Secularization: Definition, Theories, and How It Shapes Society

A definition, before any theory

The starting point is a definition from EBSCO Research Starters: with secularization, religious institutions, practices, and beliefs lose weight in social life, while reason and science gain ground. That is a different phenomenon from secularism, the political principle of separating the state from religion.

The three forms

The phenomenon reads on three distinct levels. EBSCO Research Starters describes two of them: the institutional level, where religious groups and activities keep existing but lose their specifically religious character, and the cultural level, where a society founded on religious grounds gradually moves away from those principles. The third level is individual and covers the choices single people make, changing their religious affiliation over the course of a life: that is what Pew Research Center measures in surveys.

Practical example: EBSCO Research Starters points to the ban on prayer in U.S. public schools and the lawsuits brought to remove the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, which still carries it, as signs of secularization in American culture. These are public institutions where a religious reference present at their founding is under argument, a shift that says nothing, by itself, about the personal faith of the people living in that country.

How a person comes to keep or change a religious affiliation ties into the broader process of learning a group’s norms, covered in the Recap on socialization. Switching religion, or staying outside any affiliation, is also a matter of where a person stands within their own community, a theme picked up in the Recap on social status and role.

Weber’s disenchantment of the world

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Max Weber, modern rationalization pushed religion, theology, and metaphysics outside the boundaries of legitimate knowledge, into the territory of superstition or irrationality. Weber calls this process the disenchantment of the world, Entzauberung, and treats it as a phenomenon that reaches its most radical form only in modern Western civilization. In the reading the entry offers, disenchantment first helped monotheistic religions take hold in the West; in a later stage, it turned the same rationalizing logic against those religions too, stripping them of their role as a shared worldview in modern secular society. Some readings of Weber, noted in the same entry, add a point of interpretive debate: disenchantment would produce a paradoxical new enchantment, a fragmentation of values that acts almost like magical forces. The same Western religious tradition Weber analyzes traces back to a precise rupture, told in the Recap on Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Durkheim: the sacred and the profane

EBSCO Research Starters links Durkheim’s 1912 theory to secularization through a pair of concepts: the sacred, what carries symbolic value beyond the ordinary, and the profane, everyday life stripped of that charge. That pairing is the lens the entry applies to the dwindling weight of the sacred in contemporary societies.

The debate after Weber and Durkheim

In 1999 Peter Berger published The Desecularization of the World and introduced the term desecularization to describe a revival or resurgence of religion after a phase of secularization, according to the Wikipedia entry on the concept. In the book, he argues that the classical theory of secularization had been falsified by the facts: in his view, religion was not in any general decline. In a 2015 article he partly walked that position back, saying the theory hadn’t been entirely wrong; Berger himself later called his original use of the term “a bit sloppy,” referring to the plain persistence of religion in the modern world.

On the institutional side, European history offers a textbook case in how the French Revolution redrew the relationship between the state and the church.

How much it varies by country, in 2024

According to the Pew Research Center survey, fielded between January 5 and May 22, 2024 (U.S. data collected from July 17, 2023, to March 4, 2024), the share of adults who no longer identify with their childhood religion varies enormously from one country to another.

These percentages always refer to all the adults surveyed in each country. In Sweden, in 2024, 29% said they had been raised Christian and now call themselves atheist, agnostic, or unaffiliated with any particular religion. In Japan, 23% of the adults surveyed said they had been raised Buddhist and identified with no religion; in South Korea the share was 13%.

In Spain, religious change relative to one’s childhood faith is more common among young adults (ages 18-34, 48% in 2024) than among those over 50 (36%). In Colombia the gap is even wider: 34% among young adults, 14% among older adults, again in 2024 data.