Editorial

Ronald F. Inglehart, Religion’s Sudden Decline: What’s Causing it, and What Comes Next? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); 191 pp.: 9780197547052, £18.99 (pbk)

Steve Bruce, British Gods: Religion in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); 282 pp.: 9780198854111, £25 (hbk)

Oxford University Press has brought out these two books by leading social scientists convinced that religion is fast disappearing from the modern world. Both are long-term proponents of a secularization paradigm that is less popular today among many sociologists of religion, such as Grace Davie and the late David Martin (see her review in this issue of Theology of his final book, Christianity and ‘the World’: secularization narratives through the lens of English poetry 800 ad to the present), but is still assumed by many scholars within the humanities and longed for, especially, by militant secularists. Inglehart, an emeritus political scientist at Michigan, and Bruce, Professor of Sociology at Aberdeen, present a wealth of new statistical evidence for theologians and others to ponder.

While both authors are convinced, despite their critics, that secularization is an ongoing and probably irreversible process, they offer strikingly different, albeit equally dogmatic, metanarratives. Bruce, a disciple of the late Bryan Wilson, believes that secularization is a product of modernity – adopting the position taken by Max Weber (and, rather differently, by Karl Marx) that modernity eventually renders religion in any form redundant. Wilson (like Émile Durkheim, but unlike Bruce) remained wistful about this conclusion, fearing that much will be lost to humanity once religion is gone. Inglehart evidently shares some of this wistfulness but is sceptical about modernity being the cause of secularization, arguing instead that religion flourishes in times of insecurity and, conversely, that its radical decline around the world owes much to political security in the twenty-first century and to changing attitudes to sexuality and gender.

Both authors also have long track records. Steve Bruce has been writing books about secularization for at least a quarter of a century – including Religion in the Modern World: from cathedrals to cults (OUP, 1996), God is Dead: secularization in the West (Blackwell, 2002), Secularization: in defence of an unfashionable theory (OUP, 2011) and Scottish Gods: religion in modern Scotland 1900–2012 (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) – and dozens of articles, as well as his introduction to the reprint of Bryan Wilson’s seminal Religion in Secular Society (OUP, 2016). In the introduction to his new book, he jokes that, as ‘an unbeliever’, he spends more time in church than most believers and he attempts to deflect the criticism that he is sawing off the branch on which he so obviously thrives. Yet, after so many words, is he really saying anything new? If so, I could not find it. Some of his case studies, however, are new and well researched and his statistics have markedly improved in recent years, thanks (as he acknowledges) to colleagues such as David Voas and Tony Glendinning.

In contrast, Ronald Inglehart’s statistical work has always been deeply impressive in its scope and now extends to astonishing global levels. It was Inglehart’s Cultural Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton University Press, 1990) that helped me contextualize the vexed debates about homosexuality at the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops. Using 1981 data from the World Values Survey he found that in 14 out of 16 countries surveyed there were significant differences in attitude between old and young respondents: whereas three-quarters of those aged 65 or over thought that homosexuality could never be justified, only two-fifths of those aged 18–24 did. The Lambeth Conference bishops clearly had a problem trying to please both constituencies, even within the West, let alone across the worldwide Anglican Communion. Leslie Francis and William Kay’s Teenage Religion and Values (Gracewing, 1995) confirmed this finding in Britain, even for teenagers who were regular churchgoers. Four decades later, members of this youngest cohort are now at or nearing 65 themselves, and yet churches still view homosexuality as ‘a problem’. Religion’s Sudden Decline compares this evidence with subsequent data collating 423 World and European Value Surveys from over 100 countries ‘containing more than 90 percent of the world’s population and covering all major cultural zones’. It is from this mammoth comparison that Inglehart concludes that ‘secularization recently accelerated … [T]he publics of 42 countries had become less religious from 2007 to 2020’ (p. 1), including the USA, once thought to be an exception to Western religious decline. Typical questions asked are about how important God is in one’s life, how often one attends a religious service, and how important religion is in one’s life. Using these and other (quite general) indices, he argues that, although religion does have health benefits, it is still pro-fertility in a world, especially in the West, that is now more secure and less inclined to tie sexuality to fertility. Understandably, he (and Bruce) also note the adverse effects of both religiously inspired violence and sexual abuse within churches.

Their metanarratives about modernity are indeed different, and my own research inclines me to look more favourably on that of Inglehart, who, in turn, is critical of Bruce. The latter remains monolithic in his approach to secularization and finds evidence for it everywhere – even in ecumenism, liturgical change and the renewed emphasis on spirituality and charisma. He can also be quite dismissive of other sociologists of religion – for example, likening Grace Davie’s theory of the ‘vicarious role’ of clergy to ‘eunuchs working in a harem’ (p. 67). In addition, he sometimes acknowledges that it is nominal rather than active Christians who tend to exhibit ‘homophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism’ (p. 265); then, on the very same page, he forgets and ascribes these deplorable characteristics to whole churches. Inglehart also tends to treat ‘religion’ as a single thing (reflected clearly in the book’s title and subtitle). Perhaps nuance and global data are uncomfortable bedfellows.

What is undeniable, in my view, is that, in the West at least, institutional Christianity is in decline almost everywhere. My own long-term concern about mapping this decline and its likely causes as accurately as possible has sometimes puzzled secularists and fellow Christians alike. While Bruce may appear to relish this decline and Inglehart may seem at times to regret it, my own aim is more practical – namely, to help church leaders distinguish more clearly between aspects of decline that they might be able to change and those that they simply cannot. If this aim is to be achieved, church leaders do need to listen carefully to the mass of evidence that Bruce, Inglehart and others provide, without necessarily buying into their metanarratives.