Do modernization and secularization necessarily go together? Give your views

Why they have been linked

Max Weber’s rationalisation thesis tied the modern world to disenchantment. Calculation, office and science crowd out magical and priestly control of public life. Emile Durkheim expected the cult of the individual and occupational ethics to grow as mechanical solidarity of a common church weakened, though he also looked for new forms of the sacred. Peter Berger, for a time, described a secularising modern consciousness. Functional differentiation, in Talcott Parsons and later Niklas Luhmann, gives religion a specialised slot rather than a canopy over all institutions. European histories of church and state seemed to confirm the pair: industrial society, liberal constitutions and declining Sunday practice.

Why they do not necessarily go together

The United States modernised while remaining highly religious in church membership. Jose Casanova showed public religions returning to politics. Berger later revised his own secularisation thesis after looking at global Pentecostalism and other revivals. India is a decisive case for this question. Colonial and postcolonial modernisation brought railways, universities, industry and a secular constitutional state. Religious identity, pilgrimage, televised ritual and communal politics did not fade. Ashis Nandy and T. N. Madan questioned a simple Western secularism as the only modern path. Rajeev Bhargava’s idea of principled distance describes an Indian state that is not the same as French laicite. Instrumental modernisation can even intensify religious organisation, because parties and media use sacred symbols. Fundamentalist movements use modern technology.

So modernisation tends to differentiate institutions and to create secular law in some spheres. It does not necessarily empty the public square of religion, and it does not necessarily make individuals unbelievers. Secularisation, where it occurs, has more than one path: decline of belief, privatisation, or merely the state’s refusal to be a theocracy. Those paths are historical and political, not automatic companions of the factory and the smartphone.

My view, stated plainly

I do not treat the classical pair as a law. Factories, universities and ballots can grow while pilgrimage, televangelism and religious parties also grow. What often does go together with modernisation is differentiation: the hospital is not run as a temple, and the civil code is not a sermon. That is a limited secularisation of institutions. Belief and identity can remain strong, and can even use modern media to become stronger. Turkey, the United States, Iran after a modernising state, and India after 1991 all show different pairings. A student who writes that they must go together has repeated a European expectation. A student who writes that they never meet has ignored law, science and the bureaucratic state. They often meet in part. They do not necessarily meet in full.