
referred to a span of time, such as a 'generation' or an 'era'. This meaning has been long preserved in the liturgical phrase ad saecula saeculorum,
meaning 'to one age after another' or 'for ever and ever'. As was also the case with the equivalent terms aeon and 'olam (in classical Greek and
Hebrew, respectively), this originally temporal term came to acquire a spatial connotation. 'This present age' then referred to 'this present world' and the 'age to come' came to mean 'the world to come'.
If we reclaim this earlier meaning of 'secular', then its nearest synonym is 'this-worldly' and its antonym is 'other-worldly'. We are now in a position to
define secularization without making any explicit reference to 'religion'. Secularization may be legitimately and profitably defined as that process of
cultural change which consists of an increase of this-worldliness. In other words, it is the process by which humankind focuses attention increasingly on
this world and decreasingly on an imagined or postulated other-world. Further, since religion was earlier defined without specific mention of a
particular world-view, such as a dualistic one, we are left free to discuss the effects of secularization on religion.
There is nothing very novel about this definition and indeed it had this
emphasis when the secularist movement arose in the nineteenth century. The leading British secularist, G. J. Holyoake, tells us in The Origin and Nature of Secularism
(1896), that the word 'secularist' was first used to signify a way of thinking. In actual fact 'secularism' first appeared in an issue of The
Reasoner on 25 June 1851 and it was explained to its readers as having to do with the issues 'which can be tested in this life'. The Reasoner described itself
as a journal which concerned itself with this world. It was about 1864 that the word 'secularization' first came into modern usage to describe a discernible process of social and intellectual change.
Owen Chadwick has admirably described this intellectual change in his Gifford Lectures The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century,
and here he pertinently quotes some words of Rénan written in 1868. 'Whether one is pleased or not, the supernatural is disappearing from the world: only people not of this age have faith in it. Does
this mean that religion must crash simultaneously? Indeed not. Religion is necessary. The day when it disappears the very heart of humanity will dry up.
Religion is as eternal as poetry, as love. It will survive the demolition of all illusions . . . Under some form or other, faith will express the transcendent
value of life.' This makes clear why secularization should not be regarded as necessarily anti-religious. The process of secularization leaves the future of
religion as an open question. W. B. Hodgson made a similar point in a lecture in 1850, where he said, 'Secular means belonging to the Saeculum or Age, or
period of life on this earth, as distinguished from eternity or life to come. It should never have come to mean the opposite of religious. The fact that
something may be described as secular does not preclude it from also being religious. Thus rightly considered the secular is religious in its tendency and
issue; the religious is secular in its application and practical development'. Harvey Cox strikes the right note, therefore, when he writes, 'Secularization
is man turning his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time'.
It will hardly be disputed that the process we have been describing in this
book as taking place in Europe from the fourteenth century onwards is just what Cox succinctly described in his definition of secularization. In the 15th
edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica it is described as 'a movement in society directed away from other-worldliness to this-worldliness. In the
medieval period there was a strong tendency for religious persons to despise human affairs and to meditate on God and the afterlife. As a reaction to this
medieval tendency, secularization, at the time of the Renaissance, exhibited itself in the development of humanism, when humans began to show more
interest in human cultural development and the possibilities of fulfilment in this world. The movement towards secularization has been in progress during the entire course of modern history'.
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