Secularisation

• Crockett - 40%+ of the adult population were attending church on Sundays in 1851.
• Wilson - Western societies have undergone long-term secularisation.
• 6% of the adult population attended church in 2005, halving from the 1960s.
• Sunday school attendance, church weddings & baptisms are declining.
• Religious affiliation is declining, adults with no religion increased from a third to a half since 1983.
• Small organisations have grown.
• Bruce - the influence of religion as a social institution is declining, it is relegated to the private sphere of individual and private life; that state has taken over many functions the church used to perform; number of clergy fell from 45000 in 1900 to 34000 in 2000 whilse the population increased.

Rationalisation:

• Rational ways of thinking & acting replace religious ones (Weber).
• Protestant Reformation undermined religious worldview & replaced it with a rational, scientific view.
• Disenchantment - new worldview sees God as existing above the world, not intervening in it, world has been left to run according to laws of nature.
• Events now explained as predictible forces of nature bot supernatural beings.
• Reason & science allowed humans to discover & understand how the world worked, giving humans more power to control nature & further undermine the religious worldview.

Structural Differentiation:

• Parsons - a process that occurs with industrialisation as many specialised institutions develop to carry out functions previously performed by a single institution.
• With industrialisation, religion has become a smaller & more specialised.
• Bruce - religion now separated from wider society & privatised in home & family; beliefs are personal choice & rituals/ symbols have lost meaning.
• Must conform to secular controls; church & state separate so church loses political power.

Social and Cultural Diversity:

• Wilson - pre-industrial society, local communities shared religious rituals (shared values), industrial society destroys communities & religion's base.
• Bruce - industrialisation created large, impersonal, loose-knit urban centres with diverse beliefs, values & lifestyles, undermines believability of religion.
• Individualism = a decline in community-based religious beliefs & practice.

Religious Diversity:

• Berger - trend towards religious diversity.
• Middle Ages - Catholic Church held monopoly of truth; since 16th century Protestant Reformation, number & variety of religious organisations grown, each with different truths.
• This diversity undermines religion's 'plausibility structure'.

Cultural Defence and Cultural Transition: Criticism of secularisation theory

• Bruce - cultural defence (religion provides a focus for defence of national or ethnic group identity in a struggle against an external force), cultural transition (religion provides a sense of community for ethnic groups living in a different country & culture).

• Wilson - 45% of Americans attended church on Sundays, but this was more an expression of the 'American way of life' than of religious beliefs - religion has become superficial.
• Declining Church Attendance - opinion pools about church attendance is exaggerated, e.g. Hadaway et al found that opinion polls claimed church attendance was 83% higher than actual rate.
• Secularisation From Within - emphasis on traditional Christian beliefs & glorifying God has declined, religion has instead become psychologised; ts purpose has changed from seeking salvation to seeking personal improvement. (Bruce).
• Religious Diversity and Relativism - Bruce identifies practical relativism among American Christians (accepting that others are entitles to hold different beliefs); Lynd & Lynd found in 1924 that 94% of churchgoing young people agreed with the statement 'Christianity is the one true religion' whereas in 1977 only 41% agreed; absolutism has been eroded so the assumption that own views are absolutely true is undermined.