A Christian Cancellation of the Secularist Truce? Waning Christian Religiosity and Waxing Religious Deprivatization in the West

Abstract

Analysis of International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data collected in 18 Western countries in 1998 demonstrates that Christian desires for a public role of religion are strongest in countries where Christian religiosity is numerically most marginal. Moreover, Dutch data covering the period 1970-1996 confirm that the decline of the number of Christians in the Netherlands has been coincided by a strengthening of the call for public religion among the remaining faithful and by increased polarization about this with the nonreligious. Religious decline and religious privatization, two of the most crucial dimensions of secularization (Casanova 1994), hence develop dialectically: as the number of Christians declines, the remaining faithful seem increasingly unwilling to accept the "secularist truce"-the secularist contract that guarantees religious freedom yet bans religion from the public sphere by relegating it to the private realm.

Christian Religion In The West: Privatization Or Public Revitalization?

“…It is measured by means of four Likert items that together yield a reliable scale (see Table 1). Figure 1 plots the percentage of non-Christians in each of the countries (x-axis) against the mean aspirations for religion's public revitalization among Christians in these countries (yaxis), which yields the same findings as those reported previously by Achterberg et al (2009). Christians (1998, N=18 countries, Pearson's r=0.72;p<0.001).…”

“…Needless to say, then, such a finding would clearly contradict the notion that religious decline stimulates religion's public revitalization rather than its further privatization. This notion instead leads us to expect not only that Christian aspirations for religion's public revitalization are most typically found in the countries where Christian religion is least widespread (Hypothesis 1, which is identical to the hypothesis confirmed previously by Dekker (2007) and Achterberg et al (2009)), but also that these aspirations are not only found among older Christians, but just as much among younger ones (Hypothesis 2).…”

“…In this paper, we have elaborated on previous findings by Dekker (2007) and Achterberg et al (2009), that in contexts where Christians are numerically most marginal, they nonetheless have stronger aspirations for a public role of their creed than in contexts where the proportion of Christians is high. This is clearly a remarkable finding against the background of the debate about secularization, which has dominated sociology of religion for decades, because it throws the notion that religious decline and religious privatization typically occur simultaneously into doubt.…”

“…Based on research conducted in the Netherlands -a country in which personal religiosity has dropped to much lower levels than in virtually all other countries in the world (Norris andInglehart, 2004) -, Dekker (2007) has presented evidence that the number of Christians who say that their belief is "significant" or Recent research by Achterberg et al (2009) has elaborated on this, building on the quintessentially Weberian notion that the study of secularization should not remain confined to the institutional level, as many a secularization theorist has done, but should address micro-level changes in religion's significance for individual believers as well (Chaves, 1994;Turina, 2007). Besides a replication of the trend found by Dekker (2007) for the Netherlands, Achterberg et al have yielded cross-national patterns for 18 Western countries that are consistent with the notion that in countries where Christian religion has declined most, aspirations for religion's public revitalization are not weaker, but stronger than in other countries.…”

“…Secularization theory's two principal subtheses, the 'decline-of-religion thesis' and the 'privatization thesis' (Casanova, 1994), have both become increasingly contested and recent research even suggests that these two aspects of secularization may develop in a remarkably uneven way. That idea is put forward by Achterberg et al (2009), who point out that the decline of Christian religion in the West spawns its public revitalization rather than its further privatization. This paper elaborates on this by assessing the empirical merits of two objections that suggest that these recent findings may after all not contradict the established notion that religious decline and religious privatization occur in tandem.…”