“Do modernization and secularization necessarily go together? Give your views.” (2024)
Classical sociology assumed that they did. Auguste Comte‘s law of three stages, Max Weber‘s “disenchantment of the world” and Bryan R. Wilson‘s definition of secularisation as the process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance (Religion in Secular Society, 1966) all linked religious decline to science, industry and bureaucracy. My view is that modernisation reliably differentiates religion from other institutions but does not necessarily diminish it.
Why they were expected to go together
- Structural differentiation: Talcott Parsons and Steve Bruce show education, law, welfare and medicine passing out of religious control as societies industrialise.
- Rationalisation: calculable, technical action leaves less room for magic and mystery (Weber).
- Pluralism: Peter L. Berger (The Sacred Canopy, 1967) argued that competing faiths break the single “plausibility structure” that made belief taken for granted.
- Existential security: Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (Sacred and Secular, 2004) found agrarian societies the most religious and post-industrial ones the least, because welfare and security reduce the need for religious reassurance.
Evidence that they coincide
- In England and Wales, those reporting “no religion” rose from 25.2% (2011) to 37.2% (Census 2021), and Christians fell below half (46.2%).
- Inglehart’s Religion’s Sudden Decline (2021) reports that 43 of 49 countries became less religious between 2007 and 2020.
Why the link is not necessary
- The American exception: the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study 2023–24 finds 62% of US adults Christian and the rise of the unaffiliated (29%) levelling off since 2019, in the most advanced economy.
- Berger’s recantation: The Desecularization of the World (1999) held that the world is as “furiously religious” as ever, with Western Europe and an academic elite the exceptions. Grace Davie likewise treats Europe as the exceptional case.
- Deprivatisation: José Casanova (Public Religions in the Modern World, 1994) separates differentiation, decline and privatisation; only differentiation is a general modern trend. Religion re-entered public life through Poland’s Solidarity, the Iranian revolution and the American Christian right.
- Multiple modernities: Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (2000) argues that societies modernise through their own civilisational premises, so a high-technology society can remain religiously vibrant, as South Korea’s megachurches show.
- Changed conditions of belief: Charles Taylor (A Secular Age, 2007) holds that modernity makes faith one option among many; it changes how people believe, not necessarily how many believe.
The Indian case
- Milton Singer (When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 1972) found Madras industrialists “compartmentalising” ritual at home and rational enterprise at work.
- After three decades of rapid growth, the Pew Research Center’s survey of about 30,000 Indians (2021) found 97% believing in God and about 80% of Hindus and Muslims calling religion very important in their lives.
- Modern technology intensifies religion: online darshan and the Maha Kumbh 2025 at Prayagraj, for which the authorities claimed over 66 crore visits.
- Yet secularisation as differentiation is real: M. N. Srinivas noted law, economy and education growing autonomous of religion, and pollution rules weakening in urban life.
Conclusion
Modernisation and secularisation go together only in a limited sense: modernity separates religion from state, economy and science, and turns belief into choice. Whether belief and practice then decline depends on existential security, church–state history and religion’s tie to identity. Modernity reshapes religion rather than ending it: privatised in Europe, marketised in America, and politicised and mediatised in India.