Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

restrictions on internal migration) or economic development (e.g., agrarian reform and importsubstitution policies). In some parts of the developing world (e.g., China, India, the Islamic states), extensive legal and political measures attempt to govern the formation, functioning, and dissolution of families more directly through, for example, laws on inheritance, dowry, divorce, and filiation. These more explicit family policies often bear the traces of traditional religious interests, but they may also reflect attempts to ‘‘modernize’’ countries by weakening traditional patriarchal control over the disposition of property and the labor of family members. Thus, family policy in less developed countries, whether indirect or explicit, is inextricably bound to questions of economic development, including those concerning the relationship between population and resources.

As a result, few social scientists today treat comparative family policy as an arena of inquiry separate or distinct from comparative studies of population or economic development policy. In fact, attempts to define ‘‘family policy’’ as a distinct object of study have been conspicuously absent from the scholarly literature since the late 1970s (for an example of one such attempt, see Kamerman and Kahn 1978). In part, waning efforts to define and examine family policy per se reflect heated debates about whether a uniform definition of the ‘‘family’’ is useful or appropriate. Feminist critiques in particular have challenged uniform definitions of the family as overly monolithic, static, and undifferentiated, claiming that these definitions ignore the diversity of family patterns not only in less developed nations but also in ‘‘modern’’ countries such as the United States (Beneria and Roldan 1987; Collins 1991; Baca Zinn 1990).

These definitional disputes have given rise to different concepts of what the family is. For example, some scholars argue that variations in household and kinship relations exist worldwide; they tend to prefer the term ‘‘household’’ to ‘‘family,’’ defining the former as a residential unit wherein people live in close proximity and organize activities to meet daily needs (Chow and Berheide 1994). Others, however, argue that adopting the household as the unit of analysis, with an attendant focus on how households respond ‘‘strategically’’ to the external economic and political environment, obscures conflicts of interest that arise within households (Bourque and Warren 1987; Wolf

1992). These critics tend to conceptualize the family or household not as a unit or entity but as a site that offers a cultural and moral context for the interaction of personalities, for the production and consumption of goods, and for the reproduction of populations (Acker 1988). This view of the family tends to emphasize how different interests within families are shaped by gender and age— interests that are themselves related to competition and conflict between larger systems of authority and of control over labor (e.g., capitalism, socialism, patriarchy) within national settings.

Athough the study of family policy in less developed nations has largely been overtaken by more fundamental debates about the ‘‘proper’’ unit of analysis, some of these arguments provoke new ways of thinking about why developing nations have an interest in the regulation of families. The question of what constitutes a ‘‘family’’ for the purposes of analyzing policy might be found in answers to the question: What is it that families do, in addition to their contributions to population dynamics and economic development, that captures the interest of governments? That is, why do states have a ‘‘compelling interest’’ in families?

Part of an answer may be found in Cherlin’s (1999) definition of the ‘‘public family,’’ a definition that attempts to locate the contribution of families to the public welfare in their caring for dependent members of the population, such as children, the sick, and the elderly. Adapting Cherlin’s definition to a global context, public families may be defined as one adult, or two or more adults who are related by marriage, kin ties, shared parenthood, or coresidence, who is/are taking care of dependents and the dependents themselves. In nearly every society, most caretaking of dependents is performed within a small web of relations like those defined above. Although this work is largely unpaid, it is of great social value, being necessary for the reproduction of a society from one generation to the next. Hence the state’s interest in how well families manage the care of dependents. But government interest extends beyond merely ensuring the replentishment of a population. As Folbre (1994) argues, the caretaking that goes on within families can result in the production of valuable public goods—most notably through the rearing of children who will grow up to be productive adult members of a society. Thus, governments have an interest in promoting

caretaking within families that gives rise to positive collective benefits (productive members of the next generation, including those who will continue to provide caretaking within families).

Policies that provide explicit incentives for family caretaking in the form of tax breaks or government subsidies for day care, parental leave, or child allowances tend to emerge in countries with a highly developed welfare-state appartus, which presumes the existence of large, stable (if not expanding) public revenues. That is, these policies tend to presume an already-high level of economic development that ensures stable public revenues. The European social democracies—in particular, Sweden—are examples in this regard (Acker 1994). However, some developing countries, such as China, have instituted policies that support caretaking in the form of parenting education programs, child allowances, maternity leave, and planning for social security for the aged (Chow and Chen 1994). The difference in the Chinese case, as in that of other less developed nations, is that these policies are tethered to population policies and goals. The Chinese government, for example, makes eligibility for forms of caretaking support contingent on compliance with its onechild policy, levying penalties in the form of fines, wage deductions, possible job demotion, and forfeiture of other social benefits on parents who have a second child (Chow and Chen 1994). Thus, caretaking policies in the developing world are often put into place as a mechanism for achieving family planning or development goals that aim, over the long term, to ensure national prosperity; they less often derive from such prosperity to begin with, as in the West. The extent to which developing countries manage to implement such ‘‘conditional’’ caretaking policies depends on the strength of the state—in particular, on whether this strength relies on autocratic forms of rule (e.g., China). In developing countries with weaker governments or less autocratic systems of power, support for caretaking more often arises from the adoption of programs or initiatives that are funded by international organizations committed to population control and/or globally organized economic growth. These programs often take the form of children’s health initiatives, such as immunization and nutritional-support projects sponsored by the World Health Organization and the World Bank.

A second aspect of governmental interest in the family among less developed countries concerns the role of family and kin networks as the matrix for traditional authority relations. In many emerging nation-states, political power remains locally controlled by clans or confederations of kin that resist attempts by central governments to consolidate power. Loyalties to religious or ethnically based claims to authority also tend to be coupled closely with loyalties to family and larger kin groups. Thus, the emergence of explicit family policies in less developed countries may reflect attempts on the part of central governments to wrest political control from clans or lineages (such as in sub-Saharan Africa; see Migdal 1988). In some parts of the developing world, changes in family law and policy are a function of competition between bureaucratic state interests and traditional religious claims to authority. For example, in the mid-1950s the government of Tunisia outlawed ‘‘repudiation,’’ or the husband’s Quranic, unilateral prerogative to terminate a marriage at will without judicial involvement. Prior to this time, family matters had been regulated by traditional Islamic doctrine, with allegiance to Islamic law being regionally based and deeply rooted in kin loyalties (Charrad 1994). Changes in the Tunisian civil code to abolish repudiation and make judicial intervention mandatory for divorce had the effect of unifying and strengthening the judicial system by creating a national network of courts. In terms of actual implementation of the new code, judges found themselves shifting between the values of traditional Islamic doctrine and the principles of reform. Nonetheless, the new policy has had a transformative effect on the structure of Tunisian rule, strenthening and consolidating the power of civil law. The case of the Philippines offers another example of how government policy toward families reflects competition between religious and more secular authority claims; the 1986 Philippine constitutional statement about the family reflects an uneasy compromise between Roman Catholic groups and more liberal elements of Filipino society (‘‘Proceedings of the Constitutional Commission’’ 1986).

In short, despite widespread disagreement in the literature over definitions of ‘‘family’’ and the scope of ‘‘family policy,’’ government policies in less developed nations reveal interests in the caretaking of dependents and in the consolidation

and centralization of authority that might be usefully thought of as targeting ‘‘the family.’’ In contrast to the field of family policy, the terrain of population policy is much more clearly defined, though no less marked by controversy. Population policies differ from family policies because the former are designed to meet specific demographic goals. The most common population policies found in less developed countries are those that attempt to ameliorate population growth by reducing birthrates, for example, through programs in familyplanning education and in the distribution of contraceptives (International Institute for Sustainable Development 1994). Other population policies attempt to control migration flows from, for example, rural to urban economic sectors in an attempt to control the mobility of labor and patterns of economic development. These migration policies are especially prevalent in sub-Saharan African countries, where increasing urbanization and the influx of wartime refugees from neighboring areas have placed severe pressures on cities and depleted the supply of labor for rural agriculture. For example, in the 1980s Zambia took steps to curb rural-to-urban migration and promote the resettlement of rural areas through such measures as removing subsidies for commodities in urban areas, a ‘‘back to the land’’ policy, and youth training programs in agriculture and farm management, carpentry, and other rural community-building skills (Mijere and Chilivumbo 1994).

Several demographic problems are a source of shared concern among less developed nations. Concern over rapid population growth has motivated a variety of family-oriented laws and programs, including raising the minimum legal age for marriage in order to shorten the reproductive span during which women are exposed to regular sexual activity (Piepmeirer and Hellyer 1977), providing free family-planning services, and, as in China, offering incentives and disincentives for childbearing that involve the provision or withholding of housing, paid maternity leave, and medical or educational services (Greenhalgh 1990; Quah 1990).

Another demographic problem faced by many less developed countries is the lengthening of childhood dependency through adolescence and the concomitant rise of an independent youth culture brought about by the earlier onset of puberty and rising ages at marriage (United Nations

1989). A number of governments in Asia have established sex education or ‘‘family life education’’ policies and programs that target burgeoning adolescent populations, partly as a way of maintaining government family-planning programs in the face of declining levels of marital fertility (Xenos 1990). Other governments have increasingly differentiated youth from adults in their constitutions (Boli-Bennett and Meyer 1978), and programs that explicitly target adolescents and youth are an increasingly important element of social policy in less developed nations (see Central Committee on Youth 1988; Paxman 1984).

Another emerging demographic problem affecting many less developed countries is the growth of the aged population, a situation that typically arises whenever birthrates fall. While less developed nations may have a clear and compelling interest in the production of children as ‘‘public goods,’’ the question of how to care for a growing population of the aged amid declining birthrates and the emergence of smaller families raises thorny issues. In some countries, policies are being considered to keep this burden within families rather than making it a government responsibility, reflecting the state’s reluctance to absorb the costs of dependency among those who are no longer members of the productive work force.

All three of the above concerns—about rapid population growth, an expanding youth culture, and care for the aged—mark the recent history of policy in China. The Chinese one-child policy was adopted in 1979 to ameliorate population pressure on China’s food supply and to reduce state expenditures. Later, it developed into a policy promoting modernization and economic development, with the Chinese government offering several rationales for planned fertility: It would foster better health care for children and mothers, establish better social conditions for the rearing of future generations, increase work efficiency and political awareness, and promote equality of the sexes (Huang 1982). The government created a number of assistance programs, such as fertility education, free birth control and abortion, and planning for social security for the aged; it also offered numerous economic incentives for compliance, such as extra materinity leave, housing or

farmland, free doctor visits, day care, and wage bonuses.

Overall, these provisions appear to have relieved China’s population crisis: As of 1994, population growth rates were the lowest since 1949, and the percentages of women marrying at an early age and bearing more than one child have declined (Beijing Review 1995). But because enforecement of the one-child policy is left to local jurisdictions, implementation and outcomes vary by location. The policy appears to have gained greater acceptance in the wealthier, more urban provinces, where the incentives are more abundant. Even in these areas, however, the policy has had an important, unanticipated consequence: The preciousness of the single child has led parents, especially mothers, to spend more time on child care and housework than parents in multiple-child households. Instead of promoting women’s greater participation in employment, the policy has led to a reassertion of women’s traditional roles as homemakers and nurturers. The policy’s weakening of the traditional Chinese system of old-age dependence on adult children (primarily sons) was more readily anticipated, but an alternative system of old-age support has yet to emerge.

As the aims (though not the consequences) of the Chinese policy illustrate, another area of concern involves global social movements, including those supporting equal rights for women and other oppressed groups (Bandarage 1997; Chow and Berheide 1994; Staudt 1997). A second global trend is that of environmentalism (McMichael 1996). A variety of ‘‘green’’ movements have emerged that question the assumptions behind unrestricted economic growth and have redefined the debate about development in Third World countries, focusing on the need for agricultural sustainability, the protection of ecologically vulnerable habitats (particularly in the tropical zones), and the maintenance of biodiversity. Concerns about the environmental degradation sometimes wrought by development projects are often coupled with concerns about the rights and well-being of oppressed groups—particularly in Africa, where mining and rural development policies have differentially affected female-headed households

and, as in the case of South Africa, magnified racial inequalities (Schonfield 1994).

Emerging global viewpoints and the sanction given to them by international organizations represent another trend that is likely to influence future policy concerning families in developing countries. In the 1990s alone, various arms of the United Nations offered explicit recommendations on a range of policies, including those on education, family health, women’s labor-force participation, and the family (International Institute for Sustainable Development 1994, 1995). Often these recommendations arose from the participation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in planning and development activities. Such recommendations have been closely tied to the system of international aid that includes donors such as the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development. However, the growing visibility of NGOs at U.N. conferences such as the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development and the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women in part reflects the NGOs’ lack of efficacy at the national level: These conferences provide forums for NGOs that have encountered resistance from national governments or have failed to mobilize support from the local populace (Baden and Goetz 1997).

Local and national resistance to NGO or multilaterial initiatives regarding families sometimes stems from the belief that these initiatives have been ‘‘co-opted’’ by large international aid agencies that neglect the needs of local populations and their families (Mukherjee 1993). For example, donor-influences policies in Malawi have disadvantaged female-headed households, favoring households headed by men, even though the traditional culture recognizes the mother–child pair as the most important family unit (Rodgers 1980; Spring 1986). Donor-influenced structural adjustment policies (SAPs) have become another source of conflict about policy. In response to recent economic stagnation and the Third World debt crisis, these adjustments have involved reducing levels of government employment, ‘‘floating’’ national currencies, and cutting tariffs and subsidies, while encouraging export-driven economic growth through labor-intensive manufacturing. In

many countries, women have responded by increasing their participation in home-based industries, often to provide themselves with security should a spouse lose a formal-sector or government job as a result of structural adjustment (Osirim 1994).

The case of Zimbabwe provides an example of how these SAPs can come into conflict with the aims of government policies concerning families. In the early 1980s, Zimbabwe passed laws that ensured women’s claims to property in the event of divorce and allowed married women to obtain loans and property in their own names to establish businesses. These laws, supplemented by government loan and training programs to assist women entrepreneurs, were designed to encourage the greater participation of women in national development and to advance their civil rights. However, the advent of Zimbabwe’s SAP in 1990 signaled a shift in priorities toward ‘‘shrinking the state.’’ The resulting increases in transportation, wholesale, and licensing costs for businesses were particularly hard on women entrepreneurs, some of whom had become the sole wage earners of their families after their husbands had lost a government job (Osirim 1994).

The increasing involvement of transnational social movements, international donor agencies, and nongovernmental organizations in policy development raises an important issue: the strain in many less developed countries between a Western vision of the family that may be supported by the government, NGOs, or international aid agencies, and the traditional family forms supported at the local, grassroots level. In many less developed countries, the government vision of the family may result from the colonial experience, the exposure of elites to Western society, or the perception that a more Westernized family system fits better with other governmental goals, such as economic development or undermining the traditional authority of kin, religious, or ethnic groups. Wherever political struggle focuses on family and population policies, however, the underlying issue often at stake—to which debates in the literature attest—is competition between alternative definitions of the family.

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JULIE BRINES

FAMILY AND RELIGION

Social scientific notions of the disappearance or vestigialization of religion and family are deeply

rooted in our theoretical conceptions of the social processes that created the modern world and that now are transforming that modernity into postindustrial, postmodern society. Theories of modernization envision social change as entailing the rationalization of all spheres of existence. In a statement characterizing the classic modernization approach, Moore (1963, p. 79) says, ‘‘A major feature of the modern world . . . is that the rational orientation is pervasive and a major basis for deliberate change in virtually every aspect of man’s concerns.’’ There is little room for the seemingly irrational and unscientific impulses of religion, primary emotions, and familial concerns.

With this approach, the secularization of religion is a given. Moore (1963, p. 80) states, ‘‘Even with regard to the role of religion in human affairs, the ‘rational spirit’ takes the form of secularization, the substitution of nonreligious beliefs and practices for religious ones.’’ Though religion survives, it addresses ‘‘personal misfortune and bereavement’’ above all else in modern society (Moore 1963, p. 104).

Furthermore, ‘‘economic modernization’’ tends to have ‘‘negative consequences for extended kinship systems’’ and leads to ‘‘extensive ‘family disorganization’’’ accompanying the ‘‘breakdown of traditional patterns and the incomplete establishment of new institutions’’ (Moore 1963, p. 102). For modernization theorists, although families remain significant as consumption units, the ‘‘decline’’ of the family (Popenoe 1988) is, at minimum, a metaphor for its consignment to a peripheral societal role. The analogue of the notion of linear secularization of religion is the idea of the loss of family functions (Vago 1989, pp. 150–157). Shaped in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, modernization views have continued to dominate public opinion and much of social scientific discourse. In general, according to modernization theories, both family and religion are relegated to the ‘‘private’’ sphere, set apart from the broader social processes and, thus, less significant than those broader processes.

Despite this widespread orientation, a revolution in the social sciences has been gaining momentum over the last twenty years or so. The

message of this revolution is that the modernization perspective is no longer an adequate vision for understanding the dynamics of modernity or the potentials of postmodernity for religion and family. In the sociology of religion, the paradigm shift moves social science away from a focus on religion as a disconnected phenomenon to a much more complex view of the nature of religious interinstitutional relations. Reflecting this shift, numerous scholars have begun to examine religion as an influence on and as an effect of varied social, political, and economic variables (e.g., Carter 1996; Cousineau 1998; Hammond 1985; Misztal and Shupe 1992; Roberts 1995; Rubenstein 1987; Shupe and Misztal 1998; Swatos 1992; Witte 1993). A market model of religion, based in rational choice propositions, has become the most strongly debated version of the new way of looking at the religious institution (Hadden 1995; Warner 1993; Young 1997).

Similarly for the family, there are many who now argue that, in spite of its changing forms and functions, the family as an institution remains crucially central to social processes and to the patterns of change determining the future of human societies (cf. Cherlin 1996). If not taken into consideration, family processes themselves are liable to torpedo efforts at planned social change and to deflect the vectors of unplanned change in unexpected directions (Settles 1996).

Attuned to the inter-institutional perspective, this article examines the linkage between family and religion. Then, after discussing social change processes, we make the point that the religion and family linkage today is important not only in the burgeoning private sphere but in the public realm as well. In spite of its importance, sociologists have given relatively little attention to family and religion together (Thomas and Cornwall 1990). A few journal articles and four collected volumes have addressed this institutional linkage. D’Antonio and Aldous (1983) and Thomas (1988) edited general volumes, and a collection by Ammerman and Roof (1995) focused on family and religion in relation to work. As of 1999, only one book (Houseknecht and Pankhurst 2000) had taken an international comparative approach to the topic. (An expanded

discussion of some of the themes presented here can be found in the introduction of the latter volume.)

THE RELIGION AND FAMILY LINKAGE

In order to understand the significance of religion and family for both the private and public spheres, we must see clearly their unique characteristics and how they interrelate. The inter-institutional relations between family and religion are strong and qualitatively different from other institutional relationships. Berger (1967) noted that in premodern societies kinship was permeated with religious meaning, and in modern societies religion remains closely connected to the family. Hargrove (1979), in her systematization of the sociology of religion, argued that religion and family have had a close relationship throughout history in both Western and non-Western societies. D’Antonio and colleagues (1982) also stressed the significance of the connections between these two institutions.

Both the familial and religious institutions are characterized by what MacIver (1970, p. 45) called cultural rather than secondary interests. In other words, associations within the religious and familial spheres pursue interests for their own sake, because they bring direct satisfaction, not because they are means to other interests, as in the case of economy and polity. Both family and religion are devoted to organizing primary group relations. They stand out as the only two institutions that deal with the person as a whole rather than just segmented aspects of individual lives. These various similarities that religion and family share serve to strengthen the inter-institutional ties between them.

The interrelations between the institutions of religion and family are reciprocal (Thomas and Henry 1985; Thornton 1985). Religion provides the symbolic legitimation for family patterns (cf. Berger 1969), and the family is a requisite for a vigorous religious system because it produces members and instills them with religious values. In fact, numerous familial events are marked in religious contexts (e.g., weddings and funerals), and many religious observances take place within the familial setting (e.g., prayers at meals and bedtime).

The special affinity of religion and family as institutions takes varied forms. Almost everywhere, religion provides ritual support for family and kinship structures. This is the case even in a highly secularized society such as Sweden (Trost and Palm 2000). In some societies, this ritual support may be seen in ancestor rites or memorialization, for example, in Cameroonian Kedjom rites (Diduk and Maynard 2000), Japan’s core religion (Smith 2000), Taiwan’s folk religion (Yang et al. 2000), and French Mormonism (Jarvis 2000). Such practices support family life and, at the same time, fulfill a central function for religion itself (cf. Berger 1969, p. 62). In fact, Jarvis argues that the familism of Mormonism, expressed both ritually and in church values, is its greatest asset in the eroding environment for traditional families in France. Moreover, utopian experiments and new religious movements often take the family as their essential focus. According to Christiano (2000), in the Unification Church (‘‘Moonies’’), the family serves as more than the organizing metaphor for the group: It provides a basic model for the church’s self-conception.

FAMILY, RELIGION, AND SOCIAL CHANGE

The institutions of family and religion, in their interactions with each other and with the rest of society, can be considered in terms of two broad social change patterns—institutional differentiation and institutional dominance. Secularization can be seen as a special instance of institutional differentiation, and we discuss the concept and its use below, indicating the value of religious economy models over the conventional secularization approach.

Institutional Differentiation. Underlying all the dimensions of social change is the notion of institutional differentiation. This phenomenon implies greater specialization. Although the paths and extent of institutional differentiation vary across societies, when differentiation does proceed, we see fundamental changes in inter-institutional relations (cf. Alexander and Colomy 1990; Beckford 1989). Institutional differentiation affects all institutions, and we argue more broadly that one cannot assume inter-institutional isolation of religion

and family in the private sphere, even in highly differentiated societies. The effects of these institutions are always felt across inter-institutional divisions in some measure. In this section, we examine the issue of differentiation of religion and family conceptually.

Our previous description of the religion and family linkage as involving special affinity and reciprocity was not to say that religion and family always and everywhere are, or must be, equally intimately entangled. We can see a continuum in the level of differentiation of these institutions. On the one end of the continuum, Islam in Egypt (Houseknecht 2000) displays a lack of differentiation, an elaborate interweaving of the two institutions that makes each strongly dependent on the other. And research on the Cameroonian Kedjom funerary rites (Diduk and Maynard 2000) provides an example of religious practices that are hardly differentiated from the kinship context; they are precisely an affirmation of the kinship patterns of Kedjom society.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Sweden, a country in which the Lutheran Church is officially established and a large majority of the population are nominal members, is highly secular. Developments in the family there have widely diverged from the traditional model that Protestant Christianity had advocated. In Sweden, the two institutions are intertwined only in limited ways (Trost and Palm 2000). It is primarily in regard to lifecycle rites that the two intersect. The individualized faith of many Americans also accompanies a highly differentiated system of institutional relationships (Christiano 2000).

Secularization Theories. Secularization is a special process of differentiation in which that which was previously under the ‘‘sacred canopy’’ (Berger 1969) of religion is removed from that realm and placed in a nonreligious institutional context. Allegedly, education, the acceptance of science, urbanization, industrialized work-life, and the like take away the mystery of religion and strip it of its ‘‘plausibility’’ in many areas of concern. Thus, cure of disease, protection from misfortune, explanation of the universe, and so forth are made

rational and thus not subject to religious intervention. In this approach, religion remains relevant only for very personal spiritual quests and solace in the private sphere, and most of its social institutional ramifications become, first, empty shells, and eventually vanish.

The notion of a unilinear process of secularization has long troubled many sociologists (cf. Hadden and Shupe 1986; Hadden 1987; Hammond 1985). Some have developed variants that see secularization as a cyclical process with long historical waves. Nisbet (1970), for example, reminds us of the rationality of the eras of classical Greece and of the Renaissance and Age of Reason, with the period from first century Rome to the Renaissance having Christianity ‘‘virtually eliminating secular rationalism from the European continent for more than a thousand years’’ (p. 391). Though we are now in a rationalizing or secularizing age, ‘‘To argue permanence for this age would be, on the testimony of history, absurd’’ (p. 391). Recently, as we shall see, sociologists of religion have focused upon shorter waves of secularization and have viewed the process as self-limiting. The most prominent versions of this approach apply economic models to religious markets, putting aside the notion that religion must be irrational or otherwise antimodern. Some of these postsecularization theorists argue for a rational choice approach to religion (Young 1997), an approach that is largely alien to the mode of thought underlying secularization theory.

In the long debate about the validity of notions of secularization within the sociology of religion, it has become clear that secularization cannot be understood in a simplistic way, if one wants to keep the concept at all. While certain evidence of secularization seems apparent, there are countermovements suggesting that religion is truly vital in the modern world (cf. Marty and Appleby 1995). The spread of Liberation Theology throughout Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s (Berryman 1987; Smith 1991), followed by the more recent explosion of evangelical, fundamentalist, and pentecostal Protestantism in the same world region (Martin 1990), suggest the power of the human concern regarding spiritual or nonempirical matters. Similarly, the tenacious attachment of Americans to belief in God (Greeley 1989, 1992; cf. Wald

1986), their high levels of religious activity, and the numerical growth and public voice of evangelical Protestantism indicate that religious sentiment of some sort is compatible even with a society that is highly developed socioeconomically. Going beyond the simple Marxist assertion that religion is illusion, even if religious claims are often masks for the interests of power or wealth, religion must be understood as a very real and consequential part of sociocultural life.

Casanova (1994) carried out one of the most extensive recent cross-cultural analyses of religion, a close examination of the conditions of evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism in the United States and of Catholicism in Brazil, Spain, and Poland. He argued that the social scientific literature depicts secularization as having three correlated dimensions, but his research challenges this idea by convincingly showing that the three dimensions are not always present together. First, Casanova accepts the validity of claims that secularization entails a structural differentiation of the religious institution from other institutions as societal modernization takes place. This differentiation means, in particular, the ‘‘emancipation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms’’ (Casanova 1994, p. 6). However, the second dynamic often subsumed under secularization—the decline in religious beliefs and practices—cannot be taken for granted, and it does not necessarily follow from the first. The third dynamic, which is the core of the privatization thesis, is that religion will sequester itself in the private sphere under modernity, and, according to some analysts, will be marginalized there. However, this process, too, cannot be assumed to be associated with secularizing institutional differentiation. The second and third dynamics are unwarranted correlates of the first. While Casanova would have us accept the first as the true essence of secularization, he argues that the second and third are not supported by empirical evidence and should not be seen as part of the secularization process.

While there is no question that institutional differentiation is a sort of master process of the modern era, we cannot assume that it has progressed equally far everywhere. As already noted,

cases like modern Egypt and Cameroon, though both experiencing significant pressures toward greater differentiation, evidence far less differentiation between family and religion, and between these two and other institutions, than does, for example, the United States or Sweden. Furthermore, even if there is great differentiation, one cannot presume that the influences of the religious and familial institutions end. As the debates on abortion policy illustrate, even in a highly differentiated society like the United States, there is plenty of room for religious assertions beyond the alleged parameters of secularized religion and into political life. This circumstance indicates that we cannot take for granted notions of the irrelevance of religion for social policy, as secularist analysts are prone to do.

In addition, it also is possible for there to be de-differentiation in a highly differentiated society. Some of this has happened in Belarus during the post-Soviet period (Vardomatskii and Pankhurst 2000). Better known to the U.S. public is the recent passage of laws in Russia favoring the Russian Orthodox Church (Pankhurst 1998) after many decades of antireligious, extremely secularist communist control under the Soviets and after a brief period of strict legal disestablishment of all religions between 1991 and 1997. Here are instances of seeming de-differentiation, where the gap between politics and religion is narrowed. Similarly, the debate in Indonesia over divorce law indicates efforts to reassert religious authority over a legal arena that had been under state control for several decades (Cammack et al. 2000).

Religious and Familial Markets. The notion of unilinear secularization seems untenable, but there are certainly processes of decline and growth in religious phenomena that must be explained. The general inter-institutional perspective focuses attention on relationships that are important for these variations in the strength and character of religion. In addition, sociologists of religion have found market model approaches useful, within the general inter-institutional perspective, for generating testable hypotheses about several aspects of religion and family in various societies.

Social differentiation approaches, including secularization theories, start from observations of