The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (review)

Christian Smith and colleagues want to bring human agency into the study of secularization. They argue that the transformation of religion is often portrayed as the product of social processes and autonomous cultural forces as if secularization happened without human intervention. To the contrary, the essayists contend, there was nothing inevitable about the narrowing of religious authority in fields as diverse as law, science, public education, literature, social science, medicine, journalism and social reform. Religion was read out of these fields in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the purposeful behavior of insurgent elites who recast these disciplines in ways that reserved jurisdiction for themselves. This self-interested behavior rested not principally on personal hostility to religion, but rather on the assumption that religion had little to contribute to developing professions that would better prosper by embracing science. These claims were resisted bitterly by members of the Protestant Establishment who were displaced by the secularizing elites.

This thesis is developed in Smith's programmatic essay of almost 100 pages. Calling for a new understanding of religion's loss of authority, Smith does not develop a full theory but rather identifies elements that need to be considered before such a theory can be deployed. Likening secularization theory to "some embarrassingly eccentric uncle that nobody in the family will ask to leave" (p. 5), Smith deftly identifies the deficiencies in the theory as it has been operationalized and sets out to reclaim the concept. Borrowing from social movement theory, he emphasizes that the secular revolution depended on such quintessentially human factors as power, interest and resources. The subsequent essays, written both by Smith's students and other scholars, provide a blow-by-blow account of the battles over secularization in a wide array of fields. As is typical of edited collections, some authors hew more to the party line than others, but the linkage to Smith's argument is often apparent even without explicit homage, giving the volume real coherence.

Smith embraces Mark Chaves approach to secularization as loss of (Protestant) religious authority in key social institutions, permitting him to sidestep a major problem in secularization theory. The persistence of high levels of public religiosity in the United States, often cited as evidence against secularization, is thus rendered a secondary matter. On Smith's reading, Americans increasingly occupy a world in which their strong private religious sentiments (documented in his earlier work on evangelicalism) are not deemed relevant by the social institutions that dominate and structure their public lives. Secularization and sacralization appear to coexist although the ongoing battle by contemporary religious traditionalists to "reclaim the culture" by asserting religious authority in education ("intelligent design"), medicine (stem cell research, abortion), and law (accommodationism) suggests a constant tension over boundaries and the ever-present possibility of counter-revolution.

Two features of the essays were particularly interesting. Before reading the volume, I did not fully appreciate how fundamentally a belief in science had come to dominate American intellectual life at the dawn of the 20th century. The insurgent secularizers grabbed the mantle of science in every conceivable domain where it applied (and some, such as journalism and law, where it did not). One might well conclude that "scientism" had become the new religion, achieving a level of prestige and legitimacy that seems distant in today's anti-scientific political discourse. The other striking regularity, taken up by several authors, was how secularizers often focused their attack not on the Protestant Establishment, the ostensible target of reforms, but rather on the "sectarian" religions that were outside the mainline. Calls for secular education, ending censorship, removing religious sanction in law, professionalizing journalism and other crusades identified Roman Catholics, Protestant evangelicals and popular religiosity in general as the enemy from which the professions must be insulated.

While education was covered in numerous chapters that did not take enough account of one another, I...