For Benjamin Ziemann, attributing the postwar decline in commitment to the Catholic Church to “secularization” seems to beg the question. Secularization was not a new phenomenon, and Catholic solidarity had periodically trumped its effects in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. Moreover, the Church was not unresponsive and “decidedly nonmodern,” as some have argued (208, quoting Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Die nachholende Selbstmodernisierung des Katholizismus? Kritische Anmerkungen zu Karl Gabriels Vorschlag einer interdisziplinären Hermeneutik des II. Vatikanums,” in Das II. Vatikanum—christlicher Glaube im Horizont globaler Modernisierung, ed. Peter Hünermann [1998], 61). Indeed, a significant part of the Church's response to secularization involved its deployment—sometimes done eagerly, sometimes reluctantly—of the tools of “modern” social science.

Ziemann does not reject the “secularization paradigm” (3). But rather than merely semantically equating secularization with religious decline, he redeploys the term with descriptive precision. Whereas religion once stood at the pinnacle of a hierarchical social system, religion in the modern world is just “one among many” social systems with their own “distinctive codes” (4). Formerly integrative, religion has been displaced as its adherents disaggregated into various social groups. Modernity, in short, has heightened “functional differentiation,” and as churches observed its dynamic effects, they had to review their “options” (5). While one option was to succumb to religious “decline,” other options involved revitalized forms of social engagement.

Amid the ruins in 1945, the Church actually seemed well placed to assume a reinvigorated role in German society. Instead, the once powerful network of Catholic voluntary associations steadily lost influence and members. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) was intended to reverse its predecessor's mandate (1869–1870) toward separateness and insulation from modernity by encouraging religious engagement with the secular world. Yet, some rued the perceived sacrifice of depth and mystery in favor of breadth and accessibility. Meanwhile, the decline in church attendance continued apace.

In a decidedly modernistic response, some churchmen recommended the instrumental use of social science—“the scientization of the social” (vii)—both to identify the scale of the problem and to address it. This response did not come out of nowhere. Early in the century, the gathering of statistics on church attendance had been intended to counter anticlerical scorn by demonstrating the Church's continued relevance and strength. Moving from denial to preemption, some Catholics had seen that statistics could also serve as early-warning systems. Over time, and influenced by similar trends in France, German Catholic reformers learned how to gather statistics less crudely and also how to apply them more subtly. Better statistical methods led to better questions, e.g., about the identities of the lapsed or the nonpracticing. Catholic reformers were thus drawn to the field of “sociography”—the systematic identification and evaluation of different social groups—and then to the increasingly sophisticated application of opinion polling and (from structural functionalism) “organizational research.” Eventually, a critical mass of clergy and laity came to believe in the efficacy of social scientific techniques in identifying the fallen-away and in addressing some of the reasons for their departures. What the reformers could not overcome, however, was that “science” was better at diagnosis than response. This was not because the Church was stubborn or irrational, but rather because scientific rationality was often based on different premises and norms than the theological or philosophical rationalities on which the Church relied. As the critics put it: scientific data might ascertain, or construct, behavioral norms, but behavioral norms were not moral truths. Moreover, viewing priests as “function bearers” who performed “specialized services” rendered them interchangeable with nonordained “specialists” or “functionaries” and prompted a “consumerist attitude” among the laity that squared poorly with the motives for religion (quotations from 178, 183, 190).

These points affected the deployment of two branches of the social sciences in fascinatingly contrasting ways. Sociological approaches were valued for their utility in identifying those social groups that were most vulnerable to erosion, but they were also criticized precisely because they prioritized fractured identities. By contrast, psychological approaches were intriguing because their premises and their purposes, like those of the Church, were holistic; yet, those same approaches also risked replacing religious awe and the humility of the confessional with therapeutic sterility and moral relativity. In both cases but for different reasons, the instrumental willingness to apply social science soon met up against ideational implications. Whereas conservatives articulated trepidations from the outset, some concerns later grew to trouble the reformers themselves.

Both the openness to social science approaches and the trepidations about them link this intellectual and institutional history to the many burning contextual controversies that affected the Catholic clergy and laity at specific points in time between the 1950s and the 1970s. These included the shortage of priests, congregational polity, youthful behavior and nurturing, sexual rights and obligations, birth control, changed outlooks toward the confessional, as well as changed expectations surrounding the function of—and qualifications for—pastoral counseling. This book is thus much more than a treatise about depersonalized ideas. It is, to be sure, a kind of applied intellectual history, addressing both the Catholic reception of social scientific ideas and methods and their instrumental usage by the church. But if the fact of the usage is itself enough to challenge any overly categorical assertion of Catholic anti-scientism, the motives and the reservations felt by Catholic thinkers, priests, and laity point again to the conflict-ridden social, pastoral, and family issues that made those years so vibrant.

Beyond simply guiding a translation of the German version published in 2007, Ziemann has rewritten the introduction, added context, and reduced some of the detail, which makes his material more accessible to a non-German audience. The author's original decision to steer clear of Catholic anticommunism leaves unexamined implications for divided Germany. Perhaps the only other shortfall in this unusually fine volume comes at the very end. We learn again that scientization produced ambivalence, and that secularization triggered not only a mood of crisis but also an array of productive responses. Yet, where that left the Church, German Catholics, and Catholics more generally seems less clear in sum than in the individual topical chapters. “Modernity,” Ziemann concludes, has a future; and the larger development of which his subject is a part is “the attempt to reconfigure the place of Christian religion” in a “functionally differentiated society” (277). That project remains a work in progress, and Ziemann's book is a suggestive contribution to its historical delineation.