The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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Three classical paradigms

The sociology of religion emerged from the philosophy of the Enlightenment on the one hand and its Romantic critique on the other. Although it attempts to make religion the object of scientific study, sociology has inherited certain presuppositions from the philosophical discourse that have shaped its perspectives on religion in different ways. In order to better understand the development of the sociology of religion, one has to consider how social scientific understandings of religion are informed by basic assumptions about Western modernity, the course of history, and the place of human beings in this world. Three classical paradigms had the strongest impact on the Âdiscipline: the approaches of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber.

Karl Marx (1818–1883)

For Marx, as for his teacher Hegel, history follows a logic through which human beings emancipate themselves from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom and selfrealization. However, for Marx, unlike Hegel, the engine of this development is not the dialectics of the ‘world spirit’ but that of the material conditions of existence. Human beings realize themselves in the process of the production and reproduction of their concrete lives. This takes place through actors’ engagements in the technical and technological control of nature, in conjunction with the social relations through which humans exercise this process of control. An increasing control of nature leads to an increasing division of labor, creating class distinctions initially based almost exclusively upon gender. The differentiation between manual and intellectual labor causes drastic inequality based on the ownership of private property. In early socioeconomic stages, ‘nature’ seems rather mysterious, whereas with increasing control of natural forces and increasing class differentiation, ‘society’ becomes more unfathomable.

In other words, modern science and technology have produced an unprecedented rational understanding and practical control through which nature has become widely demystified. However, capitalism has produced an extreme class differentiation between manual and intellectual labor, as well as between owners of the means of production and workers. These social relations are usually not comprehended as they actually are, but are misunderstood, misrepresented, and mysticized.

The reasons for this mystification are manifold, but all based upon the alienating structures of modern socioeconomic relations. There are the privileged, who have an interest in legitimation. They produce and spread an ideology of self-justification, which is in part strategic – perhaps even cynical – and in part self-deluding. Then there are the workers, who are alienated from each other through competition, and deprived of their creativity and self-realization through the mechanical character of their work and the loss of control over the means of production as well as their own products. Finally, misrecognition lies in the very nature of commodity production itself, since the interaction between social actors appears in the form of an exchange relation between products.

For Marx, religion plays an obvious role in these processes. In early socioeconomic stages, religion consists mainly in a response to the mysteriousness of nature and expresses humanity’s lack of understanding and control. But in more advanced stages, religion increasingly distorts the understanding of the true nature of social relations by expressing the alienation inscribed into class structures. Religion, by creating the illusion of a transcendental power of perfection which demands submission to the status quo, also prevents social actors from collectively

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establishing a social order that would allow them to realize their full potential as social and creative human beings.

In order to overcome alienation, it is not sufficient to criticize religious consciousness. Rather, one has to overturn the class structure of capitalism and change the mode of production. Once this has happened, religion would disappear and people would be able to understand and control society as rationally as they do nature, and they would be free to realize their true natures as social and creative beings.

Since for Marx religion does not represent the source of human alienation, but just expresses it, this approach does not pay much attention to the study of religion per se. Although the Marxian view that religions reflect the structures of social relations holds true for all social scientists to a certain degree, a rather narrow reading of Marx has led to a long and unfortunate neglect of the study of religion from a Marxian perspective. Only recently have social scientists recaptured the fruitful aspects of the Marxian tradition while giving up the teleological view of history (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1995).

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917)

While Marx’s understanding of history and humanity is based on a model of human and social emancipation, Durkheim’s is based on social order and its civilizing, moralizing, and socializing mission. According to Durkheim, human beings have a double nature consisting of body and soul. On the one hand, they are driven by bodily needs, following their egoistic natural drives and desires; on the other, they have souls, which are social and moral. The task of any social order is to keep the egoistic drives of individuals in check, and to transform these individuals into social and moral agents who conform to group norms (Durkheim 1914/1960).

Although civilization progresses for Durkheim, the basic problem stays in many respects the same. What changes is the division of labor, and with it, modes of thought and methods of social integration. An increasing division of labor, which according to Durkheim has been institutionalized not for its unforeseeable greater efficiency but for the social regulation of competition, makes people much more interdependent than they were in segmentary societies. This explains why segmentary societies rely much more on integration through rituals than modern ones.

Nevertheless, any social order works only when people share basic categories of thought and moral beliefs, and reinforces them through collective rituals. All categories of thoughtÂand moral beliefs originate in religion, which is based on the distinction between sacred and profane. Differentiations of space, time, cause, and number originate out of this basic distinction. Religion, therefore, is the source of thought and knowledge but, following Comte, Durkheim argues that with the progress of civilization other modes of thought, especially science, replace religion at least in part. However, this is only a difference in degree, not in kind; since scientific knowledge also becomes obligatory it is, so-to-speak, a higher form of religion. Nevertheless, religion is still needed since science cannot replace the emotional side of religion, which attaches people to each other via symbolic representations. This can be generated only by dense interactions in extraordinary and often ecstatic situations, such as public ceremonies.

Durkheim’s understanding of religion assumes a basic identity between the political and the religious unit and appears to be heavily informed by the modern Western idea of the nation. Durkheim’s theory directly jumps from tribal religion to civic religion – omitting all

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examples of religiously pluralistic empires, conflicts between and within religious traditions, and disintegrative effects of religions. Durkheim suggests via his study of Australian totemism that all societies need a unifying system of thought, symbols, norms, and values, identifying nationalism as the new ‘civic religion’ adequate to modern industrial societies (1912/1995). However, Durkheim is not a nationalist. For him nationalism represents only a necessary intermediary stage in the emergence of human universalism. Durkheim’s understanding of religion has been the most dominant theoretical influence in both sociology and anthropology.

Max Weber (1864–1920)

For Weber, neither human emancipation nor social order and integration are the central points of departure. Neither does history have an intrinsic goal, nor does modernity’s central problem lie in the control of egoistic individualism. For Weber, modern Western societies are not underregulated but rather overregulated. In the modern bureaucratic age there is hardly any space left to lead a meaningful life according to any principles other than utilitarian ones. Weber shared the Marxian insight that people make their own history but do not control it. Weber’s sociology is full of examples of how social actions have led to unintended and often paradoxical historical outcomes. Weber’s central question, therefore, is how this modern rationalist system of external social control and internalized self-control has developed historically, and how modern individuals as cultural beings can respond to it with dignity and responsibility. Although himself religiously ‘unmusical,’ Weber sees a certain dignity in religious attempts to transcend the narrow boundaries of utilitarian interests through the dramatization of ultimate values and the principled shaping of one’s life according to them.

Weber’s sociology of religion begins with an inquiry into the religious sources of modern capitalist culture and ends with a cross-culturally comparative study of rationalisms embedded in the religious traditions of China, India, and ancient Judaism. Weber draws the conclusion that the modern West is the result of a unique rationalization process, which has affected not only its economic system and its principles of bureaucratic organization but also its culture – especially its science, music, and art.

While ‘primitive’ religions were hardly differentiated from the pursuit of ‘this-worldly’ interests, the rise of ‘salvation’ religions formulated by religious intellectuals and virtuosi defined religion as a separable sphere of interests. The very idea of salvation and the different paths to salvation defined the world in relation to an ultimate value, and restructured the attitudes and life conduct of social actors towards worldly spheres of interest. Of course, this did not take place independent of political and economic structures and developments, but it added a dimension of interests, which in turn could exert influence upon economic and political institutions and actors. According to Weber, religious ideas and interests are mediated by institutions, which develop their own dynamics in conjunction with the everyday needs of their followers.

In the West, a unique type of rationalism of ‘world mastery’ developed out of the confluence of the rationalism of Judaic ethical prophecy, Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christian monasticism and the emerging bourgeois economy of independent cities. This rationalism was taken up by parts of the Protestant Reformation, particularly by Calvinism and ascetic Protestant sects, and systematized into an attitude of inner-worldly asceticism. The ethos of these groups is characterized by self-control, methodical life conduct directed towards work in a calling, and acquisition through a regularly and rationally pursued business. This religious ethos of inner-worldly asceticism matched perfectly with a socially upwardly mobile class of

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small entrepreneurs and a wider economic interest in docile workers. It became a model that was adopted eventually by wider society, contributing to the shaping of a bourgeois, modern Western type of capitalism. Ironically, this originally religious ethos has been transformed in the course of capitalist development into our modern, religiously empty work habits and utilitarian attitudes.

Challenged by critics that his view of religion in the shaping of modern capitalist culture is not well founded, Weber engaged in a cross-culturally comparative study of The Economic Ethics of the World Religions. Studying the religions of China (Weber 1920/1951) and India (Weber 1920/1958) he concludes that they offered to their practitioners very different psychological incentives from Western religions, especially ascetic Protestantism. Confucianism basically affirms the world and does not create the inner tensions which motivated ascetic Protestants to shape the world. And although Indian religions certainly reject the world, they have cultivated techniques to escape from it, rather than transforming it. Moreover, Weber observes that the spread of a religious elite’s ethos to the masses requires institutions of transmission; in the case of ascetic Protestantism, the intense involvement of the laity in congregational forms of prophetic religions was key to the development and spread of an ethic of innerworldly asceticism. But according to Weber, these were absent in China and India.

The Western rationalization processes set in motion by this religiously motivated ethos contributed to the disenchantment of the world by rejecting all irrational means of attaining salvation, and promoted the emergence of rationally organized institutional orders and ethics. According to Weber, this process of disenchantment and secularization removed the religious ethic from central economic, political, and cultural institutions, freeing them from religious control. Whoever chooses to live a life based on religious principles can do so only against the institutionalized logic of ‘unbrotherly’ bureaucratic regimes that no longer recognize religious morality but instead value efficiency, performance, and utility. Therefore, in Western modernity, religion can only survive in more central social institutions if it adapts to their logics and more-or-less sanctifies them. It is only in small voluntary associations at the social margins that religion can preserve an ethos of universal brotherhood. According to Weber, there exists the possibility of new charismatic upheavals that can change people’s inner attitudes – but given the rigidity and efficiency of bureaucratic systems, these revolutionary possibilities are rather unlikely to succeed in the modern West.

Religion, modernity, secularization

Unlike Marx, neither Durkheim nor Weber expected religion to disappear, but both certainly assumed that it would be transformed in the modern world. The next generations of scholars elaborated these arguments in more detail, usually fusing the traditions of Durkheim and Weber as they understood them. Whereas those working in the Durkheimian tradition tended to focus more on the integrative role of religion at the social center, Weberians turned instead to religious movements at the margins of society.

Modernization and civil religion

Talcott Parsons and his students elaborated the Durkheimian perspective on religion, inquiring into the integration of modern societies through generalized religious values and civil religions. Parsons (1902–1979) focused on the interpenetration of Christian (specifically

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sectarian Protestant) values into the very fabric of modern industrial (specifically American) society. According to Parsons, the generalization of Âvoluntarism and individualism made the modern US the most Christian society ever (Parsons 1963).

Robert Bellah’s work typifies this view, especially in his evolutionary theory of religion (Bellah 1970). According to Bellah, humanity’s need for religious symbols is a constant factor in social life – but as human societies have evolved over time, so have the content and dynamics of religious symbol systems. Historically, religion developed alongside of social and self-development, and as societies acquired greater knowledge and achieved greater capacity for social and self-transformation, religious belief concurrently has become characterized by individual choice. Bellah argues for a five-stage schema of the evolution of religion, ranging from primitive to modern. This schema views religion in the modern West – paradigmatically the Protestant US – as more highly developed and normatively better than other less rationalized and more magical forms. Bellah claims that the doctrinal diversity of Protestantism and the freedom of individuals to choose belief are not evidence of secularization, but rather evidence of human progress.

Following ideas of civil religion earlier explored by Rousseau and Durkheim, Bellah sought institutional settings where essential American values such as civic activism and individualism were interpreted, dramatized, and ritually enacted. Focusing on Presidential addresses at certain decisive moments in American history, he identified expressions of nationally shared ultimate values and a vision of the nation’s calling, and claimed civil religion’s continuing if fragile existence in America. According to Bellah, the particulars of American civil religion have incorporated Protestant Christian themes of covenant, death, and resurrection or rebirth, and its ritual calendar emphasizes the central importance of family and local community in American democracy. Civil religion, through narrative and collective ritual experience, creates a moral and affective consensus for democratic participation.

In later works, Bellah expresses concern that the actual practice of civil religion in the US has diminished to the point where it no longer provides moral cohesion, and worries that individualism threatens to undermine the moral consensus for participation upon which American democracy is built (Bellah 1975). In Habits of the Heart (1985), Bellah and his colleagues conclude that an individualistic ethos cannot supply the moral cohesion needed for democracy, and relocates the affective and cognitive resources necessary for democratic participation back within institutional churches, especially liberal Protestant ones.

Building on Bellah’s approach, Robert Wuthnow (1988) presents an alternative characterization of religion in the contemporary US. Wuthnow argues that, in contrast to the early twentieth-century US when religion was primarily allied with and supportive of the state, religion since the Second World War is increasingly politically polarized and often mobilized against government and other political actors. Brought about by post-war economic expansion and a strong and active state, and catalyzed by special purpose groups, the religious landscape in the contemporary US has been restructured: a cleavage between liberal and conservative religionists has replaced denominationalism as the primary source of identification and religio-political engagement .

The Parsons School also sought to elaborate aspects of Max Weber’s sociology of religion, but their reception of it was rather unfortunate. As translator of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic, Talcott Parsons encouraged his students to look for its analogs all over the world. The idea was to identify carriers of inner-worldly asceticism, which would promote the passage of ‘underdeveloped’ societies into a Western type of modernity. This represents a rather peculiar reading of Weber. Weber was not an evolutionist thinker, but a historicist one; he placed no

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credence in stage theories of societal development, nor did he believe that social scientists could identify significant general ‘laws’ of social life. Moreover, this approach ignores Weber’s very ambiguous judgment on Western modernity, and transforms it into an optimistic theory of modernization and progress. It also leaves aside Weber’s analysis of the affinity between certain classes and status groups with particular types of religious plausibility structures. Accordingly, scholars using this approach identified such diverse classes as reform bureaucrats and the military as potential carriers of modernization, classes which have little to do with the attitudes Weber has ascribed to ascetic Protestantism. Nevertheless, the Parsons School has produced some impressive studies, most importantly Robert Bellah’s (1957) Tokugawa Religion (see also Shmuel Eisenstadt 1968).

Collapsed canopies and various paths of secularization

Peter Berger’s (1967) articulation of a theory of secularization represents an alternative school of thought. Berger claims that religion’s power to shape social life has largely diminished in Western modernity because of institutional differentiation, the pluralization of worldviews, and a loss of plausibility structures. Berger grounds his theory in a phenomenological perspective, according to which religious worldviews provide shields from the chaotic, uncontrollable aspects of the world which humans inhabit. A religious worldview is reproduced through socialization; since it dominates the social contexts individuals are born into, they take it for granted and learn to interpret their experiences according to this cognitive structure. But religion can remain strong in societies only where it is supported by a dialectical, mutually sustaining, and mutually determining relationship with a social base or plausibility structure. Further, religion is at its strongest when it has a monopoly in a relatively stable society – when it comprises a ‘sacred canopy’ within which individuals understand and interpret their social existence, and where there is an absence of competing interpretationsÂ.

It follows from this characterization that secularization is an inevitable result of change within the economic and social contexts upon which religious worldviews depend. Secularization occurs when a religious worldview and the social reality no longer coincide because its plausibility structures erode, and a formerly monopolistic religious worldview becomes open to revision and a plurality of interpretations. Once the sacred canopy collapses, religion progressively loses its power to shape social life. Although Berger no longer holds these views, they represent his most influential contribution to the sociology of religion; they have had a major impact on scholars like Nancy T. Ammerman (1987) and James D. Hunter (1983).

Whereas Berger sees secularization as a necessary consequence of modernization on an abstract and general level, David Martin (1978) has focused on secularization from a concrete and historical, comparative institutional perspective. Rather sceptical about the concept of secularization, Martin shows in an admirable comparative study how secularization was conditioned by the character of religious institutions and their relationships to the state. Martin locates the occurrence of secularization at three different social levels of analysis: at the level of social institutions, at the level of belief, and at the level of a people’s ethos. He then proposes an ideal-typical schema that classifies the characteristics of nation states along several dimensions, and uses this schema to show how variation in the historical position of religion during state formation, the level of pluralism, and the logics embedded within religions practiced in particular settings, together produce different patterns of secularization. Martin’s work does not simply assume secularization as a fact, but shows how different historical

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conditions produce secularization at different levels of society. For example, historically France’s religious monopoly was politically challenged by secular institutions, which led to a comprehensive victory of secularism. In contrast, the separation of church and state and the pluralistic organization of religion in the US prevented conflict at the political level, and therefore, secularization primarily occurred on the level of the religious ethos. Martin’s work remains among the most sophisticated of empirical and theoretical studies of secularization.

Lively margins

Bryan R. Wilson’s (1982) studies of sectarianism, executed mostly in the interpretive tradition of Weber, explore an important aspect of secularization theories: the marginalization of religion. Wilson understood the central institutions of modern Western societies to be thoroughly secularized, but demonstrated that religious belief and practice endure among socially marginalized groups. He theorized the distinctiveness of these sectarian forms of religious practice.

Wilson observes that, whereas many in modern societies neither believe nor practice religion and the behaviors of mainline church members are rarely driven by religiosity, within modern sects one can yet observe the powerful social consequences of religion in individual lives. Sects shape in their adherents undifferentiated religious identities, which spill over and suffuse the whole of their lives. For the socially marginalized – for example, for temporal or generational groups such as adolescents and young adults – sects offer reassurance and comfort in the form of salvation beliefs. And with strong ethical norms and distinctive styles of life, sects bring their converts into a social world in which they can perceive themselves as integral to a social group, and in which they are aided in reinterpreting painful experiences of marginality.

Consistent with secularization theory, sectarian religion is withdrawn from the public sphere; sectarians do not engage in public discourse and have little effect on society as a whole. While incorporating aspects of modernity’s rational procedures in their organization and practices, they distinguish themselves from modern society by constituting themselves in opposition to it in their creation of undifferentiated identities and distinctive ways of life. It is Wilson’s view that social conditions for sectarian adherence include not only social marginality in its modern forms, but also the prerequisite of the lack of previous religious socialization.

Other scholars have paid attention to religion on society’s margins in studies of the emergence of new religious movements. Many recent religious movements of Asian origin, such as Hare Krishna, the Unification Church of Reverend Moon, and Soka Gakkai have been well studied, with several of these studies making important theoretical contributions to the study of religion, and especially to understanding conversion processes (Lofland and Stark 1965, 1985; Beckford 1976; Snow and Phillips 1980; Lofland and Skonovd 1983; Barker 1984; Snow and Machalek 1984; Snow 1993).

Privatization

Toward the end of the 1960s and through the 1970s, secularization theories further crystallized and affirmed the view that religious decline in the modern West would inevitably progress. Empirical evidence of secularization was abundant in religion’s increasing loss of power within political and cultural institutions, as well as in declining church attendance

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and aging congregations in many of the countries of Europe. Religion no longer occupied a place at modern societies’ centers, and scholars took for granted that this state of affairs was a necessary consequence of modernization. Even where churches thrived, as they did in the US, it seemed clear that much of this practice, especially within liberal churches, was not so much religiously as socially motivated, reflecting the internal secularization of religious institutions. For some scholars, however, this clear evidence of the decline of religion at the center of modern society propelled them to look for authentic religious Âexpression in more hidden and less public arenas.

Thomas Luckmann’s (1967) work was a harbinger of this turn: he proposed a theory of secularization as privatization which claimed that religion was not disappearing in modernity, but that its locus had shifted from the public sphere to the inner personal experience of individuals. In Luckmann’s view, religion arises as a necessary part of the socialpsychological, meaning-making process in which humans are individuated and selves created. Although religious institutions are historically common, it is not necessary that religion be institutionalized for it to endure. Rather, religion endures in human history because it is a constitutive element of the formation of selves; it is the Âanthropological conditions giving rise to religion that are indeed universal.

Luckmann describes the historical process of secularization in the West as a consequence of the endurance, growth, and internal workings of religious institutions. As churches grew, they developed secular interests and did not remain exclusively determined by their religious functions. Specialization within these institutions required that religious norms become differentiated from secular norms, and the disjuncture between the two generated inconsistencies between doctrine and its institutional expression. Therefore, where previously religion was merely taken for granted, people were given cause to reflect upon it. Human reflection thereby transformed religion into an increasingly subjective reality.

In this process, institutional religion became progressively emptied of meaning, and the erosion of public religion was replaced by its increased importance in the private sphere. In modern societies, then, religions exist in ever more privatized forms and their meanings become properties of individual selves, and thus ‘invisible.’ In this view, secularization is the process of religious institutions’ decline, but religion still endures as its social locations shift. Therefore, the new locus of religion in modernity is individuals’ inner lives, even if this inner experience is largely unavailable to empirical scrutiny.

Grace Davie (1994, 2000) has built on this perspective by analyzing the discrepancy between believing and belonging. She shows that the majority of Europeans, and the British in particular, are neither secular nor atheist. Quite the contrary, many do believe in a God or other higher powers, and membership in religious associations is rather high. It is Davie’s view that it is not Europeans’ religious believing, but only their relatively infrequent participation in religious practices compared to those in non-European countries, that has declined.

Danièle Hervieu-Léger (1999) has likewise focused on the endurance of religious belief in modernity as religion has become increasingly privatized – but interestingly, she attempts a middle way between functional and substantive definitions of religion such that she can both affirm the reality of ‘invisible religions’ and account for many empirical instances of apparent religious revitalization. She observes that, although religion has declined in modernity because of scientific rationality and the concomitant autonomy and importance accorded to the self, questions of meaning and desire for experiences of sacredness are still common among modern societies. Following the Weberian insight that religion is fundamentally transformed in modernity, she theorizes this transformation as one in modes of belief, thereby defining

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religion as a way of believing whose authority practitioners legitimize by appeal to a tradition in a ‘chain of memory.’ Although Hervieu-Léger’s definition of religion is still quite broad, it allows her to helpfully distinguish modern effervescent expressions of sacredness, such as are found in sport, from instances of religiousness which, whether collective or privatized, constitutively involve people making use of narratives – often fragmentary ones, given the nature of high modernity – to connect their beliefs and practices to a lineage.

Inspired by Luckmann or perhaps by a partial appropriation of Durkheim, other sociologists have proposed an even broader understanding of religion in modernity, where nearly any form of self-transcendence may constitute ‘religion,’ from banal everyday activities to ‘effervescent’ social gatherings. In this view, even private hobbies, shopping in a supermarket, barbecues, or soccer games can be religious phenomena, with still other quotidian experiences and practices classified as implicitly or quasireligious. This view reveals one of the primary problems in attempting to take functional definitions of religion to their logical conclusion.

Secularism, pluralism, and religious resurgence

By the late 1970s it had become apparent that a resurgence of religion was taking place globally, evident from the United States to the Middle East, from South Asia and Africa even to parts of Europe. A revitalization of religion was underway in the US, as new religious movements spread across the Bay area in California and conservative religious forces – Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon – got organized in order to be saved from the 1960s (Tipton 1982). At the same time, religious revivals were taking place across the globe: Islam returned as a public force in the Middle East and beyond, religion was playing a forceful role in the shaping of ethnic identities and the fueling of ethnic conflicts from India and Sri Lanka (Tambiah 1992, 1996) to the Sudan and Ireland, and religious movements challenged the secular state in several areas of the world (Juergensmeyer 1993). This overwhelming empirical evidence of religious resurgence in modernity challenged the old paradigm of the classics and their revisionist readings and new syntheses.

Structural conditions of secularization

In the wake of empirical evidence of religious revitalization, the problematic aspects of older secularization theories became the subject of increasing criticism, revision, and reformulation, resulting in a clearer definition of the conditions of secularization and an extended elaboration of secularization as a theory of social differentiation. Recognizing the empirical reality of religious resurgence, those working within secularization theory strove to theorize secularization in ways that did not entail its inevitability and irreversibility, and moved towards conceptualizations of secularization as an historical process to be located and explored.

Following upon Martin’s groundbreaking study, scholars sought to elaborate and distinguish secularization at different levels of analysis and to systematize characteristics of secularization within a larger conceptual framework. Among those taking this synthetic approach, Karel Dobbelaere’s (1981) work is perhaps the most comprehensive. Dobbelaere’s argument for a multidimensional concept of secularization proposes that secularization be studied through the examination of interrelated processes at three different levels of analysis. Secularization can occur through laicization – the societal differentiation of religion from other social formations and institutions – through organizational religious change, such as

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may occur within denominations, and in the religious involvement of individuals. Dobbelaere suggests that the relations between secularizing tendencies at each of these three levels do not have determinate outcomes and should be empirically investigated in order to more clearly theorize them. Although Dobbelaere believes that secularization is a contingent process, not a necessary or irreversible one, his canvas of empirical studies led him to conclude that secularization is empirically, if not theoretically, linearly progressive in the modern West.

Dobbelaere’s theory has been influential in recent years, especially among those interested in analyzing organizational religious change. His formulation has been used successfully to elaborate the occurrence of organization-level secularization in the US through analyses of denominational leadership (Chaves 1993). Unlike the earlier comprehensive narratives, the newer frameworks have allowed scholars to explore the structural conditions of secularization at various levels of analysis, and have the capacity to provide explanations for empirically specific instances of secularization in modern societies.

Homo religionomicus

Concurrent with work advancing secularization theory in the 1970s and 1980s, other scholars began a move towards its wholesale rejection, and reinterpreted evidence of varying levels of religious participation among nation states and across religious denominations under a utilitarian rubric. These mostly North American scholars have been led by Rodney Stark and William S. Bainbridge (1979), who first used rational choice principles to construct a theory of religion. Stark and Bainbridge begin with the utilitarian assumption that individuals act to attain preferred ends while minimizing costs in an environment of opportunities and constraints. But the benefits desired by individuals are sometimes unattainable, either because of their social structural contexts, or because of the physical human limitations imposed by illness, disability, and the inevitability of death. In these life situations, religious rewards

– such as doctrines promising salvation and eternal life, or religious experiences providing comfort and emotional benefits – can be sought as substitutes. In this view then, religion is conceptualized as a system of compensators for benefits unattainable to individuals. And since the human condition is such that the need for compensators – especially as a substitute for the avoidance of death – does not change, demand for religion is understood as relatively constant.

Since individual preferences are left unproblematized and the demand for religious goods are assumed to be constant, the behavior of religious institutions, frequently theorized as following the laws of market dynamics, becomes a primary locus of investigation for those working within this school of thought. Some studies, such as Iannaccone’s (1994) work on the vitality of strict churches, offer explanations for why particular religious organizations are especially attractive to seekers on the religious market. Others, like the historical study of church membership in the US by Finke and Stark (1992), focus on the market behavior of religious organizations, claiming that variations in religious practice should be understood primarily as supply side phenomena. In their view, the amount of freedom allowed in the market, the degree of regulation, and the resulting level of competition among religious organizations determine levels of religious vitality in a given society.

Rational choice theories of religion have gained broad currency among sociologists of religion in recent years. At the same time, this approach has provoked heated criticism (Chaves 1995; Ammerman 1998; Neitz and Mueser 1998; Bruce 1999), especially for its use of a utilitarian psychology, which long ago was demonstrated to be an inadequate theory