Historicizing the Secularization Debate 121
levels of church membership in colonial New England indicate a low level of “religious
vitality.” This ignores the rigorous standards for church membership then in force, and
the large numbers of “hearers” who filled colonial pews. Or consider the claim that
widespread “superstition” among medieval parishioners indicates a state of religious
stagnation. This emphasis on knowledge and belief ignores the ritual and communal
dimension of religious life in the Middle Ages (Gorski 2000). Once we correct for errors
of this sort, the antisecularization story that underlies the REM – a story of ever increas-
ing religiosity since the Middle Ages – becomes just as hard to defend as its classical
rival. In my view, then, both CST and the REM are based on implausible narratives of
Western religious development.
This brings me to the constructive aspect of the chapter, which is the attempt to
outline some possible alternatives to CST and the REM, which I have dubbed the so-
ciopolitical conflict model (SPCM) and the sociocultural transformation model (SCTM),
and to suggest some possible directions for future research. In their present forms, both
of these models are open to some of the criticisms I have leveled against CST and the
REM. For example, the SPCM in its current form might be accused of a foreshortened
historical perspective. With the exception of David Martin (1978), researchers working
within the framework of the SPCM have focused mainly on the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. This is unfortunate, because there is good reason to believe
that a more generalized version of the SPCM could be used to analyze other episodes
of secularization, such as the privatization of religion that occurred in the wake of
the Thirty Years’ War (Kosselleck 1988) or the process of disaffiliation (Entkirchlichung)
that followed the upheavals of the 1960s (Hout and Fischer 2002). In both of these
instances, religious ideas and institutions suddenly found themselves confronted with
ir- or antireligious world pictures and social movements. And it seems likely that a
more serious engagement with the historical record might turn up other episodes of
structural or cultural secularization.
For its part, the SCTM (a la Weber) might be accused of a truncated historical per-`
spective, insofar as it focuses mainly on the beginning (antiquity) and end (modernity)
of the secularization story, with little attention to anything in between. This is also
unfortunate, because Weber’s analysis of the growing tensions between the religious
and nonreligious “value-spheres” contains allusions to numerous episodes of conflict
between priestly and nonpriestly intellectuals and their respective supporters (conflicts
over religious mission andraison d’ ́etat, Christian charity and capitalist imperatives,
sexual morality and erotic experience, and so on), which could be analyzed for their
contribution to the secularization process, using the conceptual tools that have been
developed for the study of “boundary-formation” in science studies and other subfields
of sociology (Gieryn 1999; Lamont and Fournier 1992).
Despite these narrative gaps, the SPCM and the SCTM, in my view, are still more
historicized, and indeed more sociological, than their predecessors and rivals, CST and
the REM. For unlike CST, the SPCM treats secularization as a historically variable and
contingent outcome, rather than as a universal and inevitable developmental trend,
thereby leaving open the possibility that secularization is an episodic, uneven and
perhaps even reversible process. CST, by contrast, is still framed by a high modernist
meta-narrative that sees religion and tradition as inherently opposed to science and
progress in a way that even many modern-day progressives and scientists would now
find hard to swallow. And unlike the REM, the SCTM treats religion as something that