David Voas provides a neat breakdown of the powerful trends effecting the main religious communities (and apparently also minority communities as well now) in the industrial democracies in his TED talk "Why there is no way back for religion in the West." His analysis of the facts show that "the secular transition" is not explainable in any other way than as an actual substantial decline and is mostly a result of "generational replacement." Older people who are more interested in participating in the activities of religious communities are replaced by younger people who are less interested. As he comments, "you have to be raised with religion for it to seem natural." In advanced societies today it would appear that young people are raised in ways that increasingly prevent this from happening. In other words, the process is not primarily a result of individuals consciously rejecting religion. Rather, as he notes, "It's a matter of culture." He goes on to explain that new generations enter adulthood with increasingly weaker ties to a religion than prior generations, and its is very hard to develop such ties later in life. As a result, the religious cultures-- the denominations that once dominated entire societies in Europe and other places-- are now increasingly not successfully transferred. There is as he puts it "something about modernization" that leads increasing numbers of young people to look on their family's religious traditions as "alien" and "exotic."
He acknowledges, as do an increasing number of other researchers in the field of the empirical study of religion that despite over a 100 years of study of the process of secularization the specific causal mechanisms behind this process are still obscure. But there is no doubt that something about the structure of modern societies contributes to young people becoming increasingly alienated from the traditions of prior generations. Voas suggests a few possibilities which boil down essentially to greater personal liberty, prosperity, mobility, and physical and material security. In other words, only inherently good things that no person in their right mind would wish to see reduced. But he does not seem entirely confident whether these are actually the only root causes or whether they are simply roughly correlated. The exceptions of Poland and the U.S., and until recently, Ireland, for example, suggest that there is not a completely smooth correlation. Also, it is not made clear by Voas whether more subtle distinctions in levels of religiosity between advanced nations can be explained by differences in such factors. For example, he mentions that in certain cases advanced societies that actively suppressed religion have experienced levels of "spring back" when repressive policies were reversed. It seems as yet to be fully determined whether there are other factors at work besides inherently positive social trends.
The question I want to raise is why this description of the process of secularization does not sound major alarm bells for empirical scholars of religion like Voas? Although he uses technical terms like "generational replacement" the process he describes seems to potentially hold much in common with processes of ethnocide, or forced assimilation when the actions of majorities disrupt and even destroy the ongoing connection of succeeding generations of minority groups to the traditions of their forebears. That such processes have been unleashed by "enlightened" modern liberal societies on various minority groups, such as indigenous peoples, is beyond question. Could such processes also have been unwittingly unleashed on formally dominant religious groups in these societies, such as their "old conventional churches?" It seems a strange coincidence, for example, that the denominations most effected all happen to be those that created the school systems, universities and public health and social service institutions that were transformed in the second half of the nineteenth century into public institutions.
Voas is willing to acknowledge, as I would myself as a religious person, that religion is, at least in significant part "a matter of culture" in which practice and community involvement are critical factors in the successful transference (See the video at the bottom of this blog). However, the fact that unspecified causal factors of modern societies lead inevitably to young people looking upon their potential inheritance as "exotic" is something I find disturbing. Would not such a description fit at least in part the experience of First Nations people under residential school systems here in Canada? Becoming detached from ones religious cultural heritage to the point that it becomes almost impossible to find one's "way back" is not something we should look at with dispassion or resignation.
Voas must believe that the "causal" factors are either impossible to reverse, or that the positive trends associated with them can only be obtained by public policies that result in increased generational displacement. But such attitudes were also characteristic of those who unleashed the residential schools on First Nations people. The culture of the British Empire was either destined to dominate according some historically determined process of "progress," or simply deserved to dominate because it represented the highest form of human society. But in a world of a plurality of visions of what the good ultimately consists of, such triumphal assumptions are highly problematic. Religious traditions are, in fact, significant aspects of the plurality of visions of the good that make up the diversity of our society. But if Voas is correct, then significant numbers of such traditions are destined to wither away. "There is no way back" is equivalent to asserting that certain kinds of cultural diversity are inevitably diminished by certain undetermined cultural features of our society.
The obscurity of those features is the only thing protecting us, as citizens of "modern societies," from having to face the accusation that we may be involved in yet another form of ethnocide. If these factors are even partially a result of public policies then we have some potential complicity in a great wrong. Can we be sure, for example, that the increasing monopolization of certain institutions by the state over the course of the twentieth century, such as education systems, has not played a role in the processes of religious decline? After all, reasserting control over such systems has been one of the priorities of First Nations in order to make curricula more "culturally appropriate." Can we be sure that other policies implementing state neutrality regarding religion have been the right ones? For example, is removing observances such as prayers in public institutions, such as before city council meetings, the best way to proceed versus more complex forms of sharing between diverse views? Why must publicly supported forms of counselling, such as grief counselling, be limited only to "scientifically trained" professionals? Have processes of secularization of public service organizations with religious roots, such as the Y been based on philosophically coherent principles, or have they been largely ad hoc? Do we actually have appropriate forms of accommodating religious diversity in place? Or have we in most instances taken the route of simply removing forms of cooperation between such groups and the wider political community? Is such an approach the best way to have responded to increasing religious diversity?
Does it make sense, for example, to treat religious traditions differently from other facets of culture when it comes to our multicultural policies? Various theories of multiculturalism, such as those of Charles Taylor and Will Kymlikca, for example, present rationales for why the state might be required to help support certain aspects of culture. They reject the traditional liberal approach of treating culture only as a matter for individuals to support purely as voluntary efforts. As some religious studies scholars have argued, not all religions conceive of themselves by way of the model of "voluntary association," but manifest more community centred or educationally focused, approaches to the preservation of their traditions. For example, some commentators note the connection between certain First Nations communities and the specific lands they inhabit and their duties to be custodians of those specific lands. But, multicultural policies typically presume that religions can and must be distinguished from other forms of cultural adhesion, or in other words, that they must operate only according to the model of voluntary association, like the Rotary Club or Boy Scouts. In the light of such different conceptions about culture and religion and their interconnection and how to approach state neutrality regarding religion, can we simply assume that only factors too good to question are at work in processes of religious decline?
Unless we can be confident about our answer to this question, we should not be indifferent about the process that Voas describes. I don't mean to imply that he is indifferent. As he states at the beginning of his talk, his focus is on "quantitative" matters so a certain level of dispassion is in order. But his choice of title does suggest a degree of resignation regarding the process. But empirical discoveries can raise significant moral questions, and in this case they raise significant questions about the ability of modern societies to sustain certain kinds of cultural diversity. It is those moral and political issues regarding the practice of multiculturalism and religious neutrality, and the relationship between the two, that we must engage, if we are to take anything of significance from Voas's proposal that "generational replacement" is the best explanation for religious decline in advanced societies.
On a personal note, this reflection was prompted by my desire to organize an after school choir in the Reform tradition of hymnody (which I will note is a word that my spelling checker does not recognize--yet another lack of public recognition?) at my local public school for the children of families interested in that tradition, to be paid for by those families. Such an activity would be helpful not only for the purpose of helping to maintain my tradition, but also because after school care is such a pressing need here in Nova Scotia, and thus would dovetail nicely with providing a useful social service. But people within my religious community felt it would be unthinkable to ask the state for such an accommodation. When I pointed out that "yoga" activities were already occurring at the school my fellow congregants still insisted that religious people must forgo the usefulness of such an activity and the efficiency of already having children at a central location to make young people come to Church on Sunday. I started to feel that they had perhaps internalized the values of some perceived "secular" norm that made them feel ashamed of making demands on the state to recognize, support or at least avoid hindering attempts to preserve a tradition by way of useful forms of cooperation with the state.
Perhaps, I'm slightly less inclined to such feelings because I'm one of those rare cases (as Voas notes) of a person who has joined a religion after a secular upbringing. It seems strange to me to look on my adopted tradition as a potential danger to public order such that people in it should feel obliged to exclude themselves from seeking accommodation in public institutions and opportunities for fruitful cooperation between religious groups and the state. In the subtle economy of such decision-making regarding public utilities (which are structured by specific public policies) and personal sacrifice to help preserve complex traditions there is some kind of cultural tragedy of the commons at work. Countless such decisions are I think a part of the subtle pressures of decline that inevitably push people to simply give up on bearing the complex burdens of preserving religious traditions in favour of some easier secular alternative.
Sadly, when I have discussed such reluctance with others both within and without my tradition, the most common rationale given for why religious groups must exclude themselves from seeking accommodations from the state the general answer has boiled down to nebulous fears about the state becoming implicated with "terrorist madrasas" or non-progressive religious belief systems. When I suggested that prejudging groups on such nebulous fears and lumping all religious groups together regardless of their teachings before they have actually occurred, are not particularly good grounds on which to base public policies, the most frequent response was that I was being naive in my understanding of the teachings of "most" religious groups. In other words even people within my tradition have come to suspect that religion in general is a negative and even dangerous aspect of society. But I can't help but wonder whether there is a kind of feedback mechanism at work here. As religious people exclude themselves from the public sphere, it becomes easier and easier for succeeding generations to fail to perceive religion as something useful or positive. And as such belief grows, it contributes more and more to suspicions that religions are unimportant, useless or even sinister. Which just reinforces the need to self-exclude even more. In other words, it might be the case that the real motives behind the forms of religious disestablishment and state neutrality that we have adopted might have more to do with ignorance about and outright distrust of religious people, than openness to and respect for religious diversity.
"Religious truth is, therefore, a species of practical knowledge. Like swimming, we cannot learn it in the abstract; we have to plunge into the pool and acquire the knack by dedicated practice."-- Dr. Karen Armstrong
