New Paradigm in Sociology of Religion

New Paradigm in Sociology of Religion August 25, 2015

In a wide-ranging 1993 review of work in sociology of Religion, Stephen Warner observes that what he calls the “new paradigm” uses economic imagery but isn’t defined by economic imagery. Rather, the defining feature is “the idea that disestablishment is the norm” (1053). That is to say, North American pluralism is the norm, rather than European Christendom.

This is in contrast to older “secularization” models take monopolistic religious establishments as the norm and thus suggest that pluralism shocks the system: “It is said that churches can ‘no longer take for granted’ the loyalty of clients. Their ideas, ‘which previously could be authoritatively imposed,’ now must be marketed. In the pluralistic situation, religious activity ‘comes to be dominated by the logic of market economics.’ . . . Thus does Peter Berger account for the secularizing, homogenizing, psychologizing tendencies of religion in the contemporary United States, as if a few gigantic, previously privileged suppliers had been suddenly confronted a few decades ago by hordes of price-conscious consumers” (1054).

Warner admits that the “adjustment-to-pluralism model is not groundless.” It fits the experience of Eastern European Jews, and also makes sense of intellectuals from conservative families who undergo the shock of pluralism in grad school. But it doesn’t fit the American experience at all, in part because America started pluralistic and became Christianized: “the Christianization of the United States was neither a residue of Puritan hegemony nor a transplantation of a European sacred canopy but an accomplishment of 19th-century activists” (1055).

Nineteenth-century America thus becomes the paradigm of religious development: “If the paradigmatic situation for Bergerians is the sacred canopy, the religious monopoly inaugurated in Europe by Constantine in the 4th century, then for market theorists it is the furious competition to evangelize North America in the 19th, the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening and later” (1058).

No doubt this shift, now twenty years and more in the making, fits the American experience better and may be a better predictor of the unfolding expansion of Christianity in Africa and Latin America. But there’s a need for a deeper shift than a change of paradigm. Why assume that one or the other paradigm is “norm” and the other “deviant”? Why not just accept that they are different and seek illumination in narrating those differences?

As Milbank suggests, the final social science should be history, the ultimate mode of sociology is narration.


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