Asses the Nature and Extent of Secularisation in Society Today

Asses the nature and extent of secularisation in society today (33 Marks)

Over the years there have been a growing number of theories and arguments that say that society

has become more secular in recent years. A secular society is where religious beliefs and values

have lost their impact on society.

There are many sociologists that agree with this statement. For example, Wilson argued that

western society is undergoing a long term process of secularisation.Wilson defined secularisation

as “the process whereby religious beliefs, practices and institutions loose significance”. His

argument is backed up with statistics, church attendance has dropped from 40% in 1850 to

10-15% in 1960. This is a major decrease in members, however statistics on church attendance

must be questioned, if the statistics were acquired by a questionnaire or telephone interview, the

person being questioned could easily give a false answer, often people in questionnaires try to give

the ‘right’ answer i.e the answer that they think you want them to say rather than their truthful

answer. Another reason validity is put into questions that if the person interviewed was part of an

extreme sect or cult, they may not want to disclose this information due to it not being socially

acceptable to be a part of one of these particular groups.

There is a theory that although it looks like religion is declining, it is merely changing form. This is

called differentiation thesis. Bauman (1992) agrees with this thesis and says there is a ‘crisis of

meaning’ with mainstream religions such as christianity, however new religious expressions of

religiosity can restore meaning. These new expressions are very different from traditional religions,

Bauman expects to see a decline in traditional religions and and increase in New Age Movements

(NAM’s)

A sociologist that agrees with Bauman is Grace Davie, she uses the phase, ‘believing without

belonging.’ This links to people who have ties to the...