How the West Lost God
The overwhelming cause of secularization in the West has been government control of education.
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Institutions are hard to dislodge. Doubly so when they are shared widely across the length and breadth of an entire culture. Whenever a given theory, account, or bundle of convictions about some matter of public importance passes from the realm of contest and conjecture into the realm of inherited folk wisdom, it takes an almighty effort to replace it with something else, even if that something else is something more accurate.
Probably the most culturally widespread intuition influencing our historical self-understanding as a society today has to do with how we think of secularization. Why has the West become less and less religious over recent decades and centuries? The conventional answers given to this question are false, and they are all contained within a controlling 19th-century narrative of modernization.
Simply put, it is widely assumed today that the Western world became less religious
because it modernized. For the avoidance of doubt, it’s perhaps best to list here some of the trends that might be grouped under the umbrella term “modernization.” These would include the spread of scientific knowledge and mass education, urbanization, industrialization, capitalism, pluralism, technological advance, increasing prosperity, and better health. The Spanish sociologist José Casanova wrote in 1994 that some version of the theory that these modernizing trends caused the demise of religion was “shared by all the founding fathers” of 19th-century sociology.
For all their disagreements with one another, all of these men, who ranged in thought from Karl Marx to John Stuart Mill, thought that the modernizing trends listed above contributed in one combination or another to religious decline. Their almost universal agreement on this point is probably what moved the causes of secularization from the realm of popular controversy to the realm of received folk wisdom in the first place. We all
know that modernization equals secularization, the story goes; it’s just left to us to figure out exactly
how we weigh the causal heft of the different factors.
Atheists of a particularly anticlerical stripe may place the emphasis of causation on advances in scientific knowledge and educational attainment, arguing that people were simply educated over time out of their gullible belief in fairy tales. Agnostics with a more amiable or indifferent attitude toward religion might make the case instead that increased prosperity and health merely reduced the incentive to place one’s hope for a good life beyond the grave. It’s become especially in-vogue for religious socialists, post-liberals, paleoconservatives, and agrarians to blame secularization on the rise of industrial capitalism itself. They argue that capitalism eviscerates noneconomic community, family, and faith commitments, uproots people from hearth and home, and leads them on a merry chase across the globe after an endlessly proliferating confectionary of goods and services, atomizing and atrophying the human person all the while. Here is a sample of this kind of argument from the theologian David Bentley Hart, who
argued a few years ago in
First Things that “the history of capitalism and the history of secularism are not two accidentally contemporaneous tales, after all; they are the same story told from different vantages.” He goes on to note that “this is what Marx genuinely admired about capitalism: its power to dissolve all the immemorial associations of family, tradition, faith, and affinity, the irresistible dynamism of its dissolution of ancient values, its (to borrow a loathsome phrase) ‘gales of creative destruction.’”
Secularization Caused by Government Control of Education | National Review
