Historicizing the Secularization Debate 117
regulation created a situation more conducive to the growth of religious pluralism, that
is, to the emergence and growth of alternative religions, and thereby reinforced and ex-
panded the constituency which supported decreased regulation. From the perspective
of the SPCM, then, the combination of decreasing vitality, increasing pluralism, and
decreasing regulation is not paradoxical, and the fact that decreasing vitality preceded
decreased regulation and increased pluralism is no longer anomalous.
But what about the second anomaly facing the REM, namely, the greater religious
vitality of contemporary Catholicism? To my knowledge, this problem has not been
explicitly addressed by advocates of the SPCM. But the SPCM does suggest a possible
answer: One might hypothesize that varying levels of religious vitality are bound up
with varying responses to the secularist movement. In most places, Catholics responded
to the socialist and liberal “threat” by building social milieux and political parties of
their own. The result of these efforts was Christian Democracy, a movement that re-
mains powerful even today in many parts of Europe (e.g., Hanley 1994; Becker et al.
1990). Similar responses can be seen in some Protestant countries, such as Norway and
the Netherlands (Scholten 1969). But the resulting movements and parties may not
have been as broad (socially and geographically) or as deep (organizationally and polit-
ically) as their Catholic counterparts, perhaps because the Protestant Churches lacked
a centralized leadership structure capable of coordinating the various movements, or
perhaps because the Protestant churches were more (financially) beholden to, and thus
less (politically) autonomous from, the state. But these are no more than tentative
hypotheses. Historians have only begun the task of identifying and explaining these
cross-national differences, and have not yet brought quantitative data or comparative
methods to bear in any systematic way. Clearly, this is one area in which historical
sociology and the sociology of religion could contribute to the study of secularization.
One also might extend this general line of argument to explain intraconfessional
variations in religious vitality, that is for the varying levels of religious vitality that
we observewithinthe Catholic and Protestant blocs, between Italy (high) and France
(low), for instance, or Norway (low) and Sweden (very low). One could hypothesize
that these variations in religious vitality were because of variations in the relative suc-
cess of the Christian Democratic movement and its various Protestant analogues, and
one might attempt to explain these latter differences with the standard tools of social
movement theory (i.e., “resources,” “political opportunity,” “frames”). Here is another
area in which sociologists – especially political sociologists – might be able to add to
the debate.
The SPCM is also superior to its rivals in another respect: It provides a concrete ex-
planation for macro-societal secularization, that is, for the diminution of religious au-
thority within particular institutions or sectors of society. Proponents of the REM have
either ignored this second, macro-societal dimension, or defined it away, by insisting –
quite wrongly! – that secularization refers only to a decline in individual religiosity. This
cannot be said of the classical secularization theorists or their present-day defenders,
of course, for whom the sharpening of boundaries between religious and nonreligious
roles and institutions, and the declining scope of religious authority within various
sectors of society has always been a – eventhe –key aspect of secularization. But they
have tended to explain macro-societal secularization in a vague and often tautological
fashion, as the result of other macro-societal trends, such as “modernization,” “differen-
tiation,” and “rationalization,” which are closely related to secularization. By contrast,