I just finished perhaps the most powerful examination of secularization published to date. Not only does it account for secularization as it occurs in different contexts thus ruling out the old theory that "if it happened this way with Europe, it will happen that way everywhere some day", it also challenges Rodney Stark's theory that a more pluralistic society that allows for fair competition among different religious "firms" produces a more religious culture.
Rather, the theory that Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart advance in Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide is very simple. As cultures become more affluent and create systems that produce more existentially secure citizens, people within those cultures will rely less and less on religion to address their existential concerns. For instance, Pippa and Norris offer compelling evidence that this is why countries in the Southern hemisphere are more religious than those in the north; they are generally poorer, have more unstable governments that often oppress rather than support their citizens, have less health care, more contaminated sources of water, more diseases to confront, etc. Moreover, these countries are also reproducing their populations at a much higher rate than societies in the Northern hemisphere. Affluence is tied to lower birthrates. So even while they argue the North is becoming more secular, the South which is more religious continues to produce more of the worlds population and so, the world overall is becoming more and more religious.
The question is why the United States is so much more religious than other nations in the North, or the West as it were. If the US is such a wealthy nation, it seems to offer enough counter-factual evidence that this theory should have a large hole in it. This is where the sobering argument about the social equality and distribution of health and wealth of the US comes into play. The US has a lower life expectancy and a higher infant mortality rate than many other wealthy post-industrial nations like the UK, Japan, or Sweden among others.
There is also ample evidence that since the US is not a welfare state in which such needs as health are not automatically provided from womb to the grave and with a privatized economy that the social divide between the wealthy and the poor is wider creating pockets in the society that do indeed mirror issues that even third world countries face. This creates pockets of the population in urban, rural, and other areas where the overall rate of religiosity balances secularization in more existentially secure areas like the metropolitan suburbs.
(T)he United States is exceptionally high in religiosity in large part, we believe, because it is also one of the most unequal postindustrial societies under comparison. Relatively high levels of economic insecurity are experienced by many sectors of U.S. society, despite American affluence, due to the cultural emphasis on the values of personal responsibility, individual achievement, and mistrust of big government, limiting the role of public services and the welfare state for basic matters such as healthcare covering all the working population (Norris & Inglehart, 2005, pp. 107-108).
This places the mainline churches which persist as the heirs of the wealth created by their forebears at the end of the 19th century to deal with a crisis that this wealth creation has ironically reinforced. The Tower of Babel is, as much as anything else, a tale about a people who believed themselves to be so powerful that they no longer needed God. As we become more affluent in our own mainline denominations, it may be that we are deluded into thinking we no longer need God quite as much. However, this is not what Jesus asks of us. What Jesus asks of us is to serve the least of these and love our neighbor.
If the reality is that the mainline people do not feel the need for God to meet their existential needs quite as much as when each day was a trial for survival, then we are in a position to put the Body of Christ into action to serve those who continue to struggle. Not to commit ourselves to the plight of the poor and those who bear the basic existential burden of survival daily, is nothing short of erecting tall steeples of our own pride and sense of material accomplishment, only to push God out of the very churches in which we gather to worship ourselves.
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