Among the many factors, sociologists often include the following:
The Growth of Literacy and Universal Education
This brings greater empowerment of individuals, liberating them from inherited hierarchies, but it also tends to separate the individual from the community. The result is not only emancipation in terms of social and economic mobility (additional factors in modernization), but also the disruption of local cultures and the isolation and loneliness of individuals. This creates a widespread culture of rootlessness and vagrancy. Such anonymity allows you to "reinvent" yourself without accountability to family, church, and neighbors, but it also takes away those structures that made you a part of a particular community.
The Growing Rationalization of Thought and Behavior
As we seek to explain life processes more carefully (sometimes displacing religious explanations of life), more of life issues are reduced to technical problems with technical solutions. Questions of ultimate significance such as "What is the chief end of man?" are reduced to proximate questions of means, "How can I be happy?" This is sometimes called instrumental or calculative reasoning; in other words, a kind of cultural and individual reasoning that focuses on how to achieve your goals, but not whether your goals are worth pursuing. Reasoning "gets things done," but imposes no values. The result is a world of increasing efficiency coupled with value pluralism, with every conceivable end competing for our loyalty.
Economic Commodification
Rationalized thought treats everything as an exchangeable commodity, thus reality is "commodified." Whatever can't be counted, weighed, and priced isn't valuable’in fact, it might not even exist. "Value" is reduced to the economic value of goods and services. Apparently, God was even a fungible product, according to American philosopher William James, who said that the truth of a religion lies in "its cash-value in experiential terms." As Karl Marx quipped, under the conditions of modernity, "all that is solid melts into the air." There is no truth, just a supermarket of goods and services that the self can purchase for its private pleasure.
Social Differentiation
The impact of modernization is virtually synonymous with the fragmentation that we experience personally and culturally. Institutions that used to provide coherence and that depended heavily upon religion’such as welfare, education, and local community groups’are undermined and then transformed. Reality is carved up into semi-autonomous spheres that rarely interest. New and more specialized niche institutions then arise in the wake of social fragmentation. The Reformation sought to distinguish different spheres’not only between church and state, but in other fields. However, in modernization these fields drift apart, no longer finding their ultimate unity in God.
Societalization
Our lives together are increasingly organized not locally but "societally," such as through "massive, impersonal bureaucracies, and the development of anonymous urban agglomerations." Religion, which historically established local life, becomes less and less relevant to the anonymous, impersonal, and industrialized public domain, and so is displaced to the realm of "privatized, individual experience." In this setting, democracy becomes not just a political ideal, but an all-encompassing worldview, just as capitalism fills the whole horizon, including religious enterprise.
Quotations are from Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, "Secularization: The Orthodox Model," in Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis, ed. Steve Bruce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
