120 Philip S. Gorski
of the divine were not easily reconciled with the realities of the world: blood-kin ver-
sus coreligionists, the Sermon on the Mount versusraison d’etat, brotherly love versus
the profit motive, revelation versus reason – these are some of the stations along the
westward branch of the road that Weber wishes to describe. It is not a straight path,
but a spiralling one, in which the ongoing conflict between the religious and the non-
religious leads not only to ever sharper institutional boundaries between the various
“life orders” but also to greater and greater theoretical consistency within the individ-
ual “value-spheres” (political, economic, aesthetic, erotic, scientific). The consequence,
says Weber, is an ever growing differentiation between the religious and the nonre-
ligious, both institutionally and intellectually, a tendency that, for various reasons,
Weber believes has gone further (so far) in the West than in other parts of the world.
These two approaches are not necessarily at odds with one another. In fact, they
might even be seen as complementary. For each addresses a question which the other
leaves unanswered. The neo-Weberian approach explains why religious and nonreli-
gious spheres of knowledge came to be separate, something that the neo-Durkheimian
approach takes for granted. For its part, the neo-Durkheimian approach identifies the
actors who drew the boundaries, something that Weber (uncharacteristically) omits
from his analysis. Nor are these approaches at odds with the SPCM. On the contrary,
they might deepen our understanding of the “secular revolution” of the late nineteenth
century.
CONCLUSION: AN AGENDA FOR RESEARCH
I have pursued two aims in this chapter, one critical, the other constructive. On the
critical side, I have tried to identify the empirical and theoretical shortcomings of the
two perspectives that have dominated recent discussions of secularization: Classical
secularization theory (CST) and the religious economies model (REM). One problem
that is common to both, I have argued, is that they are insufficiently historical, albeit in
somewhat different ways. The problem with CST, historically seen, is that it is premised
on a truncated and romanticized version of Western religious development: Truncated,
insofar as it tends to juxtapose the modern era to the Middle Ages and ignore the
intervening centuries; and romanticized insofar as it adopts a rose-tinted picture of the
Middle Ages as a period of universal belief and deep piety, a picture that is very much
at odds with contemporary historiography. As I have argued elsewhere (Gorski 2000),
once the Reformation era is inserted back into the narrative, and a more realistic view of
the Middle Ages is adopted, the story line of Western religious development becomes
more complicated, and the classical tale of an uninterrupted decline in religious life
beginning in the Middle Ages becomes very difficult to sustain. For what we see is not
simply (quantitative) decline, but (quantitative) revival (in ecclesiastical influence) and
(qualitative) transformation (in individual religiosity) – a multidimensional ebb and
flow.
The problem with the REM rests on a somewhat different but equally flawed picture
of Western religious history, a picture that is at once foreshortened and anachronistic:
foreshortened in that it focuses almost exclusively on the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, thereby ignoring the medieval as well as the early modern period, and anachro-
nistic in that it tends to see earlier historical periods through a twentieth-century lens.
This leads to some rather egregious errors of interpretation. Consider the claim that low