The Return of the Sacred

Author(s): Bryan Wilson

Source: Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 268-280
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of Society for the Scientific Study of Religion
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1975 "A new Mayo Indian religious movement

in northwest Mexico." Journal of Latin
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1977 The Mayo Indians of Sonora: A People
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Erasmus, C. J.
1961 Man Takes Control. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
1977 In Search of the Common Good. New
York:The Free Press.
Europa Yearbook
1977 Europa Yearbook, vol. II. Europa
Publications, Ltd., London.
Instituto Nacional Indigenista
1976 Raw census data, Mayo River Region.
Mexican Department of Census
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Perez de Ribas, Andres

1645 Historia de los triunphos de Nuestra
Santa Fee, en las misiones de laprovincia
de Nueva Espana. Madrid.
Spicer, Edward
1970 "Contrasting forms of Nativism among
the Mayos and Yaquis of Sonors," in The
Social Anthropology of Latin America,
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Anthropologist, vol. 58, pp. 264-281.
Weber,Max
1958 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism. Trs. by Talcott Parsons. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

The Return of the Sacred

BRYAN WILSON*
It is a poignant comment, perhaps on sociology in general but certainly on the
sociology of religion, that its practitioners are in such profound disagreement about
the central implications of present-day religious practice, belief, and institutions. It
would not be difficult to document, from the work of the principal exponents of the
discipline, the most radically divergent appraisals of the state of religion and
religiosity. The secularization thesis, which summarizes self-evident truth to some,
is rejected almost out of hand by others, who, however, approach the subject from
quite diverse perspectives and who do not necessarily agree among themselves. Nor
has the debate been sequential: contradictory appraisals have appeared virtually
simultaneously and quite independently. When Sabino Acquaviva was publishing
L'Eclissi del Sacro nella Civilta industriale (Acquaviva, 1961) from the Catholic
fastnesses of Venice, David Martin, from the secularized wastes of suburban
London, was demanding the elimination of the concept of "secularization" from the
sociological dictionary (Martin, 1965), and Thomas Luckmann, was arguing for the
undiminished persistence of religion by specifying its indispensable functions
(Luckman, 1963).
Economists are by no means so perplexed about whether moder society has
seen a process of industrialization, nor are political scientists in fundamental
*Bryan Wilson is a Professor in Sociology at All Souls College, Oxford.
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1979, 18 (3): 268-280

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dispute about democratization or bureaucratization. But the sociologists of religion

differ radically over the reality of secularization. Even so, secularization was the
received wisdom of the discipline for many years, a widsom that has now become
part of the conventional understanding of things for the man in the street. Almost all
of the founding fathers of sociology subscribed to the idea of secularization, and saw
the decline of religion as an implicit part of the general process of social evolution
(even though, after Comte, few made their implicit evolutionism explicit). It might
not be too much to say that sociology-very much the creature of its own formative
period of development-was both a commentary on the process of secularization and
a manifestation of that process. Sociology was offered as an alternative to
theological knowledge, and its positivist and empirical orientation was set against
both metaphysical speculation and the arbitrary "truths" of Christian revelation.
Systematic organization of knowledge, logical inference, rational procedures, and
empirical evidences were the premises on which the discipline came to be founded,
and its subject matter was to include human values and beliefs from whatever source
they sprang. The increasing and cumulative body of social knowledge would
facilitate, it was assumed, the self-conscious reconstruction of society.
Such ideas explicitly set forth by Comte are to be found also in the writings of
Marx, with his emphasis on religion as false consciousness, and his demand for
demystification. For Max Weber,that demand for demystification became the social
reality of the Entzauberung der Welt, a process that implies an evolutionary
conception of the changing character of religious consciousness, as persons
recognized that what was socially taken as supernatural power was in fact no more
than their own lack of emotional control and their empirical ignorance. Emile
Durkheim exposed the latent functions of religion in simple societies, whilst
emphasizing that in advanced cultures religion was becoming defunct; indeed,
Durkheim's whole enterprise might be summed up as the search for rational
surrogates to fulfil the latent functions of the irrational. Veblen, (if, in deference to
American sociology, I may include him among the great) postulated that matter-offact habits of thought would supersede metaphysical orientations; while Hobhouse
(if I may include a British representative) explicitly expected that society would, with
sociological knowledge, become increasingly self-directing. For Freud, religion was
powerful illusion, from which man would be liberated when he became aware of the
psycho-sociological determinants of his infantile fantasies.
Obviously, to encapsulate in a few words the ideas of these founders of sociology
is to do them scant justice, but I do not think that these summary statements distort
their views on religion. Nor was religion a marginal issue for most of them. It was
accorded a central place in their interpretation of social development, even though
they all saw sociology as itself an alternative to theological knowledge. All of them
saw superaturalist ideas, practices directed towards the supernatural, and the
institutions founded upon such orientations, as anachronisms in the development of
modem society. Religion had been influential, but its influence was largely in the
past, as people steadily acquired a firmer grasp on the order of natural and social
phenomena. Whatever differences there were among the classical sociologists, an
assumption common to almost all of them was that society and the social order could
no longer rest on foundations provided by intimations of the superempirical.

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Some might argue that the early sociologists were often near-sighted,
mesmerized by the prevailing rationalism, and that, despite their endorsement of the
secularization thesis, they all hankered after an authentic sense of the sacred.
Comte, after all, produced a religion of humanity, with saints' days, ceremonials,
moral prescriptions, and the rest-although this side of Comte was taken seriously
only in limited circles. Or again, Durkheim's prescriptions for the future of society
resonate with religious sentiment: society must itself become the object of love, if
human motivations are to be summoned and regulated for the common good. The
later pattern-variable distinction of affectivity and affective-neutrality were
unknown to Durkheim, but, had he known of it, he would certainly have rejected it.
Men had to love their society in modern impersonal conditions, just as they had done
when society could be represented to them as a symbolic diety, if society were not to
be reduced to impersonal anomie.
Thus, the main thrust of the early sociological enterprise toward the
secularization thesis is indisputable. Yet, if so much of the early effort accepted and
documented the decline of the sacred, what has occasioned the contemporary
divisions of opinion with respect to the development of religion? Did religion decline,
and, if it did, does the decline continue? Whether or not there has been a return of the
sacred in society, there has certainly been a return to the sacred among some
sociologists.
The current, however, does not flow all one way. David Martin, who fifteen years
ago wanted to eliminate the concept of secularization, has now written a book called,
A General Theory of Secularization (Martin, 1978). From a neighbouring discipline
we note that Harvey Cox, who is not a sociologist but whom we may regard as a straw
in the wind, moved from enthusiastic endorsement of secularization in The Secular
City (Cox, 1965) to religious enthusiasm in The Seduction of the Spirit (Cox, 1974).
And Daniel Bell, who once gave us The End of Idology, answers his self-imposed
question about "The Return of The Sacred?" in the affirmative (Bell, 1977).
Thus, whatever appraisal is made concerning its persistence, decline, or revival,
the social apprehension of the supernatural is a subject that exercises to an
extraordinary degree the sociological imagination. Perhaps that is so because the
supernatural is generally regarded as a serious subject, but it is also because social
intimations of the supernatural are so readily taken as departure points for
fundamental theories of social order. Religion is a subject that yields something to
empirical enquiry, and yet not even the most committed positivist would claim that
his techniques even remotely exhaust the subject matter. Religion is manifestly a
social artifact, but it retains that mark of simultaneous representation, objectively
and subjectively, that is found at the very core of sociology itself; in the sense that
society is represented both as an objective entity and as something that exists only in
the minds of men. If religion provides a pre-sociological analogue for a riddle that is
also central to the sociological model, there need be little wonder at the persistence of
the sociologists' interest in religion.
There are several grounds on which contemporary sociologists have disputed
the secularization thesis. One has arisen because secularization as a process
continues to be regularly confused with secularism as a creed. In wishing to divest
themselves and their discipline of value-connotations, some sociologists have

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readily accepted the theological misinterpretations of the secularization thesis, in

which even a discussion of the process has been regarded as a form of advocacy. A
more serious criticism lies in the uncertainty of the referents of the concept of
secularization: just what aspects of religious change does it cover? As a blanket term,
it has been too vague to win automatic approval; but because the term is vague, it has
been too easily assumed that the social process which it is used to comprehend is
illusory. Others have been impressed by the variety of patterns of belief and practice,
and the differing degree of institutional resilience of religion in different cultures,
and so have been led to the somewhat unsociological conclusion that there is no
utility in attempting to comprehend these culturally diverse contents within the
framework of one general and abstract concept.
However, one may assume that those who now write of "the return of the sacred"
do not entertain any of these particular objections. Indeed, if it is contended that
society is again becoming conscious of the sacred, or that individuals are again
becoming conscious of it (and the difference is important), then, in some sense,
whatever the warrant for this proposition, there is a tacit acknowledgement of an
antecedent process of secularization.
It is not, therefore, altogether surprising that Professor Bell (to whose recent
disquisition entitled 'The Reform of the Sacred?" I wish primarily to devote my
remarks) should take issue with those most responsible for the reversal of earlier
sociological acquiescence in the concept of secularization, namely those in the
structural-functionalist tradition. Their tendency was to apply the Durkheimian
thesis-that religion is an agency of social cohesion-to social systems of far greater
complexity than those with which Durkheim himself elaborated the theory. Despite
structural differentiation, these Durkheimians argued, religion continues to be a
basis for the operation of other institutions, and as a seed-bed for the ethical precepts
by which men govern their lives. Its cohesive and ethical faculties were brought
together by Shils and Young when they wrote, "A society is held together by its
internal agreement about the sacredness of certain fundamental moral standards"
(Shils & Young, 1953). Thus, by definition, in any society that holds together the
sacred may be said to persist.
With respect to the structural-functionalists, I find myself in no significant
disagreement with Bell. My own objection to their position is that it virtually
excludes the possibility of a process of secularization and does so by definition. If
religion is defined functionally, and if its functions are indispensible to the
maintenance of society, then religion is a constant in all continuing societies. One
notes in passing that in this equation there are a number of dubious propositions. It
is not always clear when a society is holding together and when it is falling apart.
And it would be difficult to show empirically just what constitutes the valueconsensus that this position posits at the theoretical level. Nor is it clear at what
social level values must be in operation-institutionally, collectively, individuallyfor there to be consensus.
Robert Bellah has sought to develop both the societal and the individual
implications of the structural-functionalists in his civil religion thesis (Bellah, 1970).
Civil ceremoney to celebrate the establishment of the state is equated with the
symbolic objectification of society that Durkheim described for the communities of

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the Arunta. The intensity and the commitment, the mystery and the awe, that
occurred among two hundred primitives, whose lives were otherwise devoid of
spectacle, and for whom their own social organization was itself an
incomprehensible miracle, is supposedly echoed in full vigour and with similar
function for two hundred million people whose lives are drenched in fictional
fantasies, replete with symbol manipulation, and surfeited with interpretations of
man, society, and all their associated concerns. These so-called group enactments of
civil religion are purportedly expressions of social solidarity, and so qualify in that
scheme of things as religion, where religion is circularly defined as something that
fulfils particular functions, and anything that fulfils those functions is thus religion.
At the same time, for Bellah, religion operates not only at the highest and most
abstract level of social systems, but also functions for individuals in providing
ultimate solutions, in conveying a sense of the wholeness ofthings, and in equipping
them to take responsibility for their fate (see Bellah, 1970). At this level, religion is
said to be any myth that creates an emotionally coherent picture of reality; it
responds to a constant demand; it is a necessity for social life. Bellah has indeed told
us that in so far as it provides an emotionally coherent picture of reality, even the
secularization thesis may be regarded as a religion.
The structural-functionalists are among those who clearly cannot accept any
proposition about the return of the sacred, since for them society would not function
without religion. In contesting the secularization thesis, then, Bell owes no debt to
the structural-functionalists. Instead, for Bell, social structure and culture are not to
be regarded as unified in any type of Zusammenhang. The spheres of economy and
polity (or structure) and culture are separate enough that the dominant structural
features neither determine values, nor are determined by them. Rather, the value,
ideational, nominative sphere, which Bell calls the culture, is at least partially
autonomous. (I say "at least partially" because Bell specifically tells us that under
capitalism the techno-economic sphere is geared to promote not economic
necessities, but the cultural wants of a hedonistic world. However, he does not say
that cultural demand promotes supply, or that a capitalist economy stimulates
demand. To my mind, one might make a case for saying that both of these things
occur, and yet if they do, then it becomes difficult to maintain that the culture is more
than partially autonomous.)
Bell uses the sharp distinction he draws between structure and culture to argue
against the secularization thesis. He acknowledges that structural differentiation
has occurred, and that instrumentality and efficiency are the criteria of the modern
techno-economic realm. But he rejects the idea that there is any determinant
principle in the process of culture change. He writes:
Where cultures are rooted strongly in tradition, [there is] the immanent development of stylistic
forms and the absorption and rejection of new experiences as tested against the moral truths of
the culture. Wherecultures are syncretistic, as we find in the Hellenistic and Roman, and now preeminently in the contemporary world, strange creeds and exotic modes mingle and jostle in the
bazaars of culture, and individuals feel free to choose those varied combinations which define
their self-created identities or life-styles. But in the realm of imagination, once something
extraordinary is produced,it is never lost. Changes in cultureonly widen the expressive repertoire
of mankind (Bell, 1977: 435).

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The number of questions which this one paragraph evokes would take us a long
way from the question of the sacred, but one might enquire how a particular culture
becomes syncretistic; and whether in traditional cultures we may not see a very
evident link of structure and culture in something that approaches the structuralfunctionalist Zusammenhang. One might accept that a culture is not a zero-sum
phenomenon without arguing that a culture is merely a random accretion of
ideational items, pieces in a museum, accumulated but rendered bizarre and often
meaningless because drawn out of context. Presumably, cultures normally carry
meanings. A culture is not a supermarket of symbols but exists only where there is
something of a shared consciousness, a sense of being mutually informed, a set of
related attitudes, orientations, and expectations that are held more or less in
common, in other words a morality which provides a framework of conceived order.
Otherwise we have only the detritus of culture or of cultures. Certainly, to use Bell's
example, Boulez does not displace Bach, nor serial musice the fugue-but these are
high cultural forms, arising in some type of continuity and with institutions that
preserve them. Pop songs do oust each other as items and as styles, and they oust
other forms of music, and they are offered in very much the same competitive mode
that characterizes economic products-manufactured, marketed, promoted, for a
demand that is consciously stimulated and manipulated. TV does eclipse folk-styles,
inducing new habits and new sophistication, and displaces old ones. Indeed, we even
produce expendable cultural items, created not to last. It is not clear to me why we
should accept as dogma the new analogue of a law of thermo-dynamics, that in the
realm of imagination, once something extraordinary is produced,it is never lost. Not
only have cultural items been lost, but whole cultures, full of imagination, and
extraordinary imagination, have been lost-the Etruscans, the Incas, the Aztecs.
The entire process of cultural activity is very much affected by the instrumental
values and the cost-efficiency criteria of the economic sphere. Moral values
themselves may not be marketed as such, but when so much of our cultural
apparatus canvasses political, moral, and even economic values, can the common
morality remain unaffected? Much of what is produced is produced for market just
like consumer goods, while the production industries of cultural items increasingly
operate according to the criteria prevailing in the techno-economic and political
departments of social life. If production and dissemination change as processes, and
if the cultural products themselves reflect these changes, will not the moral values
also change? When the economic sphere operates according to altered values
(increasingly procedural rather than substantive values) will not this also affect the
culture? Will cultural artifacts not lose their intrinsic importance, as the cultural
area is invaded by the instrumental and procedural values of the economy? If the
culture is ultimately concerned to moderate the demand for emotional gratification,
it has in the past moulded this demand by process of socialization so as to balance
satisfactions with the maintenance of social order. But once the cultural area is
invaded by economic values, will not the profitability of pure hedonism come to
dominate? Emotional gratification will no longer be moulded and channelled, and
the culture will lose its constraining and regulatory functions. There will be less
artistry, less subtlety, less care, less cultivation. Far from being separate from the
economic sphere, the culture will be increasingly permeated by economic values, at

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the cost of all other intrinsic meanings.

Evidently, my conception of culture diverges radically from Bell's. He tells us
that he means less than the anthropologist and more than the genteel notions of
Matthew Arnold about the cultivation of taste and judgment. He refers to culture as:
the modalities of response by sentient men to the core questions that confront all human groups in
the consciousness of existence: how one meets death, the meaning of tragedy, the nature of
obligation, the character of love-these recurrent questions, which are... cultural universals...
are to be found in all societies... The starting point in understanding cultureis not human nature.
.. or human history... but the human predicament:the fact that man is 'thrown'into the world...
and in the growing knowledge of that situation becomes aware of some answers-the received
residues of culture-and gropes his way back to the questions to test the meanings for himself
(Bell, 1977: 428).

I am not sure what this has to do with such things as Bell's own example of Boulez
and Bach, and I am inclined to think that this is a conception of very modern, selfconscious, individualistic, and intellectual culture. It says more of individual
groping than of the collective awareness of tradition. I find this conception of culture
heavily affected by the instrumentalism of the techno-economic sphere, which Bell
affirms to be so separate from culture, and by no means its determinant. In this
depiction, individuals "use" cultural items for chosen life-styles. Yet choice is itself a
value, and one that arises only on contexts heavily influenced by the contemporary
techno-economic order.
Culture, as Bell conceives it, is too much of an agglomeration of cultural
artifacts. It is too intellectual, and insufficiently emphasizes the prescriptions and
proscriptions that constitute a range of shared collective evaluations. Perhaps our
diverse conceptions arise from the very different societies in which we conduct our
lives. But more to the point in a discussion of the sacred is the difficulty that arises
from his sharp division between culture and social structure. Bell rejects the idea of
rationalization, calling it merely a transmogrification of the idea of Reason which, in
the eighteenth century, was credited as the force that would supersede religion. But
reason in the eighteenth century was, of course, very much a force in the ideational
sphere, itself a phenomenon within the culture. Rationalization in the twentieth
century is a phenomenon of the structural domain.
Even though the ideational force of Reason may have failed in its opposition to
religion, it is not easy to see why the same should be true of rationality once it has
become the organizing principle of social structure (except on the a priori argument
that Bell puts forward, namely, the break in continuity between a structure and
culture). If Reason, transformed into rationality, has so powerfullyinfluenced social
structure-and modern technology and bureaucracy are merely the encapsulation of
rationality-why should we suppose, either in its intellectual form as Reason, or in
its transmogrified form as rationality, that it will leave religion unaffected? There is
a latent but powerful relationship between culture and social structure;if rationality
in social structure is but Reason transformed (and this is Bell's own formulation),
does this not imply strong contiuities between the two spheres? Of course, the causal
implications in this case are from culture to social structure. But Bell suggests that
there are no relationships. Werehe to admit any, would he want (in conformity with
his argument) to suggest that they are all one way-an autonomous culture affecting

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(if not determining) social structure? Who, after Weber's cautions, would wish to put
forward such a one-sided spiritualistic argument?
There is no disputing that religion changes. But what are the changes that
concern us: the belief content? the practices it exhorts? the appeal? the effectiveness
of religion? its organization? or the general consciousness of the people? Bell appears
to tell us that religion changes by virtue of purely autonomous forces-new ideas. I
readily agree that ideas are one source of religious change. And such new ideas may
come from other cultures-as we see in such cases as Krishna Consciousness, the
Divine Light Mission, and the modem Sufi movement. Change may also come from
the rewelding of preoccupations that were once within the religious sphere but which
later became the concern of more specialized agencies-such is the case with
physical healing and psychotherapy in movements such as Christian Science, the
various New Thought cults, Scientology, and in some of the Human Potential
movements. But if religion is so open to influences such as these, on what grounds
should we suppose social structure, which affects all our doings so much more vitally
and pervasively, is less capable of affecting us?
There is one sense in which Bell acknowledges a process of secularization: he
takes the word back to its original usage. This original usage related, of course, to the
laicization of church property, but Bell extends it to the laicization of politics, arts,
and public life. He sees secularization as the shrinkage of religious institutional
authority over the spheres of public life, a "retreat to a private world where religions
have authority only over their followers and not over any other section of the polity
or society." In this sense, America was, from its beginnings, manifestly a very much
more secularized country than, say, England-where the Anglican Church is still
established and where its links with the crown and the state are intimate-and even
more secularized than, say, Sweden, where the established church is something like
a department of state. Yet, if we take other indices-say, attendence at places of
worship-we might come to quite opposite conclusions. The same might be true were
we to measure the extent to which consciousness of the supernatural operates as a
force in everyday life.
Bell does not pursue these questions. Nor does he tell us much of the regulative
and moral aspects of religion, and the extent to which secularization has taken place
here. He says, indeed, that contingent upon secularization in the institutional
sphere, "there is no necessary determinate shrinkage in the character and extent of
beliefs." There is a curious limitation in this admission, however-namely, that it
appears to suppose that before the laicization of institutions, beliefs were in some
sense coextensive with institutions and dependent upon them. As one who is
committed to a broader theory of secularization, I would acknowledge that
institutionalization was always somewhat independent of belief, and that belief has
always been beyond complete institutional control, whether that control was mainly
a matter of disciplining and constraining, or of promulgating beliefs. In the great age
of faith of Innocent III, a church dominated by its institutional presence throughout
Europe. But many non-Christian beliefs also existed, which the Church ignored or
absorbed; some anti-Christian beliefs could be found in the prevalent heresies; and,
even more important, there remained the deposit of pre-Christian pagan culture. For
my purpose, all of these phenomena form part of a pervasive supernaturalist

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orientation, reflecting the profound religious disposition of that period, the operation
of religious conceptions in social relations, in the interpretation of motives, in the
corpus of social knowledge, and in the operation of institutions. But many of these
ideas were antecedent to the triumphant institutions of the Church.
That there has been a trend to disbelief, Bell necessarily concedes, but he regards
this Entzauberung as a process quite separate from what he narrowly defines as
secularization (i.e., laicization). In institutions, he notes a shift from sacred to
secular; in the culture, a shift from sacred to profane. Thus, rationalization in the
economy or secularization in the polity differs from profanation in culture, and the
sources of profanation "lie in somewhat autonomous tendencies in western culture."
These he holds to be the starting point for an understanding of the future of religion. I
must confess that I find Bell less than lucid at this point. He maintains that changes
in culture arise in response to changes in institutional life, but that "changes in the
character of religion, not institutional authority, begin at the second level" (that is,
at the cultural level itself). It is not apparent to me why, if religious change arises in
reaction to institutional changes, it is then said that religious change begins in the
cultural sphere, nor why other structural circumstances, other than the narrowly
institutional, should not also prompt response in religious belief and practice.
Indeed, I think one can show that such responses occur.
To take an example: modern technology has provided us with new techniques of
birth control, which is an intimate and personal concern which the Christian
Church, especially (but not exclusively) in its Roman branch, has sought to regulate
on specifically religious grounds. Where such techniques have been freely available,
birth rates have undoubtedly been affected (Westhoff & Jones, 1977), and so also
religious beliefs. Indeed it is possible, in a Church such as the Anglican, to trace the
actual influence on moral theology of changes in birth control technology (Morgan,
1976). In the background, the social structural demand for smaller families and
occupational mobility, the increased cost of education, and so on, are communicated
to individuals. Their religious perceptions are thus amended, and the influence of
God-given injunctions is moderated, if not finally ignored or rejected. The moral
issue is superseded by the technical solution, and once the technical solution is
available the terms of the moral problem change. What was once religiously defined
and religiously resolved, ceases to be a religious issue. Why then should we regard as
independent the processes of change in the structural and cultural spheres? In the
example (and there are many others), techno-economic change affects moral
attitudes and social behaviour that were themselves formed in response to religious
imperatives. Only where political agencies remain subservient to religious
prescriptions, as for example in Southern Ireland, is the social structural and
economic influence moderated, but this in itself serves only to illustrate
interconnections between structure and, culture, belief and practice.
It therefore appears more parsinomious theoretically to suppose that the
processes which Bell calls rationalization, secularization, and profanation are
linked. I believe that that linkage can be demonstrated in many facts of social life. Of
course if, like Bell, we take our evidence for profanation only from highly
intellectualiet movements-if Baudelaire is one's avatar-we become convinced that
cultural change is purely autonomous. But if we take the thinking of the man in the

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pew, or the man no longer in the power, the links between social consciousness and
social structure become more obvious. Take the decline of hell (Walker, 1964).
Christians are no longer much moved by the threat of hellfire; surely the declining
cogency of such an idea is related to the fact that, with improved living standards,
life is no longer the vale of tears that once it was. Or consider the demand for
immediate gratification, typical of consumer societies. Is not the demand for instant
gratification, and the "pay later, if at all" mentality, very much part of a process of
economic growth, mediated to us by advertising agencies who work for business (and
sometimes for political) machines? Is there no case to be made for a link that appears
so plausible, between a welfare society on the one hand with the widespread
distribution on social rights and benefits, and, on the other, the dimished concern
with post-mortem prospects and the transcendental Ausgleich?
It might be argued that links between social structure and culture did once exist,
namely in traditional societies-that functionalist assumptions applied then but are
breached in post-traditional society. Put this way, one might indeed conclude that
religion is socially less significant in advanced society, and precisely because it has
become inconsequential for the central concerns of the social system. If Bell is saying
this, he says no more than is said by those who maintain the secularization thesis:
the impact of religion on the operation of society, once great, is now negligible, and
this change has been determined by technical, economic, and political factors.
Religion becomes privatized. In a consumer society it becomes just another consumer
good, a leisure-time commodity, no longer affecting the centres of power or the
operations of the system-even at the level of social control, socialization, and the
organization of the emotions and of motivations. Religion becomes a matter of
choice, but whatever religion is chosen is of no consequence to the operation of the
social system. Only if the practice of religion actually dictates habits and attitudes
affecting work, health, common defence, or societal survival, is it likely to attract the
restraints of law-as we see, from time to time, in the clashes between the state and
some small sects.
In a sense, then, Daniel Bell accepts the secularization thesis, even though he
wants to explain the process with reference to intellectual currents. And he accepts it
in an extreme form. Whereas for most exponents of the thesis, secularization is still
in process, for Bell it appears to have run its full course; culture and structure are
insulated from one another. Others see the secularization process as asymptotic, but
not Bell; culture is the area in which religion operates, and culture is no longer
affected by social structure. The argument thus far, then, is that whereas some
secularization theorists see the social inconsequentiality of religion as structurally
determined, Bell explains the separation of religion from social structure by
reference to the autonomy of the cultural sphere.
But recall that religion, for Bell, is a response to certain universal human
predicaments, and thus the codification of answers to certain basic questions, which
is what religion represents, cannot be eclipsed permanently. Here, then, is no typical
functionalist interpretation of religion, in which religion is a persistent, indeed
imperishable, social phenomenon. Some persons can apparently live without
recourse to religious answers to these perennial questions, as they have done in the
period Bell describes as "the great Profanation." But even though some can live

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without these answers, we are to believe that not all men can do so, and the time has
come for a return. I cannot decide whether this conclusion is supposedly dictated by
some inner rhythm of cultural currents, or whether we are led to it by contemporary
empirical evidence. But on whatever grounds, we must now contemplate a return of
the sacred.
Unless one is strongly committed to a metaphysical perspective, perhaps one
should refer rather to a return "to"the sacred, but even with this formulation there is
a conceptual difficulty. The concept of sacredness is itself entrenched in social
perceptions of the cosmic and social order.Individuals cannot confer sacredness; the
sense that things are sacred is a socially communicated apprehension, the origins of
which perhaps defy analysis. The old Durkheimian paradox has to be invoked: the
sacredness must be unquestioned, must indeed have no perceived social origins,
must be an attribution that is objectively legitimated and, far from being consciously
produced by humankind, must be no more than vaguely perceived and dimly
apprehended. If the sacred is not already "there,"therefore, it is unclear to me how it
returns, or how we return to it. If people actively and consciously begin to
manufacture "the sacred," the very knowledge of their activity precludes our
believing. This is, surely, at the very heart of the dilemma of contemporary religionand of contemporary society.
Bell foresees two major types of religion, and a third, diffuse tendency to
mythical and mystical thought (analogues perhaps to the third type of religion into
which Troeltsch gave us some not very clear insights). The first type is a moralizing
religion, evangelical and fundamentalist. The second type is redemptive, in which
people seek a return to something of the past, retreat from modernity, attempt to
discharge their obligations, and search for mediating institutions-family, church,
neighbourhood. It is appropriate to quote Bell's own words concerning this religion,
particularly since it is a religion, we are told, that will find its adherents among the
professional and intellectual classes. He writes:
One can face death, perhaps, not by seeking to be self-infinitizing, but by looking back. Human
culture is a construction by men to maintain continuity, to maintain the'un-animal life'. Animals
seeing each other die do not imagine it of themselves; men alone know their fate and create rituals
not just to ward off mortality ... but to maintain a 'consciousness of kind', which is a mediation of
fate. In this sense, religion is the awareness of a space of transcendence, the passage out of the
past from which one has come, and to which one is bound, to a new conception of the self as a
moral agent, freely accepting one's past (rather than just being shaped by it) and stepping back
into tradition in orderto maintain the continuity of moral meanings. It is a redemptive process...
whereby individuals seek to discharge their obligations-and if one claims rights, at some point
there has to be recognition of obligations as well-to the moral imperatives of the community:the
debts in being nurtured, the debts to the institutions that maintain moral awareness. Religion,
then, begins, as it must, in the mutual redemption of fathers and sons. It involves, in Yeat's
phrase, becoming 'the blessed who can bless', the laying on of hands (Bell, 1977: 444-5).'

But is either the moralizing or redemptive religion much of a return? Both types
1. In establishing mediating agencies between the individual and the central state, this religion sounds like
an abstract and disinterested catalogue of desiderata for Mormonism. Perhaps it is not surprising that an
American intellectual, seeking an avenue back to something traditional, should set forth something
sounding so much like the most vigorous of the distinctively American religions. Might the convergence be
due, just possible, to some influence emanating from the American social structure?

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persist now and have their constituencies, but is Bell suggesting that they are to
become more prominent? He immediately locates each of these cultural phenomena
within the social structure: the moralizing religion will appeal to "farmers, lowermiddle class, small town artisans, and the like"; and redemptive religion will appeal
to professionals and intellectuals. Each, then, has a structural location. Among
these groups, apparently, there is to be a new cultural and structural
Zusammenhang. But neither of these groups is socially dominant, and Bell concedes
that his farmers and artisans are, even now, "in decline." Both groups are indeed
somewhat marginal. Within each group, what will be the appeal of the appropriate
religion? We know few western religions that appeal to only one stratum, and none
that demands the intensity of commitment which mobilizes the support of even a
majority of any one social group. Will not the new religions, if they emerge, be the
faiths of minorities within social groups which are themselves somewhat marginal?
What effect will they then have on the operation of society as a whole?
The redemptive religion, at least, is to restore something of those primary
groups-the family, church, and voluntary associations-in which people work and
live, and in which caring is a function; perhaps both religions are to do so. But the
new religions will also seek to alter social structure. If they are in any sense
successful, will that not bring them into some conflict with those techno-economic
forces that have destroyed community, that insist on mobility, and that condition so
much of the rootlessness of the times? It would take a powerful religious agency to
hold out the re-establishment of community as an ideal, but it seems to me unlikely
that, even if a sizeable part of the population were to accept the ideal, people would
challenge the economic basis of contemporary social structure in any effective way.
Yet if such a demand exists-and I do not doubt that it does in somemeasure-is
that demand itself not evidence, at the level of belief and consciousness, of the
operation of techno-economic forces? In his third type of new religious movement,
Bell tells us, there will be a return to the mythic and mystical, a demand for colour in
a world which has become drab, in which life has become "grey on grey." But is not
that demand itself a response to the forces of rationalization and thus ineffective as a
countervailing force? From the detritus of our culture, and even with importations
from other parts of the world, the detritus of many cultures, it seems unlikely that we
shall re-build one convincing significant whole, with its associated sense of the
sacred, its intrinsic and apparently objective transcendent force, its compelling, and
at times absolute, key to values. If small groups persist, at the fringe of society,
participating only partially and segmentally in the day-to-day economic and
political life, this is perhaps the most that can be expected. They can build the private
Lebenswelt, and such worlds will be tolerated. But they will be tolerated only as long
as they do not disrupt or vitiate the inexorable forces of economic rationalization, as
long, that is, as religion no longer claims-as it no longer can claim-to have any
general significance for social structure.
Given all the foregoing considerations, the very phrase return of the sacred
appears to me to reflect that strategic ambiguity, characteristic of religious
language, which seeks not only to denote, but also to evoke evaluations and
emotions. It implies a re-sacralization, a return to an apprehension of the
supernatural, not only widespread in society but also having a profound effect on the

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culture. It implies new devotions and new dedication amounting to more than merely
private sentiments, more than voluntary association of the like-minded for weekly
acknowledgment of their shared intellectual, moral, and emotional disposition. And
it suggests objective social legitimation of these apprehensions. But how would such
legitimation be forthcoming, and how would society celebrate the new, or restored,
objects of sacredness?
If it is objected that I am inferring too much, what then is to be understood by
"the return of the sacred"? Anything more than the likelihood that certain groups
are likely to espouse special interpretations of the world? And that the groups most
disposed to do so are typically comprised of those least enmeshed in the role structure
of the economic system-the students and the young, or those in independent
occupations and small businesses? If that is all, who will quarrel?But is that a return
of the sacred?
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