Book Review by Mike King

Martin, David, On Secularization – Towards a Revised General Theory, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005, ISBN: 0 7546 5314 5
216 pages
PB: £16.99
HB: £55.00

I was pleased to receive this book for review, because its subject – secularization – is one I have been concerned with for twenty years. However, on the first scan of the contents, index, references and sample pages I was bewildered: there seemed almost no points of contact with my own research. When I started to read the book in earnest, I realised that its location in the sociology of religion was one reason for the unfamiliarity of its style and reasoning, and in the end I concluded that the book was very useful, though a little alarming. For others it might be only a little useful and very alarming, though I will explain this a bit later on. In fact the book is a collection of essays that expand on Martin’s seminal work A General Theory of Secularization, beautifully written, and drawing on an encyclopaedic understanding of contemporary Christianity and its relation to the social and political landscapes across the globe.

The usefulness of the book lies precisely in this large sweep of Christian social history, but the last thing it does is present a theory of secularization, never mind a general one. Although Martin at several points in the book states that he is going to summarise his general theory – in order to revise it – one is forced to work very hard to garner its outlines. As far as I can make out “secularization theory,” as it had developed from its origins in sociology with Durkheim and Weber, states that religion will inevitably decline in the face of modern rationalism. Martin’s contribution, as far as I can see, is to attack this concept as a form of discredited historicism. So far so good: Popper’s attack on the historicism of Hegel and Marx for example makes clear that a belief in the historical inevitability of some chosen trajectory is at best unfounded, and at worst can lead to totalitarianism. Historicism is pseudo-science; what real science demands is a cool look at the evidence, and theories that are more than projections of human fantasy. Hence Martin’s advance is to challenge the assumption that religion is destined to be swept away. Instead he offers a “centre-periphery” account which proposed that liberal elites impose secular systems of thought, emanating from centres of learning such as Paris, and which tail off in influence in the provinces where ordinary people are largely unaffected by such intellectual fancies.

The bulk of Martin’s writings do indeed present us with evidence that Christianity in Europe, North and South America, Russia and parts of Asia continues largely in its traditional mould, making only small compromises with secular modernity. He avoids statistical presentations, for which I am grateful, though one is left with the feeling that a close look at the figures would probably support his thesis. This is not where I argue with Martin. What is astonishing, and a little alarming, in his work, is the impression that slowly forms from the deafening silence on certain topics, and the quiet asides on others, that he loathes secularization. One begins to think that a better title for his work would be On Secularization – How I Wish it Hadn’t Happened. In one way my sympathies are with him: the loss of the sacred in the modern world has been nothing short of catastrophic. Where we part company is that he seems to regret the entire Enlightenment, whereas I believe that it has paved the way for what I regard as crucial to the spiritual life of the future: spiritual pluralism.

At first I thought it was simply the location of Martin’s scholarship in the sociology of religion that made him view the Enlightenment in such a radically different way. Sociology is not so concerned with the history of ideas as with how contemporary citizens negotiate their relationships with each other and the State. But Martin constructs a discourse in which he jettisons the ideas of the great Enlightenment thinkers as “avant gardism;” he dismisses the notion that “the intellectual elite propose today what the mass will accept tomorrow.” He is frank, saying: “I found it very difficult to absorb approaches to secularization based on the history of ideas.” But the advantage for Martin is that he can retain his Christian beliefs unchallenged by Locke, Voltaire, Paine, Ingersoll and Bradlaugh – iconic figures in bringing Enlightenment concepts to the masses – and effectively shut out the modern world. Hence there is no engagement within this book with the core ideas of the secular mind, no suspicion that these represent enormous advances in liberty, freedom of expression, women and gay rights, and democracy. Nor does he raise key questions that come out of a direct engagement with secular thought, for example why is mainstream popular culture in the West so intensely secular? If the masses at the periphery reject the liberal elites, why do they consume their secular cultural productions so avidly? Why were secularists consistently ahead of the Church in the abolition of slavery, and in establishing women’s and civil rights?

Martin’s book is a fascinating read, but leaves one with a concern for academic scholarship in general. He was Professor at the London School of Economics (1962-1989), and is highly regarded in the sociology of religion, but one does wonder about the deployment of such academic erudition and literary skill in the pursuit of Christian apologetics. To adhere to faith in the modern world is valuable, but surely that faith is much more convincing when it confronts the challenges of modernity head on. A book on secularization that effectively writes it – and its Enlightenment origins – out of history can be fascinating, but surely it is a little alarming. Don’t we expect more from our academics?