2 The Default View’s Historical-Cultural Origins

Where did sociology’s default view of religion come from? All ideas start somewhere, and this one has not been around forever.

The ancient Greeks, for example, certainly did not think that religion only happened in temples. Temples housed priests and ritual sacrifices, which were important for civic life, but religion also happened in other places. Religious festivals happened in streets and along village roads, not in buildings. Dionysian thiasoi wandered mountain slopes seeking ecstatic union with the divine. The mysteries of Eleusis attracted pilgrims who sought enlightenment and security in the afterlife, but who went home afterward and might never return. Religious belief was not central. People could believe what they liked, so long as they practiced the rituals and did not deny the gods. None of this resembles sociology’s default view of religion as located in religious organizations and focused on beliefs and moral rules.1

Europeans of the late medieval period also did not think of religion in modern terms. Yes, there was an authoritative church, but popular religion was more important to people’s everyday lives than was formal church participation, at least beyond the yearly confession and communion expected in the Easter season. Late medieval religion differed from modern Western Christianity in two distinct ways.2

First, it was focused on practices rather than on beliefs. Certain acts were seen as central to Christianity: baptism, basic prayers, ritual gestures of blessing, yearly confession and communion, and so on. Doing these was what mattered. Except for monks and nuns, interior life was not so important. Here, for example, is an Italian peasant, speaking as a character witness for an Inquisition suspect. That suspect, he says, “performs all the duties of a good Christian”:

When he is not tending the herds and is at home in winter or when it rains . . . he always goes to Mass; he always makes the sign of the cross when the Ave Maria tolls; he recites the Ave Maria, crossing himself first . . . ; blesses the bread and offers thanks to God after he has eaten; . . . in church he is respectful and recites the rosary.3

Note that this witness does not mention beliefs, though he does mention church attendance. We do not know what the suspect thought about anything, we just know what he did. This peasant clearly thought that religion was a matter of doing, not believing. This is different from the default view.

Second, religious practices before the Protestant and Catholic reformations were quite diverse. Individuals were free to choose from a large number of possible actions, shaping their religious lives to their personal needs. Here is how Meredith McGuire described the pattern:

One woman’s everyday devotional practices might include seeking help from a saint known for protecting and healing children, devotions at a nearby holy well known for promoting fertility, involvement in rituals for the patron saint of her valley, and such routine women’s religious responsibilities as the daily blessing of the hearth on rekindling the fire. An older neighbor . . . might say similar blessings on the hearth and the kitchen, seek a different holy well (perhaps one for the health and fertility of her barnyard animals) . . . , [and follow] those saints who help persons with aches and pains, failing memories, and sore throats.4

The men in these households would have had their own personal rituals, oriented toward their own needs and daily tasks.

To moderns, this sounds like ‘magic’ or ‘superstition’, but that is an anachronism. Late-19th-century scholars such as Sir James Frazer and Émile Durkheim claimed there was an innate dividing line between ‘magic’ and ‘religion’, but such lines are matters of cultural definition.5 Pre-reformations Europeans thought they were doing religion by engaging in such individualistic daily rituals.

McGuire analyzed this matter in depth. Based on the work of historians Robert Scribner and Keith Luria, she argued that calling such practices ‘magic’ or ‘superstition’ was an attempt on the part of religious elites to disvalue them.6 It was part of the process, she wrote, by which those elites tried to monopolize sacred power during the period that these historians called the “long reformations” (1350–1750).

The reformation movements—both Protestant and Catholic—attacked the popular idea of sacred power. Reformers tried to distinguish “true” religion from “mere” magic, and by the end of the Long Reformation, most religious organizations severely sanctioned unapproved persons’ exercise of sacred power. . . . For instance, if a “wise woman” healer successfully healed a sick person, the churches’ interpretation was that she did so with the aid of the devil and must be punished severely. . . . Various Protestant reformation movements tried to eliminate magic from religion altogether. . . . The Catholic Church still allowed some devotions and use of sacramentals to which many members attached magical meanings. Church authorities decried magic, however, and tried to centralize the mediation of divine power in church-approved rituals performed by priests who were under stricter control of the hierarchy.7

Here, we find the second and third elements of my students’ definition combined. Religions, they saw, involve rules laid down by authorities, who use formal organizations to enforce them. The “long reformations” were efforts on the part of elites to control their subject populations. They did so by enforcing organizational control over religious beliefs and practices, suppressing anything that remained outside. Religion as belief, rules, and organizations is now the norm. Even without knowing the history, my students clearly see what is at stake.

McGuire posed a further wrinkle. She pointed out that we can see this trend now because we are entering an era in which the established definition of religion is breaking down. Many people no longer defer to religious authorities, they no longer see religion as just a matter of beliefs, and they are no longer willing to limit their religious lives to what formal religious organizations have to offer. McGuire described a good number of such people in her analysis of contemporary popular religion. She is one of the first sociologists to track elements of contemporary religious life that escape organizational purview.8

Frazer and Durkheim, however, absorbed the churches’ post-reformations view. They saw religion as organized where magic was individual; Frazer, at least, thought that religion centered on belief in gods where magic centered on practices. Though later anthropologists knew better, their work never seems to have penetrated mainstream sociological thinking. The textbook treatments I summarized in the previous chapter certainly reflect the disciplinary norm.

Sociology’s French Birth

The early modern religious elites’ struggle for power is, however, just part of the story. Sociology was not forced to take up these definitions whole hog. Like all intellectuals, the early sociologists clearly began with the concepts current in their intellectual milieu. Yet they were able to reformulate most of the ideas they inherited about social life. They proposed new ways of thinking about society, about culture, and about the core elements of the human condition. Why did they not create a new, more nuanced understanding of religion than the one current in their day?

Manuel Vásquez has recently analyzed sociology’s early-19th-century origins and has proposed an answer to this question. He pointed out that sociology was an epistemological child of the Enlightenment: like the Enlightenment thinkers, early sociologists saw rationality and empirical observation as the ultimate sources of knowledge. Specifically, the Enlightenment opposed knowledge based only on faith and revelation. As Vásquez put it, “Modernity defined itself . . . in opposition to the irrationality of the Dark Ages.” From Descartes through Locke, Hume, Kant, and the 18th-century philosophes, early modern intellectuals developed “the notion of an autonomous, rational, and self-transparent subject capable of grasping and eventually mastering the laws of society.” Sociologists took this idea and set it at the heart of their new discipline.9

This, wrote Vásquez, involved sociology in a critique of theology from its very beginnings. Auguste Comte (sociology’s putative founder) famously distinguished theology, metaphysics, and science as the three stages of human intellectual development. Only the last of these grasps the underlying laws that rule the cosmos. Comte’s “social physics” (later called “positive sociology”) sought to do for social life what physics and chemistry were doing for the world of nature. It promised to uncover the natural laws that govern how people live.10

Vásquez’s point is simple: any intellectual discipline must distinguish itself from other ways of thinking. Sociology had to show that society could not be reduced to biology, which treated (and sometimes still treats) human action as the result of bio-chemical processes. It also had to differentiate itself from psychology, by showing that social life is not merely the sum of individual behaviors. Émile Durkheim argued the former by showing that socially shared ideas cannot be reduced to neural conditions; he argued the latter by showing how “collective ways of acting and thinking have a reality outside the individuals who, at any moment in time, conform to it.”11 Vásquez argued that theology was sociology’s third opponent, an especially important one at the time and place of its intellectual birth. In his summary,

Sociology had to adopt a thoroughly humanistic perspective that wrestled agency away from the clutches of supernatural beings and forces and focused on the historical praxis of men and women. In other words, sociology had to differentiate itself from theology. It is thus not surprising that sociology took up the critical thrust of the Enlightenment, which sought to make “man the measure of all things” and to critique forms of authority not grounded in human reason, such as dogma and revelation. With sociology, a humanistic universalism replaced theological absolutism.12

Thus Comte’s opposition between theology and science was not just rhetoric; it was central to early sociology’s self-identity. By defining their field as the rational transcendence of faith-based theology, early sociologists read back their own self-understanding on religion, but in negative terms. Religion was cast as sociology’s ‘Other’. Sociology was designed to value reason; thus sociologists portrayed religion as valuing irrational belief. Sociology values free inquiry; thus religion must value authority and repression; sociology seeks the free development of individuals; thus religion creates organizations that seek to maintain their social monopoly on the sacred. By this process, sociology constructed “religion” as the imagined antithesis to its hopeful self-image. Is it any wonder that it saw belief, authority, and church organization as the defining elements of its chosen intellectual adversary?

Vásquez further pointed out that sociology’s treatment of religion as its intellectual ‘Other’ biased the new discipline toward the belief that religion is passing from the world scene. If sociology is part of a scientific future, then religion must be the dying past. Secularization theory, Vásquez claimed, is thus built into sociology’s very foundation. No wonder it has had such staying power in the discipline.

There are two additional historical factors that fed the sociology’s sense that religion amounts to supernatural beliefs embedded in authoritarian organizations. The first is the political role that the Roman Catholic Church played in 19th-century France in opposing the Republic. This shaped the discipline particularly strongly, because France was where sociology was born. The second is the late-19th-century conflict between religion and science surrounding Darwin’s theory of evolution. This shaped both American and European images of science and thus shaped scientific sociology’s view of religion in both places.

First, religion and politics. Sociology developed as a separate intellectual discipline in France, where it was heavily influenced by 18th- and 19th-century French political history. Despite its flaws, Republican France carried the Enlightenment’s hopes for human freedom. The Roman Catholic Church was one of its main opponents because the Church had had tremendous power under the ancien régime. Clergy had formed the first of the three Estates (clergy, nobility, and wealthy commoners). The Church had been the largest landowner, collecting massive rents as well as tithes. It had controlled the schools, had registered marriages, births, and death, and had run most hospitals. Its influence had been huge—enough so that France was often called the “elder daughter of the Church.” Except for a few radical priests, the Catholic Church staunchly supported the monarchy.

The French Revolution confronted the Church directly. To break its power—and also to pay its own bills—the revolutionary government voted in 1789 to confiscate church property and to eliminate the Church’s privileges and its authority to tax. The next year’s Civil Constitution of the Clergy made priests state employees and required priests and bishops to swear allegiance to secular authorities. Some priests pledged, but in April, 1791 the Pope denounced the Constitution and a year later hundreds of “nonjuring” priests were executed or murdered (the “September massacres”). In 1793, public worship was banned and the Republicans installed the “Goddess of Reason” in Notre Dame Cathedral. Tensions relaxed somewhat after Robespierre’s fall (1794), but it was not until 1801 that overt conflict ended. In that year, Napoleon signed an agreement with the Vatican, the Concordat, that recognized the Catholic Church as just one among four religions to be subsidized by the French state, while affirming that it was “the religion of the great majority.” Thus Catholicism was no longer the only state church. The Pope could dismiss bishops but he could not appoint them without state permission. The Church did not regain its lost property and could not interfere in political affairs. With some wiggling, this remained official policy for the rest of the century.13

Unofficially, however, the Catholic Church remained a major intellectual and organizational supporter of anti-Republican reaction throughout the 19th century. The 1815 Restoration under Louis XVIII was relatively liberal and retained freedom of religion, but the government of his successor Charles was dominated by Ultramontanists—Catholics who supported the right of the Pope to influence national affairs. The Royalist parliament immediately passed a law against sacrilege, which implicitly gave the Catholic Church special protection: the prohibited ‘sacrilegious acts’ offended only Catholics, not Protestants or Jews. This law generated much opposition and was repealed after the 1830 July Revolution, which brought Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orleans, to power.14

However, Ultramontanists continued working to restore the Church’s special place in public life, and not just in France. The First Vatican Council (1869–1870) was their major victory. It proclaimed papal infallibility in matters of doctrine and papal supremacy in matters of Church government. These were designed to centralize Church power, so that the Papacy could more effectively combat the growing strength of European nation-states. The irony, of course, was that the Council ended abruptly when Germany overran France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. The Kingdom of Italy no longer had to fear French interference, so it annexed Rome. Napoleon III’s supposedly ‘secular’ Second French Empire had protected the Catholic Church—if only beyond French borders.

The French Third Republic (1870–1940) was not expected to last long. However, the inability of the French monarchists to unite around one royal family (Bourbon or Orleans) cost the Church the support it needed to regain political influence. The political crisis of 16 May 1877 (“Crise du seize mai”) crushed the monarchists and established parliament’s rule. The Republicans removed the Church’s authority over education in 1880 and 1882 and gradually constructed the system now known as laïcité. This is more than just freedom of religion, in the way that Americans understand the term. It is rather freedom of the state from religion. People can be religious in their private lives, but not in the public sphere.15

Laïcité was solidified in a 1905 law that ended the 1801 Concordat and provided for strict church/state separation. Religious officials could not participate in politics or serve on charitable boards. Religious schools were closed and religious instruction was prohibited in the school system. Church land was confiscated. The state ceased paying priests’ salaries and monastic orders were ended. The only positive feature for the Church was that the state no longer appointed bishops. Politics and religion in France finally went their separate ways.16

For the Republican French, this history encouraged their image of religion as a reactionary force in society. They long struggled against a powerful religious organization bent on exercising authority over the minds and morals of the French citizenry. They won, but the battle was hard fought. It is no wonder that French sociology, which saw itself as a progressive science, would see in this political history confirmation of its sense that religion is a holdover from an unenlightened past. The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), though not openly about Catholicism, certainly cemented the notion that religious intolerance was a negative social force. It is worth noting that Émile Durkheim—like Alfred Dreyfus, of Alsatian Jewish descent—signed the January 1898 petition calling for Dreyfus to be retried in the light of new evidence against his supposed treason. Like other progressives, Durkheim called for setting his 1894 conviction aside.

We will return to Durkheim later in this chapter, as his sociological work was crucial for the story we are following. First, however, please note that the French Republic’s battle with religion encouraged the view that religions are authoritarian organizations. Though perhaps implicit, the Republic did not focus on religions as matters of belief. For that element, we need to look at the 19th-century conflict between religion and science—a fight that continues in the United States today.

Religious Past, Scientific Future

Most people know enough about the conflict between religion and science that there is no need to recount much here. We can merely recall two episodes. Each of these reinforced the sense that belief matters a lot to religion as it had come to be understood in the late-19th- and early-20th-century world—the period of sociology’s intellectual birth.

The first is the controversy surrounding Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).17 This book presented no challenge to religious organizations; it was at most a challenge to the Christian belief that Genesis was literal history, even though that was a minority view in Darwin’s day. Most mid-19th-century Christian theologians did not think that world had been created in an actual seven days. They did, however, think that it had been created and that God guided its development. Their “natural theology” also taught that species existed just as God had created them, except for some that had been destroyed in previous disasters and others that humans had altered for domestic purposes. Darwin famously drew a parallel between the way that humans bred pigeons (artificial selection) and the way that competition (natural selection) bred differently shaped birds. The former required an intelligent designer but the latter did not. Natural selection only required that some varieties of plants and animals be better able to survive the rigors of particular environments. Darwin argued that species arose through such natural processes; for many, this undercut the need for God.

Some Christians were outraged but others were not bothered. Many clerics were perfectly happy to learn of new ways that God managed His creation. Others saw a slippery slope to atheism. Asa Gray, the devout Christian botanist who published Origin for Darwin in America, wrote an influential article entitled “Natural Selection Not Inconsistent with Natural Theology.” This liberalism required, though, that humans be excluded from the evolutionary process. Even though Darwin scarcely mentioned humans in Origin, the book was soon read as supporting human descent from apes. Writing in 1874, Charles Hodge used this argument to equate natural selection with atheism. This charge appeared more frequently in coming decades, as the conflict between Evangelical Protestantism and science grew.18

It is commonly thought that Darwin delayed publishing his theory because he was worried that it would ignite religious controversy. The story, publicized by Stephen Jay Gould and others, was that he did not want to offend his deeply religious wife, Emma, and perhaps also his mentor, the Beagle’s Captain Robert Fitzroy. It was not until he received Alfred Russell Wallace’s manuscript on the topic that he knew he had to put his ideas into print. Historian John van Wyhe has recently argued that Darwin did not delay at all. Instead, wrote van Wyhe, he was simply working on other projects: first his reports of the Beagle expedition, then his treatises on barnacles. Only when these were finished did he turn to his work on species. Van Wyhe points out that Emma Darwin certainly knew of his evolutionary theories, as did many others.19

The issue here is whether Darwin himself thought belief was central to religion. Gould certainly thought so a century later, though he also thought that religion and science would not be in conflict, were each to stay in its own sphere. If van Wyhe is correct, Darwin did not worry about this problem when he published Origin. His later Descent of Man, however, was another story. There he wrote, “I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious.”20 He was right about this, for it was the application of evolution to human beings that religious people most strongly opposed. Christians could accept the natural origin of the earth and other species far more easily than they could accept the evolution of their own kind. It was not until 1996, with Pope John Paul II’s encyclical “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth,” that the Roman Catholic Church officially accepted evolution as a factual description of human history. Many sectarian Protestants have yet to do so.

This leads us to our second episode, the birth of Protestant Fundamentalism.

The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth consisted of ninety essays published in twelve volumes between 1909 and 1915 by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. These were not tracts by uneducated yahoos. They were reasoned essays by serious Christians (mostly men) who attempted to restate what they saw as Protestant orthodoxy in new times. Authors included ministers, evangelists, professors, doctors, and missionaries. Almost uniformly, they rejected liberal theology, biblical source criticism, Catholicism, socialism, spiritualism, Mormonism, Christian Science, the social gospel, and a host of other ‘modernist’ movements. Their essays wrestled seriously with their opponents, finding them wanting. They are definitely worth reading—far more than their current negative reputation among liberals would suggest.21

Four of the essays are about evolution. Two of them are critical minor pieces, and one—by the geologist George Frederick Wright—embraces theistic evolution: Wright claimed that the evolutionary process is driven by God’s hands. The best, however, is by James Orr; entitled “Science and Christian Faith,” it is worth examining in a bit of detail.22

Orr began by noting the common claim that religion and science are incompatible. He quotes scientists who claim that Christianity is disproved by natural law, and he acknowledges that religious authorities have suppressed science where it threatened established religious views. These are both, he said, mistakes. In fact, science’s “supposed disharmony with the truths of the Bible [is] an unreal one.” The difficulty is one of worldview: scientists do not have to believe in a Creator but Christians do.

The Bible is a record of revelation. Christianity is a supernatural system. Miracle, in the sense of a direct entrance of God in word and deed into human history for gracious ends, is of the essence of it. On the other hand, the advance of science has done much to deepen the impression of the universal reign of natural law. The effect has been to lead multitudes whose faith is not grounded in direct spiritual experience to look askance on the whole idea of the supernatural. God, it is assumed, has His own mode of working, and that is by means of secondary agencies operating in absolutely uniform ways; miracles, therefore, cannot be admitted. And, since miracles are found in Scripture—since the entire Book rests on the idea of a supernatural economy of grace—the whole must be dismissed as in conflict with the modern mind

Orr argued, however, that miracles do not undercut a belief in natural law. There is no logical problem with a God who created natural law being able to set it aside on special occasions. That is what miracles are: the suspension of the ordinary state of affairs. “The real question at issue,” he says, is theism:

Miracle can only profitably be discussed on the basis of a theistic view of the universe. It is not disputed that there are views of the universe which exclude miracle. The atheist cannot admit miracle, for he has no God to work miracles. The pantheist cannot admit miracle, for to him God and nature are one. The deist cannot admit miracle, for he has separated God and the universe so far that he can never bring them together again. The question is not, Is miracle possible on an atheistic, a materialistic, a pantheistic, view of the world, but, Is it possible on a theistic view—on the view of God as at once immanent in His world, and in infinite ways transcending it?

The answer, of course, was yes. Science does not contradict Scripture, wrote Orr, because science cannot prove that miracles do not exist. Science merely opens up “new vistas in the contemplation of the Creator’s power, wisdom, and majesty,” by showing how the world works in its ordinary mode. When the Bible makes statements about the natural world, it

clearly does not profess to anticipate the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its design is very different; namely, to reveal God and His will and His purposes of grace to men, and, as involved in this, His general relation to the creative world, its dependence in all its parts on Him, and His orderly government of it in Providence for His wise and good ends. Natural things are taken as they are given, and spoken of in simple, popular language, as we ourselves every day speak of them. . . . To this hour, with all the light of modern science around us, we speak of sun, moon and stars “rising” and “setting,” and nobody misunderstands or affirms contradiction with science. The Bible, using the language of appearances, was no more committed to the literal moving of the sun round the earth than are our modern almanacs, which employ the same forms of speech.

Orr cited John Calvin’s commentary on the first chapter of Genesis: “He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts,” he said, “let him go elsewhere.” Considered rightly, science is clearly no threat to religion, in his view.23

Both of these episodes are telling. Like Darwin and the rest of his critics, Orr saw belief as central to the religious enterprise. Christianity presents a theistic interpretation of the world; atheist science denies theism. These are both matters of belief. The science versus religion controversy is thus between two ways of seeing the world.24

This was, however, a shift from an earlier sense of what religion was all about. Belief was not so important for the late-medieval Italian peasant we quoted some pages ago. For him, religious practice mattered. He did not even mention beliefs as evidence for the religiosity of his friend. The shift from practical religion to belief-centered religion began during the “long reformations” but was reaffirmed by the 19th-century conflict between religion and science. This conflict continues today.

A demonstration of this landed on my doorstep the very morning that I sat down to write these lines. I live in Texas, where the State Board of Education decides which books can be used in public schools. The past several years have seen considerable controversy over the science curriculum, in part because several creationists got themselves elected to the board and have been trying to add “creation science” as an equally valid approach to evolutionary biology. At yet another hearing, former board president Don McLeroy—who is not a scientist—urged the current board to adopt changes that would “strike the final blow to the teaching of evolution.” Other speakers complained that this proposal would treat religious belief as science and would furthermore impose the beliefs of a single religion on everyone. Belief, again, seemed to be central to the religious agenda.25

What’s the point? Darwin had nothing to do with sociology, nor did Orr, nor does Don McLeroy. Of what interest are these people for this book? Nothing in themselves, but everything for the cultural pattern that they represent. I claim that sociology has taken on board several unexamined assumptions about religion, based on the organizational and cultural peculiarities of Euro-American post-medieval religion. It has particularly taken on the image of religion in the era of its intellectual origin. That image has three parts.

As Manuel Vásquez noted, religion was a core part of the intellectual milieu from which sociology emerged and against which it struggled to define itself. Religion was its ‘Other’; thus it saw religion as benighted and authoritarian—everything it imagined it was not. Eighteenth- and 19th-century French political struggles defined religion as authoritarian and backward looking and moreover emphasized its organizational character. The Roman Catholic Church, as an organization, became a model for sociology of how religions manifest themselves in the social world. Finally, the late-19th- and early-20th-century conflict between religion and science reinforced the notion that religions are all about beliefs.

These three things—beliefs, rules, and organizations—are precisely the cultural definitions of religion with which my students begin my class. They are sociology’s default view.

I’ve already noted Vásquez’s argument that sociology’s 19th-century origins primed it to favor sociology’s secularization thesis: the notion that religion is disappearing from the modern world. The work of early sociologists bears him out. Auguste Comte thought that religious ways of seeing the world were primitive; they had been surpassed by philosophy and were being surpassed by science. Émile Durkheim’s doctoral dissertation and first book, The Division of Labor in Society, argued that increased “social density”—population size, economic differentiation, and information flow—undercut religion by triggering a shift from a form of social solidarity that depended on fixed beliefs and rules to a form that depended on a well-developed division of labor. Max Weber famously wrote about the “disenchantment of the world.” These and other early sociologists put religion in the past. (We will return to Durkheim and Weber below.)26

If, as Vásquez claimed, sociology identified itself with a progressive scientific future set against a religious past, then religion must pass from the scene in order for science to triumph. He wrote:

For the founding fathers, religion was important only because it revealed the origin of our conceptions, a mode of thought that, while foundational, had been overcome by a new humanistic, naturalistic, scientific thinking. Thus, they approached religion with great ambivalence, granting it the power to shape worldviews and ethos, but also theorizing it as an anachronism, as a phenomenon bound to disappear or, at a minimum, to be drastically transformed—privatized or rationalized—by the juggernaut of modernity.27

Vásquez noted sociology’s “tendency to see religion in mythic terms, as a reality that existed in the past, a formidable force that defined everything at the dawn of humanity, but that is increasingly irrelevant in the present.”28 He connected this to sociology’s foundational dualisms: mechanical versus organic solidarity, Gemeinshaft versus Gesellschaft, and, on the one hand, traditional and charismatic authority, arrayed against means-ends bureaucratic authority on the other. Taken together, these dualisms shaped a grand narrative:

of inexorable social differentiation, rationalization, and disenchantment. . . . These grand narratives of religion’s fall from Eden have made it difficult for sociology to study in specific historical and cultural contexts the multiple and changing relationships that religion and modernity sustain.29

Vásquez is not, of course, the only, or even the most prominent intellectual to note this trend. He cited both Talal Asad and Pierre Bourdieu, who made similar points. Bourdieu is quite direct:

The social sciences, having been initially built up, often at the cost of indisputably scientistic distortions, against the religious view of the world, found themselves constituted as the central bastion on the side of the Enlightenment . . . in the political and religious struggle for the vision of “humanity” and its destiny.30

religion as a new historical object: anchored in personal experience, expressible as belief-statements, dependent on private institutions, and practiced in one’s spare time. This construction of religion ensures that it is part of what is inessential to our common politics, economy, science, and morality.31

In short, secularization theory was implicit in sociology’s foundation. Its continuing strength derives, at least in part, from its birth.

Counter-Arguments

There are two potential problems with the picture I have been painting. One is a well-established myth: the oft-told story that sociology was born out of a conservative reaction to the French Revolution. In contrast, I have described early sociology as being intellectually and socially progressive, bent on distinguishing itself as a rational science from irrational revelation. If the myth is right, sociology and religion both opposed the Enlightenment’s faith that society could be reorganized along rational lines. They both emphasized the irrational aspects of human social life and the importance of traditional community bonds. Which tale is true?

The second problem has to do with my claim that the sociology of religion’s core concepts are based on Western Christianity. This may be true of second-tier sociologists, but what about the early giants of the field? Émile Durkheim and Max Weber both treated religion subtly and creatively. Their work embraced cross-national and cross-cultural comparison. Though incomplete, that work was surely not culturally limited. Or was it? Let us see how.

We will start with the myth. This is the view, developed by Robert Nisbet and others, that many of sociology’s core concepts stem from an early-19th-century reaction to the excesses of 18th-century rationalism.32 Arguing that Auguste Comte, the founder of French sociology, was heavily influenced by the work of conservative ideologues like de Maistre, Bonald, and Chateaubriand, Nisbet noted that

both Saint-Simon and Comte were strong in their praise of what Comte called “the retrograde school” . . . [who], Comte tells us, . . . were the first in Europe to appreciate the true nature of the crisis that was overwhelming Western Society.33

That crisis, wrote Nisbet, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on individualism. He cited Comte’s early Essays and their aversion to the basic principles of

popular sovereignty, equality, individual liberty, and [opposition to] the whole negative view of family, religion, local community, and intermediate associations which had been so much a part of the writings of the philosophes and of the enactments of Revolutionary legislators.34

This view, he claimed, shaped Comte’s later approach to social life. Where the Enlightenment highlighted individualism and rationality, Bonald and de Maistre praised community and custom. Comte planned sociology to be the science of just these factors; indeed, community and custom remain central sociological concepts to this day.

Nisbet admitted, however, that though the young Comte of the Essays was still Catholic and Royalist, the mature, sociological Comte had long ago left his childhood faith. Unlike those whom he still praised as his influences, Comte did not advocate a return to an imagined medieval order. “Comte, recognizing the identical crisis [as de Maistre, Bonald, etc.] advocates instead a new body of intellectual-spiritual principles—those of Positivism.” He praised both Enlightenment and Revolution for clearing away (in Nisbet’s words) “the moribund Catholic-feudal system.” And Comte insisted

that the second of his two great divisions of sociology, “social dynamics” owes just as much to such Enlightenment minds as Turgot and Condorcet as “social statics” owes to the postrevolutionary conservatives such as Bonald.35

Nisbet argued, however, that on balance the conservative strand proved more substantial than liberalism in dictating sociology’s future direction. He cited the work of Frederick Le Play, “one of the most neglected sociological minds of the nineteenth century.” Le Play’s 1855 study European Workers, wrote Nisbet, “is hardly more than a detailed, empirically broadened fulfillment of ideas contained in Bonald’s” essays.36 Nisbet even portrayed Alexis de Tocqueville as a conservative, for “his obsession with equality and its potentially destructive effect on liberty,” for his distrust of the centralized state, and for his

veneration for family, local community, regionalism, division of political power, religion as the necessary basis of society, complete autonomy of religion from the state, and, far from least, veneration for profuse, voluntary, intermediate associations.37

The obvious objection, of course, is that de Tocqueville was a political liberal and a defender of a moderate Republicanism. Indeed, he played a prominent liberal role on the 1848 Constitutional Commission. Nisbet noted this but claimed that sociology’s root concern with individualism versus “the conservative recognition of the priority of authority, community, and hierarchy to any genuinely free society” puts de Tocqueville in the conservative camp.38

I think those charges are misplaced. Nisbet’s portrayal may have seemed plausible in 1960s and 1970s America, where hippie individualism and the “Me Decade” pitted individualism and authority against each other. Yes, America’s conservatives opposed the New Deal, the Great Society, and other programs to help the poor. They did so in part because these programs centralized state power, which those conservatives feared. But reading that concern back onto early-19th-century ‘conservatism’ is anachronistic. It mischaracterizes the debate out of which sociology grew.

In fact, the Bourbon monarchy was itself centralized. It had Church support, such that the state and religion were the twin pillars of hierarchy. Nineteenth-century French reactionaries did indeed want to return France to an earlier era, but that era was not the small-town, community-oriented, family-friendly utopia that American 20th-century conservatives revered. The French monarchists were not Burkians, for Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution on liberal grounds.39 Sociology’s founders were not apologists for the ancien régime. They saw the problems that revolution had brought, but they did not produce a conservative philosophy. Indeed, they produced a science of society—exactly what the Enlightenment had hoped.

I am by no means alone in this interpretation. Raymond Aron’s analysis of early sociology, in his essay “The Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848,” came to strikingly different conclusions than Nisbet about early sociology’s supposed ‘conservatism’. He wrote:

August Comte was an almost unqualified admirer of modern society, which he called industrial, because this society would be peaceful and Comtist or, if you prefer, posititivist. In the eyes of the political school [de Tocqueville], modern society is a democratic one . . . one society among others . . . [although] not the ultimate fulfillment of human destiny.40

This sounds much more Republican than conservative, at least when ‘conservative’ is read in 19th-century terms. Nisbet has, I think, misread the 19th-century French ‘conservatives’ as akin to the American ‘conservatives’ of his own day. Perhaps he projected his own distaste for 1960s expressive individualism onto sociology’s founders.

A central issue here is how one is to treat intellectual influences when evaluating a sociologist’s theories. As Anthony Giddens argued in his own critique of the ‘conservative sociology’ myth,

We may, and ordinarily we must, distinguish between the intellectual antecedents of a man’s thought, the traditions he draws upon in forming his views, and the intellectual content of his work, what he makes of the ideas he takes from the tradition.41

Giddens argued that all social thinkers draw from previous theories; however, they reconfigure them. Comte certainly drew on Bonald, de Maistre, and so on, but he crafted a far different view of the world than they. Durkheim in turn drew on Comte but, in Giddens’s view, he

explicitly rejected the basic features of [Comte’s] model; it was Comte’s methodological writing, as manifest in the Positive Philosophy, which particularly influenced him (together with the more proximate influence of Boutroux). In evaluating and rejecting what he saw as the reactionary implications of the Comtean hierocratic model, Durkheim drew upon elements of the overlapping, yet distinctively different analysis of the emergent society of the future seen by Comte’s erstwhile mentor, Saint-Simon (while seeking to effect a critique of the latter also).42

I think the myth of sociology’s conservative origins should not distract us. None of the early sociologists, and certainly not Comte, de Tocqueville, and Durkheim, based their sociological work on Christian ideas. Quite the contrary. Comte clearly distinguished his scientific approach from religion, in precisely the way that Vásquez claimed. De Tocqueville recognized religion’s social utility, particularly in America (which lacked a hegemonic church), but his sociology was similarly opposed to religious worldviews. Durkheim, too—but here we need to take a closer look.

Et Tu, Émile?

It is no exaggeration to say that Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life retains considerable influence some hundred-plus years after its publication.43 Not only is it a magisterial treatment of religion’s origin, it put forth a distinct way of defining religions that still resonates with scholars, and it drew into a single theory religious practices from across history and around the world. Though based on what we now regard as outmoded fieldwork and hobbled by a social evolutionism that most scholars now reject, few volumes can match this one for brilliance and depth. How does The Elementary Forms stand up to my criticism?

On the one hand, it stands up rather well. Remember my students’ rough-and-ready definition of religion—as focused on beliefs, as emphasizing moral rules, and as being controlled by formal religious organizations? Each of these, I argued, makes sense for the Western Christianity of the last few centuries, but not for religion in other times and places. What did Durkheim have to say about these matters?

Clearly, Durkheim thought that religious beliefs were part of the picture but he did not define religion by them. He criticized reducing religion to beliefs, particularly beliefs in supernatural beings, no matter how broadly defined. He pointed out that many religions lack formal deities; this was a direct challenge to Edward Tylor’s claim that religion always involved a belief in spiritual beings. He argued at length that Buddhism does not bother itself with deities; instead, pure “Buddhism of the South” centers on the Four Noble Truths and on the individual’s efforts to attain salvation.44

That’s not all. Against Herbert Spencer’s broader contention that religions “consist essentially in ‘the belief in the omnipresence of something which is inscrutable,’” and Max Müller’s parallel claim that religion is “a struggle to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable, a longing after the Infinite,” Durkheim argued that the concern with mystery and the ineffable varies from religion to religion and from age to age; it is thus poor ground on which to raise a universal definition. Moreover, “it is certain that this idea does not appear until late in the history of religions.” Beliefs, even in amorphous ‘higher powers’, were for him only part of the picture.45

Morality was more central to Durkheim’s definition, but not in the way that my students imagine. For Americans, ‘morality’ has to do with rules about how one should and should not act. It focuses on individual choices of right and wrong. The French “la morale,” on the other hand, is just as much about inculcating the proper spirit as it is about guiding proper actions. It combines the two English words “moral” and “morale” into one concept. It includes action and judgment, but it also includes aspects of worldview and the sense of purpose that undergirds a well-shaped human life.

“La morale” is moreover a communal term, not primarily an individual one. One speaks (in French) of “la communauté morale” (the moral community), which does not mean a community that tells people how they should behave. Instead, a communauté morale is a community that is held together by a shared culture. This includes shared ideas about proper behavior, shared ideas about the nature of the world, and shared practices that unite the community’s daily lives. Religions are, for Durkheim, excellent examples of such moral communities. For him, that meant far more than my students’ claim that religions are about rules.

About the importance of churches, on the other hand, there is no question: Durkheim saw social organizations as central to the religious process. These organizations could take various forms and did so depending on a given society’s evolutionary level. Durkheim noted that modern society is divided into functionally differentiated institutions, of which religion is one. These institutions are embodied in formal organizations: schools for education, police departments, courts, and prisons for criminal justice, and churches for the sphere we are considering. ‘Primitive’ societies, on the other hand—and Durkheim did use this now almost tabooed term—carry out the various life-functions as a ‘committee of the whole’. They do not create separate organizations, but do everything mixed together. The Elementary Forms was, first and foremost, a description of religion in one such society, the Arunta of central Australia. There, clans and the society as a whole carry the religious burden. But religion there is still a social, not an individual, matter.

This was, in fact, Durkheim’s ground for distinguishing religion from magic. For him, unlike for Frazer and for Malinowski, the difference was not that magicians tried to manipulate the world while religious people beg the aid of higher powers. It was instead that religions always involve organized groups, while magic can be an individual matter. As he put it:

There is no church of magic. Between the magician and the individuals who consult him [and] between these individuals themselves, there are no lasting bonds which make them members of the same moral community, comparable to that formed by the believers in the same god or the observers of the same cult. The magician has a clientele and not a Church.46

Durkheim thus agreed with my students: religions happen in particular, organized places.

Not all social organizations are religions, however. Religions are typified by a specific focus: on things that are ‘sacred’ as opposed to things that are ‘profane’.

The real characteristic of religious phenomena is that they always suppose a bipartite division of the whole universe, known and knowable, into two classes which embrace all that exists, but which radically exclude one another. Sacred things are those which [religious] interdictions protect and isolate; profane things [are] those to which these interdictions are applied and which must remain at a distance from the first.47

Durkheim thus put taboo at the center of the religious enterprise. It separates sacred things from everything else and specifies how we are supposed to act toward each of them. Religious beliefs are secondary, in that they provide the images that allow people to express ideas about the sacred. Yet it is the sacred itself that makes religion possible. The same is true of religious rules: for Durkheim these “prescribe how a man should comport himself in the presence of these sacred objects.”48 They are not primarily codes for everyday behavior. The sacred/profane division is central to Durkheim’s sociology of religion.

We need to be a bit careful about that word “profane” here. Durkheim did not mean profanity, in the current sense of nasty language. Nor did he think that “the profane” needed to be something bad. Instead, he used the word to indicate everyday things as distinguished from “sacred” things that were set apart. Eating an ordinary lunch is a profane event, no matter what the state of one’s table manners. Eating a communion wafer in the context of a Mass is, for Catholics, sacred. The valence is on the sacred side, not on the other.

Religion for Durkheim thus always involves sacred things that are set apart from ordinary life. It involves a perception of duality at the heart of the world—one pole of that duality having to do with the sacred and the other having to do with everything else. And it involves a community that recognizes and maintains this division. Different communities will treat different things as sacred, and they will decry any perceived violation of that sacrality. To take a contemporary and somewhat shocking example, Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph Piss Christ, which depicted a crucifix floating in a pool of urine, violated many Christians’ sense of the sacred. The extreme outbursts against it, however, violated other people’s sense of the sacredness of art, free speech, and the like. These competing senses of the sacred were carried by different communities. Each regarded the others’ thoughts and actions as a violation of ultimate values. Durkheim would not at all have been surprised.

So how did Durkheim define religion? Here is his definition in French, followed by Joseph Swann’s English translation:

Une religion est un système solidaire de croyances et de pratiques relatives à des chose sacrées, c’est-à-dire séparés, interdites, croyances et pratiques qui unissent en une même communauté morale, appelée Église, tous ceax qui y adhèrent.

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them.49

Durkheim thought that both parts of this definition were crucial: the distinction between sacred and profane and the presence of a moral community. The actual content of the religious beliefs and practices was irrelevant, as was the identity of the particular community that supported them. He thus defined religion by what it accomplishes: the separation of the sacred from the profane and the unification of the moral community for which it does so. Is not this definition broad enough to escape Euro-American cultural bounds?

Yes . . . but. The problem is that Durkheim set his analysis firmly within an evolutionary framework that ranked societies from ‘primitive’ to ‘modern’. He wrote about Arunta totemism because he thought it was the earliest religion, from which all others descended. Tracing religion to the belief in spirits—‘animism’—or to a sense of awe before nature—‘naturism’—would not do, he wrote. The first reduces religion to a system of hallucinations and the second fails to explain how the sacred/profane distinction began. Totemism does explain that distinction, so it (or something like it) must have come first. All other religions, from then to the present, inherited its sense that some things are sacred or set apart. In principio finis. At least, that was his presumption.50

We need not review how Durkheim demonstrated that totemic religion made possible the sacred/profane divide, except to say that it was social, experiential, and just as much of a category mistake as the animism he criticized. In his portrayal, the Arunta feel a “collective effervescence”—the sense of excitement that special social gatherings produce. They mistakenly attribute it to the presence of their clan totem, which they carry much like a flag. They thus feel themselves to be in the presence of something special, something holy; here the idea of ‘the sacred’ is born.

Yet, wrote Durkheim, that mistake is actually no mistake at all. The flag-like totem does create the clan’s experience of being in the presence of something special, because in fact they are. They are in the presence of the group itself. The collective feeling that comes from group ritual is experienced as something special, something set apart. It does not just change people’s beliefs; it changes their lives.

Durkheim thought that modern rituals did the same. In his words:

The cult [ritual] is not simply a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly translated; it is a collection of the means by which this is created and recreated periodically. Whether it consists in material acts or mental operations, it is always this which is efficacious.51

Put otherwise, religion accomplishes something for its members and it does so by shifting their experiences. We shall see in Chapter Seven an entirely different and more plausible way of arriving at this conclusion.

So what’s the problem? By setting ‘primitive’ totemism at one end of human history, Durkheim set early-20th-century industrial Europe at the other. Though not a survival-of-the-fittest evolutionist like Herbert Spencer, he, too, arrayed human societies on a line of development. His ranking depended on the level to which they had developed their social division of labor. Simple societies like the Arunta had a low division of labor; complex societies like France had a high one. Durkheim did not think one was more valuable than the other. He did, however, think that they had different strengths and weaknesses. Their religions also differed. He was not saying that reactionary 19th-century Catholicism was ‘primitive’. But he was saying that religion changes its form as society evolves, and that authoritarian Catholicism was appropriate to past societies, not to the present. The transition to a possibly religionless future was never far from his mind.52

We get hints of this in The Elementary Forms. Writing of his own time, he noted that “There still remain those contemporary aspirations towards a religion which would consist entirely in internal and subjective states, and which would be constructed freely by each of us.”53 This individualized religion violated his insistence that religions require groups; he thus explicitly left it out of his definition of religion. Yet he returned to it at book’s end, writing:

If we find a little difficulty today in imagining what these feasts and ceremonies of the future could consist in, it is because we are going through a stage of transition and moral mediocrity. The great things of the past which filled our fathers with enthusiasm do not excite the same ardor in us. . . . The old gods are growing old or already dead, and others are not yet born.54

He hoped for revival, but he did not predict it. For him, science cannot see the future. Throughout his career, Durkheim worried that contemporary society was losing the social and moral glue that had held together societies of the past.55 No wonder that his work was so easily assimilated to the secularizationists’ cause.

That, of course, is the point. For all his genius, Durkheim still thought that Europe was at the leading edge of world history. Studying other societies was important, but only as grist for a European intellectual mill. He looked to Arunta social processes so that he could better understand religion in all times and places. He did not look to the Arunta for insights, either about their religion or about the religions of his day.

Mary Douglas, with her typical brilliance, hit the nail squarely:

[For Durkheim], primitive groups are organized by similarities; their members are committed to a common symbolic life. We by contrast are diversified individuals, united by exchange of specialised services. . . . [Primitives’] knowledge of the world [was] unanchored to any fixed material points, and [was] secured only by the stability of the social relations which generated it and which it legitimised. . . . [On the other side stands] objective scientific truth, itself the product of our own kind of society, with its scope for individual diversity of thought. . . . [For Durkheim] the social construction of reality applied fully to them, the primitives, and only partially to us.56

Durkheim ultimately thought that only the modern West could understand the rest of the world.

Weber versus the Traditional World

What about Max Weber, the other giant of classical sociology? Is his sociology of religion as Eurocentric as are the others? He was certainly important to the subdiscipline’s development. His Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism helped shape our approach to religions. His exploration of the religions of China, India, and ancient Judaism are still influential, though seldom read. His contribution to the theory of sectarian groups helped launch a sociological subfield. And his sense of the importance of religious worldviews for shaping human actions gave the sociology of religion some of its most seminal insights. Not bad, for someone who famously considered himself “unmusical religiously”!

Perhaps he was not so tone deaf. William Swatos and Peter Kivisto discovered that this phrase is almost always taken out of context. The full passage, from a 1909 letter from Weber to Ferdinand Tönnies, reads,

It is true that I am absolutely unmusical religiously and have no need or ability to erect any psychic edifices of a religious character within. But a thorough self-examination has told me that I am neither antireligious nor irreligious.

Swatos and Kivisto usefully weigh the extent to which Weber can be seen as a Christian sociologist, as were some American sociologists of his period. They argue that some of his sociological concerns reflect his liberal Protestant upbringing. They show how his background affected his choice of topics, especially his emphasis on duty and vocation. They see him as being a semi-secularized Lutheran, overtly free of his tradition but still colored by it.57

This is not, however, the particular rabbit hole that we need to explore. For the purposes of this study, the issue is not whether Weber was or was not a Christian, even if a partially secularized one. Nor does his religious background matter to our argument. The question is, are Weber’s core concepts so shaped by his Western milieu that they fail to see important parts of religious life? To make sure that we explore this cleanly, we need to set Weber’s sociology of religion aside for a moment and take up another part of his oeuvre: his sociology of authority. Here one finds an unconscious Eurocentrism that prevented Weber from seeing religions clearly. His presuppositions prevented him from seeing the nuances of not just other societies, but of his own.

Every sociologist is familiar with Weber’s work on authority. He proposed three models of why people grant others decision-making power over their lives. Traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic authority, for him, represent distinct types of motives for following others. People can obey a leader because they have always done so. They can obey because Reason (or rational law) tells them to do so. Or they can obey because that leader’s personal qualities attract their allegiance. Weber called these “ideal-types.” They are ‘ideal’ because they exist nowhere in actual social life; real cases are always combinations. But they outline the logical possibilities, so they make analyzing actual cases much easier.58

Ancient China, for example, was for Weber a “patrimonial” and “Caesaropapist” state in which religious and secular traditions supported the emperor’s charisma.59 Modern Europe is dominated by rational-legal thinking, mixed with a certain amount of tradition. Other social settings have seen other combinations. For him, the job of the sociologist is to sort out the details of any particular situation, using the ideal types as analytic lenses that deepen our understanding.

These types serve two functions. First, each type is logically distinct from the others. An appeal to tradition is fundamentally different than an appeal to reason. Following someone because of her or his personal charisma can likewise not be reduced to the other two. If a sociologist knows what possibilities can be present, then she or he can determine which in fact are operating at any given time. Ideal-types are thus tools that make social analysis possible.60

Second, Weber argued that each of the types carries with it an internal logic that pushes people in predictable directions. The problem of political succession, for example, forces charismatic authority to evolve into one of the other two forms. Charismatic authority has a fundamental problem: charismatic leaders die and their successors seldom inherit their full personal magic. How can one maintain charismatic authority in the face of inevitable death? One way is to follow the charismatic leader’s heir, on whom the leader bestows her or his charisma. This transfer of charisma, however, never works completely. It devolves, Weber said, into either the charisma of an office—for example, the charismatic mantle that a Pope assumes on his election. Or it devolves into tradition: people follow the son or daughter of the leader, then her or his son or daughter, etc. In former times, this produced hereditary kingship. People followed their rulers by tradition, no matter if those rulers were weak, corrupt, or even insane.

Weber was particularly interested in another path, however: the path by which traditional authority is replaced by rational-legal authority. He noted that modern countries pride themselves on following “the rule of law.” To use a contemporary example, George W. Bush became the U.S. president in 2001 not because he was a great person or the son of a former president, but because the Supreme Court decided to stop the vote count in Florida. As his opponent Al Gore put it, that decision was the law, which everyone had to follow. Anything else would produce chaos. Weber saw an increasing reliance on rational-legal authority in the modern world. His analysis of what he called the “Protestant ethic” showed how rationality replaced tradition in economics. The growth of modern bureaucracies had different sources, but it was part of the same trend.61

The problem is that Weber did not develop all of his ideal-types equally well. Though his image of rational-legal authority is quite clear, he presented “traditional authority” as a form of social inertia. He based it on “traditional action,” which in his words “is very often a matter of almost automatic reaction to habitual stimuli, which guide behavior on a course which has been repeatedly followed.” For example, the Chinese literati were ‘traditional’ because as a class they based their lives on a knowledge of ancient texts and eschewed formally rational rule for a substantive justice modeled on the past. True, their traditionalism gained them a charisma in the eyes of the common people that contributed to their social position. Yet Weber thought that both the traditional and the charismatic aspects of their authority prevented China from developing a modern rational governing system. (He could not, of course, foresee the later Communist-led revolution and the ruthlessness with which the Communist regime attempted to push China into the modern world.)62

Yet is ‘tradition’ just inertia? The central thrust of Weber’s sociology was to understand the emergence and shape of the society of his day. He asked what forms of subjective action distinguished the modern world from its predecessors. Clearly, he saw the West increasingly typified by disembodied, instrumental Reason, notably goal-oriented rationality. He traced this to Protestant spiritual individualism: for Weber, Puritan value-rationality (the pursuit of holiness by rationally monitoring one own actions) gradually transformed itself into secular goal-rationality (the pursuit of wealth for its own sake). That in turn shaped the rationalistic “iron cage” within which modern life finds itself imprisoned.63 As he put it at the end of The Protestant Ethic,

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism.64

Weber knew quite well that the traditional world was familiar with rational motives, oriented toward both goals and values. His distillation of ‘tradition’ as a type, however, required him to strip out those rational elements, reducing tradition to unthinking habit. Only thus could he isolate the goal-oriented rationality that he saw as the key driver of modern life. In short, he constructed his ideal-types by working backward. Real traditional societies demonstrate mixed motivations, but that is true of all societies. Creating an ideal-typical ‘reason’ required him to impoverish ‘tradition’. Only thus could he show the historical shift from one to the other. Yes, his ideal-types make logical sense, but only if they are seen from a modern point of view.

Edward Shils noted this problem in 1981 book Tradition. Weber, he argued, presented tradition as a negative rather than a positive quality. It is an absence, not a presence. It is mere continuity, not positive action. In short, it supports a worldview that portrays the modern West as active, rational, and the leading edge of world history. This is ethnocentric to the core.65

Yet what if we do not construct our ideal-types from that standpoint? What if we treat all of our types as positive? Can we create logical distinctions that are not so ethnocentric? A short visit to the field of theoretical ethics brings us an answer.

H. Richard Niebuhr distinguished between three ideal-types of ethics, which correspond to three of the four types of subjective social action that were the foundation of Weber’s action-schema. Two of these correspond to Weber’s well-developed rational types. Utilitarian ethics are concerned with goal-rational action: action that is designed to bring about some desired end. Deontological or rule-based ethics are concerned with value-rational action: action designed to support some absolute rule or value.66

As Niebuhr noted in his critique of utilitarian and rule-based ethics, both goal-rational and value-rational action depend on similarly isolated images of the self. He called these the “man-as-maker” and “man-as-citizen.” In his view, both the instrumentalist and the law-follower are essentially separate from the society around them. Niebuhr thought people did act like that, but he also thought there were other possibilities. He proposed a third picture that starts with a social notion of the self: “man-the-answerer” set in a web of social relations. Where the goal-oriented self thinks of personal ends and the value-oriented self thinks of personal values or rules, “man-the-answerer” starts with his or her relationships and responsibilities. He illustrated this with the Hebrew prophet Isaiah:

when Isaiah counsels his people, he does not remind them of the law they are required to obey nor yet of the goal toward which they are directed but calls to their attention the intentions of God present in hiddenness in the actions of Israel’s enemies.67

In the story, Isaiah acts from his sense of responsibility to God and to his people. He calls each to its Covenant with the other. His ethics are thus social: we are all in relationship with other beings, to whom we have ties and responsibilities. This relationship generates its own ethical motives. These cannot be reduced to either goal-rational or value-rational action. They are not, however, mere negative inertia. They are a positive ideal-type.

The contrast between Isaiah and the stories of two later Christian divines, Augustine and Luther, is striking. Augustine described in his Confessions how he found God individually, alone in his garden, as he surrendered his personal will. Luther’s defining moment was his resistance to his superiors, standing alone with his conscience because he could “do no other.” In these two normative images, Christians encounter God alone and call each believer to personal salvation. Individualism thus becomes a theological imperative. The ideal Christian thus resists the world and the blandishments of friends, choosing the road less traveled.68

The story of Isaiah also presents an individual before God, but this individual is not alone. Isaiah spoke for and to a community on behalf of a communal relationship. Yes, his visions came to him alone. Yet through him they served his community. He was no isolated individual and his was not an individual path. His story is typical of the Hebrew prophets: they consistently called their people to account for their disobedience to God and their violation of their Covenant. Yet they also stood with the people and argued with God on their behalf, when the people were found wanting.

Weber’s work is clearly filled with Augustinian and Lutheran themes, yet it misses Isaiah’s connection to the Hebrew people. His Ancient Judaism correctly noted the lack of support Israel gave to its prophets, but in his concern to trace the possible emergence of ethical rationalism, he neglected both the content and the context of these prophets’ message. They sought to reestablish the tie between God and the Hebrew people. They were supremely ‘traditional’, not because they followed accepted patterns but because they thought in terms of communal relationships. Not isolated selves, they were nested in a community even as they lambasted that community’s failings.69

Seen positively rather than as a foil for modernity, tradition is thus much deeper than Weber’s sense of it being “almost automatic.” One follows traditional authorities, for example, not out of inertia but because one has an ongoing relationship with those authorities that one is not willing to break for either goal- or value-rational reasons. Likewise a traditional leader acts out of an established, ongoing relationship with followers, not because of mindless habit but because these social ties establish the very selves that relate with one another. This is the very “man-the-answerer” that Niebuhr presented as a third ethical form.

Seeing “traditional action” and “traditional authority” as relational rather than as just oriented to the past undercuts many applications of the Weberian authority scheme to religions. Thomas O’Dea’s classic “dilemmas” of religious institutionalization are good examples. Each of O’Dea’s dilemmas arises from the problem of moving from a “charismatic” to an “institutionalized” form of religion, in which the so-called problem is how to keep members connected once the charismatic leader is gone. The dilemma of “mixed motivation,” for example, imagines that each individual is separate from others; the problem is how to coordinate a movement in which people no longer share the same ends. The “symbolic dilemma” sees a natural urge in people to objectify and rationalize meaning-systems and to manipulate group symbols for individual purposes.70

Yet were individuals enmeshed in a web of traditional relationships (in Niebuhr’s, not Weber’s terms), none of these dilemmas would prove biting. People’s ties would hold a religion together, not the congruence of their desires nor the identity of their beliefs. Symbols might become objectified yet the religion could prosper, because community, not symbolism, is the core of their common faith. Were tradition central, sociality and belief would not be at odds with one another, and we would not doubt people’s religiosity when they express it through their social ties rather than through their ideas.

Weber saw the self as rational and individualized. He began with a self for whom society and social relations are a problem, not something to be taken for granted. For him, social ties certainly did not create the self nor were they central to it. Such radical individualism typifies much Western philosophy and—as the examples of Augustine and Luther show—much Christianity. Despite his cross-cultural sophistication, Weber’s approach is thus a Western view, not something culturally universal. By presuming social disconnectedness, his sociology of authority is tied to Western-style modernity. When sociologists of religion use it as a central explanatory device, they bias and limit their understanding.71

Was not Niebuhr also Western, and a Christian theologian besides? Yes, but that makes no difference. Individualized, rationalized, Western-style modernity is normative for Weber; for Niebuhr it is not. Ethnocentrism comes from one’s intellectual blinders, not from one’s genes.

* * *

Why do history and culture matter? What is the point of recounting sociology’s origins as an intellectual discipline? The short answer is that a discipline’s past shapes its present. This is not a matter of sociologists affirming Comte’s “law of the three stages,” Durkheim’s claim that ‘primitive’ peoples’ cosmologies reflect their social structures, or Weber’s claim that Western music is more rational than are the musics of other civilizations.72 Such empirical claims are easily falsified and discarded.

Sociology’s origins, however, continue to shape its core concerns. Sociologists still try to understand social change, though today’s changes are different from those of sociology’s founding era. They still try to understand what holds societies together and what tears them apart. They still explore the ideologies that shape people’s actions. Sociology has added new questions, but these old ones linger. They are part of our identity as a discipline. They are part of what distinguishes our discipline from others.

Sociology’s struggle to create itself as the ‘science of society’ happened in a particular historical time and place. Religion mattered to that era, so sociologists had to deal with it. Indeed, a specific image of religion mattered then, and that was the image with which sociologists had to wrestle. This is what I have called sociology’s default view.

Like all views, the default view focuses on some aspects of religions and fails to focus on others. It does a good job of understanding formal religious organizations. It does a poorer job of understanding religion that takes other forms. It does a good job of tracking people’s religious beliefs. It does a poorer job of understanding people’s religious practices. It recognizes the importance of religious symbols. It too often fails to recognize the importance of religious experiences. It typically treats religion as a separate institutional sphere, which prevents it from easily seeing religions’ connections with other spheres: race, ethnicity, inequality, war, peace, and so on.

The point is not that the sociologists of religion do not investigate such topics. They do. The point is that the historical-cultural context of sociology’s birth has made such investigations marginal to the discipline, just as sociology’s traditional male-centeredness has prevented it from seeing the complexity of women’s lives.

What does this marginalization keep us from understanding? What would we see, were we to take off the blinders that hide these topics from our view? What would sociology understand better about religion, had it emerged from a different historical-cultural context? The next six chapters will explore three such contexts, to show how each would create a sociology of religion that focuses on a different aspect of the religious world.

Adkins Family House God. Photograph by J. Spickard, 2016.