credited with nearly magical properties, shifting from a symbol of disciplinary penitence to a symbolic celebration of fish and of Christ as the fish and fisherman.68

Douglas gives a spirited defense of the ritualism of the Bog Irish against well-meaning reformers, Catholic or otherwise, who are critical of such old-fashioned rites and would have the Bog Irish adopt a more sober or modern form of religious commitment, that is, something less ritualistic and more internal, intellectual, and ethical in style.

An equally exotic if still familiar example of a highly orthopraxic community is the neighborhood described in Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street, which portrays the ritual life of an Italian immigrant community in New York City through the first half of the 20th century. Every aspect of these people’s lives was dominated by religion, particularly ritual observances. In the midst of these ritual activities, the larger

Church as an institution and teacher of theological doctrine, was nearly marginal and held in some disdain. The community’s religious and ritual lives were constituted by the set of established customs and values that celebrated and sustained the community as a distinct and autonomous subculture. Central to this culture was the annual festa of the Madonna of Mount Carmel, a complex religious drama that began with a procession that lasted for days. For several decades, it was customary for families to drag a female relative face-down the length of the main aisle of the Church of the Madonna so that she could lick the floor stones as she was hauled to the altar. As Orsi notes, such dramatic religiosity was considered quite peculiar by other groups of

American Catholics, who remarked on the Italian tendency of devotion to rituals instead of “the great truths,” which they considered more truly religious.69

Yet these outside observers had to question even the Italians’ devotion to ritual: while everyone threw themselves into baptisms, marriages, funerals, and festas, there appeared to be little regard for Sunday mass. The men and women of Italian Harlem made no distinction between the religious and social aspects of such community events. The public and communal rites were, Orsi notes, “sacred theater,” in which the denizens of the neighborhood disclosed their most basic social values, moral perceptions, and religious cosmology. Amid all the many meanings of the festa of the

Madonna—simultaneously religious, communal, political, personal, and familial— it purged emotions, expressed frustrations, and defined the family as the dominant social world with women as the central guardians of its traditions.70 Festa reestablished links to the old country, relegitimated the immigrant’s overt severing of so many ties to past, kith, kin, and polity, while simultaneously recreating authoritative Italian tradition and Italian-American identity. As a study of a “theology of the streets,” Orsi’s analysis of the cultural and religious life of Italian Harlem illustrates the power of ritual activity to be the medium by which a people defines themselves and their tradition. These definitions were never a matter of belief in doctrines. Instead, they were shaped and preserved in the complex and layered modes of ritual orchestration.

Traditional and Secular

More common than the contrast between orthodoxic and orthopraxic styles of ritual life has been the distinction—variously drawn and amply debated—between “tradi-

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tional” societies, in which religion has a strong central place, and “secular” societies, where religion seems weaker and marginal. With the development of sociology in the 20th century, “secular,” “secularism,” and “secularization” became technical terms for a social process by which religious worldviews and institutions give way to more scientific outlooks and this-worldly values—Weber’s “disenchantment of the world.” As the earlier discussion of typologies demonstrated, secularization is also correlated with the displacement of ritual, the dominance of moral-ethical values over intercession with divine powers, the emergence of lay authority over clerical authority, and the privatization of spirituality. Some specialized analyses, however, also suggest the reverse of privatization, that secularism brings new public and political personas for religious organizations which must compete in a context of religious pluralism.71 Underlying many of the most nuanced discussions is the idea that secularism entails basic social processes in which major societal institutions are differentiated from each other and no longer represent the same values or work together to provide an overall coherence to social life.72

Secularization theories imply a contrast with so-called traditional societies, those societies in which a shared, religiously rooted cosmological and moral order maintains a strong congruence among the various dimensions of the social system—cul- tural, political, economic, and psychological.73 According to this perspective, the social values, attitudes, customs, and conventions of behavior in a traditional society tend to fit together and reinforce each other. This reinforcement naturalizes basic units of social groupings, such as the family and regional leadership systems, and authenticates the more cognitive and psychological dimensions of the culture, such as the acceptability of certain emotions, characterizations of femininity and masculinity, and styles of spirituality. This view of traditionalism suggests a society characterized by a single dominant order of things that ensures a holistic sense of the basic fit among all aspects of social and personal life, although alternative orders may be latent or marginal. In a very fundamental way, therefore, there is no such thing as religion per se in a traditional society since religious beliefs and practices cannot be separated from how people organize their families, govern themselves, engage in hunting, agriculture, or trade, and so on. This description of traditionalism, which may be more imagination than reality, clearly includes an amalgamation of some of the notions of “primitive” societies deployed in the typologies discussed earlier.

By contrast, a secular society lacks this degree and type of coherence. By virtue of what some theorists have called “institutional differentiation,” the religious system becomes independent of the political system (separation of church and state), and both are apt to separate from the educational system, the economic system, and maybe even the family and lineage system.74 When each of these institutions achieves a relative autonomy, they will function differently and have different degrees of direct or indirect dependence on each other. Secular differentiation enables these institutions to develop value structures of their own, which may not always harmonize with each other. Hence, the competitive “dog-eat-dog” world of capitalist economics coexists, uneasily perhaps, with the value system of caring and mutual support extolled for family relationships; a political system might emphasize the freedom of democratic individualism, while the educational system may try to inculcate values of conformity and discipline.

In a secular society, people have many more choices about what to believe, how to act, and where to affiliate and devote their energies. The existence of these choices puts greater emphasis on the individual as the basic unit of the society and less on the family or clan or group as a whole. In a traditional society, by contrast, a person is more likely to locate his or her sense of personal identity within a set of interconnected relationships. Like the point where the spokes of the wheel come together at the hub, individual identity is more likely to be experienced as the nodal point of a matrix of socializing and humanizing relationships. In secular societies, persons are also involved in relationships but are somewhat less likely to derive their sense of self from the sum total of those relations. Some analysts, like Robert Bellah, have argued that secularism gives rise to the type of excessive individualism in which a person defines him or her self only over and against other people, not through them or with them.75 This is probably an exaggeration, but there does seem to be a tendency toward a more corporate sense of identity in traditional societies and a more isolated, individualistic sense of identity in secular societies.

Sociologists not only describe secularization differently but also attribute it to different causes.76 Some see the loss of religious institutions and ways of acting primarily as a result of distinctive forms of social change. For others, the devaluation of traditional religion results from “the shrinking relevance of the values, institutionalized in church religion, for the integration and legitimation of everyday life in modern society.”77 Secularism is also formulated as the retreat of religion from the public and political sphere “to a private world where religions have authority only over their followers and not over any other section of the polity or society.”78 However, despite these different perspectives, it has become clear that secularization does not entail the progressive demise of religion in general but a transformation of its form.

In a secularized or secularizing society, religious activities increasingly become a matter of personal choice and voluntary affiliation instead of an automatic cultural assumption or obligatory public duty. The content of religion tends to become less concerned with exact ritual performance and intercession with deities and more concerned with moral intentions, good works, and the social needs of the community here and now. Secularism has a positive connotation for many that is historically associated with greater freedom of thought, practice, and personal belief but a negative meaning for those who experience this transformation as the marginalization and restriction of expressions of religious faith, such as school prayer.

While the causes of secularization are complex and much debated, a number of identifiable factors are clearly part of the picture: cultural pluralism, the legal separation of church and state, the concept of individual rights, industrialization and technological development, and the development of critical or scientific ways of thinking. Hence, many scholars and popular writers cast secularization as a specifically modern phenomenon dependent on social and economic forces that began to be felt in post-Renaissance Europe. For Max Weber and Robert Bellah, underlying these forces was a more fundamental process of “rationalization,” the beginnings of which can be found even in quite ancient societies. Yet others, like Mary Douglas, have eschewed any idea of a single, historical process; Douglas sees secularism as one type of worldview closely dependent upon particular modes of social organization. For that reason, it can turn up in any historical age and locale. Secularism,

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Douglas writes, is not just a “modern trend, attributable to the growth of cities or to the prestige of science. . . . [Rather, it is] an age-old cosmological type, a product of a definable social experience, which need have nothing to do with urban life or modern science.” Here secular means “this-worldly,” unconcerned with transcendent explanations and powers, focused on inner experience instead of communal worship, having attitudes of antiritualism with little interest in developed religious institutions. Douglas finds these qualities in a variety of groups, including politically leftist movements rebelling against the current value system, tribal societies such as the Mbuti pygmies (and the Dinka and Nuer to a lesser extent), and Christian denominations gradually turning away from ritual and theological doctrines to more ethically sensitive and socially concerned styles of religiosity.79

If one sets aside all theories of “historical process,” either long-term or short-term, as Douglas does, then the reason why one society is secular and another is not is reduced to the dynamics of social structure, which are not themselves explained in any way. Frustration with this impasse, perhaps, has led some scholars to take the more extreme position that there is no such thing as secularization, and our tendency to interpret things in this way is simply a function of our own cultural biases—par- ticularly the tendency to assume the superiority of so-called modern technological society in contrast to the style of less technologically sophisticated cultures. The historian Peter Burke goes so far as to claim that “all societies are equally ritualised; they merely practice different rituals. If most people in industrial societies no longer go to church regularly or practice elaborate rituals of initiation, this does not mean that ritual has declined. All that has happened is the new types of rituals—political, sporting, musical, medical, academic and so on—have taken the place of the traditional ones.”80 Yet Burke’s analysis does not try to explain why some societies attend church while others attend soccer games.

A more moderate position suggests that secularization is neither a linear developmental process that spells the demise of religion nor a mere interpretive bias on the part of Western scholars. Rather, it can be seen as a type of self-limiting process at work in all ongoing religious systems both ancient and modern. It is self-limiting because it can stimulate religious revival and innovation.81 As such, secularism may result from some critical degree of contact with different cultures—afforded by travel, conquest, immigration, or competition with neighbors for access to limited resources. If the exposure to plurality—that is, to other value systems and alternative forms of social organization—is intense and sustained or occurs at times of internal social chaos, it can begin to undermine the coherent sense of a unifying order that underlies a traditional society. Some people opt for new and foreign ways of doing things, especially if they are not the ones benefiting from the old ways. People have choices they never had before, whether they want them or not. The mere existence of choices among ways of thinking and acting relativizes what was once deemed absolute, raises questions, necessitates decisions, and promotes experimentation. In this context, some groups become more defensive of tradition, attempting to shun all new options while preserving the old without any change whatsoever. They may even attempt to ignore or retreat from the world around them. Yet older customs strictly maintained in the face of change do not function the way they used to, when they never needed to be asserted and defended. As a society tries to hold together increasingly diverse points

of view, one effect is the institutional differentiation that comes with secularism. For example, as Catholics and Jews moved into small, traditionally Protestant New England towns and claimed their rights as full citizens, the explicit and implicit role of Protestantism in the fabric of the town’s social and economic activities was forced to retreat. What was a loss for some was a gain for others. As a result there is a shift of religion from the public and communal sphere to the private and personal, leaving some institutions shorn of all involvement in religion, while others become more explicitly the bastion of religious practice, values, and even public outreach and political lobbying.

As these perspectives demonstrate, there is great deal of controversy over the notion of a process of secularization, especially in regard to such associated features as modernization, increased rationalism, and decreased religion and ritualism. Yet a view of secularism as a theory of institutional differentiation precipitated by the force of pluralism has come to dominate, in part because it recognizes that religion does not die out in secular cultures. On the contrary, in the form of autonomous institutions, religion may have a much sharper profile, it may demand more personal commitment, and it may even exercise more single-minded influence on other institutions.

Ritual in traditional societies tends to be highly organized and communal, expressing collective concerns and establishing collective understandings of tradition, authority, and the community ethos. The festa of the Madonna of 115th Street, the Mukanda initiation among the Ndembu, and the potlatch among the Kwakiutl are examples of ritual in fairly traditional societies. In highly secular societies, however, ritual retreats from the most public arena to the relative privacy of particular religious subgroups. While there may be extensive rites of initiation into such a group, more general coming-of-age rites will probably fade away. The most widely shared rituals will be only vaguely religious, giving rise to the vast body of “civic” rituals that include pledging allegiance to the flag, swearing in political leaders, jurors and witnesses in courts of law, costumes on Halloween, and turkey on Thanksgiving.82 As the typological theories suggested, this type of secular society is also likely to emphasize moral-ethical commands over ritual duties, even within the different religious subgroups, in part because moral-ethical injunctions are sufficiently abstract, universal, and embracive to enable religious people to have a sense of how to address, and live in, a nonreligious society. Undoubtedly some subgroups will use intense ritualization of their activities to foster a deep sense of community and separateness from the rest of the world; however, most churches do not want to abandon the secular world, but to address it and guide it.83

A final note of irony is particularly apt in any discussion of secularism. In 1982

Mary Douglas argued that scholars of religion, by clinging to theories that envisioned a relentless historical process of secularism at the expense of religion—theories she considered to be marked by “confusion, elitism, and bias interspersed with bril- liance”—had turned out to be very poor predictors of the future of religion.84 Most analyses projected the weakening of ritual and the total demise of religion in general. By the early 1980s, this was clearly wrong given the various forms of religious resurgence that had occurred around the world in the preceding decade, such as the Islamic revolution in Iran, Islamic resurgence in the Arabic and north African world,