Kommentar zu Willfried Spohn

Abstract

The recent debate on the concept of secularization, as raised by American and Anglo-Saxon sociologists and social historians — some of whom even claimed a paradigm shift in the sociology of religion (Warner 1993) — is not at all a new debate. This is shown best by the work of David Martin (1969) who, in his 1969 book — »The Religious and the Secular« — called for an elimination of the concept of secularization altogether. »There is no unitary process called ›secularization‹«, he claimed, »arising in reaction to a set of characteristics labelled ›religious‹«. And he continued: »It can be shown that religious institutions bear no such common characteristics« (Martin 1969: 16). What Martin referred to at that time was mainly the ideology of secularism, in its manifestations of rationalism, Marxism, and existentialism. In his view these attempts to formulate »master trends« were rooted in ideological views of history, all of which he felt suffered from the poverty of historicism (Martin 1969: 2). Nine years after his original proposal to eliminate the concept of secularization, Martin (1978) published his own »general theory of secularization«, in which he (first) critiqued pre-existing secularization theory and (second) developed a new theory which attempted to avoid reproducing the theoretical difficulties of »master trend theories”. In order to do this he took into account the variety of circumstances (religious configurations, geopolitical frame conditions, and socio-economic contexts) under which secularization took place. Willfried Spohn has praised Martin’s attempt, but he has also added further differentiations to it.