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"The central claim of this book," writes Christian Smith in the preface to The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Life, just published by the University of California Press, "is that the historical secularization of the institutions of American public life was not a natural, inevitable, and abstract by-product of modernization; rather it was the outcome of a struggle between contending groups with conflicting interests seeking to control social knowledge and institutions." Edited by Smith, with essays by a number of scholars, the book offers a bracingly revisionist account of secularization that is sure to generate debate. To whet your appetite, here is an excerpt from Smith's introduction.
Revolutions and social movements are not simply the result of interested and aggrieved activists capitalizing on new political opportunities. To mobilize and prevail, activists also need access to material resources sufficient to sustain their cause. In some cases, the difference between successful and failed revolutions and movements can be traced largely to increasing and decreasing supplies of resources. The secular revolution succeeded in part because new sources of material resources outside of the control of Protestant authorities became available for secular activists to deploy in the cause of secularization. This story is long and complex, and varies in different spheres of public life. Given space limitations, I focus here on the core economic transformation that shaped activists' secularizing of American higher education and science: the boom and incorporation of industrial capitalism.
One of the most profound social changes taking place during the crucial decades of the secularization of higher education and science was the incorporation of industrial capitalism. The magnitude of this transformation, Clyde Barrow shows, was astounding.1 Spurred by the "epoch-making innovation" of the national railway system established between 1861 and 1907 and the national markets it opened up, the structure of America's productive capacity, ownership of wealth, and class system was profoundly altered. Before the Civil War, only about 7 percent of U.S. manufacturing took place in corporations; by 1900, that figure had grown to nearly 66 percent. Economic centralization merged industries into massive corporate trusts. Between 1897 and 1905, more than 5,300 industrial firms were merged into only 318 corporations. More than 1,200 mergers took place in the single year of 1899. By 1904, there were 26 different major trusts that controlled at least 80 percent of the production in their particular fields. In the process, the structure of the labor market was also revolutionized. At the start of the 19th century, the vast majority of American workers were self-employed entrepreneurs; but by century's end, two-thirds of workers had become wage and salaried employees. The ownership of wealth was centralized dramatically as well. During the 1840s, there were fewer than twenty millionaires in what was still a primarily agricultural United States. By 1893, a mere 9 percent of the most prosperous Americans had come to own 71 percent of the nation's wealth. In sum, in a relatively short time of historically unprecedented growth and centralization of wealth, American capitalism had incorporated under the control of the Morgans, Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies, and Du Ponts of the country.
This economic transformation had important consequences for the place of religion in American higher education and science. The interests of corporate, industrial capitalism proved in certain ways unfriendly to religion's playing a significant role in science and higher education. It was not that capitalism and Protestantism were in a direct and logical way intellectually and socially irreconcilable—as with Bryan Wilson's suggestion that people simply can't believe in God in an age of conveyor belts.2 But corporate capitalism did significantly influence resources that facilitated activist secularizers who were working to undermine religion's authority in American higher education and science.
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