Secularization

The word secularization comes from the Latin sæculum, which could be taken to mean an age (or era) but also, at least by the fourth and fifth centuries, “the world,” probably as an extension of the idea of a “spirit of an age.” By this date, too, the word had already developed an ambiguous meaning. It could be used to mean something like unending time (the phrases “world without end” or “forever and ever” that still often appear at the end of formal Christian prayers are translations of the Latin in sæcula sæculorum), or the world “out there” (monastic priests, who were “enclosed” and under a formal “rule of life,” were distinguished from “secular” clergy, meaning the parish clergy who served the people “out in the world”), but it was also used to mean a life or lifestyle that is at odds with God (thus, people would enter monastic life to flee “the world”). Later the term would come to be used to distinguish between civil and ecclesiastical law, lands, and possessions. In the nineteenth century, the term was adopted by the British free-thinker G. J. Holyoake, who founded the Secular Society as a group committed to a just world order and moral program of individual action that would address human problems without the use of supernatural explanations. Hence, the term had an increasingly negative use by the time it was adapted into social science: Secularization conceptualized and gave “scientific” status to the advance of secularism.

The term secularization was introduced by Max Weber, but ever so lightly, in his Protestant Ethic essays and was adapted by his sometime associate Ernst Troeltsch. To the extent that one may reference a single integrating focus in a body of work as extensive as Max Weber's corpus, it must be said to be that of rationalität, or the processes of the rationalization of action, the specific form of social change that enabled the “modern world” to come into being. Weber was interested in how it was that methods of rational calculation had come to dominate virtually the entirety of modern life. He referred to this as the “spirit of capitalism.” His studies convinced him that, from the sixteenth century forward, a process had been occurring in Western civilization as a result of which one after another sphere of life had become subject to the belief that explanations for events could be found within worldly experience and the application of human reason.

The consequence of this worldview was that explanations referring to forces outside this world were constantly being laid aside. The flip side of rationalization [Page 681]Weber termed Entzauberung—a word usually translated as disenchantment, although perhaps more accurately rendered de-magi-fication or de-mystery-ization. Disenchantment did not simply mean that people did not believe in the old mysteries of religion but, rather, that the concept of mystery or “the mysterious” was itself devalued. Mystery was seen not as something to be entered into but something to be conquered by human reason, ingenuity, and the products of technology. Weber gave the name secularization to this double-sided rationalization-disenchantment process in religion. Secularization was both the process and the result of the process; however, it is also the case that the term occurs only rarely in Weber's writing.

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