Ebook: Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide

This book presents a significant re-statement of secularization theory, framing religion as declining with the advance of "existential security" through modernization and human development. Along the way, the argument interestingly contradicts with strong empirical findings Stark and Finke's "religious economies theory," in a way that will demand a response from them. The book's strengths (and perhaps weakness, in some ways) are its cross-national perspective and survey data, which are all too rare in sociology of religion (although some are skeptical of the reliablity of the World Values Survey) and its attempt to seriously empirically test hypotheses deduced from significant theories. This is an important book in many ways, but note that is also compromised by a number of apparent flaws: 1. It uses mostly cross-sectional data to make claims about historical changes. 2. It perhaps wrongly assumes cohort rather than age effects in its generational analyses. 3. It does not actually even directly measure its key variable of existential security, but relies instead on indirect measures and inferences. 4. It does not well develop theoretically the social psychological and cognitive mechanisms that would lead increased existential security to secularize, leaving the reader to imagine the connections that would make that happen. 5. The major types of societies analyzed are also strongly correlated with different kinds of religions (post-industrial are heavily Protestant, agrarian heavily non-Christian), which the analysis does not always control for well. 6. It focuses on the "mass publics" of various nations, relying on calculated national means, with little attention to potentially important diversity and complexity within cases that matter for the overall argument. 7. We have very good reason to doubt that the survey measures used really work well across all religious traditions analyzed--e.g., can one survey question about church attendance or prayer really facilitate comparison across, say, Alabama fundamentalism, Japanese Shintoism, and Indian Hinduism?--very blunt instruments, indeed. 8. The book theoretically recognizes the importance of culture, but hardly touches on culture in its own analysis, other than creating regression dummy variables for different religious types, which is hardly attending to cultural analysis well--one supposes these are the limits of conducting research from a computer lab. 9. Some of the writing reflects a lack of genuine familiarity with religion as a human phenomenon per se (e.g., pg. 241 talks about "fundamentalist Evangelical churches," which anyone who knows American religious history ought to know doesn't make sense). 10. The strong linking of religion to existential insecurity seems reductionistic and two-dimensional, at least to this reader. The authors do recognize some of these problems, but recognizing them does not fix them. Thus, the book has significant potential flaws, but I think still is an important voice in an ongoing debate and is thus still worth a reading. Despite its flaws, many of the empirical correlations presented are truly impressive and need to be explained one way or another. And the empirical evidence on post-Soviet societies and on Islam and democracy is very interesting. One looks forward to Stark and Finke's reply to this book's attack on their paradigm/theory.