Социология религии_общее (англ.) / Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

judiciously and are likely to make more sense in some parts of the world than in others.8

Whatever the theoretical difficulties, it is abundantly clear – given the nature of the religious phenomena described in this section – that a global frame of reference is increasingly necessary. And within such a framework, careful comparative analysis becomes the most obvious way to work if we are to reveal the specific features of particular cases, from which accumulations of data begin to emerge. Patterns and connections begin to form, which in turn suggest heuristic (and sometimes full-fledged theoretical) possibilities, for example the “ideal type” of fundamentalisms already outlined. Martin’s work on global Pentecostalisms offers another example (Martin 2002). Building from encyclopedic reading in the field, largely of relatively small-scale anthropological studies, Martin constructs a framework through which to “make sense” of these very different situations. The framework is strong enough to guide the reader’s thinking, but sufficiently flexible to allow the empirical material to speak for itself. Among many emergent themes, Martin makes it abundantly clear that circumstances alter cases, once again underlining the essential point: The world is indeed contingent and effective sociological thinking must take account of this fact, if it is to understand (or even begin to understand) the bewildering variety of ways in which religion and modernity interconnect.

8It is interesting, for example, that Finke and Stark’s contribution to this volume makes reference to both the Latin American (Pentecostal) and the fundamentalist cases. RCT undoubtedly sheds light on these examples (especially the former), alongside other theoretical perspectives. Gill’s work (1998, 1999) on Latin America is particularly helpful in this respect.

PART TWO

Religion and Social Change

to equalize or even reverse the relative sizes of the religions. It looks like the process that lies beneath the so-called decline of the mainline Protestant denominations in the United States (Hout et al. 2001). Imagine if their higher fertility made Catholics the dominant religion in Northern Ireland or Muslims the dominant religion in Israel (see Kennedy 1973 for a discussion of the Northern Irish case). Suddenly demography looks relevant for religion after all.

The power of demographic analysis comes from this ability to understand how society changes even when no member of society has changed. That makes it a quintessentially sociological form of explanation – at once powerful, complete, and free of reference to individual change. Arthur Stinchcombe considered this style of demographic explanation in his classic text, Constructing Social Theories (1968), but too few sociologists practice it.

Research has shown that demography plays a role in real life; it is far more than thought experiments. As religious researchers accumulate ever-longer time series and ever-more-sophisticated databases, the potential for evaluating demographic explanations of religious beliefs and practices will grow. And future sociologists of religion will see a demography chapter as a natural part of their handbook.

BASICS: POPULATION, EVENT, AND EXPOSURE

The most basic notion in demography is the “population,” the pool of people being studied. The demographer’s concept of population includes the everyday meaning, that is, the people inside some geographic or political boundary. But in principle, a population is any aggregation worth studying, for example, Protestant clergy, people raised Jewish, native-born children of immigrants. Make population as broad or narrow as your theory warrants. Populations do not even necessarily have to be composed of living beings, for example, Catholic parishes, utopian communes, and faith-based social welfare agencies might be populations (e.g., Carroll and Hannan 2000). The idea is so basic that it probably seems trite, but it is also so basic that it is completely indispensable.

The twin ideas of “event” and “exposure” are also essential ideas to demographers. They are less intuitive. A demographer’s understanding of what counts as an event is a bit narrower than the everyday usage. Demographers are mostly interested in events that have consequences for the size of the population; births, deaths, and moves into or out of a population can be thought of as the main events. Marriages, divorces, enrollment in school, retirements, and other important transitions that are closely tied to the life cycle have gotten attention from demographers over the years. For religious researchers the list would be expanded to include baptisms, confessions of faith, and annulments for individuals as well as foundings, mergers, and schisms within populations of religious organizations (e.g., denominations, congregations, or monasteries). In principle, though, any event might be studied using demographic methods.

“Exposure” is the opportunity or risk of experiencing an event. Demographers characteristically use the phrase “exposure to risk” even when the event in question is more of an opportunity than a risk for what amounts to historical reasons: The ideas arose first in the study of mortality. Exposure is important because events cannot happen to people who are not exposed to the risk (or opportunity) of the event occurring. For the demographer, exposure is important because some women are too young to have children; some are too old; married people cannot get married again without first getting

divorced, and so on. In religious research, this is likely to be more simple: A person cannot convert from religion A to B unless she is an A to begin with. The most basic activity in demographic research consists of measuring “rates” – the ratio of the number of events to the number of people at risk of having an event. Most people are familiar with the idea of a fertility rate, defined as the ratio of births to women of childbearing age. Similarly, the marriage rate is the ratio of the number of marriages to the number of unmarried people; the divorce rate is the ratio of the number of divorces to the number of married people. Rates are important because they estimate the probability that the event in question will happen to an individual much more accurately than do estimates that mix into the calculation people who are not at risk of having the event occur.

All of this linking people to the risk of events comes together in a simple equation that is true by definition: The number of events equals the probability that an event will occur to a person at risk of the event times the number of people at risk. This simple reexpression of the obvious becomes important when change occurs. The number of events may change over time if either the rate or the number of people at risk changes. So, for example, the number of births in the United States rose from 1980 to 1989 even though the birth rate did not because the number of women between fifteen and fortynine years old increased. This is useful because while probabilities refer to behavior of individuals, the number of people at risk is the factor that refers only to the population and does not involve behavior per se. When a change can be attributed to a change in the probability of an event occurring, then the explanation lies in something that influences the behavior of interest. By contrast, if the number of events increases or decreases because the number of people at risk changed, then “demography” is the full explanation – as in nobody behaved any differently, there just happened to be more people to act in the usual way. When demography is the full explanation, theories about behavioral change are irrelevant.

The most obvious application in the sociology of religion would be to note that the number of church members in a given locale or denomination rose because the population increased. Trivial as it sounds, this was an important point to be made when the Archdiocese of San Francisco closed several parishes in commercial districts while opening new suburban parishes. The San Francisco Examiner asked in an editorial why the residents of the commercial districts were giving up religion. The newspaper missed the point that as the office buildings replaced apartments, the population in those districts declined. The people still there were as religious as ever – they used that fact about themselves to lobby the bishop to reverse his decision. But there were fewer of them in the old neighborhood and more in the suburbs. The reallocation of priests made demographic sense and told nothing about the relative piety of downtown and suburban Catholics.

HETEROGENEITY AND EXPLANATION

The idea of linking people at risk of events to the rate at which those events occur has even greater payoff when the rates in question vary systematically across important categories. Then the distribution of the population across those categories can come into the explanation of observed changes in either the number of events or in the overall rate at which those events occur. Most characteristically, the mortality rate varies a great

deal with age: The mortality rate is much lower for people in their twenties than for people in their sixties. Then a change in the population that increases the number of twenty-somethings while the number of sixty-somethings stays the same or goes down will decrease the overall mortality rate. The number of deaths in Florida rose dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s despite improved overall longevity in the United States because so many people retired to Florida during those years, not because the environment in Florida suddenly became hazardous.

The religious connection here is in the relationship between age and religiosity. The currently aging American population will probably increase the church attendance rate because church attendance is also lower for twenty-somethings than it is for sixtysomethings. We may never see this change, however, because rising immigration and falling marriage and fertility counteract it. The analysis of the heterogeneity in all these rates is grist for the demographer interested in religious behavior.

DEMOGRAPHY AND RELIGIOUS RESEARCH

Religion has long been recognized by demographers as an important factor in fertility and migration. More recently, demographers have become aware of important religious differences in mortality. Hummer et al. (1999) published life tables for the religiously active and inactive that show the advantage that the religious enjoy. McCullough et al. (2000) compiled forty-two independent studies of religious involvement and mortality. Not only did researchers consistently find that involvement in religion prolongs life, but they also found that religion adds to the effects of things – like stable marriage – that often go with religious involvement.

An earlier line of research documented large differences between the fertility of Catholics and Protestants during the baby boom (e.g., Westoff and Jones 1979; Mosher and Bachrach 1996). At the point of peak difference (in the late 1950s), Catholic women were averaging one more birth than Protestant women were having. By 1970 – a span of just fifteen years – the difference was gone. Although most researchers gave scant attention to differences among Protestant women of different faiths, recent work shows that they were just as large as the Protestant-Catholic gap (Hout et al. 2001). Women from evangelical and fundamentalist denominations were averaging one birth more than women from mainline denominations were having. This gap, too, was gone by the early 1970s. Another way to summarize this pattern is to note that women from mainline Protestant denominations contributed what amounted to a baby blip; the baby boom was concentrated among Catholic, evangelical, and fundamentalist women.

These studies view religion as the cause of important demographic differences. The persistence of religion from one generation to another means that demographic differences based in religion in one generation show up as religious differences based in demography a generation later. I have already referred to the recent work my colleagues and I have done on the role of fertility differences in the decline of mainline Protestant denominations. In a companion paper we ask why Catholics’ demographic advantages – higher fertility from 1920 to 1975 and greater immigration in both the first twenty and last twenty years of the last century – did not raise the Catholic share of the U.S. population above 25 percent. Without a demographer’s sensibility, of course, the nearly constant share of the population that is Catholic is not problematic in the least. Who worries about nontrends? But this is an interesting puzzle. The Catholic

advantage in fertility and migration should have resulted in between 32 and 35 percent of adults being Catholic in the late 1990s. The steady 25 percent that is observed over and over in national surveys implies that something is interfering with the growth of the Catholic population. In fact, 33 percent of American adults interviewed in the late 1990s were raised Catholic (according to the General Social Survey). Ten percent had left the Church – half to Protestant denominations, nearly half to no religion at all, and the small remainder to non-Christian religions. The demographic analysis does not explain the trend in this case. It points to the phenomenon to be explained. But without reference to demography we are not aware that there is anything to explain. Once we see the demographic advantages that the Catholic Church had for most of the twentieth century, its constant proportion in the population becomes a puzzle to be solved.

DATA NEEDS AND RESOURCES

Demographic research on religion has long been hampered by the lack of religion data in the census. Demographers thrive on fine-grained comparisons over long periods of time. The catalogue of religious data is very thin on both counts. Other countries’ censuses routinely record the prevalence of religion in the population. In nations where religious divisions overlap with political conflict – I already mentioned Israel and Northern Ireland and it is true in Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands as well – census returns are anxiously monitored for signs of advantage or disadvantage. The U.S. census does not ask about religion, initially because census officials and congressional leaders in the late 1930s thought that it was a bad idea to have lists of Jews stored in one place and more recently because census items must now be tied to the evaluation of specific social and economic policies. The U.S. Bureau of the Census did conduct surveys of religious bodies in 1906, 1916, 1926, and 1936. But inconsistent definitions of membership across denominations and over time limit their usefulness.

The typical survey is sufficient to track the relative sizes of the Protestant and Catholic populations, the population with no religion, and some of the larger Protestant denominations (e.g., Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans). But groups that are less than 5 percent of the adult population – interesting groups like Jews, Muslims, Mormons, and members of the traditionally African-American churches – are impossible to assess reliably in a single survey of eight hundred to two thousand adults, and few researchers have the resources to interview more than two thousand adults.

The General Social Survey, an ongoing project that used to interview about fifteen hundred adults every year and now interviews three thousand adults in even-numbered years, has become an invaluable resource for religious researchers interested in these churches that comprise less than 5 percent of adults (e.g., Smith 1990 and the GSS website: www.icpsr.umich.edu/gss). The GSS does not get any more Jews, Muslims, or Jehovah’s Witnesses than any other survey of that size, of course, but because it has such high standards of keeping the design and questions the same year after year, data from several years can be combined to gain insight about these smaller religions and denominations. Since its inception, but especially since 1983, the GSS also has taken pains to distinguish precisely among denominations as similar-sounding (but doctrinally very different) as the United Church of Christ and the Church of Christ, the Church of God and the Church of God in Christ, and the Southern Baptist Convention,

the American Baptist Convention, and the National Baptist Convention. In all, the GSS codes 177 Protestant denominations, the distinction between Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, three Jewish denominations, five non-Christian faiths, and no religion.

Very few other surveys take religion that seriously. Researchers affiliated with the Gallup Polls, most notably George Gallup, Jr., have written extensively about religion. But the Gallup data are much harder to use because of design changes, wording changes, and few attempts to enumerate more finely than seven or eight Protestant categories. Just as an example, the ubiquitous question about Americans’ belief in God at first appears to be an important time series stretching back to the 1930s. Two important wording changes break that trend line at crucial points; most recently the addition of the phrase “or a higher power” to the question in 1976 reversed a downward trend in response to the simpler question “Do you believe in God?” (see Bishop 1999).

CONCLUSION

Demography and religion have a fruitful past and a promising future. We can claim Durkheim’s Suicide (1897/1951) as the first study in over a century of research linking demography and religion. Researchers have looked at the consequences of religion for demography – first in the fertility studies from the 1930s to the 1980s, more recently in studies of religion and longevity – and (less often) at the consequences of demography for religion. Both kinds of research have illuminated social change and helped us understand religion’s role in American society.

The future is not guaranteed. The cutting edge of this kind of research depends on infusions of mass data. With no questions about religion in the census, the continuation of long-term studies such as the GSS are essential to our ability to keep doing this important work.