Around four centuries ago, Western society was deeply religious. The religious class had a great influence on society, they were considered not only the guardians of the spiritual life of people and responsible for their afterlife, but also had great political powers which they used to enforce public morality and conformity to standard doctrines and rituals.
Gradually, over four centuries, the role of religion in society has shrunk to unprecedented levels and is continually shrinking. It is not only that religion no longer has any place informing the policies of western states but personal belief in the existence of a higher power and a system of morals mandated by a higher power has also dropped considerably.
In a recent survey it was revealed that among the 18-29-year-olds of the United States, a country considered to have one of the most religious populations in the Western Hemisphere, only 53% are certain that God exists (PewResearchCenter). In this paper, we shall attempt to enumerate and examine some of the more compelling factors which lead to this incredible change in Western societies.
Religious Autocracy
Christianity first became associated with political authority with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine I (306 to 337 C.E.). Gradually a central Christian bureaucracy grew in the form of the Roman Catholic Church, which by the end of the twelfth century had complete religious control over all of Western Europe (Wylie).
The Roman Catholic Church, headed by the Pope had enormous influence over the political affairs of Western States. Western rulers were beholden to the Pope to grant them legitimacy. The Catholic Church was able to call upon European heads of state to use the coercive power of the state to crush competing ideologies by the use of force whether these completing ideologies lay outside Christianity, as in the case of the Crusades, or within Christianity such as the persecution of Cathars in the Albigensian Crusade (Roach).
The Catholic Church was also able to exercise its influence to make the heads of the secular governments enforce religious laws and to punish severely, those who committed moral crimes such as adultery, fornication, blasphemy, heresy, or witchcraft (Nash).
This awesome temporal power of the Church naturally attracted to itself those who wished to exercise this power for worldly gain, thus kings and princes would conspire to have their political allies appointed as pope, popes would enter into alliances with kings and generals to safeguard their papacy, several different claimants to the papacy would arise each claiming to be the rightful head of the Church and each with the backing of a section of the ruling classes of Europe. In short, the papacy became the focus of European ‘dirty politics’ (Wylie).
Decadence
As the wealth and power of the Catholic Church grew, the culture of the Church grew more and more decadent, the rituals became more and more ornate; the lifestyles of the priestly class became more and more lavish. Many of the highest office holders of the Church have been described as living a life that scarcely resembles the life of Jesus and the Apostles (Wylie).
The practice of Church authorities compromising upon moral matters with the secular authorities and members of the public became more and more common (Wylie). These compromises included viewing prostitution as a necessary evil, allowing certain individuals and institutions to engage in usurious practices by the use of legal artifices, and the buying and selling of Church offices and indulgences (Sider).
Schism
The tyranny and decadence of the Church elicited a strong reaction from certain intellectuals, and it caused them to deny altogether, the exclusive monopoly of the Church in interpreting the Christian faith. The first of these rebels against the Church was Martin Luther (1483-1546) (Wylie).
Unlike earlier challengers to the Church’s authority, Luther gained the protection of powerful secular forces and the Catholic Church was unable to punish him for heresy or suppress his voice (Wylie). Luther’s rise was like the breaking of a dam, over the next centuries, hundreds if not thousands of schisms occurred all over the Western world. Hundreds of self-declared reformers of Christianity declared their understanding of the Christian faith to be ‘true Christianity’ (Wylie).
Religious Wars
Many of these newly created schismatic religious movements attracted a section of the European ruling class and the common Church goers to their denomination, before long Catholic and Reformed Christianity and various competing forms of Reformed Christianity began duking it out in the battlefields of Europe leading to the deaths of millions of people in armed combat (Hyma).
There came a period when the various Reformed Churches and the Catholic Church would both use the powers of the state to oppress and persecute common followers of their religious rivals in the localities in which their denomination gained ascendancy. For example, during the reign of the fanatically protestant Oliver Cromwell (1653- 1658), Catholicism was brutally suppressed in England and Catholic France, the persecution of French Calvinists or Huguenots continued till the end of the 18th century (Wylie).
The Rise of Secularism
When a clear winner failed to emerge from the struggle between reformed and traditional denominations of Christianity, to keep the peace in countries where the followers of both the fanatically opposed factions existed, it was considered necessary to divorce matters of religion from the business of the state (Hyma).
Often the weaker side in the conflict would demand freedom of religious belief and a degree of governmental neutrality in matters of religious conflict; gradually a person’s right to believe whatever they wished in religious matters began to be considered a fundamental human right (Hyma).
In many European countries, people’s right to adopt whatever religious doctrines they wished or to give up religion altogether became enshrined into law or part of the constitution of country an example of this is the first amendment to the constitution of the United States of America which forbids the legislature from interfering in religious matters or promoting a particular religious belief or restricting the freedom of an individual to say what he or she wishes. The amendment reflects a growing unwillingness in the ruling class to privilege Christianity or a specific type of Christianity over other religious faiths and to prevent criticism of the Christian religion and forbid blasphemous speech, which in the past would result in swift and harsh reprisals by secular authorities (Nash).
Advances in Scientific Knowledge and the Resistance of Religious Authorities
Religious authorities persisted in adhering to models of the universe that were demonstrably false, an example of this is the condemnation of the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei by an inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church due to his assertion that the Earth revolves around the Sun. This sort of attitude on the part of the religious elite not only served to alienate from religion those intellectuals whose field of interests lay in secular studies of natural phenomenon, but once the scientific facts became known to the common people it made the teachings of Christianity seem fallible and factually incorrect in their eyes (Bonham).
Materialism
With the rise in scientific knowledge, people began to learn of the physical processes behind natural phenomena such as the change from day to night and the change from summer to autumn which were previously considered examples of direct divine intervention in the affairs of the world. With the knowledge about the hidden but natural processes that cause natural phenomena, came the perception that all events must have a natural explanation.
This led many people to reject as myths the stories of the miracles of the patriarchs and Jesus as told in the Bible, the many stories of the miracles of various saints, and the stories of witches and wizards that had been passed down from generation to generation. Secularists pointed out that the incidence of alleged miracles seemed to have an inverse relationship with the spread of education in society (Bonham).
Alternate Sources of Morality
With the rise in secularism, it became possible for intellectuals to compose and advocate alternate systems of morality, not based on the Bible or the idea of the existence of a higher power. Certain ideas from these newly founded systems of morality caught on with the general populace. Based on these ideas it became common for people to find fault with the actions of God or the righteous as described in the Bible; for example the wars, the harsh sentences ascribed to seemingly mild mistakes such as breaking the Sabbath and God’s destruction of the innocent along with the sinful. Many people started seeing the Bible, not as a source of moral guidance but a controversial source of immoral doctrines (Davies).
Capitalism
Before the rise of capitalism, the upper class considered themselves to be in a parental relationship with the masses. The nobility was concerned with the spiritual welfare of the lower class and was interested in getting them a moral and religious education. Due to the rise of capitalism, the upper class became concerned only with profits and an increase in production which led to a decline in religious practice (Miller).
Scarcity of time
The pressures of the modern economic system necessitate that people spend a great amount of time earning their living. People nowadays lack both the time and the inclination to regularly attend church or other religious services; this has destroyed the Church-based society that was responsible for keeping people religious in the earlier ages.
Multiculturalism
Till the early 19th century, it was common for European countries to have discriminatory legislation suppressing the religious practice of non-Christian minority religions such as Judaism. Jews were marginalized and forced to reside in special neighborhoods called ghettos. With the rise in secularism, such discriminatory legislation was gradually repealed and non-Christians were also allowed to become full members of society with equal rights. This contributed to the de-Christianization of society.
In the two World Wars, a large number of adult men of European countries were killed. To make up the labor shortage, European countries allowed a large number of people from their former colonial possessions in Asia and Africa to immigrate and settle in their countries. These people usually did not adhere to Western forms of Christianity but were believers in Islam or Hinduism. The presence of a large number of people from non-Christian backgrounds further eroded the Christian character of Western societies (Burayidi).
Conclusion
A look at the history of the West shows that Western societies seem to be set on a course of de-Christianization and secularization. These trends have continued for more than four centuries now and barring any unforeseen events, these trends are only like to continue.
Works Cited
Bonham, John M. Secularism: Its Progress and Its Morals. Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2008.
Burayidi, Michael. A. Multiculturalism in a cross-national perspective. Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1997.
Davies, Tony Humanism. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997.
Hyma, Albert Renaissance to Reformation. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1951.
Miller, Pavla Transformations of Patriarchy in the West: 1500-1900. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Nash, David Blasphemy in the Christian world: a history. New York, NY: Oxford University Press US, 2007.
PewResearchCenter. Religion among the millennials. 2008. Web.
Roach, Andrew The Devil’s world: heresy and society 1100-1300. White Plains, NY: Pearson Longman, 2005.
Sider, S. Handbook to Life in Renaissance Europe. New York, NY: Oxford University Press US, 2007.
Wylie, J. A. The History of Protestantism. Rapidan, VA: Hartland Publications, 2002.