The agency of women in secularization

Abstract

Secularization confounds many faith scholars. Where once in the 1960s and 1970s it was accepted as a facet of modernization, the 1990s and 2000s witnessed the rise of a desperate religious assault on the concept as in itself secularist and atheist-inspired—an intellectual conspiracy of religions’ enemies. New theories abounded from the churched community to contain the intellectual threat: people believed but had stopped belonging; the mainstream churches were in decline but not popular faith; the parish structure of old Europe was disintegrating and making way for diversity— house churches, megachurches, pick ‘n’ mix faith; religiosity was giving way to spirituality; new age religion was dismantling denominationalism; and the majority secular people were now expecting the minority faithful to conduct the moral work of the whole community (Berger et al., 2008; Davie, 1994, 2000; Heelas, 1996; Roof, 1993; Wuthnow, 2007). Though such ideas still keep coming, if truth be told, what is happening to faith now takes second place to what is happening with nonfaith: the rise of morality without religion, growing proportions of people identifying as “nones,” atheists, and agnostics, and declining churchgoing and membership (Brown et al., 2022). And most bittersweet for the churches in the west is the waning of the faith’s most faithful: Christian women. Where once moral purity and sanctity of womanhood adorned the Christian family, feminist impulses have done much to de-sanctify morality. Scholarship has been slow to perceive the concatenation of moral, cultural, and demographic dangers that are unraveling the religious moral system hung in western nations upon female purity. New scholarship has already been sculpting this replacement narrative, and now Philip Jenkins’ book, Fertility and Faith, offers the latest and so far most comprehensive demographic understanding of secularization. The book inevitably must refocus attention upon the gender question in the declining social significance of Christianity and Judaism from the middle of the twentieth century onwards. We should all be grateful for his redeployment of a social-science lens upon the decline of faith in the western world—broadly Europe, North America, Australasia, and Japan, but his treatment also explores its consequences for other continents. But before considering the merits of Jenkins’ monograph, it is important to restate firmly that the study of religious decline is not, should not, and cannot be a demographic science alone. Without the fusion of quantitative and qualitative (some would argue postmodernist) methodologies, there can be no full understanding of the direction of the faith change that started in the third quarter of the twentieth century and which is now advancing—as Jenkins notes—with vigorous speed. It has taken scholarship some considerable time to place demography as a major conceptual tool with which to study secularization. The impetus began in the sociology of religion between the 1940s and 1960s, raising the prospect of understanding the changing constituencies of churchgoers by age, gender, social class, and ethnicity. It was social class upon which European scholars focused— arguably obsessed. Until the mid-twentieth century, the place of Christianity in the social and