Secularization, Social Order, and World History: Toward a Global Perspective

Secularization, Social Order, and World History provides a new perspective on the nature of secularization. Scholars have shown that the concepts of “religion” and the “secular” that are assumed in traditional accounts of secularization are not universal human categories, but specifically modern and Western ideas. What if we told the story of secularization not from the perspective that secularization itself produced, but from a standpoint outside the modern West?

This book draws on premodern traditions from China, India, the Islamic world, and beyond to develop an alternative conceptual framework of “sacred-social order.” Sacred-social orders aim to align all of human life―from marriage to government to the calendar―with suprahuman purposes and authorities. From the perspective of sacred-social order, the secularization of Western societies was not simply “the decline of religion,” but a revolutionary break with sacred order across all social domains and the attempt to construct a new secular order on purely human foundations. As the secular order has been exported around the world, it has provoked movements for the restoration of sacred-social order that are often misunderstood as mere religious revivals or a clash of civilizations.

Bridging sociology, history, religious studies, and philosophy, this work offers an innovative, global account of secularization and its discontents.

Kevin N. Flatt is Professor of History and Associate Dean of Humanities at Redeemer University in Ontario, Canada, and a Research Fellow at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Societal Futures. His scholarship focuses on secularization in modern societies and the history of Protestantism in Canada. His first book, After Evangelicalism: The Sixties and the United Church of Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), examined the transformation and decline of the country’s largest Protestant denomination.