iS SECULARIZATION essential for a nation-state to be modern?

Secularization is that epochal process by which people have gone from living in a world suffused with the sacred to living in a world in which sacred meanings have been largely drained away.

During the Dark Ages when scientific findings are suppressed due to the supremacy of religious belief, modernization is slow and the society becomes stagnant. Strict adherence to traditional norms and beliefs is said to have prevented people from embracing changes. One example is the ancient belief that the earth is plain square and flat having dead ends on each sides and that reaching such ends will make you fall into unknown depths. For this reason, sea voyages declined due to fear stopping them from exploration and new discoveries about the physical world.

According to Emile Durkheim, religion is often associated with fatalism where an individual creates certain beliefs on supernatural phenomenons without scientific and logical basis making him ignorant of what's real and tangible. Even Galileo who thinks that it is the earth that revolves around the sun and not the other way around was laughed at and taught to be crazy and is absolutely out of his mind yet, now, we may either see Galileo as the only sane person among all of them at that time. Religion, therefore, is like a closed room where you imprison yourself and refuses to go out.

Secularization, therefore frees a nation from fatalistic and infectious beliefs for them not to be suppressed from what they can and what they're able to do—thus, in order for a nation to grow.


However, their should still be balance between religion and science where demolishing the other would amputate a nation. On one hand, religion molds people the way society wants them to become-- individuals who are conscious of both their good and evil doings because they abide some kind of law which is due by faith. Thus, religion is the intangible path that directs a person how to live his life the way it should be.

Yes, traditional religions are weakened and less persuasive in times like ours. But finally, the religious impulse itself is not fatally weakened by the success of science and technology. Religion is not basically a response to our desire to understand lightening and thunder, quarks and gluons. Religion is a response to our predicament as mortal beings living with an acute awareness of our mortality. Thus, people today have the same need to make sense of the world, the same need to ask and try to find answers to the big questions of life, as have the people of any time or age.