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

reforming individuals. Religious communalists such as liberation theologians are more likely to talk about “social justice” than about individual “salvation.” But communalism is not uniquely characteristic of leftist theologians. Hart (1992), for example, provides an insightful account of how this paradigm operates among mainstream Protestants and Catholics in the United States.

MAPPING U.S. RELIGIOUS GROUPS

So far, I have presented the dominant paradigms as a fairly strict typology with mutually exclusive categories. Empirically, however, these categories occur together in various configurations and interact dynamically. Any group’s ideology will need to take a position on both the question of moral authority and the question of the moral project. In American religion, both mainstream and peripheral groups make use of a wide spectrum of ideas and symbols. Some of these ideas and symbols fall neatly into the given categories while others are highly ambiguous. Ideas are never simply given and are rarely stable, but are constantly contested, refined, and adapted, leading to dynamic relationships within and between paradigms.

In thinking about plausible configurations of the paradigms discussed above, one might intuitively expect the individualistic paradigms of modernism and libertarianism to occur together and be opposed to an alliance between the collective paradigms of traditionalism and communalism. In fact, American ideology has been counterintuitive in this respect. Although they may have used different terms, various writers have noted the paradoxical combination of traditionalism and libertarianism in conservative or right-wing American ideology (e.g., Nash 1976; Lipset and Raab 1978; Himmelstein 1983; Platt and Williams 1988). Although many scholars view this paradox as primarily a characteristic of post-1945 American conservatism, de Tocqueville (1831/1969), as far back as the 1830s, noted in Democracy in America that traditional religion in the United States had combined with unrestrained self-interest to promote the general welfare. In contrast, the American left has combined modernism with communalism, supporting both the moral autonomy of the individual and the regulation of economic and political activity in defense of the public good. These are, of course, ideal-typical characterizations. They represent two poles on the American ideological spectrum. Clearly, there is a large ambiguous middle position; but there is, nevertheless, a clear contrast between the right and left in its “pure” forms. Recognizing the contrasts between and paradoxes within mainstream American ideological positions is important for understanding specific cases of ideological change or conflict. One can speculate about the reasons for these paradoxical configurations. Perhaps there is a “need” for a balance between individual and collective values. Himmelstein (1983) suggests that, on the right, neither traditionalism nor libertarianism carries much appeal on its own, but each provides a corrective to the unappealing aspects of the other. More recently, writers promoting “communalism” as a school of social thought have made normative arguments about the necessity of balancing individual and collective concerns (e.g., Taylor 1991; Etzioni 1996; Putnam 2000).

Figure 23.1 is a graphic representation of what I call “American mainstream ideological discourse.” Here the dimensions defining the paradigms are represented as spectra rather than categories. The x-axis represents the locus of moral authority and the y-axis represents the moral project. Idea systems may theoretically be located at any position

on the map. Although right-wing purists would tend to be located in the northeast corner and left-wing purists in the southwest corner, the boundaries of these categories are porous. The line connecting the two extremes is the realm of mainstream discourse. There are clear, sharp, often bitterly contested differences between positions along this line, but those located within the mainstream understand the differences. There are routinized vocabularies, procedures, categories, etc., for discussing and negotiating these differences. Most negotiation takes place in the “ambiguous middle.” Here is where the majority of political institutions are located. This is the area where compromises are formed, where the observer finds the juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible elements of opposing paradigms as “politics make strange bedfellows.” The implementation of policies formulated at either “purist” location tends to gravitate toward this middle.

I argued above that bipolar conceptions of cultural conflict ignored the presence and role of peripheral groups – groups that did not fit either of the two opposing categories. This is an important theoretical shortcoming, especially at a time when the importance of “the periphery” is highlighted in theories of social change. Many of the most influential contemporary theories of political and economic change posit a dialectical relation between core and peripheral institutions. This tension provides the engine for social change processes.

Cultural or religious change and conflict operate within a similar dialectical system of ideological tensions within and between mainstream and peripheral cultural groups. Elsewhere (Kniss 1988), I make this argument in some detail. To shorten the long story, the two-dimensional map proposed above helps to specify exactly how some groups might be peripheral to the mainstream. Figure 23.2 suggests where some peripheral groups might be located on the map. Recognizing the presence of groups that lie outside the mainstream and specifying the ways in which they are peripheral allows the analyst to include them in an explanatory model and to consider how they might affect or be affected by mainstream tensions and/or polarization. Note, however, that there is a significant difference between my conceptualization and some of the core/periphery theories. Consider, for example, Shils’s (1975) theory of the cultural center and periphery. For Shils, the center is the “ultimate,” “irreducible,” “sacred” realm of society’s most important symbols, values and beliefs. I am suggesting that these values exist most purely at the periphery, while the center is the realm of ambiguity and competition over ideas.The periphery has been especially fertile ground in American religious history. Various historians (e.g., Gaustad 1973; Moore 1986) have argued that religious innovation on the periphery is the defining characteristic of American religion. In particular, there has been a striking amount of activity in the southeast quadrant of the map. In many of the new religious movements in America over the past two centuries, a millenarian impulse produced a collective moral project, the establishment of a new social order, and stressed the moral authority of the collectivity, even though that authority may have been embodied in a charismatic leader (Bettis and Johannesen 1984; Tuveson 1968). The Mormons are the prime example of such a group.

But other less exotic religious groups are also peripheral to the American cultural mainstream as I have mapped it. Mennonites, Amish, and related groups belong there, as I will discuss in greater detail later. So, too, do many of the African-American Protestant groups, who have combined traditional notions of religious authority with a more progressive social ethic, focusing on transformation of the social order. This was most evident in the central role played by “conservative” African-American religious groups

in the civil rights movement. An interesting recent variation on a similar theme is the “new evangelical left.” Groups such as the Sojourners in Washington, DC, combine traditional notions of religious/moral authority with collectivist moral projects aimed at both establishing their own alternative utopian social order and reforming the larger secular social order as well. I place the Quakers halfway between the southeast and southwest points on the map. They tend not only to focus on collective moral projects but also place more emphasis on an authoritative “divine spark” within individuals. They stop short of granting complete moral autonomy to individuals, however, since particular manifestations of the divine spark are to be tested and implemented within the context of the collective community. Hamm (1988) documents the Quaker move toward modernist ideas around the turn of the century. Pentecostals, while focusing on individuals as the moral project, hold a similar midway position on the locus of moral authority. They give more credence to individual experience than other conservative Protestants.

American Catholicism and Judaism are especially interesting cases with respect to the scheme I propose. I would argue that they are also best placed in the southeast quadrant with other groups that hold collectivist ideas about both moral authority and moral project. Although individual reason clearly has a prominent role in the development of Catholic and Jewish theology and philosophy, it has also been subject to the authority of tradition and the religious hierarchy. Kurtz (1986) and Burns (1990) document this in their studies of the Catholic controversies over Modernism. However, there is enough diversity within Catholicism, especially post–Vatican II and especially in the U.S. context (cf. Seidler and Meyer 1989), that any attempt to place Catholics in a single location is of necessity a gross generalization. The same is true for Jewish groups. If, as many argue, the history of U.S. Catholicism (and to a lesser extent, Judaism) is one of “Protestantization,” it may be that some subgroups (Reform Judaism, for example) now occupy mainstream locations as well.

Dillon (1999a) examines a diverse set of groups that she calls “pro-change Catholics.” These include gay and lesbian, pro-choice and pro-women Catholic groups that may seem to belong in the southwest quadrant along with liberal Protestants. But Dillon shows that while these groups apply individual reason in their challenge to the authority of Catholic tradition, they also construct an identity that maintains continuity and solidarity with that tradition, thus recognizing its authority while promoting change within it. In another study recognizing Catholic internal diversity, Burns (1992) shows that, by separating political and economic issues from matters of faith and morals, Catholics are pulled in multiple directions. In my terms, they are pulled toward the southwest where they find allies on issues such as economic justice (a collective moral project), and they are pulled toward the northeast where they find allies on moral issues (that highlight the collective moral authority).

I have said little about the northwest quadrant of the map, largely because few groups tend to locate there. An ideology that is thoroughly individualist will not easily sustain a coherent group identity. To the extent that groups do cohere around an ideology, they tend to move toward the collective end of at least one of the dimensions. So, for example, anarchist ideologies would be located here, but anarchist groups are notoriously short-lived. Some of the highly individualist therapeutic utopias of the 1960s and 1970s also combined individual moral authority with individualist moral projects. Many of these did not survive for long, while others moved rightward in

authoritarian directions as they grew and institutionalized. The Church of Scientology is a good example of such an evolution. More recently, “new age” movements and the expansion of Eastern immigrant religions in the United States, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, are repopulating this corner of the map. But many of these groups are also being pulled toward the mainstream. I will discuss this in more detail later.

The presence of so much ideological activity in locations off the mainstream belies the notion that American religion or culture is best described in bipolar terms. It also raises significant questions for the thesis that a “culture war” is underway. The presence of active peripheral ideologies complicates easy coalition building, and mitigates cultural tension within the mainstream by exerting crosscutting pressures. I will say more about this later.

EMPIRICAL AND THEORETICAL APPLICATIONS

Understanding Intragroup Conflict

The “moral order map” provides a useful heuristic for analyzing many of the specific cultural or religious conflicts that interest sociologists, especially those involving “sects” and “cults.” These terms usually refer to groups that lie “off the diagonal” on the moral order map. The map helps us to be clearer about just how these groups differ from the mainstream. In my work, I have used the map to analyze ideological conflict among American Mennonites. I argue that Mennonites are a peripheral group because they combine the paradigms of traditionalism and communalism, a configuration that places them outside the mainstream of American ideological discourse. Throughout their history, they have combined an emphasis on transcendent moral and spiritual values, biblical and communal authority, and denial of individual interests in favor of the collectivity (i.e., traditionalism), with a concern for egalitarianism, social justice, pacifism, environmental conservation, mutual aid, and the like (i.e., communalism).

This ideological peripherality has been a source of conflict for Mennonites. Their combination of traditionalism and communalism has been especially uneasy within the context of twentieth-century America. Mennonite individuals and groups who are primarily concerned with traditionalism have often looked to the American right for external supportive links. Those most concerned with communalism, by contrast, have looked to the American left. When these external links come to the fore, various social structural cleavages come into alignment. At particular times in Mennonites’ history, the internal cleavage between paradigms has aligned with external cleavages between fundamentalists and modernists in American religion and between the right and the left in American politics. Increased conflict along external cleavages results in the emergence or intensification of internal conflict.

The dotted-line diagonal in Figure 23.2 represents an imaginary line dividing the American right from the left. Note that the right-left division becomes an internal cleavage for Mennonite ideology. It would be expected that, during times of unusual ideological dynamism within the mainstream (“unsettled times” to use the concept suggested by Swidler [1986]), the internal cleavage between traditionalism and communalism would become more salient and thus conflict would be more likely to emerge around these paradigms. The hypothesis would be that if either or both of these paradigms are objects of contention in the mainstream, then the cleavage between them would

become sharper within the Mennonite community and the number and intensity of such conflicts would increase. Elsewhere (Kniss 1996), I have presented a comparative historical analysis that finds support for these hypotheses.

Internal conflict within mainstream groups is also affected by their varying position along the main diagonal. The current debates within U.S. Protestant denominations over sexual orientation provide a good example. Within mainline or “liberal” Protestant denominations, the fiercest debates are occurring in those denominations, such as Presbyterians and Methodists, that were formed by earlier mergers of evangelical and liberal wings of the tradition. In these denominations, the argument is rooted in the moral authority dimension, and the two sides of the debate can legitimately draw on differing paradigms within their tradition. The conflicts turn on the question of whether collective canon law should prevail or whether actions should be determined based on individual conscience and local pastoral concerns.

When denominations on the religious right, by contrast, fight about sexual orientation, the terms of the debate are different. Here, the moral authority of the collectivity is taken for granted. The core question is: Which collectivity has the authority to decide policies and procedures regarding sexual orientation? That is, do congregations have the right to make their own decisions on these matters, or can the denomination set policies and hold congregations to them? This basic argument is at the core of the various disagreements that have split the Southern Baptists over the past fifteen years.

Impact of Peripheral Groups on the Mainstream

I have been making the point that bipolar conceptions of cultural conflict lead to ignoring or misunderstanding the experience of sectarian, utopian, or other peripheral groups and movements. But some may argue that this is no great loss – that peripheral groups may be interesting curiosities, but are, after all, peripheral and thus relatively insignificant for understanding large-scale cultural conflicts occurring in the mainstream. However, another implication of the moral order map I propose is that the interaction between groups on and off the diagonal has an impact on both.

My analysis of intra-Mennonite conflict, by focusing on internal events as the dependent variable, highlighted the causal effects of external factors on internal cultural dynamics. But it is a logical implication of the model I propose that peripheral groups like the Mennonites should also have an impact on the larger environment. This kind of argument is much more difficult to make concisely or coherently because the dependent variable, impact on the sociocultural environment, is so diffuse. However, if we focus on specific characteristics of the environment, it is possible to make such an argument.

Probably the best example in the case of Mennonites would be American government policy toward conscientious objectors to war. The rapid succession of wars in the twentieth century and the disastrous experience of Mennonites during the first one led to their increasingly sophisticated dealings with the government (in cooperation with other “peace churches”) in developing conscientious objection policies (Kniss 1997a). The successful institution of such policies in U.S. law changed at least this one aspect of the political environment, making conscientious objection to war more respectable and more accessible to many people other than Mennonites. Institutionalizing and

expanding the legitimate bases of conscientious objection was one important element of the widespread antiwar activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Another more recent example, and one that is missed by simple bipolar conceptions of cultural conflict, is the public discourse around abortion and capital punishment. The irony of people’s positions on the value of human life has been pointed out by partisans on both sides of the abortion and capital punishment debates. That is, pro-choice parties in the abortion debate accuse pro-lifers of being concerned about saving the life of the fetus, but being unconcerned about the lives of the mothers, or of prisoners on death row, or of victims of American military interventions. Pro-life parties, on the other hand, suggest that pro-choicers are inconsistent in being willing to “kill” innocent unborn children, yet being unwilling to kill convicted murderers and rapists.

However, the seeming paradox in this debate vanishes if we consider it in light of the “moral order map” I propose. That is, the accusations of each party ignore the location of the specific issues with respect to the larger moral questions, since the issue of abortion is primarily an issue of the locus of moral authority, while the issue of capital punishment concerns the moral project.

The point I want to highlight here, however, regards the impact of peripheral groups on the mainstream discourse. A relatively recent development in the public debate is the entrance of Protestant and Catholic groups located “off the diagonal” in the southeast corner of the moral order map who oppose both abortion and capital punishment and refer to themselves as “consistent pro-lifers.” They have built alliances with groups on both sides of the culture wars, thus opening space for accommodation and, at least potentially, mitigating tension. For example, there are emerging groups like Common Ground, a Midwestern organization that brings together pro-choice and pro-life activists in cooperative efforts toward lowering rates of unwanted pregnancies and providing services such as improved prenatal care to women who find themselves in that position.

Understanding the New Religious Pluralism

Sociologists of religion have come to understand that religious pluralism in North America constitutes an important form of American exceptionalism, raising important questions about grand theories of secularization and modernization. Over the past two decades, one of the most important debates within the sociology of religion has been over how pluralism has affected religious participation in the United States and elsewhere. Warner (1993) provides a synthetic review of this debate, pointing to the emergence of a “new paradigm” in the sociology of religion that views pluralism as one key source of continued religious vitality in the United States.

In much of this literature, pluralism is treated as a given and the debate focuses on its consequences. Problematizing pluralism, that is, paying attention to the distinctions that constitute pluralism in the United States, may shed some useful light on these ongoing questions. The moral order map I propose would suggest that not all pluralisms are alike. The kind of distinctions that are salient in a given social context may have important effects on religious participation. Furthermore, some communities may seem very pluralistic when denominational measures of pluralism are used; but if all the relevant religious groups are clustered in one sector of the moral order map, then it may be incorrect to define that community as “pluralistic.”

Research on the religion of new (post-1965) immigrant communities has been a burgeoning subfield in the sociology of religion (Ebaugh, Chapter 17, this volume; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000b; Warner and Wittner 1998). The new work also draws heavily on theories of religious pluralism, particularly to address questions of religious identity and change. Placing these new (for the United States) religious communities on the moral order map suggests some useful research questions to be explored.4

One of the first things we notice when placing new immigrant religious groups on the moral order map is that many of them lie off the main diagonal. Hindu and Buddhist groups cluster in the northwest quadrant where both the locus of moral authority and the moral project are primarily individually based. These communities are an increasingly visible presence, particularly in U.S. cities, populating a sector of the moral order that had previously been quite underpopulated, as I noted earlier.

With regard to moral authority, priests and monks in these traditions are religious virtuosos and exemplars more than authorities or hierarchs directing the religious lives of congregants. Neither is there an authoritative scripture tradition that is the equivalent of the Bible or the Qur’an for Jews, Christians, or Muslims. This was manifested in one of our field sites, a Buddhist temple, when a field researcher observed a conversation between an African-American seeker who had been raised in a Protestant tradition (Nicole) and a temple leader (Qian). Our researcher observed, “It struck me that Qian really seemed to be witnessing to Nicole about the benefits of Buddhism, but whenever Nicole tried to say something like ‘So I need to do such and such?’ Qian would say, ‘This is my experience.’ Qian seemed reticent to cast her story in terms of a universal truth” (fieldnotes, 1/31/01, Religion, Immigration and Civil Society in Chicago Project).

Similarly, with regard to the moral project, the Hindu and Buddhist temples we are observing focus primarily on individual projects. One storefront Hindu temple promotes nutritional products, selling wheatgrass juice to worshippers and the public. A Buddhist temple offers martial arts classes. Meditation is offered as a solution to a variety of modern problems. We see very little activity around collective social issues compared to the activities of say, a Puerto Rican or Mexican Catholic parish. I noted earlier that communities with thoroughly individualist ideologies are difficult to sustain over time. The Eastern religions that we have observed have overcome this problem by maintaining tight linkages between religion and ethnicity. Where collective concerns are addressed, they tend to be organized around cultural or ethnic identities rather than around religion, per se.

In contrast to the Eastern religious groups, Muslims, currently one of the fastestgrowing religious groups in the United States, are clustered in the southeast quadrant where moral authority and the moral project are collective. Moral authority resides in a scriptural tradition that is collectively shared. The moral project, the establishment of the umma (the political, social, and religious community of the faithful), is collective as well.

These placements spark a few immediate observations regarding the new groups’ relationships to U.S. society. First, we can make predictions about where these groups are likely to find friendly allies in American culture. Note that Hindus and Buddhists

4The observations I offer here are meant to be suggestive and somewhat speculative, but they are based on early work in a three-year project in which Paul Numrich and I are currently engaged, Religion, Immigration and Civil Society in Chicago. The project, supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, is studying new immigrant religion in the Chicago metropolitan region.