The Myth of Secularization

(Click on link for episode) The Myth of the Secular, Part 1

Western social theory once insisted that modernization meant secularization and secularization meant the withering away of religion. But religion hasn’t withered away, and this has forced a rethinking of the whole idea of the secular. David Cayley talks to Craig Calhoun (editor of Rethinking Secularism), Director of the London School of Economics, and Rajeev Barghava (author of Secularism and Its Critics) of India’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

In modern Western societies a powerful ideology divided the world into two opposed domains, the religious and the secular.   Religion was private; the secular was public and political.   As societies modernized, they would become more secular, and religion would gradually lose its remaining public significance.  Until quite recently this was the story told in Western social thought.   But it no longer seems to fit. Religion, far from fading, has grown ever stronger.  And modernization has developed along different lines in different societies.