Assuming or Demonstrating?

Wood thinks Wilson is defective in assuming rather than demonstrating the declining public significance of religious institutions. A number of matters should be raised in Wilson’s defence.

First, we must question the distinction between assuming (while offering a few illustrations) and demonstrating. Proving any assertion in the social sciences in a manner and to an extent that will satisfy the doubter is difficult, and that is particularly the case for what is at issue here. Unlike the matters that Wilson does unarguably demonstrate—decline in rates of adherence to religious institutions, declining use of religious offices for rites of passage, declining numbers and social status of the clergy—it is difficult to show the influence of religious institutions. He provides a number of examples but, as Karl Popper (Reference Popper1969) argued, no number of white swans definitively establish that all swans are white––there may be a black swan around the corner. The same methodological problem applies to Wood’s own examples. He wishes to make a general theoretical point about the behaviour of religious institutions in a society in what he dubs “advanced” secularization but he cannot establish (and indeed does not try to establish) that his few examples are representative. In a book length treatment, Wood could have presented many more examples, perhaps enough to persuade the sceptic. But he is confined by limited wordage and by the need to discuss other issues. The same could be said of Wilson. My defence to Wood levelling the same charge against me is the same. It is true that my theoretical writing on secularization offers only general assertions supported by a few illustrations but Wood overlooks the many areas and thematic publications in which I demonstrate the marginalization of religion through detailed examination of such matters as the increasing inability of Church of Scotland kirk sessions to discipline members, the removal of Scottish education from the churches, the failure of Christian parties in British elections in recent decades, the repeal of the blasphemy acts, and the like [Bruce Reference Bruce1985; Reference Bruce2012; Reference Bruce2014].

In any case, Wilson clearly felt little need to spend time presenting at great length evidence for the declining influence of religious institutions because it would have been obvious to most readers of Religion in Secular Society [1966] and even more so to readers of any of his later secularization presentations. In 1966 the great raft of progressive legislation passed by Harold Wilson’s Labour government against church opposition—legalisation of abortion (1967), decriminalisation of male homosexuality (1967), abolition of theatre censorship (1968) and relaxation of constraints on divorce (1969)—had yet to come but the churches were swimming against the tide of changes in attitude. The more perceptive church leaders were aware of that, as were Wilson’s readers.

A further reason for Wilson’s apparently assuming rather than demonstrating is that, in a democracy, the public influence of the churches is largely a function of their popularity (albeit a time-lagged function). Religion in Secular Society spends a great deal of time demonstrating the decline in indices of popular involvement in organised religion and the decline in the status and remit of the clergy. I have authored a number of papers concerned with public attitudes towards the influence of the churches (for example, Bruce and Glendinning 2011). As we will see, when scholars do study those matters that Wood says secularizationists assume rather than demonstrate, they discover that campaigns by religious organizations to gain public influence fail because the only people receptive to them are the religious (whose declining number Wilson demonstrates).

Finally, the preference of secularizationists for demonstrating changes in individual religiosity over studying attempts of religious organizations to reclaim public space is a sensible use of resources given that the criticisms of the secularization approach (from Grace Davie’s ‘believing but not belonging’ notion to the rational choice theorists’ supply-side alternative) have concerned individual religiosity [Davie Reference Davie1994; Young Reference Young1997].

In defence of British sociology of religion overall, it is worth mentioning James Beckford’s work on prison chaplaincies, which Wood overlooks [Beckford and Gilliat Reference Beckford and Gilliat2008]. What that made clear was that the Church of England only retained publically-funded positions such as prison chaplaincies because it broadened its remit from offering Anglican religious offices to presenting itself as the “senior” denomination defending first Christianity in the widest sense and then (when non-Christian religions grew) religion per se. Arguably that remit has become even broader in the last two decades with spiritual and humanist counselling displacing religious offices and instruction in the work of prison, hospital and school chaplains.

Notoriety versus influence

Wood says “religion appears to have greater public ‘visibility’ in recent years” [2015: 247], and indeed it does have. However, in Western Europe, this is largely because representatives and adherents of very small non-Christian religions have become increasingly assertive. This would only be a challenge to the secularization thesis if it had resulted from religion becoming more popular among the population that was previously accurately described as largely secular or if new contests about the rights of religion were triggering some sort of religious revival among the formerly largely secular. Neither is the case.

The UK differs from France, the US and a number of other “modern” societies in that its church-state relations are not the subject of a written constitutional settlement. Instead they evolved in a clumsy case-by-case manner as dissenting denominations pushed back Anglican influence but then stopped challenging elements of the Church of England’s former hegemony once the foundations of real power had been pulled out. For example, when the right to graduate from Oxford and Cambridge was confined to people who “conformed” to the Church of England (Easter Communion was usually sufficient), Nonconformist denominations established their theological colleges in London and major northern cities such as Sheffield, Birmingham and Newcastle. But when in 1872 Oxford and Cambridge were opened up, those denominations moved their theology colleges to Oxford and Cambridge where they gradually became constituent colleges. The Catholic Church stopped complaining about the state-funding of Anglican schools once its schools were also state-funded, and non-religious people stopped objecting to church schools when Anglican schools stopped being especially Anglican.

The presence, as of right, in the upper chamber of the UK legislature of twenty-six Anglican bishops lost salience when the chamber was enlarged to include a far greater number of peers appointed by the political parties, when it became common to include leading non-Christians in such appointments, and when the Church of England by-and-large accepted that its “Lords Spiritual” should not use their position in a partisan manner: an informal commitment that has largely held [Bown Reference Bown1994]. The one major exception to that self-denying principle came in 1963/1964 when the Lords Spiritual were effective in barring an amendment to legislation concerning the licensing of pharmacists that would have allowed members of the Exclusive Brethren to sit all the tests required for registration but not actually join the new Royal College of Pharmacists: an amendment necessary to allow Exclusive Brethren pharmacists to remain true to their extreme interpretation of Paul’s injunction to ‘be ye not yoked together with unbelievers’ (2 Corinthians 6: 14). As Wood condemns Wilson for not attending to the public influence of the churches, it is worth noting that Wilson wrote a number of letters to the press and newspaper articles severely critical of the Church of England’s behaviour in this matter. Mostly because it has proved impossible to find a widely-acceptable alternative to the current mix of party-appointed peers and inherited peerage, reform of the House of Lords, though widely accepted as necessary, continues to elude governments. Tony Blair’s Labour government capped the number of hereditary peers who were allowed to sit in the House of Lords at any one time but then lost its nerve. However, it is surely significant that when, in the 1990s, devolved assemblies were created for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, there was no suggestion that religious leaders should be allocated seats.

Furthermore, religious influence on state schools has been reduced by the imposition of a national curriculum in all subjects except religious education (RE) and sex education––the only subjects from which parents may withdraw their children. This may seem like a victory for the churches but the implied assertion that geology and biology should be uniform across all schools is a major constraint on religious particularities, as is the fact that state schools of all stripes are subject to a uniform system of school inspection (which has criticised some schools with few non-Muslim pupils for not teaching topics that some conservative Muslims find offensive). Add to that the fact that local councils set a common curriculum for RE and that the principal publishers of school text books are not willing to produce special editions that accommodate religious sensitivities and again one has the classic British pattern of a head-on collision with minority religious interests being avoided while all the governmental pressure is in a secular direction.

Although the UK is often contrasted with other European countries in trying to permit “multiculturalism” rather than insisting on a common secularity, two further legislative changes are important signals of the marginalization of religion in response to its notoriety. The first concerns blasphemy laws; the second concerns the equality of all religions. The blasphemy laws are a good example of the messy evolution of church-state relations in the UK. It was a criminal offence in all parts of the UK to blaspheme: meaning here to offend against Christianity. Some secularists argued that such laws were passé. However, rather than repeal them (which would have provoked contention), successive governments from 1843 in Scotland and 1921 in England simply refused to sanction official prosecutions. Like farmers “docking” lambs’ tails, rather than amputating the offending laws, governments simply applied a tight tourniquet in the hope that the loss of the blood supply of actual prosecution would lead to the appendages withering and falling off. As Britain’s Muslim population grew, it became more assertive and many Muslims argued that it was unfair for the criminal law to protect Christianity but not Islam. After much deliberation, the Blair government agreed but, instead of extending the protection of the law to cover non-Christian religions, it levelled the playing field in the other direction by repealing the laws.

The other signally important piece of legislation was the 2010 Equality Act. This was an extension of previous acts that outlawed racial and gender discrimination, making it a criminal offence to discriminate in the provision of goods and services on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, age, religion and sexual orientation. While in one respect this strengthened the protection of all religions, it did so only in the context of a privatization of religion. It protected the right of people to believe and worship as they wished provided those people did not, in the public sphere, act on any particular socio-moral principles supposedly derived from their religious beliefs and so long as their actions did not express disapproval of particular classes of people. Court cases are still exploring the precise operation of the 2010 Act but judgements have already established that, no matter that they claim religious exemption, Christian bed-and-breakfast providers have no right to deny service to gay couples. Even if Wood is right to say that Wilson assumed rather than demonstrated religion’s loss of public influence, the assumptions he made in his 1966 Religion in Secular Society have proved to be prescient.

Ambient faith

Wood offers an excellent summary of research on campaigns by the Bible Society to introduce Christian symbols into the public space. He correctly notes that attempts to increase the amount of “ambient religion” in the public arena were only permitted when the particularly Christian elements of the symbolism was muted. His summary of work on the reception of religious messages (such as promoting Christian ideas with paid advertising slogans) shows them to be a dismal failure and his explanation is correct. People do not respond to objective stimuli alike. They respond on the basis of their existing beliefs. Unless people have been socialised in childhood to be receptive to religious messages they are unlikely to even notice them, let alone be persuaded by them. Which is precisely why Wilson concentrates on measures of individual religiosity.

The religious provision of secular services

Wood then discusses various studies of religious groups providing secular services (such as welfare). This is a new problem for the churches. In 1900 enough of the population were still either personally religious (and that then meant Christian) or close enough to religion (having for example attended Sunday School) for churches to perform social services with the confidence that few people would object to such good works being avowedly Christian in both intention and practice. Until the late 1960s, many hospitals had an “almoner”: a welfare worker whose title anachronistically referenced the alms-giving of the Middle Ages. It is only over the second half of the twentieth century that social work became professionalised and one of the key professional standards was respect for the beliefs and attitudes of the service-user. Hence social work became secular.

During the long period of Conservative government from 1979 to 1997 anti-statist ideology produced a number of schemes to persuade voluntary groups to fill the space left by the curtailing of local government. Wood is entirely correct that “the presence of religious organizations in the provision of public services may hide a number of processes that are associated with secularization” [2015: 258]. The constitutional settlement in the US produced a very clear legal position. The state could support churches and other religious groups providing services such as free clinics, free breakfasts and shelters for the homeless but only if such activities did not involve proselytising and if there was no “excessive entanglement” with religion: meaning in this case that churches should not use the fact of their secular activities being taxpayer-funded to claim or even imply that the state approved of their religious beliefs. As in all such matters, the British position was less clear because it was not based on any written constitutional settlement. However, the outcome was the same and it reflected popular attitudes. People were quite happy to give the Salvation Army money to fund welfare work or support hospices run by religious people but they were not happy for such funding to support religious activities. Wood is quite right in rejecting the idea that permitting or even encouraging religious groups to engage in secular work is evidence of “de-privatization” or “re-sacralization.” What matters is the nature of the work (not the motivation behind it) and that is thoroughly secular. That is, far from providing evidence of “de-privatization” such activities demonstrate perfectly the public-private divide that lies at the heart of Wilson’s secularization theory. Where Wood is wrong is to suggest that this was not understood perfectly well by Wilson.

Chronology

A final word in defence of Wilson concerns chronology. Wilson wrote Religion in Secular Society fifty years ago. Although the churches had lost their influence over the economy and the polity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, through the twentieth century they still expected to influence personal moral (especially sexual) behaviour. And the less perceptive churchmen still mistook for real influence such signs of residual deference as survey respondents exaggerating their church attendance or governments periodically consulting (but then largely ignoring) church leaders about issues that affected them. What Wood discusses is indeed unique to “advanced secularization” in that attempts to reverse the privatization of religion could only come after such privatization was widely recognised and accepted. That is, what concerns Wood could only come after the changes that Wilson discusses. Hence he can hardly be faulted for not sharing the research agenda that Wood advances.

Does secularization theory need reformulation?

In the final section of his paper Wood suggests that secularization theory needs to be reformulated along the lines proposed by Mark Chaves: focussing on religious authority and the links between secularization at every level, from the societal to the individual. For Wood ‘advanced secularization’ should be understood in terms of three analytically separable processes: structural differentiation, the secular adaptations of religious organizations, and declining individual religiosity [2015: 264]. In particular we should be aware of the ways in which “religious organizations deal with and appropriate the demands of secular authorities, and in so doing become co-opted by relinquishing their authority” [2015: 267].

This seems entirely unobjectionable and my only problem is in seeing how this differs from anything Wilson argued in what is generally taken as the fons et origo of modern secularization theory. Wood believes that orthodox secularization theory supposes that religion loses social significance “by being excluded from societal sub-systems” rather than more accurately noticing that religion may also be “co-opted” by the secular world. I am not sure that such a reading is fair to Wilson. The term “excluded” suggests someone or something that is doing the excluding. That is certainly how some Christians view it, especially in the US: militant secularists have curtailed religion. This is not what Wilson says and it is not a view held by me or anyone else associated with the secularization paradigm. What Wilson correctly argues is that changes associated with modernization inadvertently reduce contact with and reliance on religious institutions, ideas and officials. On science and technology, for example, Wilson notes that new bodies of knowledge and expertise reduce the role of the clergy. Like many clergy, especially in rural areas, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was often called on by his followers for medical advice and he distilled his experience into Primitive Physic or An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases [1960 [1747]]. No mainstream cleric would now feel competent to author a medical text and, outside of a very few Pentecostal congregations, no parishioner would seek the medical advice of a priest, pastor or minister before a properly qualified medical practitioner. Structural or functional differentiation does not exclude religion in any deliberate sense; it marginalises it by offering more specialised and thus more effective knowledge elsewhere.

It may seem a waste of time to object to an article which very largely supports one’s views but it is now so common for the secularization thesis to be caricatured by critics that one feels obliged to defend it, even sometimes from its friends. Studying the ways in which religious organizations attempt to promote their beliefs and the ways in which such activity can lead to those organizations themselves becoming somewhat secular are entirely laudable activities and I would not want to discourage them. But they are not necessary for establishing the fact of, or the explanation for, secularization. As Wood himself shows, such attempts have been failures. That being the case, there is no need to insert an extra term into the equation that links elements of modernization to the privatization of religion. And there is no need to present that case as an indictment of the secularization thesis or of Bryan Wilson.