The Secularisation Thesis: How the Lack of Actual Science in Social Science Caused a Ultimately Fruitless Debate  

Secularisation is the theory that across time, in the West, religion will become less important and will be replaced by reason and science. But there’s something about it which seems to induce an aspect of religion — fervent belief — in the sociologists who explore it. In 1999, American sociologist Rodney Stark (1934–2022) published a study in Sociology of Religion entitled “Secularisation: RIP.” In 2002, British sociologist, and proponent of the theory, Steve Bruce published his stridently titled book God Is Dead: Secularisation in the West.

Both authors used death metaphors as a means of asserting, in absolute terms, that the secularisation thesis is complete nonsense or that religion in the West is absolutely doomed. Steve Bruce is an atheist while Rodney Stark was agnostic in 1987 and, by 2007, claimed to be an “independent Christian.” It is as if, beneath these supposedly neutral sociological studies, were merely means of justifying the authors’ own desires. This is precisely what a new study has found.

Published in the journal Sociological Science, the new study is entitled “The Faith Factor: How Scholars’ Religiosity Biases Research Findings on Secularization.” There have been hundreds of studies of secularization in different parts of the world, with sociologists unable to agree that secularization is even happening, let alone on how it is happening and what its end point will be. The study tested whether researchers’ religiosity is related to their personal belief in the secularization thesis and the likelihood of supporting secularization in their published articles.

The authors constructed an international database of scholars working on secularization and conducted a survey measuring their religiosity and beliefs about religious decline. They then coded their publications according to whether they supported the secularization thesis or not and linked the two data sets. They found statistically significant evidence of bias. Researchers who were “religious” found less evidence for secularization while researchers who were not religious found more evidence for it. The result could not be explained by differences in research methods, study quality, or the religious and geographic contexts under investigation.

Such a finding is unsurprising, because most sociology does not have proper scientific standards. As a rule, sociologists are not only heavily left-wing but they are also environmental determinists. The Secularisation Thesis is, effectively, a kind of prophecy which assumes that people are religious for environmental reasons, people are rational, and the world is one of linear progress towards atheism.

Indeed, in his book God Is Dead, Steve Bruce dismisses periods in which the world seems to become more religious, such as in the wake of wars, as “humps and bumps” in the, apparently, inevitable march of secularization. Bruce was briefly the co-supervisor of my doctoral thesis at Aberdeen University and I confess that in my early-twenties, before I had discovered science, I saw little reason to believe anything other than that Europe and the US would become less Christian, though I took the view that secular religions — such as Political Correctness, as we called it at the time — which were non-rational though atheistic were surely on the rise.  

The way to solve the debate over secularisation is to introduce what the biologist Edward O. Wilson called “consilience.” It was reading Wilson that opened my eyes to science. Science is a hierarchy of disciplines each of which must make sense in the one that underpins it. Sociological theories must make sense in terms of psychology. Psychological theories must make sense in terms of biology, biological theories must make sense in terms of chemistry, and so on.

It is here that the Secularisation Thesis runs into problems. It assumes that religious belief is a matter of environment, but it isn’t. Twin studies find that the heritability of religiosity is as high as 0.66 depending on which measure you employ; so it is strongly genetic. Indeed, it has all of the components of a psychological adaptation: elevated at times of stress, associated with mental and physical health, associated with being pro-social, associated with elevated fertility, a human universal and so on.

As I’ve discussed in various books, most recently in Woke Eugenics: How Social Justice is a Mask for Social Darwinism, there was a long period when we became less religious for both genetic and environmental reasons. This occurred in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, in which, due to medical advances, mortality became less salient, particularly infant and childhood mortality. Religiosity, which is associated with genetic fitness and selection for genetic health, became severely weakened. Religiosity emerges when we are confronted with death and there was a lot less death about. But genetically sickly people seem to have sickly inclinations, including not wanting children, and the future belongs to those who show up.

In Western countries, religious people outbreed non-religious people. This is even more pronounced when you just look at the top quartile of intelligence among Whites — at those who are likely to run the society — or establish breakaway White enclaves — in the future. The big predictor of fertility is religiosity. As far as I can see, this — consilience — substantially solves the debate over secularization.

The entire discussion, whether the sociologist is a Christian or an atheist, is based on assumptions: the Christian assumption of linear progress and the leftist assumption of environmental determinism. If we accept the reality of genetic influence on salient psychological traits and on civilizational cycles, then we can cut the Gordian Knot of the Secularization Debate and the way in which it seems to be little more than an out-working of the religious biases of the sociologists involved.

The actual science substantially disproves the Secularisation Thesis and even the proposed causes of secularization — that science answers our questions coherently, so we cease to answer them using religion. Secularization should indeed “Rest in Peace,” but not for the reasons Rodney Stark proposed.

Again, the future belongs to those who show up. And that means that the future will be disproportionately religious.