Secularization

Secularization denotes the changing role of religion in the modern period, such as the establishment of legal separation between state and religious authority; the decline in religious belief and practice; and the transformation of religious motifs and symbols into cultural or political ones. In history writing, the concept of secularization raises the fundamental question of the relation of modern society’s ideological, political, and cultural foundations to its inherited religious past. Whether this relation should be understood primarily in terms of continuity or in terms of disruption has been a central topic in some of the landmark debates within twentieth-century philosophy of history.

Although the concept is today applied globally, namely, to any society and any religion, it has its origin in modern European philosophy’s and sociology’s analyses of the relation between Western Europe and (notably Protestant) Christianity. From the late twentieth century onward, increasing attention has been brought to the implications of the fact that the concept was molded in the Protestant West. Hence a growing number of theorists have criticized the concept for being inapt or even distorting when applied to contexts other than modern Europe.