Euro-centric Theory

In an essay entitled “The World is Not Flat,” sociologist Stephen Warner describes his growing realization of the limits of sociological theories of religion. Initially attracted to the “sacred canopy” ideas of Berger and Luckman, he came to the insight that the theories were forged from European rather than American experience, and for that reason their application to American religion was limited.

As Warner puts it, “religious institutions in the US had never been embedded within what the reigning theory spoke of as a single societal ‘sacred canopy.’ I insisted that that concept, or what may be translated as a monopoly established religion, applied instead to the historic experience of European societies from the time of Constantine until the Reformation, extending much longer in countries like Spain, Italy, and Sweden. With the erosion, or collapse, of the sacred canopy, issues of plausibility and the challenge of pluralism confronted the previously protected European religious monopolies. But because religious pluralism was part of the US experience from the outset, because the US had an ‘open market’ for religion, because religious institutions could not count on the support of the state, because in the absence of state funding they had to persuade people to follow them, and because many of them did so with remarkable success, many of the matters (e.g., pluralism, plausibility) that the reigning theory took as problems that had to be addressed were, in the American context, not real problems at all. Instead, the understanding of American religion demanded that analysts explain, for example, why some religious bodies were more successful than others in attracting and maintaining adherents and why adherents of one religious body were, say, more likely to support women’s rights than were others. When, as in Europe, there were many fewer religious options, such questions of variation among them were much less compelling” (2-3).

Apart from the few, brief establishments during the colonial and early national periods, American churches have never had a monopoly. Even the establishments were rapidly contested (Anne Hutchison, Roger Williams). Having never been a monopoly faith, the American churches have been shattered by the collapse of monopoly and the rise of competition. Pluralism doesn’t undermine plausibility because pluralism was a fact of life from the outset.

What this misses, though, is the fact that America did have a soft, informal establishment through much of our first two centuries. The loss of that quasi-monopoly over the past half-century has been disorienting for a Protestantism that used to regard the U.S. as a Protestant republic.