Desecularisation names the claim that the social significance of religion has not declined with modernity but has been reasserted, and specifically that religion has moved back from the private conscience into public life — into politics, welfare, media, law and collective identity. The term is polemical by design. It was coined against a mid-century consensus that treated secularisation as the necessary companion of industrialism, urbanism, science and bureaucratic rationality.
Two things must be kept apart at the outset. Desecularisation is a claim about social fact — about what religion is actually doing in modern societies. It is not a claim about secularism, which is a normative and constitutional doctrine concerning how a state should relate to religious communities. A state may hold firmly to secularism while its society becomes more visibly religious; this is precisely the Indian configuration, and confusing the two produces most of the muddle in answers on this topic.
Berger's revision
No episode illustrates the shift better than Peter Berger's change of mind. In The Sacred Canopy (1967) Berger gave one of the most elegant statements of the secularisation thesis: modernity pluralises the plausibility structures that sustain belief, so that what was once taken for granted becomes one option among many, and religion is driven into the sphere of private preference where it survives as a matter of choice rather than of fate.
By the 1990s Berger judged the prediction empirically wrong. In The Desecularization of the World (1999) he argued that the modern world is, with notable exceptions, as furiously religious as ever, and that the real sociological puzzle is not resurgent faith but the secularity of a thin stratum of Western intellectuals and of Western Europe. He retained the insight about pluralism while detaching it from decline: pluralism makes belief a matter of choice, but chosen belief can be far more energetic, mobilised and publicly assertive than inherited belief ever was. What changes is the mode of religiosity, not its quantity.
Casanova and deprivatisation
José Casanova gave the argument its most careful analytical form. In Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) he disaggregated secularisation into three distinct propositions: the differentiation of secular spheres such as economy, state and science from religious institutions; the decline of religious belief and practice; and the privatisation of religion into the individual conscience. The first, he argued, is a genuine and probably irreversible feature of modernity. The second and third are neither necessary nor uniformly observed.
His key concept is deprivatisation: religious traditions refusing the marginal, private role assigned to them and re-entering the public sphere to contest the claims of states and markets. Casanova's cases — Catholicism in Poland, Brazil and Spain, and evangelical Protestantism in the United States — show religion acting not as anti-modern reaction but as a participant in civil society, mobilising for democracy, human rights and social justice as often as against them. This distinction matters for examination answers: deprivatisation is compatible with differentiation, so one can accept that modern states are functionally secular while denying that religion has become socially inconsequential.
The evidence advanced
Four bodies of evidence are usually offered. First, revival movements: the worldwide growth of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, Islamic reform and piety movements, and Hindu devotional and organisational revival, all of them urban, literate and media-competent rather than rural survivals. Second, religious nationalism — the fusion of faith with claims to territory, majority ownership and national character, which turns religion into the idiom of citizenship itself. Third, faith-based welfare, education and media: schools, hospitals, relief agencies, satellite channels and digital platforms through which religious bodies deliver services the state supplies unevenly, thereby accumulating public authority. Fourth, the religious framing of political claims, in which demands over conversion, cow protection, personal law, dress, places of worship or blasphemy become the substance of electoral competition.
The counter-arguments
Defenders of the secularisation thesis are unimpressed. Steve Bruce replies that visibility is not significance, and that the world's exceptions do not overturn a trend measurable in the West by church attendance, clerical recruitment, membership and the shrinking authority of religious bodies over education, law and morality. Religion may grow loud precisely because it is losing: assertiveness is the sound of institutions that can no longer take compliance for granted. Bryan Wilson made the deeper point that secularisation is a claim about the loss of religion's capacity to determine social action in the differentiated spheres of a rationalised society — a loss consistent with intense private devotion and with noisy public agitation. Both would add that where religion appears politically potent, it is often functioning as an ethnic or national marker rather than as a system of belief regulating conduct.
The Indian case
India makes the argument concrete because modernisation and public religiosity grew together. Literacy, urbanisation, mass media and a competitive electoral system did not thin ritual life; they expanded it — televised epics, mass pilgrimage on new highways, mediated satsangs, corporate temple trusts, caste and community organisations doing the work of welfare associations. T. N. Madan argued that secularism in South Asia was the project of a Westernised élite in a society where religion had never been a private compartment, so its writ was always fragile. This is desecularisation of a particular sort: not the reversal of an accomplished secularisation, but the public flourishing of religion in a polity whose constitution remains secular in the sense of guaranteeing equal treatment of faiths rather than the absence of religion from public life.
For the UPSC answer
Open by disaggregating secularisation into differentiation, decline and privatisation, so that desecularisation can be stated precisely as the denial of the second and third rather than a blanket rejection. Use Berger's revision as the narrative spine, Casanova's deprivatisation as the analytical concept, and Bruce and Wilson for the reply that public noise is compatible with declining social significance. Insist on the distinction between desecularisation as social process and secularism as state policy — the Indian case, where a secular constitution coexists with intensifying public religiosity, is the illustration that proves you have grasped it. A balanced conclusion holds that religion has been transformed and repositioned rather than either destroyed or restored.
References & further reading
- Berger, P. L. (1967). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Doubleday.
- Berger, P. L. (ed.) (1999). The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Eerdmans.
- Casanova, J. (1994). Public Religions in the Modern World. University of Chicago Press.
- Bruce, S. (2002). God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Blackwell.
- Wilson, B. R. (1966). Religion in Secular Society. Watts.
- Madan, T. N. (1987). Secularism in Its Place. Journal of Asian Studies, 46(4).