Rodney Stark, Subjective Religiousness and a Prolonged Farewell to Secularization Theory

Abstract

In 1999, Rodney Stark announced that the secularization theory had died and should be buried in a graveyard of failed doctrines. He presented the rationale for this verdict in Secularization, R.I.P., which was supposed to show that the theory of secularization is not capable of correctly describing either the past or the current state of religiosity in European countries, and even more so in the rest of the world. While Stark’s findings have been accepted by many scholars, the current researches show that Stark was too hasty with his conclusion, and the theory of secularization still has significant descriptive and explanatory potential. Thus, the results of recent research by Ronald F. Inglehart show that, although religions continue to play an important role in the modern world, their importance is steadily declining even in countries and regions that were previously considered permanently religious (for example, in the United States or in South America). Accordingly, Inglehart speaks of “recent acceleration of secularization” as the reality in which most countries in the world live. In the situation of the ongoing discussion about how fully and accurately the secularization theory is able to describe the laws and mechanics of social changes, it also becomes relevant to consider the question of why the previous criticism of the theory, including that of Stark, was not very effective. It seems that in Stark’s case the following factors have played a negative role: an ideologized approach equating the theory of secularization with secularism, the interpretation of the subjective religiosity of some societies as an unchangeable constant, which, moreover, should be accepted as constant for all other societies, and an extremely simplified interpretation of fundamental principles of secularization theory, which, according to Stark, is no more than the prophecy about the end of religion. The incorrectness of some Stark’s critical ideas is demonstrated by a statistical analysis of long-term trends in the religiosity of Iceland, Great Britain, and the United States. The most telling example seems to be that of Iceland, whose religious landscape has changed dramatically over the past three decades and bears little resemblance to the image of rural religiosity of the 1980s that Stark drew in Secularization, R.I.P., and which he considered unchanged.