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>> 21 2 Sacred Archipelagos Spaces of Secularization Incorporating secularization theory into an explanation of the popularity of American evangelicalism might seem counterintuitive and hopelessly out of fashion. It is an obviously odd choice because secularization is most commonly thought to refer to the decline of religious practice. In this present study of one of the most successful and influential religious movements in the United States, secularization theory would seem to offer very little. But it is even stranger still because many observers in the social sciences believe that secularization as a historical process has been thoroughly discredited. In sociology and anthropology, secularization is démodé, while in geography it was never part of any disciplinary debates in the first place. But if secularization theory, in the words of Christian Smith, is like an “embarrassingly eccentric uncle” whom everyone wishes would leave,1 the “postsecular” has been treated with warm hospitality.2 Although it means many things to many people, postsecular has become an attractive touchstone to those who believe that secularization (as a social process concomitant with modernization), secularism (as a set of beliefs and 22 > 23 organizations face a different set of social limitations and opportunities in advanced, postindustrial milieux than their industrial and preindustrial counterparts did. The charge that the world is as full of religion as it ever was is beside the point of the secularization paradigm because the latter postulates a particular social environment for religion, not necessarily the responses to it. The fact that this is often overlooked in recent debates over secularity and the “postsecular” is in part the result of non-spatial glosses on the broad tenets of the secularization paradigm. But, as geographers have long argued, by spatializing social theory we can begin to see new cracks and fissures as well as new contours and potentials.9 Not only does the secularization paradigm have a widely agreed-upon, valid core based on differentiation theory, but this core has unexamined spatial elements and implications. The spaces of secularization are not secularist spaces but are instead spaces in which religious action is constrained and liberated in different ways depending on its socio-spatial scale. The secularity of modern urban space and especially postsuburban space is necessarily partial, fragmented, and dependent upon the socio-spatial scales of religious action. Through the lens of secular differentiation, certain obstacles and opportunities for religious expression in the “secular city” become more apparent. Additionally, while secular differentiation closes off certain religious options, the new options opened up are particularly advantageous for “liturgically lite,” symbolically flexible, and spatially supple religious expressions such as the postdenominational evangelicalism of Saddleback Valley Community Church. Space, Place, and Secularization Secularization theory is usually traced back to Max Weber and his modern rationalization and disenchantment theses. Here, Weber’s “iron cage” thesis of modernity was that calculative efficiency and predictability snuffs out religious or enchanted modes of experience. This Weberian genealogy is often used to highlight secularization theory’s supposed teleology. But a different genealogy would lead us back much farther in time to the sixteenth century when the French political philosopher Jean Bodin foregrounded the secularizing tendency of religious diversity. Not the iron cage, but the practical intermingling of religious traditions in an emerging global world would cause the faithful to relax their convictions.10 It was not until centuries later that the effects of religious diversity along with the Weber’s modernizing forces were refined and incorporated into what is now most aptly called the secularization paradigm.11 Having been formulated in many different 24 > 25 is either shorthand for the absence of religion20 or the inhospitable nature of modern society for religion.21 Very little consideration is given to what a secular space/place would be, how it would be structured, and what it would look like. In this way, geographers have accepted many of the dominant academic narratives about secularization, a central one being that secularization and secularity are social phenomena. Geographers have made an implicit division between the grounded, embodied, and emplaced religious activities that are thriving in local places22 (and thus at first glance contradict “the secularization thesis”) and the structuralist, disembodied, non-spatial levels and processes imputed by the secularization paradigm. It is true that sociological debates over secularization have generally remained at the level of theoretical abstraction, and when they have been empirical they have been restricted to the “macro” levels of the nation-state or global regions. However, it is certainly not the case that proponents...

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