Post‐War Sociology of Religion 1945–2024 in Britain and America

After the great heyday of the early sociology of religion—Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and Troeltsch—the sociological study of religion went into decline. One might argue that it was revived in the 1960s, but ironically, it had a second life to study secularization. The two major figures who did not share the same view of secular society in British sociology were Bryan Wilson (1926–2004), who published Religion in Secular Society in 1966, and David Martin (1929–2019), who spent much of his academic career attacking the secularization thesis publishing an early collection of articles on secularization in The Religious and the Secular (Martin, 1969) and The Future of Christianity (Martin, 2011) shortly before his death in 2019. For example, the legacy of Martin is found in the work of Grace Davie (1994, 1997) with the idea of "believing without belonging" and in Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas in their research on spirituality replacing institutionalized religion (Woodhead with Heelas and Martin 2001). Their view of the vitality of spirituality in a secular society depends on whether religion, in any form, can survive the process of deinstitutionalization. James A. Beckford (1942–2022) was another important figure at this stage of the sociology of religion in post-war Britain. He held various positions at British universities such as Reading, Durham, and Warwick. In 1975, he founded the study group for the sociology of religion for the British Sociological Association, but he also developed a strong connection with French sociology. His first major publication was The Trumpet of Prophecy. A Sociological Analysis of Jehovah's Witnesses (Beckford, 1975). The status of the Witnesses as a religion and their place in British society was still controversial, and Beckford's publication was important in correcting many public misunderstandings about the Witnesses as a religion. Beckford was also instrumental in bringing to attention the growing importance of Islam in British life. He drew attention to the neglect of Muslims and their issues in British society, including the role of prison detention for the Muslim community (Beckford et al., 2005). Beckford was, in some respects, a reflection of the traditions of both Martin and Wilson. Returning to Martin's sociology of religion, one feature of his approach that has received less attention was the relationship he identified between religion and two revolutions, namely in America and France. Martin gave secularization theory a new and interesting direction in his analysis of the long-term impact of two revolutions in 1783 and 1789 on religious institutions. The American Revolution of 1783 separated the church and state, whereas the French Revolution of 1789 subordinated the church to the state. My general position on theories of secularization is that we must consider more than the attitudes and practices of individuals. It must also look at the structure of and struggles with power in society. For that reason, Martin's approach to the consequences of revolution was welcome. The political strategies of these societies to solve the problem of power with respect to church and state have indeed been profound and long-lasting. However, the political results have been extremely varied. In the United States, the constitutional settlement of the revolution, starting in colonial Virginia, built a wall between the church and the state to secure individual religious freedom. However, in the past decades, evangelical Christianity and Catholicism have had decisive effects on the political agenda of the state with respect, for example, to sexual identity, marriage, and reproductive rights. However, there are now six conservative Catholic members of the Supreme Court. The religious composition of the Supreme Court has raised criticism regarding the independence of their decisions, especially after the overthrow of Roe v Wade following Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health. The French Revolution provides a dramatic example of a state enforcing secularity in the public domain by making legal decisions, for example, about what is acceptable as a "religion" rather than a "cult." The French policy toward religion has in the past been described as a "War on Sects" (Palmer, 2011). Laicite has become the fundamental lens through which religious institutions are administered and bureaucratically controlled. The ideal of a civil religion as a foundation of public life has created a permanent tension regarding public display of religiosity, for example, the right to wear a burqa in public has been a divisive issue (Gunn, 2004). Despite their different revolutionary origins, the role of the Shari'a in both societies has been contentious, where the Shari'a is misconstrued as "state law" and "arbitration tribunals" have been misidentified as "courts" (Possamai, Richardson, and Turner, 2015). Martin did not include the British Isles in his studies of the long-term effects of political revolutions on culture and religion, but the British example is, in fact, important for his argument. Political revolutions in Britain in 1649, when Oliver Cromwell created a Commonwealth and executed Charles 1, and again in 1688–1689, when the monarchy was restored under the rule of William of Orange, but under the oversight of Parliament, have supported the dominance of Protestantism over culture and constitution. George 1 was the first Hanoverian King in 1714. The two revolutions have guaranteed the long-term role of the Anglican Church as the conduit of conservative values and sentiments (Scruton, 2012). These political events and their national consequences have not seriously interested sociologists of religion despite the British monarch being the head of the Church of England. The rituals surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth and the coronation of Charles III celebrated the peculiar survival of royalty in a modern democracy. The significance of the continuing monarchy was best captured by the political theorist Tom Nairn in his The Enchanted Glass (1989), whose main argument was that Britain had become an industrial society without ever becoming a modern one. Its secularization was limited by the widespread "fetishism of the crown." Jose Casanova (1994) in Public Religions in the Modern World offered yet another version of the focus on religion and revolution in his publications on public religions and social change. Apart from the moral majority in the United States, his examples came from Catholic societies undergoing political change, namely Spain, Poland, and Brazil. Casanova claimed that these developments constituted a "deprivatization" of religion. The American example has primarily involved Protestant churches. The contemporary Protestant support for Donald Trump's version of populism continues to support Casanova's argument. However, the other examples can be regarded as post-Vatican II developments and in response to the Catholic Church's involvement in movements for autonomy and democratic governance in Poland, Spain, and Latin America. There have, in fact, been no further examples. In addition, the national and international role of the church in public life has been compromised by revelations of sexual abuse by the priesthood from the 1980s onward. Various commissions have been undertaken, such as the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in Ireland. It was after 2018 that the Pope began to take overt action to address the problems while recognizing at the same time the depth of the crisis, for example, in Chile. The other challenge to the Christian churches concerns same-sex marriage. Can the churches suddenly change the traditional meaning and rituals around marriage? The larger crisis centers on the future development of marriage itself. How far can a liberal understanding of marriage evolve? If same-sex marriage is acceptable, why not polygamy? (Macedo, 2015). For many observers, the basic question of homosexuality has produced a crisis in the Anglican Church (Sachs, 2009). One neglected figure in these debates about secularization is the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce (1910–1989), who understood what he called the "sexualization" of modern culture as a fundamental aspect of modernization in two major publications: The Crisis of Modernity (Del Noce, 2015) and The Age of Secularization (Del Noce, 2017). The dominant ideology of the technological society is "scientism" or the view that the only valid knowledge is drawn from science. One consequence of scientism has been the replacement of the "good life" with "well-being" which requires the removal of all forms of "repression." Scientism provides the philosophical foundations for the sexual revolution in which all forms of "bigotry" and "repression" must be eliminated with the intervention of the new science of psychology (Del Noce, 2015:157–186). In this process of liberation, sex is disconnected from procreation and family life. Sex becomes an end in itself and is liberated by the widespread availability of contraception. Any criticism of these developments is rejected as repressive. Such repressed individuals need sexual counseling by scientific psychology. One consequence of these developments is the decline in the fertility rate. The total fertility rate (TFR) is the number of children born to a woman if she successfully completes her fertility around 49 years of age. A TFR of 2.1 is required to replace a population. In 1900, the Italian TFR was 4.6, but in 2020, this rate fell to 1.33 or well below replacement. This contemporary demographic change provides a dramatic confirmation of Del Noce's pessimism about the sexual revolution. Without immigration to replace its labor force, Italian society would face economic stagnation and widespread political instability. Del Noce, who had lived through the time of Italian fascism, argued that the age of scientism would usher in a new totalitarianism. Del Noce's views were often rejected as reactionary, but he replied that the new totalitarianism is a form of disintegration before becoming a form of domination. While rejecting the past, it cannot create any new values and would become ironically conservative in protecting the economic and political interests of a dominant class. What is required is not the preservation of the authority of the church but the defense of the religious dimension of human existence. The refutation of totalitarianism requires a recognition of the transcendent in human life. The originality of Del Noce's approach to modernization as secularization was to connect it to a sexual revolution as an aspect of a new totalitarianism. Whereas the contemporary debate about secularization has, in many respects, become stale, Del Noce took it into a new dimension by connecting it to sexual liberation as indicative of repressive politics. In the United States, Peter Berger (1929–2017) was originally a champion of the idea of secularization in his theoretical framework that explored the fragility of 'plausibility structures' in the modern world with Thomas Luckmann (1967). His early theoretical work had engaged with the German philosopher Arnold Gehlen, whose philosophical anthropology had inspired Berger's view of the precarious nature of social institutions, including religious structures (Turner, 2018). Berger wrote the Foreword to Gehlen's Man in an Age of Technology (1980). Gehlen's philosophical anthropology pictured humans as instinctively weak and that their survival depended not on instincts but on building institutions. Gehlen also saw modern society as in a state of post-histoire. Berger and Luckman's (1967) sociology of knowledge was completely built on these foundations. Eventually, Berger came dramatically to recant the idea of secularization as a universal component of the process of modernization in his Desecularization (Berger, 1999), especially after he became aware of the vibrancy of religion outside the West. This publication did much to bury existing theories of secularization, and indeed, criticism of the secularization thesis became "the new master narrative itself" (Pollack, 2014:111–122). I have, however, supported Steve Bruce's argument that the recantation was unnecessary and that Berger's work on plausibility structures remained valid (Bruce, 2011, 2018). In any case, there is little disagreement that the churches are in decline and that we are moving into a period of postinstitutional religion. Churches are compelled to adopt contemporary means of self-promotion, such as advertising themselves online, if they are going to retain their congregations. Spirituality and believing without belonging may offer valid insights into these new forms of religiosity, but they may also be seen to be perfectly compatible with a private culture of modern individualism. American sociologists have challenged this view. Stark and Bainbridge (1985), in their economic model of religion, argue that the vibrancy and dynamism of American religiosity depend precisely on the absence of a dominated established church and the openness of the religious market. One might argue that these research themes—secularization, the decline of institutionalized religion, and the erosion of the plausibility structures supporting religious faith—were the legacy of the heyday of the early sociology of religion. Durkheim had spoken of the decline of the "old gods." However, he concluded that religion "seems destined to transform itself rather than to disappear" (Durkheim, 2001:326) and "No society can exist which does not feel the need at regular intervals to satisfy and reaffirm the collective feeling and ideas that constitute its unity and its personality" (Durkheim, 2001:322). In the 1960s, much of the focus of American sociology was not on sociological developments in Europe and still less on the rest of the world. Durkheim's use of Australian aboriginal resources that had been collected by British colonial administrators was unique. The other major figure in the American sociological tradition in this period was Robert N. Bellah, who played a key role in this article, especially when I looked at the comparative historical sociology of religious traditions in the so-called "Axial Age." Bellah is central to my own approach to sociology, given my long-standing interest in Max Weber's legacy of historical and comparative sociology, as perhaps best illustrated in Weber and Islam (Turner, 1974). Bellah's sociology has, in fact, always been comparative and open to diverse cultural traditions. For example, his early research involved a study of the Apache kinship system (Bellah, 1952). Ironically, however, his most influential publication, at least in his early career, was his article on the civil religion in Daedalus (Bellah, 1967) that involved the debate about religion in the public domain in the form of "the civil religion" in America. Given Bellah's' lifelong interest in "tribal cultures" and "nonwestern societies," the success of the 1967 article was something of an albatross around his neck. The article "took on a life of its own, one that distracted attention from the substantive issues for which it was originally intended" (Bellah and Tipton, 2006:221). However, aspects of the debate continued to appear in his later work, such as Habits of the Heart (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton, 1985). I dwell on Bellah because his work is, in many respects, the centerpiece of this article. His later engagement with the key idea of 'transcendence' is, to my mind, a key turning point, not only in the sociology of religion but in historical sociology. Two publications coming towards the end of his life, namely Religion in Human Evolution (Bellah, 2011) and The Axial Age and its Consequences (Bellah and Joas, 2012) may have been his major—indeed magisterial—life achievements. Although much of this interest was developed towards the end of his life, his engagement with religiocultural evolution developed from his time at Harvard in seminars with Parsons and Eisenstadt in 1955. The idea of evolutionary stages was presented in Beyond Belief (Bellah, 1970). Apart from Bellah's developing interest in Japan (Bellah, 2003), the sociology of religion of the 1960s was perhaps unsurprisingly local and national. Because sociology was late to develop in Britain, much of my undergraduate sociology involved studying American sociology. Thinking back to my undergraduate sociology program at the University of Leeds in the 1960s, our set reading included Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology in 1960 (Gleason, 2005). My reading in social theory included the daunting Structure of Social Action (Parsons, 1949). When I eventually came to prepare for my dissertation on the decline of Methodism in England—of which Martin was the external examiner—I was reading Martin's A Sociology of English Religion (Martin, 1967) and Bryan Wilson's (1959) "An Analysis of Sect Development" in the American Sociological Review. In retrospect, the main interest of my thesis was the division that emerged in Methodism between the local chapels and the senior ministers in the Methodist Circuit over ecumenicalism, which involved combining with the Church of England. To understand that development, I turned to Philip Selznick's (1949) TVA and the Grass Roots to understand conflicts between the grassroots and management—a study that had little to do with the sociology of religion! The thesis was submitted in 1970 as The Decline of Methodism: An analysis of religious commitment and organization. In short, much of the attention of sociology in the period 1945 until Berger's recantation in 1999 involved a national focus on religion and its decline or transformation. Talcott Parsons, starting in the 1960s, played a key role in the sociology of religion. He wrote numerous articles on the importance of Christianity in modern America throughout his academic career. He also did much to keep European sociology of religion on the academic agenda in the United States, starting with his translation of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1930 and in The Structure of Social Action in 1937, he discussed the work of European sociologists who have remained on the sociological canon. Parsons's influence was eventually eclipsed by the widespread rejection of structural functionalism. His influence in Europe was also overshadowed by the influence of Ralf Dahrendorf (1959) and John Rex (1961) on conflict theory. However, Roland Robertson was lecturing on the sociology of religion and sociological theory at Leeds during my undergraduate time at the University. Robertson defended Parsons in British sociology against the influence of neo-Marxism and conflict theory. He also promoted the study of religion but eventually focused increasingly on his globalization theory, publishing Globalization. Social Theory and Global Culture in 1992. It was initially a critique of the neglect of religion and culture in "world systems theory." Although his work became influential in various areas, including interdisciplinarity, Globalization faced a lot of early critical opposition (Featherstone, 2020). Although Berger's desecularization argument may have opened the windows on religious vitality outside the West, the dominant topics in the sociology of religion have had a Western or, more specifically, a national focus. This attention to European history was perhaps driven by the influence of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. My early reading of Weber was focused on the Protestant Ethic, which, apart from anything else, included a discussion of English Methodism. Although Parson's translation of Weber in 1930 was influential, it was challenged by historians and subsequently by later translations that questioned many of his renditions of German, including specifically Herrschaft, which Parsons translated as "leadership" rather than "power." The other complaint was that Parsons artificially forced Weber into his own "action frame of reference" (Cohen, Hazelrigg, and Pope, 1975). Nevertheless, the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism inspired a generation of sociologists. Despite this attention to German sociology, the peculiarity of these developments in secularization theory was the absence of any great awareness of the debate about secularization in German theology, philosophy, and sociology in the period leading up to the First World War and the end of the Second World War involving Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, Karl Loewith, Hans Blumenberg, and Karl Jaspers. I was fortunate to be invited to write the preface to Karl Loewith's Max Weber and Karl Marx (1993). His article first appeared in Archiv fuer Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitk and was eventually translated into English in 1982. Loewith had been a student under Martin Heidegger and had absorbed much of Heidegger's existentialism. Loewth's argument was that, despite their differences, Marx and Weber shared what Loewith described as philosophical anthropology. Following Heidegger, much of European social theory and philosophy struggled to come to terms with Heidegger's question, "What is man?" in modernity. I found this existential approach congenial after studying the impact of Arnold Gehlen's anthropology on Berger. The gist of this article concerns the strange neglect of comparative sociology of religion and the dominant focus on the United States and Europe. Weber was eventually equally famous for his Religion of India (Weber, 1958) and The Religion of China (1951) when these appeared in English translation. Given the neglect of Weber's scattered commentary on Islam, My Weber and Islam (1974) was immediately successful and was positively reviewed by Ernest Gellner, who was by then famous for his research on the Atlas Mountains. Perhaps the success of my publication reflected the fact that there was little competition, and the book was critical of Weber's view that Islam was a warrior religion. I pointed out that Sufism was carried to much of Asia by Muslim traders rather than Muslim warriors. My publication was also treated sympathetically by a group of young anthropologists and historians working on Islam and development studies. Their number included people who subsequently became influential in the study of Islam and, more generally, in the anthropology of religion. They included Talal Asad, who had been a student of Evans-Pritchard and was to become the dominant anthropologist of Islam of his generation. It also included Roger Own, who became a famous historian of British Egypt. These scholars entrusted me to review the three-volume Venture of Islam by Marshall G.S. Hodgson (1974), which expanded our understanding of Islam as a global system or the Oikoumene as he called. His critical approach was also to oppose "Arabism" with its exclusive focus on the Arab foundations of pre-Islamic culture. Hodgson was for a time the Chair of the famous Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and through that extraordinary collection of intellectuals, his history of Islam included sociology, economics, and politics. I return to Karl Jaspers and the origins of the modern debate on the Axial Age in part because I view the question of the historical origins of many of the world religions and philosophies that had their origins in the period 800–400 B.C. as fundamental to what we understand as constituting "religion." In addressing this turning point, Bellah embraced the legacy of Jaspers and restored evolutionary theory to contemporary sociology. However, Bellah's concerns were with the heritage of the Axial Age and to what extent it can address our modern-day "crisis of coherence" (Boy and Torpey, 2019: 81). I will conclude this personal review of the sociology of religion over the last 50 years or more with three observations. The first is that the secularization debate is now deeply embedded in modern-day sociology, and it is difficult to imagine that the debate will disappear. However, it is equally difficult to believe that there will be major conceptual or theoretical breakthroughs that transform the whole field. There will no doubt be ample scope for empirical research on how young people engage with and express their individual religious or spiritual needs outside institutional religion, but this research will not produce any "big picture" of our modern crisis. My second conclusion is that in the past churches depended to a large extent on the coherence of the family to support its intergenerational survival. Christian Churches came to depend on the family for recruitment, especially if they did not have a strong missionary or evangelical tradition. My own postgraduate thesis on Methodism in the 1960s concluded that the future of Methodism depended no longer on the conversion of new members but on the socialization of its inherited population. In modern societies, we are witnessing a radical decline of the traditional family, including late marriage, no marriage, no-fault divorce, and transgender marriage. These developments will continue to depress the fertility rate of the developed world and shrink future generations of Christians. These developments not only influenced church institutions but also Christian theology, which traditionally included the idea of the Holy Family and the Sonship of Jesus. The basic Christian prayer—the Lord's Prayer—starts with "Our Father who art in Heaven." There is no question that major festivals such as Christmas have become commercial as much as family festivals. Bryan Wilson, who was, of course, far more conservative than David Martin, had argued that Christianity had survived in the United States at the cost of its theological content. Thus, turning to Steve Bruce's new edition of Religion in Secular Society, in America, the process of "secularization drained the religious content, without too radically affecting the form, of religious institutions" (Wilson, 2016:204). Finally, the inspiration of Bellah's turn to the Axial Age brought together many of the leading scholars of his generation in sociology, history, and theology. It was the extraordinary scholar Arnaldo Momigliano who defined what was axial about the age by concluding, "We are in the age of criticism" (Momigliano, 1975:9). The Axial Age established the idea that there is a different and better world beyond the world in which we live now. Along with the idea of transcendence, the Age invented new "stories"—I use the word in Bellah's discourse with respect. Apocalypse was one such story. These developments in the late work of Bellah should encourage contemporary sociologists of religion to take these traditions more seriously. Weber, of course, took theology and biblical studies very seriously. It is enough to refer to his Ancient Judaism (Weber, 1967) and to recall that Weber was deeply engaged in debates about the social role of Christianity in the Evangelical-Social Congress. Alfred von Harnack (1851–1930), who was also involved in the Congress, was a relative of Weber. Harnack was a controversial figure in his own right, having published Marcion. The Gospel of the Alien God (von Harnack, 1990) which challenged many of the conventional assumptions of biblical history. He also published the highly successful Das Wesen des Christentums which was later translated as What is Christianity? He played a role in Weber's development of the "ideal type" and in Weber's understanding of charisma (Adair-Toteff, 2016). The debate about the Axial Age produced a wealth of important scholarship across a variety of academic disciplines. Nevertheless, the idea of an Axial Age has also produced a wealth of criticism. For example, the religious breakthroughs in the period 800–400 were historically too far apart to constitute a single age (Black, 2008). An alternative view is that human history has been shaped by many breakthroughs rather than by one single transition. There is also the problem of the absence of any attention to Africa and the Americas (Boy and Torpey, 2013; Torpey, 2017) in axial history. Bellah's account tells us very little or nothing about religious activity before the Axial Age. Bellah recognized that some form of religious activity such as rituals existed in "aboriginal" or "ancient societies," but they—"tribal religions"—lacked the critical ingredient of a complex notion of "transcendence." One might legitimately conclude that while the idea of a single transformative age could not be sustained, it has generated many critical debates that have redefined and enriched our understanding of religion and religions. While the Axial Age debate concluded that this early period of human development created the age of criticism and, thus, critical attention to questions about power, kingship, and justice, my version of these religious developments is that they addressed, not just transcendence, but rather the precarious character of human existence—the body, our vulnerability, suffering, and death. These issues, which are basically existential in character, are the perennial foundations of any religious understanding of human life. These conclusions are perhaps fortuitously consistent with Karl Jaspers's own existential response to the catastrophe of the age in which he lived and brought him to reflect on the Axial Age. The idea of transcendence was a response to these existential issues, which remain with us despite secularization and the presence of medical science responses to our vulnerability and the inevitability of our death. Open access publishing facilitated by Australian Catholic University, as part of the Wiley - Australian Catholic University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.