Western Religion Today

This chapter argues that Western religion today, besides losing public importance, has also largely been transformed in accordance with this cognitive shift to the ‘this-worldly’. The chapter shows how arguments like ‘believing but not belonging’ and ‘vicarious religion’ do not discredit the secularization thesis; nor does the idea that Christianity gave rise to Western modernity and therefore the West must be religious. The decreasing salience of Christianity became undeniable in the Victorian age. The 1960s saw this trend intensified and diffused more widely; this cognitive shift is illustrated in both the workings of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and in the World Council of Churches Uppsala Assembly (1968). The Christianity that the mainline Western churches exhibit today has become internally secularized, evidenced in characteristic works of modern academic theology.

Introduction

John Peel has remarked, in reference to conversion in Africa: The only workable definition of conversion is the process by which people come to regard themselves, and be regarded by others, as Christians. This social identification is what being a Christian most immediately and unarguably ...

The Future

This chapter addresses the limits of religious change. It argues that invoking the notion of change is sometimes less helpful than admitting that something has been discarded or hollowed out or evacuated. A new mentality has arisen in the West, which has marginalized the awareness of the otherworldly that is indispensable to ‘religion’ as substantively understood. Moving to this new cognitive style has constituted a definitive break (the ‘Great Ditch’) in the history of humankind. This new cognitive style is the essential plank of modernity. Modernity can be manifested in a variety of cultural expressions but the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ is misleading if it suggests that modernity is possible without it. Religious institutions persist in the West, in many cases with considerable power and influence, but they have been largely NGO-ized or reduced to the role of pressure groups or agencies within civil society. Their role today is as promoters of human values; it is hardly the role traditionally claimed, which was relating the human to the otherworldly. It is not that religion ‘poisons everything’, as some New Atheists say; it is that a new cognitive style has changed the human situation irrevocably.

US Exceptionalism

It has been widely accepted that the secularization thesis is wrong because the most modern of all societies, the modern United States, remains profoundly religious. This chapter argues the US is not more substantially religious than Europe, and the Evangelical Revival and the American New Age or counterculture are better understood as cultural and political movements; they are religious only according to a very loose definition of religion. American religion has become a part of American capitalist society. The widespread prosperity gospel is better understood as inculcating the American dream of victory and achievement in the capitalist system. Many churches are thus effectively reduced to preaching motivation, self-help and fulfillment of potential. Christian universities illustrate the triumph of the modern scientific mindset, for the great majority have lost all but the most rudimentary reference to their original denominational supernaturalism in adopting the this-worldly cognitive style. The religion of President Obama is used to further illustrate the internal secularization of America’s Christianity.

A Cognition Transformed

This chapter traces the transformation of cognition in the West. By sketching the example of Christian belief in the Christendom of the Middle Ages, this chapter shows that the natural, immediate and normal way of understanding reality was in terms of otherworldly forces; events were actually experienced as the work of these forces. Manipulating these forces was often achieved through relics, and resulted in miracles. Beginning in the sixteenth century, this cognitive style gradually receded in importance, as the scientific revolution and its subsequent application in technology, steadily encouraged a completely new mode of cognition, one seeking explanation in terms of this-worldly causes. Religious tradition and authority gradually gave way to observation and experiment. Not all cultures share this scientific approach, as is argued in reference to Africa (Senegal in particular) where the normal explanation of worldly events is in terms of malleable otherworldly forces.

Issues

This chapter argues that a substantive definition of religion provides considerable clarity, enabling us helpfully to differentiate religion from culture, ethnicity and politics. Such differentiation has become possible only with the rise of the modern West. The secularization thesis claims that with modernity religion loses its importance. This thesis is commonly held to be wrong; this book by contrast upholds the thesis, from a novel standpoint. Secularization is usually argued with reference to affiliation and attendance, with belief less analyzed. This book directly addresses the issue of contemporary belief and argues that belief (or a cognitive element) is integral to religion substantively understood. Traditionally, this cognition has entailed reference to otherworldly forces, and it is this otherworldly reference that modernity has peripheralized. Identity in the modern world increasingly has marginalized supernatural referents.