Secularization reformulated: Every day they ask, where is your God? (Psalm 42).

Secularization has been an important component of sociological theory since the earliest days of the discipline, with little empirical verification. Recent evidence challenged traditional formulations and precipitated heated debates, resulting in multiple revisions of the theory, but little coherence. Spirituality, as a dimension distinct from religion, was rarely studied. This dissertation develops a schematic framework for mapping the many secularization theories, argues for consideration of religion and spirituality as integrally related aspects of human experience, and proposes a bi-directional model of movement between sacred and secular poles. The interwoven effects of age, social generation and period are studied in three dimensions of secularization (religious identity, religious participation, and accordance with religious authority) and three aspects of spirituality (frequency of prayer, self-rating as a spiritual or religious person, and daily spiritual experience) using data from 36,387 respondents to the General Social Survey 1972--1998. The results confirm that each time-component is of primary importance within some (but not each) dimension, statistically controlling the impact of race, gender, education, political ideology, marital status, religious preference, and geographic region. The profession of social work is considered as a case study of organizational-level secularization, and the implications of religiosity, spirituality, and secularization for clinical practice are explored. The utility of secularization theories for understanding social processes and improving social work practice is exemplified in three quantitative studies. The first assesses the impact of secularization on attitude change and policy efforts related to the consistent ethic of life, finding evidence of both privatization and autonomization. The second explores spirituality as a predictor of general well-being, and the third examines the relationship between religiosity and anomic worldviews; connections between religiosity, spirituality, and mental health outcomes are observed in both studies. Quantitative results demonstrate the widespread prevalence of religious identification, the existence of a small, highly secularized group and another highly religionized segment of American society, qualitative differences in recent cohorts' experience of religion, and the continued importance of religious and spiritual experience in many aspects of social life. The dynamics inherent in a bi-directional, dialectic model are better able to explain these findings than linear secularization theories.Ph.D.Philosophy, Religion and TheologyReligionSocial SciencesSocial researchSocial workUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132536/2/9977125.pd