Bryan Wilson was the most rigorous defender of the secularisation thesis in English-language sociology, and the sharpness of his position comes from a definition that is narrower than the one his critics usually attack. Secularisation, for Wilson, is the process by which religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance. It is a claim about the organisation of society, not a prediction about the contents of individual minds.

That distinction carries the whole argument. A society may contain any number of believers and still be secular in Wilson's sense, provided that its economy, politics, law, medicine, education and welfare are conducted on grounds that owe nothing to religion. Conversely, crowded churches prove nothing about secularisation if the church no longer decides anything. Alongside this thesis Wilson produced the other work he is examined on — a systematic sociology of sects and, later, of new religious movements — and the two projects are connected, because he read the proliferation of small religious groups as itself a symptom of religion's retreat from the centre of social life.

Life and intellectual formation

Wilson was born in 1926 and, after study at the London School of Economics, spent almost his entire career at Oxford, where he was Reader in Sociology and a Fellow of All Souls College. He came to the sociology of religion through fieldwork rather than theory: Sects and Society (1961) is a close comparative study of three British groups — the Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance, Christian Science and the Christadelphians — examining how each recruited, disciplined and retained members, and what happened to it over generations.

This empirical starting point shaped everything that followed. Wilson distrusted grand theory and religious apologetics equally, and his writing has an austere, unsentimental quality that made him a formidable opponent in debate. He worked in the tradition running from Weber and Ernst Troeltsch through the structural study of religious organisation, and he was as interested in the internal mechanics of small groups as in the fate of Christendom.

Secularisation as declining social significance

Religion in Secular Society (1966) sets out the thesis. Wilson's central causal argument is that secularisation follows from societalisation — the shift of social life from the local community, where religion could plausibly integrate a whole way of living, to the large-scale impersonal society organised through bureaucracy, market and state. Religion was effective as a source of social order in the small community. It has no comparable purchase on a society coordinated by technical and legal rationality.

He traced the consequences through several strands, which are worth separating in an answer:

  • Differentiation. Education, welfare, healing, law and dispute settlement detach from religious institutions and become the business of specialised secular agencies, so religion loses functions it once monopolised.
  • Loss of authority over conduct. Religious bodies retain the right to speak but not the power to bind; their pronouncements on sexuality, marriage or economic life become opinions among others.
  • Rationalisation of consciousness. Practical problems are approached technically, so supernatural explanation is displaced not by argument but by irrelevance.
  • Privatisation. Religion survives as a matter of personal preference and leisure choice, meaningful to individuals and inconsequential for the operation of institutions.
  • Internal secularisation. Churches themselves adopt managerial, therapeutic and organisational idioms, becoming service providers among others.

Wilson was explicit that this is not a theory of religion vanishing. He expected religion to persist, and even to flourish in small, intense, marginal forms — precisely because such forms make no claim on the operation of society and are therefore tolerated.

The typology of sects

Wilson's second major contribution, developed in Religious Sects (1970) and extended in his study of religious movements of protest among colonised and tribal peoples, replaced classification by doctrine or origin with classification by response to the world. The question is what a group tells its members to do about a world it regards as unsatisfactory. Seven responses recur.

  • Conversionist. The world is corrupt because people are corrupt; the remedy is to change hearts one by one through evangelism and personal conversion. Typical of revivalist and Pentecostal groups.
  • Revolutionist. The world is beyond reform and will shortly be overturned by supernatural action; the members' task is to be ready and separate. This is the millennial or adventist response.
  • Introversionist. The world is irredeemable and must be withdrawn from; the group cultivates its own purity in a sheltered community and does not evangelise.
  • Manipulationist. The world's goals — health, success, prosperity — are accepted, but the group claims special knowledge or technique for attaining them. Wilson also called this the gnostic response.
  • Thaumaturgical. The concern is with personal miracle: healing, relief from affliction, communication with the dead, immediate demonstrations of supernatural power in individual cases rather than any programme for the world.
  • Reformist. The group engages the world in order to improve it, working through conscience and social service; Wilson treated this as a late transformation of an originally introversionist stance.
  • Utopian. The world must be remade according to religious principles by constructing a model social order, combining withdrawal with a reconstructive programme.

Two things make the typology powerful. It is comparative — Wilson used it on movements far outside Christianity, including cargo cults, millennial movements and tribal prophetic movements — and it is dynamic, since a group's response can shift over time, most commonly from revolutionist or introversionist towards reformist as it accommodates. His later work on new religious movements applied the same analysis to the groups that alarmed Western publics in the 1970s and after, arguing soberly that their significance was routinely exaggerated by opponents and that their world-affirming, therapeutic character marked them as products of a secular society rather than evidence against one.

Criticisms and the secularisation debate

Wilson's thesis provoked the central controversy in the modern sociology of religion, and he spent decades defending it.

José Casanova, in Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), separated the thesis into three claims — institutional differentiation, decline of belief and privatisation — accepted the first, doubted the second and rejected the third. The late twentieth century, he argued, saw a deprivatisation of religion, as churches and religious movements re-entered public argument on human rights, abortion, nationalism and social justice; the Iranian revolution, Latin American liberation theology, Solidarity in Poland and the American religious right are all awkward for a privatisation thesis.

Peter Berger, who in The Sacred Canopy had given secularisation a sophisticated theoretical basis in pluralism and the collapse of plausibility structures, publicly revised his position, concluding that the world was as furiously religious as ever and that Western Europe, not the globe, was the exception requiring explanation.

Rational-choice theorists, notably Rodney Stark along with Roger Finke and William Sims Bainbridge, mounted the most direct attack. Demand for religion is constant, they argued, because it answers needs no secular agency can meet; what varies is supply. Religious monopolies, especially state churches, produce lazy clergy and empty pews, while open competitive markets produce vigorous participation — hence high American and low Swedish attendance. Stark went so far as to declare the secularisation thesis dead.

Others attacked the empirical baseline. Wilson's argument implies a religious past against which the present has declined, and historians have questioned whether medieval or early modern popular Christianity was ever as devout as the comparison requires. Grace Davie's formula of believing without belonging suggests that falling attendance measures the decline of institutional obligation rather than of faith, and non-Western evidence — Pentecostal expansion in Africa and Latin America, Islamic revival, Hindu revivalism in India — sits badly with any unidirectional account.

Wilson's replies were consistent. Revival evidence, he held, is about the persistence and even the intensity of belief, which his thesis never denied; what matters is whether religion decides anything about how a society is run, and on that measure differentiation is irreversible. American vitality he read as religion adapted to the market and drained of social authority — high participation, low consequence. His position was carried forward most vigorously by Steve Bruce.

Legacy

Wilson set the terms in which secularisation is still argued. His insistence that the thesis be tested at the level of institutions rather than of individual piety forced later writers to state precisely which claim they were defending or denying, and Casanova's three-part decomposition is essentially a response to that demand. His sect typology remains the standard classification in teaching and research, and his treatment of new religious movements set a professional standard against a public discourse dominated by moral panic.

For Indian sociology the argument requires translation. Secularisation in Indian usage often refers to the constitutional relation between state and religion, and to a doctrine of state neutrality, rather than to the declining social significance of religion. Srinivas used the term in something closer to Wilson's sense, describing the retreat of ritual considerations before rational and utilitarian ones. T. N. Madan argued that secularism in India is an imported and socially thin ideal in a society where religion remains the idiom of everyday and public life. The result is a society in which differentiation has advanced in law, administration and technology while religious identity has become more, not less, publicly salient — which is why India figures so often in the case against Wilson.

For the UPSC answer

Define secularisation in Wilson's own terms at the outset — the process by which religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance — and stress immediately that this is not the same as the death of belief, because that distinction is what separates a good answer from a weak one. Build the body on his mechanism, societalisation, and its strands: differentiation, loss of authority over conduct, privatisation and internal secularisation. Then stage the debate, using Casanova on deprivatisation, Berger's revision, and Stark's supply-side argument that competition rather than modernity explains religious vitality, and give Wilson his reply that intensity of belief is beside the point. If the question is on sects rather than secularisation, use his seven-fold response-to-the-world typology with one example each, and note that groups migrate between types as they accommodate. Close with the Indian case — differentiation in institutions alongside intensified public religiosity, and Madan's doubts about secularism as a social ideal — to show the thesis is being evaluated, not recited.

References & further reading

  1. Wilson, B. R. (1961). Sects and Society: A Sociological Study of Three Religious Groups in Britain. London: Heinemann.
  2. Wilson, B. R. (1966). Religion in Secular Society: A Sociological Comment. London: C. A. Watts.
  3. Wilson, B. R. (1970). Religious Sects: A Sociological Study. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
  4. Wilson, B. R. (1982). Religion in Sociological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  5. Wilson, B. R. (1990). The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism: Sects and New Religious Movements in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  6. Casanova, J. (1994). Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.