From the Kuyper Center Review Volume 2 Bavinck, Nietzsche and Secularizaon Gordon Graham Princeton Theological Seminary I For most of the 20 th century, the sociology of religion was dominated by the idea of secularizaon – the thesis that the disnguishing features of modern culture are inhospitable to religion. The consequence, it was held, would be is a steady decline in religion wherever modernizaon gets a hold, and it was widely believed that empirical evidence confirming this was everywhere. Generally, the thesis was presented as a purely factual claim that could be greeted either with enthusiasm or with regret. Secularists could welcome it as the end of oppressive superson and the beginning of human freedom, religionists could lament it as a loss of the sacred and the hollow triumph of humanism. But for the social scienst, it was simply a maer of recording an historical change, albeit a seismic one. The precise evidenal basis of this thesis was never enrely certain. To compare the start and finish of an historical trend requires comparave data about past and present, and good data from periods when people did not gather stascs or conduct social surveys is difficult to obtain. There is the further maer of what exactly this data should be? Stascs on church aendance, religious marriage, burial of the dead and the like, even if we have them, need to be interpreted before they can tell us much about the cultural posion of religion. In addion, the precise status of the ‘secularizaon’ thesis itself was uncertain. Did it simply describe a widespread, but purely conngent, cultural change, or did it explain in some deeper way why that change was taking place, thereby making it historically irreversible? Once raised, this queson revealed, that though agreement among social theorists on the facts about religion’s decline might be widespread, there were very deep differences between them about secularizaon as an explanatory process – and not just its basic mechanisms, but its ming as well. Was the key to be found in the success of science and technology, or increasing prosperity, or the rise of popular