Religion in Secular Society

Bryan Wilson’s Religion in Secular Society, originally published in 1966 and reissued with Steve Bruce’s commentary in 2016, notes that when science developed as a specialized profession and gained social prestige through demonstrable practical results, the clergyman was left as what Wilson calls a distinctly more amateur practitioner. His special expertise, knowledge of theology and liturgy and the license to perform sacramental acts, became increasingly less relevant to a pragmatic society. The prestige of scientific procedures was such that it affected theology itself, pulling it toward the canons of objectivity, neutrality, and empiricism. Clergy who had once been the educated class, the people who knew things, found themselves outflanked in every domain of knowledge they had previously owned. Psychology, sociology, pastoral counseling, social work: each carved off a piece of what the clergy once did and professionalized it under secular auspices. Even in their pastoral functions, Wilson writes, the clergy may be said to have become amiable amateurs.
This is the structural condition that produces rabbi whisperer Michele Lowe. When the clergyman loses specialist authority across domain after domain, what remains is the performance of the role itself. The sermon is one of the last things the clergy still own exclusively. No sociologist can give it. No therapist can give it. It belongs to the pulpit. But Wilson’s analysis predicts exactly what then happens: the one remaining jurisdiction gets subjected to the same professionalization pressure that colonized every other domain. The sermon coach is the secular expert arriving to professionalize the last redoubt.
Wilson’s argument, which Bruce summarizes as Americans secularizing by reducing the specifically religious in their churches rather than by leaving them, is the precise condition that makes sermon coaching a growth industry in America rather than a marginal curiosity. In England, secularization produced empty churches. In America, it produced full churches with increasingly thin religious content, institutions that maintained attendance by becoming more socially useful, emotionally resonant, and culturally fluent. Wilson writes that in America religion remains institutionally central but ideationally much more bankrupt, and that church allegiance in a relatively non-religious society functions as social respectability. If your congregation comes for social respectability and communal belonging rather than theological formation, your sermon must compete on different terms. It must hold attention. It must be emotionally resonant. It must send people away talking. That is the demand that makes Lowe’s $400-an-hour sessions rational for the rabbis hiring her.
Wilson also has a passage that connects directly to the defense mechanisms the clergy-inspiration industry represents. He writes that clergy who cannot fill the churches seek to keep their institutions alive through other means, including the burgeoning of theological and quasi-theological academic disciplines, pastoral work, ritual elaboration, and what he calls the new responses and defense mechanisms mounted for professional survival. The clergy-inspiration industry is exactly such a defense mechanism, institutionalized and commercialized. It converts the anxiety of professional irrelevance into a coaching product.
The professionalization of the sermon is not a recent response to social media and algorithm-driven attention. It is the latest iteration of a century-long pattern in which the clergy, stripped of domain after domain, improvise new forms of expertise to justify their professional standing. Lowe is not introducing something foreign to the rabbinate. She is accelerating something that Wilson described the structural conditions for in 1966.