In the classic social-scientific literature of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, religion often held a central place, but most authors also
felt that it was somehow at odds with the dominant features and tenden- cies of modern society (Durkheim 1965; Freud 1985; Marx and Engels n.d.; Weber 1992 [1930]). This notion that modern society was a prevail- ingly or at least increasingly secular or non-religious society held sway in the literature until the post-World War II period (Beckford 1989), and in the 1960s experienced another temporary dominance, especially in the writings of authors like Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Harvey Cox and Bryan Wilson (Berger 1967; Cox 1965; Luckmann 1967; Wilson 1966). Since the 1970s, however, the idea that modernity somehow implied an absolute decline in the presence and social importance of religion has grad- ually faded such that by the end of the century the pendulum seemed to have swung the other way, with scholars across the Western world, espe- cially in the United States but also in Europe and elsewhere, declaring that the thesis was simply wrong and always had been (Davie 2000; Stark and Iannaccone 1994). All along this trajectory, however, a significant number of authors insisted that the question of the relation between religion and modernity could not be subsumed under the simple option of decline or maintenance, that the question of secularization or sacralization was more complex, had more than one dimension, and was subject to different answers depending on what one meant by religion, on region, historical period or social location (Dobbelaere 1981; Martin 1978; Simpson 1988). Secularization meant more than one thing, had more than one outcome, and was more about religious change than it was about either decline or resurgence. Observing religion in today’s global society as a function system very much adopts this latter view of the situation. Accordingly, in consonance with other observers such as José Casanova (Casanova 1994) and Luhmann (Luhmann 1977), to mention only two, I view seculariza- tion primarily as a question of the consequences of differentiation, specifically as the outcome of the historical development of a plurality of function systems as global society’s dominant subsystems, one of which is for religion. From this perspective, secularization refers to the non- religiousness and hence secularity of the other subsystems and to the effects of this situation on the form, function and importance of religion. Secularization is about the relation between the religious system and the others. Whether that means ‘weaker’ religion or ‘stronger’ religion is a question of comparison with these other systems, and only in that light with the situation in past societies or of today’s society as a whole.
Comparing the religious to other function systems involves two sorts of consideration, namely the relative efficacy of religion as a system in comparison with the others, and the degree of conditioning or constraining effect that the religious system has on the others. One might phrase these as two questions: how powerful is religion as a system? and how much does the religious system affect the others? Although these two questions are related, it is important to stress that they are not the same. The former
has more to do with the internal structures of the religious system, the latter with the incorporation of religious criteria into the internal struc- tures of other systems. Thus, just to take the example of the economic and political systems by way of illustration, the capitalist economy is not only powerful and pervasive in its own right, its criteria are incorporated signif- icantly into the processes of the political system which not only must see to its own finances but cannot regulate economic matters in disregard for what the economic system dictates. The reverse is also the case, in spite of claims that ‘globalization’ implies the decline in the power of states. How then is it with religion?
I deal with the question of the internal coherence of religion as system first. The question we are asking here concerns the efficacy of religion as a societal system, and not directly the presence or absence of communication that could be considered religious. Religion is at issue, not just religious- ness. Thus, as I emphasized in the previous section, the number of people engaging how frequently in religious communication is important since the system cannot persist without elements; yet even more critical is how well such communication coheres into a recursively structured system. Another way of approaching the issue is to look at the nature and extent of reli- gious convergence or authority. If anyone and everyone constructed their religious communication in whatever fashion suited them from time to time, we could speak of religiousness but not of religion. The high and increasing pluralism in today’s religious world as well as the great degree of variability in the practice even of the formed religions makes this a real issue. Adapting Thomas Luckmann’s analysis of the 1960s (Luckmann 1967), if religion really did become purely or even dominantly a matter of individual bricolage, then this would amount to a fairly radical ‘seculariza- tion’ of our society. Religiousness might be broadly present in the consciousnesses of individuals, but it would have a great deal of difficulty having any real social effect. This is more or less what Bryan Wilson (Wilson 1979) meant by secularization and, as Luckmann’s title aptly put it, such religion would be invisible. Comparing such a situation to other systems, it would be the equivalent of everyone being able to print their own money, raise their own armies, enact their own laws, declare their own truths according to their own criteria, or certify their own qualifica- tions. Yet, even though this sort of atomized religious expression is undoubtedly on the rise in various parts of the world today (cf. Heelas et al. 2005), convergent or authoritative religion is also very much present and in many places dominant. This is religious expression that follows programmatic patterns and these programmatic patterns are the religions. As I noted above when discussing religious programmes, while the reli- gions may not be all that there is to the global religious system, they do constitute it quite as much as the sovereign states together make up the global political system. Without the religions there would in effect be no
religious system. Indeed, the radically individualized sort of religious prac- tice just mentioned can only appear socially as religion by virtue of its resemblance to the forms that the religions take.
Even if we can accept for the moment that religion has sufficient convergent form to warrant its observation as a societal system, that by itself does not settle the question of efficacy. In the absence of any logical or defensible criterion by which this could be measured absolutely, the only way to address the issue further is on the basis of comparison, not, as I said above, with other societies, but with other function systems in today’s society. From this perspective, we have to consider more than one factor. First, although religion clearly has a power dimension, as I discussed above, its power medium does not have the sort of clarity that is typical of some other systems. Here the fungibility of money or the clear delimitation of political office, among others, can serve as notable contrasts. How much economic power exists can be measured in terms of money; whether or not one has political power is a matter of occupying defined positions which have jurisdiction in precisely defined territories. Similarly, educational attainment translates itself into grades and diplomas, prowess in sport through records (hence sport’s obsession with statistics), and even health through the absence of clinically defined disease. Religion, in comparison, has quite modest possibilities in this respect, at least as far as fungibility and precise delimitation are concerned. Relatively few mechanisms for measuring piety and devotion have been developed, and these are in any case not comparable from one religion to another, often not even from one subdivision of a religion to another. Various religious ‘offices’ also exist and these quite often carry with them the attribution of elevated levels of religious power. Priests, preachers, gurus, sadhus, rabbis, ulama, pirs, lamas, monks and nuns usually repre- sent significant concentrations of such power; their religious communication often carries more ‘weight’ than that of individual ‘lay’ devotees. And yet the power distinction between religious virtuoso and lay adherent has, if anything, diminished in the modern historical process of religion formation, as the above-discussed massification of contemporary religion indicates. That said, however, this relative vagueness of religious power or piety does not necessarily pose a problem for religion as concerns its efficacy and societal influence. Other function systems, notably that for art and entertainment or perhaps increasingly that for mass media, display a similar vagueness in how systemic power is acquired and recognized; but this does not detract from the pervasive influence and presence that these systems have. Nonetheless, in comparison with the other systems, religion does have certain peculiarities that can be understood as a comparative weakness or disadvantage. These concern the relative difficulty in instru- mentalizing religion and, borrowing another term from Luhmann, its orthogonality vis-à-vis the other systems (Luhmann 2000b).
Even a cursory look at the more prominent religions in today’s religious system shows a consistency in their structures which we can describe as an emphasis on holism. These religions claim relevance to virtually anything having to do with human life and the universe because they purport to offer a perspective that grounds or makes possible the whole. Analyses of religion such as that of Berger or Luhmann, with their respective emphases on distinctions between cosmic and nomic or transcendent and immanent, treat this feature of (modern) religion as more or less definitive. The cosmic or the transcendent are the proper domain of religion, but the func- tion of this domain is to render the opposite pole, the nomic or immanent, meaningful. The ‘other world’ is the condition for the possibility of meaning and power in ‘this world’; and religion is that which allows access in this world to the source of power and meaning in the ‘other world’, even if that ‘other world’ is conceived as an intimate dimension of ‘this world’ (cf. Beyer 1994). Thus, to illustrate from a number of the religions, in the Abrahamic religions, God creates, renders possible or communicates the world. In Hinduism the Godhead, whether Brahma, Shiva, Devi or Vishnu, is ultimately the source, the reason and indeed the only underlying reality of this world. From a core Buddhist perspective, all worldly exis- tence is a product of dependent origination or previous causes, the entire edifice resting on, not so much nothing at all, as upon that which it is impossible to say anything about but which is nonetheless the only reality, namely nirvana or Buddha consciousness. Not all religions are in such a principled way ‘monotheistic’ or ‘monothetic’, but all of them have in common the idea of this fundamental realm that is the condition for the possibility of everything worldly, nomic and immanent.
While this may be an accurate description of a central feature of these modern religions, we have to ask why this is the case, above all when one considers that these religions as modernly reconstructed as well as their religio-cultural antecedent forms in past societies were very often also or even predominantly directed towards much more ‘this-worldly’ concerns and religious communication. Their aim is and has been, for instance, healing the sick, bringing rain, ensuring success in war, legitimating regimes, controlling one’s neighbour, encouraging fertility, picking a marriage partner, acquiring wealth, assuring a good hunt, and so on: prac- tical everyday issues, not just ultimate goals. The answer to this question lies in the practical limits to the instrumentalization of religion, but this only in comparison with the other systems. In terms of having concrete, visible, ‘this-worldly’ and empirically recognizable effect, religion seems to have more limited possibilities than do many or most of these others. For the sheer production of goods and services, that is wealth, the mechanisms and instrumental structure of the capitalist economy are noticeably more effective than prayer and sacrifice to the gods. For healing illness, medical- ized health is verifiably more powerful than reliance on faith or
shamanistic voyages. And empirical science with its logical procedures and experimental techniques produces results that no religious technique has shown itself capable of doing. Put into the terms that I used in the previous chapter, the ‘adaptive upgrading’ that has been such an important feature of the construction of these modern function systems has resulted in the unprecedented production of instrumental power for many of these systems; but for religions, it seems more to have favoured the enhanced development of their ‘other-worldliness’ (cf. Weber 1946). This may very well be by default; other systems have taken over, developed and sought to monopolize the production and reproduction of social power media like truth, law, political power, wealth and even beauty. Religion appears to be unchallenged only in the operation of faith or piety (cf. Simmel 1959).
This peculiar specialization of modern religion does not, however, spell the irrelevance let alone disappearance of the religious mode in modern global society, as perhaps certain versions of the secularization thesis had it. It does, however, point to particular consequences which might be inter- preted precisely as indicators of a decline in social significance. One of these is a high degree of privatization, which here means that it is relatively more difficult to enforce religious authority and therefore to ensure a concentrated degree of orthodoxy/orthopraxy (see Beyer 1994). Another way of putting this is to say that religion in the context of the modern global system is not only prone to pluralism, it also lacks much in the way of effective means for limiting that pluralism. In the political system, by comparison, the physicality and set amount of territory on the globe supplies a ready-made way of restricting the number and, to some degree, the size of states; as does the force that states typically have at their disposal. Moreover, the religious power medium’s lack of fungibility makes it difficult to translate that medium from one religion to another. An apparent result is therefore increasing pluralism both within religions and between religions, a tendency that if it develops sufficiently could threaten the systemicity of the religious system as such. At the moment, this outcome seems unlikely; and short of that result such privatization and pluralization does not imply that religion ceases or will cease to be an effective and highly present domain in modern global society. The system of art and entertainment, after all, suffers from similar lack of instrumen- talization and consequent pluralization of its forms. This system is nonetheless very effective world wide, perhaps because it has found a syner- gistic – which is to say mutually reinforcing without de-differentiating – relation with the incontrovertibly instrumentalized, convergent and powerful capitalist economic system and more recently with the mass- information media. Such a linking, at least of economy and religion, seems unlikely. The linking of mass-information media and religion has, by contrast, been somewhat of a constant at least since the nineteenth century. In another direction, it is probably because of the advantage of such rela-
tionships that there has also been a historical tendency to politicize reli- gion, to try to establish such synergistic relations between a state and a particular religion. I shall return to this question shortly.
A further apparent consequence of religion’s comparatively low instru- mentality is what Luhmann has called its generally orthogonal relation to the other systems (Luhmann 2000b). I have elsewhere tried to analyze this same feature in terms of religion’s affinity for addressing ‘residual prob- lems’, which is to say problems that either other systems do not address or which they create without being able to solve (Beyer 1992, 1997). What this means is that, while the power media of the other function systems are mutually reinforcing, access to and distribution of the religious medium seems to bear far less, if any, relation to that of other systems. It runs perpendicularly or orthogonally to the pattern of access and distribution of the other systems. Symptomatic of this divergence is that, while people in today’s society who have money generally also have greater access to health care, education, scientific knowledge, legal recourse, political power, sport participation and even artistic performance, access to reli- gious power is much more easily available even to the poor, powerless and marginalized. The richest and most powerful regions of the world are not also mostly the ones where religion is most present; one might even be tempted to say that the exact reverse is true. While that would be going beyond what the evidence indicates, undeniable is that religious power is distributed differently in global society than is the power of other systems. Religion, it appears, is relatively easy to produce without simultaneous access to the highly technicized and specialized means that are typical of most of the other systems. Religious ‘virtuosi’ or religious ‘experts’ are still possible and very much present in today’s society; they are just as impor- tant for the reproduction of the religious system as are corresponding specialists in the other systems. Yet even religious expertise does not require a high level of access to the power of the other systems; it only needs ‘calling’, ‘dedication’, ‘study’, ‘inspiration’ or ‘charisma’. This does not rule out religious expertise as the result of expensive and scientifically rigorous academic training or of mass-media savvy; but those routes are not the only or perhaps even the dominant ones.
Religion’s character as an orthogonally constructed, almost alternative, system further gives it a peculiar status as a system that seems more local than global, and more non-systemic or even anti-systemic than systemic. Accordingly, religions tend to locate themselves largely in the gaps left by the more dominant systems. They found oppositional movements, they take critical stands towards the dominant systems, often locating the roots of local and global problems in the operation of these systems. They gravitate in their operation towards the marginalized people and regions of the world. They create opportunities for sectarian flight from the world of the dominant systems. They have been peculiarly suited for founding movements that
define and assert the exclusive difference of particular groups and cultures in the face of the seemingly homogenizing and imperialistic tendencies of the dominant systems. And they are among the most important institutions for helping the more marginalized, but not excluded, people structure