The overwhelming cause of secularization in the West has been government control of education.
The overwhelming cause of secularization in the West has been government control of education.
I ntuitions are hard to dislodge. Doubly so when they are shared widely across the length and breadth of an entire culture. Whenever a given theory, account, or bundle of convictions about some matter of public importance passes from the realm of contest and conjecture into the realm of inherited folk wisdom, it takes an almighty effort to replace it with something else, even if that something else is something more accurate.
Probably the most culturally widespread intuition influencing our historical self-understanding as a society today has to do with how we think of secularization. Why has the West become less and less religious over recent decades and centuries? The conventional answers given to this question are false, and they are all contained within a controlling 19th-century narrative of modernization.
Simply put, it is widely assumed today that the Western world became less religious because it modernized. For the avoidance of doubt, it’s perhaps best to list here some of the trends that might be grouped under the umbrella term “modernization.” These would include the spread of scientific knowledge and mass education, urbanization, industrialization, capitalism, pluralism, technological advance, increasing prosperity, and better health. The Spanish sociologist José Casanova wrote in 1994 that some version of the theory that these modernizing trends caused the demise of religion was “shared by all the founding fathers” of 19th-century sociology.
For all their disagreements with one another, all of these men, who ranged in thought from Karl Marx to John Stuart Mill, thought that the modernizing trends listed above contributed in one combination or another to religious decline. Their almost universal agreement on this point is probably what moved the causes of secularization from the realm of popular controversy to the realm of received folk wisdom in the first place. We all know that modernization equals secularization, the story goes; it’s just left to us to figure out exactly how we weigh the causal heft of the different factors.
Atheists of a particularly anticlerical stripe may place the emphasis of causation on advances in scientific knowledge and educational attainment, arguing that people were simply educated over time out of their gullible belief in fairy tales. Agnostics with a more amiable or indifferent attitude toward religion might make the case instead that increased prosperity and health merely reduced the incentive to place one’s hope for a good life beyond the grave. It’s become especially in-vogue for religious socialists, post-liberals, paleoconservatives, and agrarians to blame secularization on the rise of industrial capitalism itself. They argue that capitalism eviscerates noneconomic community, family, and faith commitments, uproots people from hearth and home, and leads them on a merry chase across the globe after an endlessly proliferating confectionary of goods and services, atomizing and atrophying the human person all the while. Here is a sample of this kind of argument from the theologian David Bentley Hart, who argued a few years ago in First Things that “the history of capitalism and the history of secularism are not two accidentally contemporaneous tales, after all; they are the same story told from different vantages.” He goes on to note that “this is what Marx genuinely admired about capitalism: its power to dissolve all the immemorial associations of family, tradition, faith, and affinity, the irresistible dynamism of its dissolution of ancient values, its (to borrow a loathsome phrase) ‘gales of creative destruction.’”
The emphasis is placed in different places by different parties. Hart’s Christian-socialist account of secularization would likely be gainsaid by Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins, either of whom would probably point to a graph showing increasing literacy and numeracy rates and consider their work done. No doubt Freud would say that sex had something to do with it. But no matter the permutation, the basic story stays the same: Religion is thought to be an essentially uneducated, rural, preindustrial, precapitalist phenomenon consisting of poor, ill illiterates who lived their lives under the specter of an imminent and likely painful death. As one moves away from any or all of these things, the culturally regnant thesis of secularization holds that one also moves away from the plausibility of religious belief.
Despite how deeply ingrained in our collective unconscious this association between secularization and progress is, it’s a complete myth and has been known to be such by academics in the relevant fields for decades.
The seminal study of secularization in the 20th century, for example, was published by researchers Raphaël Franck and Laurence R. Iannaccone in a June 2014 issue of the journal Public Choice. Of the 19th-century sociologists who shaped our popular perception of religious decline, Franck and Iannaccone write that “their thinking on secularization might well be called sociology’s most successful failure, for it remains received wisdom on religious change and commitment among intellectuals, the general public, and even most church-goers despite two centuries of empirical disconfirmation.” They found no evidence that any of the modernizing trends discussed above contribute to declining church attendance to any significant extent. In their own words:
The classic causes show no sign of driving decline. . . . The impact of GDP per capita is negative but always small and never statistically significant. Rates of Secondary Education and Post-secondary Education likewise show no sign of reducing attendance — their coefficients are small, statistically insignificant, and more often positive than negative. Declines in the Birth Rate appear equally unimportant. The shift to cities, as indexed by the growth of Urban Population Shares, fails to lower attendance. Indeed, among the classic culprits of secularization theory, only industrialization turns in a consistently strong performance — and that quite clearly is the “wrong” effect, since our Industrial variable raises rather than lowers attendance!
Increased wealth, better education, fewer children, mass migration to cities from the countryside: None of these modernizing trends contributes to a decline in religious association or practice. The rise of industrial capitalism, meanwhile, at the door of which Hart and others are keen to lay the blame for religion’s decline, is actually found to have raised the rate of religious association. As Franck and Iannaccone note, social upheaval has often been a boon to religious observance rather than a deadweight, contrary to what the popular association of religion with stasis and order would lead one to expect:
Richardson and McBride (2009) have persuasively modeled an analogous Medieval phenomenon, in which the social instabilities produced by the Black Death induced the joint emergence of European guilds and the Catholic doctrine of purgatory — tightly linking economic and religious activity, promoting association, identity, and mutual aid among members of the same profession, and sustaining exceptionally high rates of religious attendance, charity, and belief.
The huge release of social and economic energy that occurred during the industrial revolution didn’t leave religious belief in its wake for greedier and more materialist pastures — it carried religious belief along with it, just as the great unsettling of the Black Death had done centuries earlier.
A similarly materialist thesis, that the decline of religion can be put down to the state’s replacing churches as a supplier of material goods, is also exploded by Franck and Iannaccone’s research. They “find no simple inverse relationship between church-supplied and state-supplied services.” Attempts to characterize secularization as a purely, or even mainly, economic phenomenon are, in other words, no longer viable. Socialist attempts to attribute religious decline to markets and libertarian attempts to attribute it to a general increase in government spending are both unsupportable.
In fact, the overwhelming cause of secularization in the West has been government control of education.
An important distinction must be made here. It is not the case that educational attainment lowers religiosity. As Lyman Stone noted in his own report on America’s declining religiosity:
Evidence that education reduces religiosity is fairly weak: American religiosity rose considerably from 1800 until the 1970s, despite rapidly rising educational attainment. But the evidence that specifically secular education might reduce religiosity is more compelling. Indeed, statistically, most researchers who have explored long-run change in religiosity find that education-related variables, which I have argued are a proxy for secular education, can explain nearly the totality of change in religiosity.
The notion that secular education “can explain nearly the totality of change in religiosity” is a bold thesis, but it’s supported by Franck and Iannaccone’s research. In their own words, their work “does not show that schooling lowers religiosity.” Rather, it is the particularly secular nature of government schooling in the Western world that accounts for religious decline. Summing up the implications of their research, Franck and Iannaccone write:
Our results fit well with studies that link religious commitment to religious capital accumulated through experience, instruction, and interactions. Where you stand depends largely on where you have been sitting, and with whom. And most youthful sitting occurs in schools. The principal policy lessons should not surprise public choice researchers: schools are instruments of indoctrination, both religious and secular; competing interests battle endlessly over every aspect of education; and no institution wields more power in modern nations than the centralized state.
As they put it more pithily at the conclusion of their study, “greater government funding of schools brings more government control over the content of schooling, and the content of schooling shapes religious commitments.”
The statistical calculations that Franck and Iannaccone make using the data they’ve gathered are staggering. They present a rough counterfactual history of how religious trends would have differed in America if no government money had been spent on education from 1925 to 1990:
Our results predict that average attendance for Children in 1990 would have been about 11.8 percentage points higher and for Parents about 8 percentage points higher. By way of comparison, the actual average drop in attendance from 1925 through 1990 was 11.81 percentage points for Children and 11.79 for Parents.
Franck and Iannaccone concede that “these estimates strike us as too close to be true,” but they reach the same conclusion as did Stone. The estimates “imply that greater public spending accounts for all of the drop in 20th century religiosity across our ten Western democracies.”
If we were more attuned to this research, surely there would be a tectonic shift in how we think about politics and cultural change. It’s become transparently clear that the instruction given to children early in life is hugely determinative of the beliefs they hold as adults. This is not a hasty deduction drawn from a single study. A wealth of evidence has been accumulated by researchers across disciplines testifying to the fact. For anyone whose care for the future of their country extends beyond their own tax rates, this means that every domestic political issue ought to take a backseat to education. The secular turn taken by public education during the last century and the prohibition or desertion of religious instruction in government classrooms has been almost solely responsible for secularization. We have no reason to believe that the government schools will be any less effective at indoctrinating children with a new metaphysic as they’ve been at rooting out the old one.
What we omit to teach children is as important as what we do teach them. By excluding religious instruction from government-funded schools, and by ramping up public spending on these schools year after year and decade after decade, the governments of the West have imbued children with the notion that religion is a kind of weekend hobby, like baseball or going to the movie theater. It’s hardly surprising then, that fewer and fewer of them are taking traditional faiths seriously while more and more of are conversant with the alternative liturgical rites they’re taught in the classroom.
What’s more, as Stone writes, “even as public schools are becoming more rigidly secular, they are claiming a growing share of children’s lives.” He goes on to note:
Accounting for increasing years of schooling, changing attendance among enrolled students, increasing total enrollment as a share of the population age 3 to 17, and changing length of school terms, the average number of days spent in public schools for kids age 3 to 17 has risen from about 20 days a year in 1840 to nearly 150 days a year today.
This leaves religious believers with two options. On the one hand, they could start to build institutions with a view to overturning the existing prohibition on taxpayer funding of explicitly religious schools. The strict laicité-like reading of the establishment clause that underwrites this prohibition is completely ahistorical as far as an originalist reading of the Constitution is concerned, and there’s no textual reason why it should prevail in the long term if resistance is persistent and organized enough. Of course, in a diverse and expansive country that is home to many religions, tailored religious instruction will never make a comeback in the public schools — for practical reasons, to say nothing of the legal challenges that would arise. But there are many countries in the world wherein both secular government schools and religious schools receive state funding, and there’s no reason why this arrangement couldn’t obtain in the U.S.
The other option would be for parents to pull their kids out of public school and either homeschool them or pay for them to attend private religious schools instead. This is the easy way out for affluent parents, to be sure, but it would require creative and generous charity work on their part in order to make such an option available for eager working-class families.
These are the only two realistic routes to a religious renaissance in the United States. Secular schooling is the cause of religious decline in the West, and only actions that address this cause will change its effects.
Civilization is a process as well as a product, and the school is the place wherein the process of civilization is enacted, yielding its final product in the form of grown men and women inducted into the social order of which they’re a part. If control over schooling is ceded to those who are hostile or even just indifferent to religious faith, how could we expect anything other than a drift toward a less religious society? Whether we are urban or rural, childless or fecund, conservative or liberal in our outlook, well-credentialed or not, the crucial question, empirically as well as morally, is this: What will we teach our children to associate with the true, the good, and the beautiful during their earliest and most impressionable years? The fate of our social order depends much more on how we answer this question than we seem to realize.