Skip to main content

Secularisation

It is a fact that in most societies of the global north, such as the United Kingdom and France, church attendance has dropped significantly since the 1800s and in places now represents a tiny minority of something like 1-2%. 

The term "secularisation" refers to the process by which religious faith is increasingly marginalised from society, and limited to the private lives of a small number of individual believers.

A major contemporary expert on secularisation is Professor Hugh McLeod of the University of Birmingham, who is himself a Quaker.  

Hugh McLeod's work offers lots of statistical data and insights into the phenomenon of secularisation. 

The process of secularisation goes back at least as far as the 1600s, and a major contributing factor was co-existence and belligerence between rival forms of Christianity during that century.

There appears to be a certain typical chronological sequence for secularisation in "Christian" countries, beginning with the co-existence of plural versions of the Christian faith, followed by toleration, the open expression of non-Christian beliefs (e.g. Deism or atheism), the separation of church and state (either de jure or de facto), and leading to a widespread fall in church attendance and increasing marginalisation of Christian faith in society.

There appears to be a corelation between affluence and irreligion/religious indifference, although at the present time countries such as the USA or South Korea appear to "buck the trend". 

There is a whole range of other factors contributing to secularisation. These include the following:

  • people moving from villages to urban areas and losing their "roots" and connections with the church 
  • scientific challenges to the Christian faith, e.g. in terms of the age of the earth or the origin of biological species 
  • philosophical alternatives to Christianity such as revolutionary socialism or Freudian psychology. 
  • the availability of birth control, and the sexual revolution 
  • a breakdown in the faith being passed down from parents to children
  • the impact of fewer women (i.e. mothers) having religious faith   

The progress of secularisation began a long time ago, but has accelerated in more recent times. As recently as 1984, church attendance in Scotland stood at 17%. In 2017, this figure was just over 7%.    

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The origin and spread of the early Baptist churches in the North West of England and elsewhere

The origins of Baptist churches go back to the 1600s.  The very first Baptist church began in 1609 and was for English speaking Christians based in the Netherlands, relocating to London in 1611 (Thomas Helwys). These churches were known as "General Baptists" and followed the theology of Arminius and the Anabaptists.  A second genesis of Baptist churches was in London in about 1638 (John Spilsbury). These churches followed the Reformed Theology of John Calvin and the Synod of Dordt. In 1644, the First London Baptist Confession was signed by seven Baptist churches in the capital.  Baptist churches later spread from London outwards.  During the time of the English Civil War (1642-1651), there were Baptist Christians in the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell. In 1648 the New Model Army campaigned in Lancashire during the Second Civil War.  1. John Wigan & the "Coldhouse cause"   During the time of the English Civil War (1642-1651), John Wigan (d. 1665),...
Post a Comment
Read more

Die Erweckung (revival of evangelical Christianity in Germany in the 1800s)

Die Erweckung (literally, "the Revival") is a name for the revival of evangelical Christianity in Germany in the 1800s. It has overlap with the Réveil in Switzerland, France and the Netherlands, and also with the second Evangelical Revival in Britain and the Second Great Awakening in America. The Pietist movement, which began during the Baroque era around 1675 under the leadership of Philip Spener, had waned by the 1730s. By this time, Halle university, originally founded by Pietists and a flagship of the movement, became a centre for rationalism under academics such as Christian Wolff (1679–1754).  In the interim, Pietism was kept alive in part by a network of small groups (the Diaspora) which followed the spirituality of the Moravian Christians, a movement similar to Pietism but with its own church structures under the leadership of Von Zinzendorf. There was also the Basle-based Christentumsgesellschaft founded by Urlsperger in 1780, a society founded to counter the ratio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know you've got till it's gone

If you are old enough (or, young enough) to get the reference, the title of this blog post is a line from a 1970 song . The next line is, "They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot." This is a post about things that we have as Evangelical Christians, but perhaps have failed to cherish and value. These are reasons to stay Evangelical - even if other Christian traditions might at times seem appealing, tempting even. Evangelical Christianity is the faith I have received, the form of Christianity I was born into spiritually, and which has been my home since 1991. At least in this post, my concern is not to question the legitimacy of other Christian traditions, such as Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, or the faith of those brought up in those traditions, so much as to value my own tradition, and to encourage my fellow evangelicals to "stick with it" and "dig deeper" rather than going elsewhere. This blog is dedicated to a couple of dear friends who i...
Post a Comment
Read more