Historicizing the Secularization Debate 115
populace that is Catholic: The highest levels of religious participation are to be found
in homogeneously Catholic countries (e.g., Ireland, Poland, Italy, Austria), while the
lowest levels are in homogeneously Protestant countries (e.g., the Scandinavian lands),
with confessionally mixed countries (e.g., Germany, the Netherlands and Britain) gen-
erally falling somewhere in between. This state of affairs is very much at odds with the
competition thesis – the thesis that greater competition is always correlated with greater
vitality – and, indeed, statistical analysis suggests that this thesis cannot be sustained
for Western Europe as a whole (Chaves and McCann 1992).
Now, it could be that the relationship between Catholicism and vitality is actually
spurious, and that the actual cause of the observed variations is religious regulation. In
other words, one could argue that the differences between Catholic, mixed, and Protes-
tant countries are really due to differences in the level of state control over the church.
For it is true that the Catholic Church often has more institutional and financial au-
tonomy than its Protestant rivals, and it is also true that the Protestant Churches in
the confessionally mixed countries of North Atlantic Europe are more autonomous
than their Protestant brethren in the Scandinavian countries. And, in fact, this
hypothesis – that religious regulation is negatively related to religious vitality – has
withstood statistical scrutiny (Chaves and McCann 1992). Unfortunately, it is not
clear that the regulation hypothesis can withstand historical scrutiny. If the regulation
hypothesis were correct, then one would expect that the historical declines in religious
vitality that began during the late nineteenth century and accelerated during the 1960s
would have been preceded by increases in religious regulation. But this does not appear
to have been the case. In most countries, levels of religious regulation actually declined
during this period. What is more, there is some evidence that suggests that these de-
clines in regulation were actually preceded by declines in vitality. Thus, both the sign
and the direction of the relationship between regulation and vitality appear to have
been the opposite of those predicted by the REM (see Gorski and Wilson 1998; Bruce
1999). Why?
I now turn to a third approach that suggests some possible explanations for these
anomalies.
A THIRD APPROACH: THE SOCIOPOLITICAL CONFLICT MODEL
Different as they may be in most other respects, there is at least one important similar-
ity between classical secularization theory and the religious economies model: Neither
pays much attention to politics. For classical secularization theorists, of course, politics
plays no role whatsoever: “Religious decline” is the product of deep-rooted, socio-
economic changes, such as urbanization and industrialization. As for the supply-side
model, politics do enter in to some degree, but only as an exogenous and secondary
factor, that is, as state “regulation” of the “religious economy.” There are other schol-
ars, however, for whom politics has loomed larger and been more central, in both the
explanansand theexplanandum. They see sociopolitical conflict as the master variable
in the secularization process, and changes in church-state relations as a key part of
the outcome. But these scholars have played little role in the recent debate over sec-
ularization, perhaps because most of them are historians. This is unfortunate, since
their work speaks directly to the problems at hand, and may help to resolve some of
the anomalies generated by classical secularization theory and the religious economies