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You Need to Know These 3 Cultural Currents

Sociologist Peter Berger, among many others, has long suggested that the modern world is being shaped by three deep and fast-moving cultural currents: secularization, pluralization and privatization. Big words. Even bigger ideas. But it’s within these words and ideas that we find the wider cultural key to the rise of the “nones”—the fastest growing and now second largest religious constituency in the U.S.

The Process of Secularization

The English word secular derives from the Latin saeculum, which means “this present age.” The contemporary term secular is descriptive, referring to that which is divorced from religious or spiritual sensibility. Secularization is the process by which something becomes secular. It is the cultural current making things secular.

And it is raging through our world like a flash flood.

Berger defines secularization as the process by which “sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols.” The effect of this process is that the church is losing its influence as a shaper of life and thought in the wider social order, and Christianity is losing its place as the dominant worldview. Richard John Neuhaus writes that we live in a “naked public square,” meaning that religious ideas and mores no longer inform public discourse.

Christianity has ceased to be the motivating center of Western life; the religious question is consciously or unconsciously pushed from the heart of human concerns, and the institutional forms of Christianity have, and are, undergoing revision at the hands of the world. Or as C.S. Lewis observes, “Almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.”

Yet a full-blown secularization thesis has been challenged. Not the reality of the process itself; what is debated is the degree to which the process of secularization can redirect a person away from a belief in God. This argument is clearly in question in the United States, for while the process of secularization is clear, it has yet to produce an overwhelmingly secularized population. German philosopher Friedrich Nietschze may have proclaimed God dead, but it could be contended that few in America attended the wake. Our day is, as Berger himself observes, “as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever.”

But that is where Berger was wrong. We may not be losing our belief in God, but we are losing our religion. While we may not be turning into atheists, we seem quite content to accept the idea of faith being privately engaging but culturally irrelevant. And yes, this is because of the process of secularization.

Think about how faith itself is tended. It needs support. Apart from a Christian community, we quickly wither. We need a context of encouragement. Beliefs don’t exist in a vacuum; they need to be nurtured, reinforced. A secularized world no longer offers the deep religious socialization and the frequent reaffirmation of beliefs necessary for a distinctive faith to flourish. The declining social significance of religion will inevitably cause a decline in the number of religious people and the extent to which those people are religious. When society no longer supports religious affirmation, the difficulty of maintaining individual faith increases dramatically.

As a result, we should not be surprised at the rise of the “nones”—or when their ranks continue to swell.

The Process of Privatization

Privatization is the process by which a chasm is created between the public and the private spheres of life, and spiritual things are increasingly placed within the private arena. So when it comes to things like business, politics, or even marriage and the home, personal faith is bracketed off. The process of privatization, left unchecked, makes the Christian faith a matter of personal preference, trivialized to the realm of taste or opinion.