This article needs attention from an expert on the subject. Please add a reason or a talk parameter to this template to explain the issue with the article. WikiProject Sociology may be able to help recruit an expert. (November 2009)

Sociology
Outline
Theory · History
Positivism · Antipositivism Functionalism · Conflict theory Middle-range · Mathematical Critical theory · Socialization Structure and agency
Research methods
Quantitative · Qualitative Historical · Computational Ethnographic · Network analytic
Topics · Subfields
Cities · Class · Crime · Culture Deviance · Demography · Education Economy · Environment · Family Gender · Health · Industry · Internet Knowledge · Law · Medicine Politics · Mobility · Race and ethnicity Rationalization · Religion · Science Secularization · Social networks Social psychology · Stratification
Browse
Portal Category tree · Lists Journals · Sociologists Article index
v t e

Secularization (or secularisation) is the transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward nonreligious (or irreligious) values and secular institutions. The secularization thesis refers to the belief that as societies "progress", particularly through modernization and rationalization, religion loses its authority in all aspects of social life and governance.^[1] The term secularization is also used in the context of the lifting of the monastic restrictions from a member of the clergy.^[2]

Secularization has many levels of meaning, both as a theory and a historical process. Social theorists such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim, postulated that the modernization of society would include a decline in levels of religiosity. Study of this process seeks to determine the manner in which, or extent to which religious creeds, practices and institutions are losing social significance. Some theorists argue that the secularization of modern civilization partly results from our inability to adapt broad ethical and spiritual needs of mankind to the increasingly fast advance of the physical sciences.^[3]

The term also has additional meanings, primarily historical and religious.^[4] Applied to church property, historically it refers to the seizure of monastic lands and buildings by anti-clerical European governments during the 18th and 19th centuries, which resulted in the expulsion and suppression of the religious communities which occupied them (see Kulturkampf). Otherwise, secularization involves the abandonment of goods by the Church where it is sold to purchasers after the government seizes the property, which most commonly happens after reasonable negotiations and arrangements are made. In Catholic canon law, the term can also denote the permission or authorization given for a member of a religious order to live outside his or her religious community or monastery, either for a fixed or permanent period.^[5]

Background[link]

Secularization is sometimes credited both to the cultural shifts in society following the emergence of rationality and the development of science as a substitute for superstition — Max Weber called this process, "the disenchantment of the world" — and to the changes made by religious institutions to compensate. At the most basic stages, this begins with a slow transition from oral traditions to a writing culture that diffuses knowledge. This first reduces the authority of clerics as the custodians of revealed knowledge. As the responsibility for education has moved from the family and community to the state, two consequences have arisen:

• the collective conscience as defined by Durkheim is diminished; and
• through the fragmentation of communal activities, religion becomes more a matter of individual choice rather than an observed social obligation.

A major issue in the study of secularization is the extent to which certain trends such as decreased attendance at places of worship indicate a decrease in religiosity or simply a privatization of religious belief, where religious beliefs no longer play a dominant role in public life or in other aspects of decision-making.

The issue of secularization is discussed in various religious traditions. The government of Turkey is an often cited example, following the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate and foundation of the Turkish republic in 1923. This established popular sovereignty in a secular republican framework, in opposition to a system whose authority is based on religion. As one of many examples of state modernization, this shows secularization and democratization as mutually re-enforcing processes^{[citation needed]}, relying on a separation of religion and state. In expressly secular states like India, it has been argued that the need was to legislate for toleration and respect between quite different religions, and likewise, the secularization of the West was a response to drastically violent intra-Christian feuds between Catholicism and Protestantism. Some have therefore argued that Western and Indian secularization is radically different in that it deals with autonomy from religious regulation and control. Considerations of both tolerance and autonomy are relevant to any secular state.

Definitions[link]

John Sommerville (1998) outlined six uses of the term secularization in the scientific literature. The first five are more along the lines of 'definitions' while the sixth is more of a 'clarification of use':^[6]

1. When discussing macro social structures, secularization can refer to differentiation: a process in which the various aspects of society, economic, political, legal, and moral, become increasingly specialized and distinct from one another.
2. When discussing individual institutions, secularization can denote the transformation of a religious into a secular institution. Examples would be the evolution of institutions such as Harvard University from a predominantly religious institution into a secular institution (with a divinity school now housing the religious element illustrating differentiation).
3. When discussing activities, secularization refers to the transfer of activities from religious to secular institutions, such as a shift in provision of social services from churches to the government.
4. When discussing mentalities, secularization refers to the transition from ultimate concerns to proximate concerns. E.g., individuals in the West are now more likely to moderate their behavior in response to more immediately applicable consequences rather than out of concern for post-mortem consequences. This is a personal religious decline or movement toward a secular lifestyle.
5. When discussing populations, secularization refers to broad patterns of societal decline in levels of religiosity as opposed to the individual-level secularization of (4) above. This understanding of secularization is also distinct from (1) above in that it refers specifically to religious decline rather than societal differentiation.
6. When discussing religion, secularization can only be used unambiguously to refer to religion in a generic sense. For example, a reference to Christianity is not clear unless one specifies exactly which denominations of Christianity are being discussed.

Opposition[link]

Abdel Wahab Elmessiri (2002) outlined two meanings of the secularization term:

1. Partial Secularization: which is the common meaning of the word, and expresses "The separation between religion and state".
2. Complete Secularization: this definition is not limited to the partial definition, but exceeds it to "The separation between all (religion, moral, and human) values, and (not just the state) but also to (the human nature in its public and private sides), so that the holiness is removed from the world, and this world is transformed into a usable matter that can be employed for the sake of the strong".

Sociological use and differentiation[link]

As studied by sociologists, one of the major themes of secularization is that of "differentiation": the tendency for areas of life to become more distinct and specialized as a society becomes modernized. European sociology, influenced by anthropology, was interested in the process of change from the so-called primitive societies to increasingly advanced societies. In the U.S., the emphasis was initially on change as an aspect of progress, but Talcott Parsons refocused on society as a system immersed in a constant process of increased differentiation, which he saw as a process in which new institutions take over the tasks necessary in a society to guarantee its survival as the original monolithic institutions break up. This is a devolution from single, less differentiated institutions to an increasingly differentiated subset of institutions.^[7]

Following Parsons, this concept of differentiation has been widely applied. As phrased by Jose Casanova, this "core and the central thesis of the theory of secularization is the conceptualization of the process of societal modernization as a process of functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres – primarily the state, the economy, and science – from the religious sphere and the concomitant differentiation and specialization of religion within its own newly found religious sphere." Casanova also describes this as the theory of "privatization" of religion, which he partially criticizes.^[8] While criticizing certain aspects of the traditional sociological theory of secularization, however, David Martin argues that the concept of social differentiation has been its "most useful element."^[9]

Institutional secularization[link]

In most Western countries, government, the not-for-profit sector and the private sector have taken over the provision of social welfare functions, but in Germany, secularization has not occurred to the same degree. There are still about 100,000 Church-based charitable foundations providing services from pre-school education to health care for the elderly, making the two major Churches the second largest employers after government. This is funded partly by the Churches out of their own revenues, with the balance coming from general tax revenue. Critics argue that by allowing the Churches to play such a major role, the State is breaching its duty of neutrality under Article 4 of the Grundgesetz, and they consider it inappropriate for such heavy subsidies to be given to the Churches. For their part, the Churches see this work as a natural part of their Christian mission. (On the extensive secularization in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century, see German Mediatization)

Current issues in the study of secularization[link]

At present, secularization as understood in the West, is being debated in the sociology of religion. Some scholars (e.g. Rodney Stark, Peter Berger) have argued that levels of religiosity are not declining, while other scholars (e.g. Mark Chaves, N. J. Demerath) have countered by introducing the idea of neo-secularization, which broadens the definition of secularization to include the decline of religious authority.

In other words, rather than using the proportion of irreligious apostates as the sole measure of secularity, neo-secularization argues that individuals increasingly look outside of religion for authoritative positions. Neo-secularizationists would argue that religion has diminishing authority on issues such as birth control, and argue that religion's authority is declining and secularization is taking place even if religious affiliation may not be declining in the U.S. (a debate still taking place).^{[citation needed]}

Finally, some claim that demographic forces offset the process of secularization, and may do so to such an extent that individuals can consistently drift away from religion even as society becomes more religious. This is especially the case in societies like Israel (with the ultra-Orthodox and religious zionists) where committed religious groups have several times the birth rate of seculars. The religious fertility effect operates to a greater or lesser extent in all countries, and is amplified in the West by religious immigration. For instance, even as native whites became more secular, London, England has become more religious in the past 25 years as religious immigrants and their descendants have increased their share of the population.^[10]

See also[link]

External links[link]

• Definition of Secularization at Garethjmsaunders.co.uk
• Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy. (1967)
• Berger, Peter. The Desecularization of the World. (2000)
• Bruce, Steve. Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults
• Bruce, Steve. God is Dead: Secularization in the West. (2002)
• Casanova, Jose. Public Religions in the Modern World. (1994)
• Chaves, M. Secularization As Declining Religious Authority. Social Forces 72(3):749–74. (1994)
• Ellul, Jacques. The New Demons.
• Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World. (1985/tr. 1997)
• Martin, David. A General Theory of Secularization. New York: Harper & Row. (1979).
• Sommerville, C. J. "Secular Society Religious Population: Our Tacit Rules for Using the Term Secularization. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (2):249–53. (1998)
• Said, E. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin. (1978).
• Skolnik, Jonathan and Peter Eli Gordon, eds., New German Critique 94 (2005)Special Issue on Secularization and Disenchantment
• Stark, Rodney, Laurence R. Iannaccone, Monica Turci, and Marco Zecchi. How Much Has Europe Been Secularized? Inchiesta 32(136):99–112. (2002)
• Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press. (2007)
• Warrier, Maya. Processes of Secularisation in Contemporary India: Guru Faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission, Modern Asian Studies (2003)
• Abdelwahab Elmessiri, Dar Al-Shorok, "The Partial Secularization and The Complete Secularization", "العلمانية الجزئية و العلمانية الشاملة"

Kenneth Alfred Ham (born 20 October 1951) is a prominent Australian young-Earth creationist^[1][2] and advocate for a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis.^[3]

Biography[link]

Ken Ham obtained a bachelor's degree in Applied Science, with emphasis in Environmental Biology, through the Queensland Institute of Technology and, in order to begin teaching science in Australian public schools, a diploma in Education from the University of Queensland.^[4][5][6] On 30 December 1972, he married Marilyn ("Mally"),^[7] whom he describes as a "very, very submissive, supportive wife" who has "always supported me five million percent."^[8] The Ham couple have five children — four are married and one lives with them in the Cincinnati area and have seven grandchildren.^[5] In 1979, Ham co-founded what was to be later known as the Creation Science Foundation (CSF) in Queensland, Australia with John Mackay.^[9][10][11]

Answers in Genesis' Creation Museum.

Ham worked for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), a leading young-Earth organisation.^[12] In 1994, with the assistance of what is now Creation Ministries International (Australia), Ham and colleagues Mark Looy and Mike Zovath set up Creation Science Ministries, later renamed Answers in Genesis.^[13] The Christian ministry specialises in young Earth creationism and promotes the belief that the initial chapters in Genesis should be taken as literally true and historically accurate.^[14] He then began raising "tens of millions of dollars" to build the ministry.^[15]

He has been awarded two honorary degrees: In 1997 from Temple Baptist College in Cincinnati, Ohio and in 2004 from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.^[5]On 28 May 2007 the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky, a project which cost $27 million. The necessary funds were donated throughout the 1990s.^[16] It is about 70,000 sq ft (6,500 m²)^[17]

In May 2007, Creation Ministries International (CMI) filed a lawsuit against Ham and AiG in the Supreme Court of Queensland seeking damages and accusing him of deceptive conduct in his dealings with the Australian organization. Members of the ministry were "concern[ed] over Mr Ham's domination of the ministries, the amount of money being spent on his fellow executives and a shift away from delivering the creationist message to raising donations."^[11] According to the CMI website, this dispute was amicably settled in April 2009.^[18] In 2008, Ham appeared in Bill Maher's comedy-documentary Religulous.^[19] In a press release AiG criticized the movie for what it called Maher's "dishonesty last year in gaining access to the Creation Museum and AiG President Ken Ham."^[20]

In March 2011, the Board of Great Homeschool Conventions, Inc. voted to "disinvite" Ham and AiG from "all future conventions" due to Ham's words about other Christians being "unnecessary, ungodly, and mean-spirited statements that are divisive at best and defamatory at worst."^[21][22][23] AiG responded: "It is sad that a speaker and ministry, which stand boldly and uncompromisingly on the authority of God’s Word, are eliminated from a homeschool convention."^[22] Ham hosts Answers. . . with Ken Ham, a 90-second radio program broadcast daily on over 600 radio stations worldwide and the Internet^[24] featuring Ham's commentary on issues.^[25]

Beliefs[link]

As a young Earth creationist, Ham believes that the universe was created about 6,000 years ago, and that Noah's flood occurred about 4,500 years ago in the year 2348 BC.^[26] He believes that the animals carried on Noah's ark produced the biological diversity observed on Earth. Ham also believes that dinosaurs co-existed with modern humans. He supports his view with biblical scripture.^[27] Ham accepts that natural selection can give rise to a number of species from an original population, by Mendelian recombination of already existing genes, but that new genes cannot arise from mutations, because this would be "adding information" (he claims that only intelligence can cause a beneficial mutation). Mutations and natural selection can only "remove preexisting information."^[28] All of these species are of the same kind, and no new kind can arise from this process.^{[citation needed]}

Ham does not trust radiometric dating, which is a well-established technique, the accuracy of which is accepted by nearly all scientists,^[29] used to date objects such as moon rocks, fossils and human artifacts.^[30] Since 1989, Ham has frequently made the comment, "Were you there?" regarding the origins of life and evolution,^[31] implying that knowledge of unwitnessed events is inferential and not observational. Talk.origins responded that the evidence for evolution "was there", asserting the necessity to continue the task of scientific inquiry, though missing Ham's concern for "observational science"^[32] In 2005, The Daily Show poked fun at Ham's question.^[33]

Ham believes that there is a difference between facts, and interpretation of facts. "Creationists and evolutionists, Christians and non-Christians, all have the same evidence—the same facts. Think about it: we all have the same earth, the same fossil layers, the same animals and plants, the same stars—the facts are all the same. The difference is in the way we all interpret the facts. And why do we interpret facts differently? Because we start with different presuppositions; these are things that are assumed to be true without being able to prove them. These then become the basis for other conclusions. All reasoning is based on presuppositions (also called axioms). This becomes especially relevant when dealing with past events."^[34]

Ham's beliefs and tactics have been criticized by other Christians and old earth creationists. Answers in Creation, an old Earth creationist website, has called Ham willfully ignorant of evidence for an old earth, and said that he "deliberately misleads" his audiences on matters of both science and theology.^[35] Astronomer Hugh Ross, a progressive creationist, has debated Ham and other Answers In Genesis staff^[36] regarding the compatibility of an old Earth with the Bible.^[37] BioLogos has also responded to Ken Ham's criticisms of their viewpoint.^[38]

Bibliography[link]

• Ham, Ken (1987). The Lie: Evolution. Green Forest: Master Books. ISBN 0-89051-158-6. 

References[link]

External links[link]

• Ken Ham at Answers in Genesis