Bibliographic record
Abstract
Review EssayStark Contrasts: Or, Secularization Redux Brian C. Wilson Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society. By Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryan T. Cragun. New York University Press, 2023. 227 pages. $89.00 hardcover; $30.00 softcover; ebook available. Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America. By Stephen Bullivant. Oxford University Press, 2022. 272 pages. $32.99 hardcover; ebook available. Religion, Spirituality, and Secularity among Millennials: The Generation Shaping American and Canadian Trends. By Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme. Routledge, 2023. 196 pages. $170.00 hardcover; $48.95 softcover; ebook available. Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next? By Ronald F. Inglehart. Oxford University Press, 2021. 208 pages. $130.00 hardcover; $33.99 softcover; ebook available. The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious. By Joseph Blankholm. New York University Press, 2022. $89.00 hardcover; $32.00 softcover; ebook available. This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism. By David Sehat. Yale University Press, 2022. 344 pages. $30.00 hardcover; ebook available. Why Baby Boomers Turned from Religion: Shaping Belief and Belonging, 1945–2021. By Abby Day. Oxford University Press, 2022. 256 pages. $95.00 hardcover; ebook available. [End Page 104] For the last 30 years, I have been teaching American religious history in a Comparative Religion department at a state university in Michigan. For most of that period, demand for our classes has remained relatively steady, and while the number of majors was always small, we could always count on robust enrollments in General Education courses, a fact that I attributed to our location in a highly religious corner of the state. Not anymore—majors are now in the single digits and even General Education classes are hard to fill. Of course, all of the Humanities have suffered declines, especially at institutions like mine that now stress technical over liberal education. And yet, it seems that the attitudes of our students towards religion have changed markedly as well. In classroom conversations, I have found that even for those who identify with a religious tradition, religion actually plays little role in their lived experience, and for those not raised in a faith tradition (a growing number), hostility towards religion has been replaced by frank indifference. I guess I always knew that secularization was proceeding apace in the United States, but I was caught off guard by its precipitous acceleration in the last decade. Apparently, I wasn't the only one. A recent spate of academic books has been published that grapple with this issue of rapid secularization from a variety of perspectives, thus signaling what appears to be a renaissance of secularization studies. In this essay, I will briefly review seven of them. The secularization thesis, which dates back at least to the late nineteenth century, forecast that western societies would progressively marginalize religion in favor of other institutions, thus resulting in a concomitant decline in individual religiosity. Theorists such as Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and later, Peter Berger insisted that this process was inevitable given the logic of modernity. For the last couple of decades, however, the secularization thesis went into something of an eclipse, as Rodney Stark and his school proclaimed that it was nothing more than academic myth. These Rational Choice theorists argued that human beings have an innate need for religion in general and that, all things being equal, the ups and downs of specific religious traditions were nothing more than the fluctuations of a permanent market economy of religions. That such a highly developed western nation as the United States maintained high levels of religiosity was often adduced as strong evidence for Stark's theory, as was the continued strength of religion in the non-western world. And yet, as Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryan T. Cragun demonstrate in Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society, these facts no longer hold true. Not only has the twenty-first century witnessed a broad decline in religious belief and practice globally, but even in the United States the decline has been precipitous, especially among younger age cohorts. Moreover, against the Stark school's claim that religion is innate and irrepressible, the authors cite studies showing that children raised without...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".