Secularization: Not Dead, But Never What It Seemed

Abstract

Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. By Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 348 pp., $70.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-83984-X), $24.00 paper (ISBN: 0-521-54872-1). Bringing Religion into International Relations. By Jonathan Fox, Shmuel Sandler. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. 224 pp., $55.00 (ISBN: 1-4039-6551-X). The past few years have seen an increase in academic studies examining the role that religion plays in political life. For instance, in The Desecularization of the World , sociologist Peter Berger (1999) and his colleagues declared that the secularization thesis was dead. That thesis, which held that modern forces—such as science, democracy, technology, and enlightenment—had deprived religion of its public and, in some versions, even its private role, seemed to be disconfirmed by the resurgence of worldwide religious movements and their political impact. Nonetheless, political scientists continued to examine the role of religion by looking at particular countries, and thereby limiting their analyses to domestic and comparative issues. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide , by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, and Bringing Religion into International Relations , by Jonathan Fox and Shmuel Sandler, break new ground by broadening the scope of this analysis. Norris and Inglehart draw upon the World Values Survey to compare attitudes toward religion and public life on a worldwide scale. They provide useful comparisons between the much studied West and other parts of the world that have hitherto been left under-examined (namely, Africa, Asia, and the Islamic countries). Fox and Sandler, on the other hand, consider the role of religion in international affairs. They make a persuasive case that international relations scholars should treat religion as one of their major variables. The unanswered question that haunts both books, however, is how to define religion. According to Norris and Inglehart, religiosity throughout the world is rising. However, the cause of this increase is the higher population growth in countries marked by high religiosity. In other words, secularization endures where it has set in, but it decreases relatively as the populations of secular societies fail to keep pace with those of religious societies. Given this …