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Rodney Stark
by Christopher Chantrill
April 11, 2005
AT LEAST since the Enlightenment, most western intellectuals
have anticipated the death of religion as eagerly as ancient Israel awaited the
Messiah.” Thus do sociologists
Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge begin The Future of Religion
They decided to develop their own typology, dividing the religious world into churches, sects, and cults. They picked up a definition developed by Benton Johnson in 1971: “A church is a religious group that accepts the social environment in which it exists. A sect is a religious group that rejects the social environment in which it exists.” In other words, a church is in “low tension” with the surrounding society whereas a sect is often in “high tension” with society. But what about cults? They are often in high tension with society, just like sects. So Stark and Bainbridge decided to define a sect as a “schismatic group” that claims to be “the authentic, purged, refurbished version of the faith from which [it] split.” A cult is something new, incorporating “a new revelation or insight justifying the claim that it is different, new, ‘more advanced.’”
The Churching of America: 1776-2005
Roger Finke and Rodney Stark decided to
develop “quantitative evidence for the study of American religion” that
could answer questions about the extent of religious observance and the changes
in church membership rates over the years.
What they found was that, starting at a reported low ebb in 1776,
religious adherence in the United States has increased dramatically over the
years. In 1776 only 17 percent of
Americans were religious adherents. By
1980 a full 62 percent adhered to a church.
So much for secularization. What
had happened?
The United States, it turns out, is not just the home of the written constitution, the separation of powers, and the free market system. It has also developed the bold and persistent tradition of religious entrepreneurism, a subculture of people that have believed that the people of the United States could and should be saved. By 1800 they had already perfected the system of “religious revivals” that continues to this day. Between 1776 and 1850 they drove the rate of adherence from 17 percent to 34 percent, and most of that growth was in the upstart Methodist Church that increased its market share from 2.5 percent to 34.2 percent. After 1850 the Irish took over and applied exactly the same principles to the Catholic Church. Only they did not talk about “revivals” but “parish missions.” In the United States today, about 62 percent of Americans adhere to a church.
Acts of Faith
Rodney Stark and Roger Finke follow the advice of Austrian
economist Ludwig von Mises and use economics as a subset of a general theory of
human action. They analyze churches
and religious movements as if they were religious firms supplying religious
products and services to religious consumers.
They take the opportunity to present their approach to the study of
religion as a “new paradigm” using Rational Choice theory and to refute the
claims of the “old paradigm” that religion is “false and harmful,” that
“religion is doomed,” and that religion is an “epiphenomenon,” a mere
manifestation of “more fundamental social phenomena.”
So they attempt
to demonstrate that it is possible to produce an adequate micro theory of religion based on rational assumptions. The single difference we acknowledge between exchanges involving only humans and exchanges when one of the partners is a god is that the latter can involve far more valuable payoffs. Aside from that, in their dealings with the gods, people bargain, shop around, procrastinate, weigh costs and benefits, skip installment payments, and even cheat.
Then they apply their theory of costs and benefits to the collapse in vocations in the Catholic Church that occurred immediately after Vatican II. They find that the collapse was caused by the removal of the substantial benefits that the religious, priests and nuns, enjoyed in the old dispensation when they had been told that they “were in a superior state of holiness. Now, despite their vows, they were just like everyone else.”
They apply their idea of “tension” between church and society to develop a model of the religious economy, with various market niches from the “very strict” to the “ultraliberal.” The various niches all fall into a Bell Curve, like any market, where the big, mass-market niches fall in the middle, the “moderate” and “conservative” niches where the costs and benefits to religious membership are moderate. Most people, it turns out want a religion with moderate costs and moderate benefits. Only a few people want a religion with high costs and benefits, or will bother to belong to a church that makes very small demands upons them.
This
is all bracing stuff, and tremendous fun if you are a conservative who loves to
see liberal oxen gored. There are
more books to
check out
Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
Responsible Self
[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.
Robert N Bellah, "Religious Evolution", American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3.
Taking Responsibility
[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier.
Gen. Hans von Seeckt, quoted in MacGregor Knox, Williamson Murray, ed., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050.
Civil Society
“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
