Defining secularization

We have read and heard a great deal about what place religion holds in human life in the modern and postmodern periods and how this place changes. A significant part of what we have read and heard contains, rather than an assessment of where the world is heading, a normative discourse about how things should be. This discourse, about how large or small the place of religion in daily life or in politics should be, takes place largely around debates on laicism.

We are almost familiar with its normative part turning into a political pressure and program concerned with regulating the relations between religion and the state. Yet the social science literature on both laicism and secularization is concerned with diagnosing and identifying secularization in the world as a transformation of mentality, a change in everyday habits and conceptions. At this level it is expected to be non-normative. Indeed, all the processes that gave rise to modernization also bring about a serious secularization, even where it is not the object of any political pressure, as a result of the processes of everyday industrialization and urbanization.

Traditional society is regarded as enchanted because everything that happens in the world is associated with a cause beyond this world. Correspondingly, many aspects of daily life, or politics, are arranged according to the requirements of this enchanted world. This is an indicator of the religiosity of traditional society. Yet the most important indicator of the transition to modern society is that the cause of everything that happens in the world is sought within the limits of this same world, and that the relativity brought about by the differences among various religious worlds creates a broad atmosphere of consciousness, so that secularization comes to be adopted by everyone. The modern city is the city in which a certain level of empathy toward people with whom one lives together, but who one realizes look at the world from another faith, has become an important part of culture.

This picture of secularization drawn by social scientists is an almost complementary cross-section of modern society. In the details of this picture there is also the gradual independence of people from any religious influence while organizing and determining their daily lives. The separation of state and religion and the rules regulating it are a process of worldliness that governs not only politics but individual life itself. In fact, among the many definitions of secularization, "worldliness" (dünyevileşme) is one of the most suitable, and in this form it is taken as the exact opposite of the religiosity of the world. So much so that the famous German philosopher F. Nietzsche would not hesitate to describe the ongoing process as the death of God.

While all findings and analyses about modernization say that worldliness, that is, hostility to religion, dominates the world more every day, the last quarter of the twentieth century on the contrary witnessed a surprising return of religion. Not only in the Islamic world but also in the Christian, Jewish and Buddhist worlds, let alone the process of shedding religiosity as portrayed by modernization theories, signs of clinging more to religion, perhaps even in a modern format, began to appear in all of them. Religion again began to come to the fore as one of the most important factors in many wars, conflicts, tensions and developments in the world. This was described by some sociologists as a kind of "revenge of God", who had been hastily killed off in the modern period. It is an indisputable fact that today the most important factor limiting the EU's strategy of enlargement, particularly toward Turkey as an Islamic country, is religion. Likewise, Israel, the most important stop on the line of tension in the Middle East that affects the whole world, has religion as its reason for existence and as the source and reference of all the tensions it produces. Those who oppose it also oppose it with the same motivation and the same reference. That is, religiosity still retains its character as the most determining motivation, especially in international politics. In the same way, in the internal politics of countries too, there is an increase in religiosity rather than a decrease.

Despite this, there is a common finding, among both religious and laic circles, that we are in a development toward worldliness. Of course, in the religious circle this finding is expressed as a kind of complaint and anxious warning, but these concerns can also carry a claim of being descriptive. Interestingly, however, these anxious discourses are increasingly being articulated onto descriptive discourses produced from a laic starting point.

So, in the face of so many religious developments that have invalidated even the classical modernist theorists, can we nevertheless say that the course of the relations between religion and the world is today evolving toward ever greater secularization?

Today the literature that dominates the sociology of secularization seems, interestingly, to have acquired a skill in twisting and turning even the most evident indicators of religiosity into indicators of secularization. For example, the existence of differences of opinion among Muslims, and the acceptance of these differences as normal, can be seen as a stage of the secularization process. In addition to the increasing Islamic visibility, the fact that this Islamicity accepts living together with other nations as well, instead of being evaluated as part of the extremely self-confident religious attitude that Muslims have displayed since the very beginning, can be seen from the same point of view as a requirement, consequence or indicator of secularization as a telos destined to be reached. Is secularization in this sense a kind of culture or ultimate way of life corresponding to a stage of "the end of history" that everyone will eventually reach? In fact, the very need to distinguish between secularization and laicism stems from the fact that the boundary that can be drawn between the matter's quality of being a sociological process and its quality of being a political regime can be quite thick in Turkey. Truly, it is of great benefit these days to dwell a little more on this debate from many angles. That is why we will continue.