Secularization: a cultural Pattern of the Enlightenment?

Project manager: Prof. Dr. Jörg Dierken

Duration of project: 2005 - 2020

The notion of secularization is one of the key concepts used to describe the relationship between religion and society after the Enlightenment. It is then that the role of religion and of its institutional representatives changed dramatically in comparison to pre-modern times.

Religion is no longer the virtually all-competent instance for the control of the polity. With the Enlightenment, it has forfeited its function as a central source of normativity and as an integrative bond for the members of society. Its loss of authority is unmistakable. It has found itself on the defensive vis-à-vis reason and its conceptions of autonomy, and vis-à-vis immanent rational forms of action in politics, economy, and culture. Society and culture seem increasingly secular in the modern period. And religion, inasmuch as it did not become unrecognizable or even disappeared, appears in some cases to completely dissolve into the secular and its implicit normativity, and in some cases to withdraw into the recesses and on the margins of social life. Secularization was and is often understood as an essential cultural pattern for a modern world disenchanted by the Enlightenment. Along these lines, the concept of secularization was and is frequently used for the description and analysis of modern society after the Enlightenment.

However, a series of unanswered questions arise. Phenomenally speaking, the diagnosis of a permanently declining religion is contradicted by its resurgence, in particular in the shape of fundamentalisms of various kinds. These affect not only the Islamic world, but also Christianity and other religions. The secularity of society proves to be most of all a European phenomenon. In other thoroughly modernized societies, religious groups and their semantics are strongly represented in the public space. The concept of secularization also raises substantial issues in theoretical and conceptual terms. On the one hand it states that religion becomes an increasingly differentiated sphere along other spheres of social experience in economy, politics, science, etc. This sphere is not about the secondary effects of religion, such as moral education, social integration, etc., but rather religion, through secularization, can truly be practiced as religion – in the form of faith, cult, and piety, and can thus literally come to its true self. On the other hand, secularization is understood as the process whereby what was formerly clad in sacred garb and communicated in sacred forms is henceforward transposed into secular patterns. Typical examples are the social valorisation of the individual as a secularized version of the individual’s immediate experience of God or the concept of human rights as a worldly yet sacralising redeployment of man’s conception of the image of God. Fundamental concepts of rights and politics became understood as secularised theological concepts, for instance sovereignty, power, or rule. The fact that the discourse on a secular society must always resort to religion as a foil, and therefore that the theme of religion, although negative, remains present also belong to these paradoxes of the concept of secularisation. This research project addresses the efficiency, but also the limits of this key concept of modernity after the Enlightenment. 

Jörg Dierken, L. Charbonnier and M. D. Krüger (eds.), Eindeutigkeit und Ambivalenzen. Theologie und Digitalisierungsdiskurs, Leipzig 2021, therein: Im Nachgang. Überlegungen zur Weiterarbeit, pp. 32–337.

Jörg Dierken, Gott und Geld – oder: Ähnlichkeit im Widerstreit, in: Gott gebe Wachstum. Historische und systematische Studien zur protestantischen Wirtschaftsethik nach Max Weber, eds. Georg Neugebauer, Constantin Plaul and Florian Priesemuth, Berlin 2021, pp. 221–238.