The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (27 page)

concerned with development and environmental issues. The human rights para-

digm is contested by all these and similar social actors at the international as well as the national level. Indeed, since globalization itself is not a neutral phenomenon, as it tends to enhance existing power relations, sociologists should seek to apply their conceptual and methodological insights to the working of global

forces and processes at the local and national, as well as the international, levels (Cheah, 1997; Bauman, 1998).

Concluding Remarks

By the very nature of its subject matter, and the dynamic processes of the

articulation and implementation of its normative content, the human rights

paradigm offers sociologists and other social scientists a very rich and useful

research agenda. As it seeks to negotiate the relationship between the local and the global, the human rights paradigm can benefit from sociological analysis at

both the national and international levels. Moreover, the human rights paradigm

raises questions about the conceptual possibility of the universality and validity of cross-cultural moral judgment. From a sociological perspective, these types of questions relate to such issues as the meaning and implications of personhood

and human dignity in interpersonal or communal relations, gender and child±

adult relations within the family and wider community, questions of race,

ethnicity, and religion within and between communities, the nature and role of

religion in public life, and the nature of the state and its institutions in relation to society at large. Sociological analysis is also necessary for mediating the tension between procedural and substantive aspects of the human rights paradigm; that

is, their role in ensuring ``the space'' for struggles for justice, as opposed to being specific expressions of substantive justice in individual and communal relations, including questions of affirmative action or positive discrimination.

In conclusion, however, I wish to emphasize that even when judged on its own

terms, the protection of human rights is only part of the answer to the major

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issues of social justice facing all societies. Other theoretical approaches and

practical strategies for the realization of justice will of course always remain necessary. Accordingly, the invitation here is for sociologists to contribute to the further development and clarification of the human rights paradigm as a major

component of the framework for justice within and between societies through-

out the world. As sociological issues become increasingly transnational and

globalized, it is clear that human rights are too important to leave to lawyers

and a few political scientists.

8

Sociology of Religion

Christian Smith and Robert D. Woodberry

Three decades ago, sociologists paid little attention to religion as an important force in social life, nor was religion considered to be of great significance.

Anthropologist Anthony Wallace (1966, p. 265) summarized the then-prevailing

view that ``The evolutionary future of religion is extinction. Belief in super-

natural beings and supernatural forces that affect nature without obeying nat-

ure's laws will erode and become only an interesting historical memory. . . .

Belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as the

result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge.'' But

affairs have changed dramatically in the few decades since then. Peter Berger,

one of an earlier era's most eloquent theorists of secularization, now proclaims a shift ``from the crisis of religion to the crisis of secularity'' and of ``secularism in retreat'' (Berger, 1983, 1996), concluding that ``those who neglect religion in their analyses of contemporary affairs do so at great peril'' (Berger, 1996, p. 12).

Sociologists' renewed interest in religion as a social factor is primarily the

result of global events that spotlighted religion's vitality. Throughout the era of religion's academic neglect, there were sociologists who produced distinguished

scholarship demonstrating religion's continued social significance. But instead it took a series of international political incidents to shock academia out of the old secularization paradigm. The crucial years were 1979 and 1980. In 1979,

Muslim militants overthrew the Shah of Iran and installed an Islamic republic,

which reverberated into a broad irruption of militant Islamic movements in

many parts of the Middle East and beyond. At the same time, a Christian

Right catapulted itself into American politics, as Christian fundamentalists ±

who for half a century had remained invisible on the political radar screen ±

publicly announced their intentions to mobilize à`moral majority'' to counteract the forces of secular humanism and reclaim a Christian America. Then, in 1980,

Salvadoran Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated while

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saying mass, for his role in the Latin American liberation theology movement

which committed the region's Church to progressive social activism and some-

times revolutionary insurrection on behalf of the poor; Romero's was only the

most prominent of tens of thousands of political abductions, tortures, and

murders of Latin American Christian social activists in the 1970s. Only months

later, the Roman Catholic-based Solidarity movement initiated a wave of protest

strikes against Poland's communist government, winning unheard-of conces-

sions from the state, culminating in Lech Waøesa's signing of the Gdansk Accords with a Pope John Paul II souvenir pen while sporting a lapel pin of the Black

Madonna of CzeÎstochowa. Ensuing years would witness the emergence of a

series of important religiously based movements around the globe: the anti-

apartheid movement in South Africa, the anti-communist movement in East

Germany, the Central America peace movement in the United States. With

new eyes to see religion's social and political significance, sociologists have

also increasingly noticed the high-intensity Pentecostalism sweeping Latin Amer-

ica, Christianity spreading in parts of East Asia, the panoply of religions multiplying in the USA through new immigration, the resurgence of religious

identities in parts of post-communist Europe, and so on. By the 1990s, the

University of Virginia's James D. Hunter (1991) was declaring a religiously

infused ``culture war'' in America, and Harvard's Samuel Huntington (1996)

predicted a global clash of civilizations with religious differences at the heart.

Overstated, perhaps, but the point remains: religion is back.

Academic scholarship is now struggling to catch up with and make sense of

the implications of these major events. For a long time, social scientists assuming secularization were lazy in thinking about religion. Now much empirical and

theoretical work remains to bring our scholarship `ùp to speed'' with our

growing awareness of religion's social significance. This chapter is an attempt

to map out some helpful recent work in that regard, and to suggest areas that

need greater attention in future sociological scholarship on religion.

Much of the most interesting and important work in the sociology of religion

in recent years has resulted from its scholars engaging theoretical influences from other fields, and from their shifting attention to varied levels of analysis. Stimulating debates have emerged, for example, as scholars have applied to religion

theoretical insights from rational choice theory, cultural sociology, social psychology, institutional and organizational theory, studies of ethnicity, sociology of professions, and so on. The perceived failure of older categories of thought has given way to alternative conceptualizations of religion in social life. Here we

observe some developments which we believe are among the most valuable and

interesting.

Rethinking

Rethinking Micro-level

Micro-level Secularization

Secularization

One area of ferment in the sociology of religion in recent years has been the

reconsideration of secularization theory at the level of individual belief, con-

sciousness, and practice. The apparent persistence of religious commitment and

102

Christian Smith and Robert D. Woodberry

activity at the grassroots, particularly in the United States, has spawned attempts to better theorize religious growth and strength. This has revolved around two

related theoretical approaches, both of which argue that religious and cultural

pluralism does ± or at least can ± help religions to thrive.

One theoretical approach is thè`religious economies'' theory of Roger Finke,

Rodney Stark, Laurence Iannaconne, and others (for example, Finke and Stark,

1992; Iannaconne, 1994; Young, 1997; Sherkat and Ellison, 1999; Stark and

Finke, 2000; see also Warner, 1993), which employs a rational choice framework

to try to explain: (a) the effects of religious competition and entrepreneurial

mobilization on differential rates of church attendance; (b) the influence of religious capital formation on religious conversion and continuity; (c) the effect of

religious strictness on church growth; and (d) the influence of the distribution of diverse religious products in a structured religious field on different religious organizations' ideologies, membership appeals, and growth and decline cycles.

This theory's attempt to recast religion in economic terms, and especially its

claim that religious pluralism and competition strengthen religion, has generated opposition from dissenting scholars, including Kenneth Land (Land et al., 1991), Judith Blau (Blau et al., 1993), Kevin Breault (1998), and Daniel Olson (1998).

The jury is still out on the theory of religious economies, but the debate thus far has helped to push the sociology of religion into work using much stronger data, more sophisticated quantitative analyses, and more theoretical clarity.

The second theoretical approach emerging in the rethinking of micro-level

secularization has been thè`subcultural identity'' theory of Christian Smith and colleagues (1998). Rather than taking an economistic rational choice approach,

this theory synthesizes insights from literature on moral identity, reference group theory, the social psychology of group identity, the social functions of intergroup conflict, and structural approaches to deviant subcultures. It uses these insights to explain the positive effects of modern pluralism on the identity-work and

symbolic boundary maintenance of thriving religious subcultures. It suggests

that religion survives and can thrive in pluralistic, modern society by embedding itself in subcultures that offer satisfying morally oriented collective identities which provide adherents with meaning and belonging; and that those religious

subcultures will grow strong which possess and use the subcultural tools to

create both clear distinction from and significant engagement and tension with

relevant outgroups. Like the religious economies theory, the subcultural identity theory advances an explanation for traditional religion's persistence in the

modern world that turns on its head secularization theory's premise that cultural and religious pluralism is detrimental to religion. However, more empirical

research and theoretical refinement are needed to assess the subcultural identity theory's enduring contribution and limitations.

Religious Transformation

Another avenue of investigation generated by the attempt to rethink individual-

level secularization has been the effort to replace the old notion of religious

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103

secularization as decline, displacement, and extinction with the more open, less evaluative notion of religious ``transformation.'' This can take many forms, but the key idea is that religion is neither declining, nor statically reproducing, but instead undergoing socially significant metamorphoses. Religions adapting to

their environments is not a modern phenomena ± it is evident throughout

recorded history ± and thus change should not automatically be interpreted as

implying secularization or weakness. As with biological evolution, species that

adapt to changing environments survive and those that do not often die out. In

some cases, this transformation is expressed by what appears to be a growing

popular interest in ``spirituality,'' which is more individualistic, customized, and fluid than traditional, institutionalized religion (Wuthnow, 1998). Religious

transformation is also evident in religious syncretism, in which believers unite adherence to different religious traditions or combine elements of multiple traditions into a personalized hybrid (for example, `Ì'm a Catholic-Buddhist-pagan'').

A third form examines expanded religious transience; for example, the increase

in church-shopping ``religious seekers'' and the entrepreneurial organizations

that package themselves to appeal to that market ± usually ``seeker-sensitive''

mega-churches, organizationally modeled on the shopping mall. Another focus

of the religious transformation literature is the new wave of religious congregational studies that track the effects of neighborhood transitions and cultural

movements on local congregational adaptation and restrategization (for exam-

ple, Ammerman, 1997). Other cultural approaches to religious transformation

analyze how traditional theological concepts ± such as thè`headship'' of hus-

bands and fathers, or thè`stewardship'' of possessions and wealth ± are being

modified by religious communities to make better sense of their changing struc-