Sociological Approaches

John Schmalzbauer

This entry appears in the Encyclopedia of Religion in America, edited by

Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams, Washington, DC: CQPress,

2010, 2109-2117

Over the past century, sociologists have made an enduring

contribution to the field of religion in America. From Robert

Bellah and Peter Berger to Robert Wuthnow and Nancy Ammerman,

sociologists have earned a place in the canon of religious

studies. Without their theories, concepts and findings,

scholarship on American culture would look very different. In

assessing this legacy, it is important to take the long view,

tracing the development of the sociology of religion from its

nineteenth-century beginnings to its post-war resurgence and

contemporary vitality. Only then is it possible to see how

sociological narratives and concepts have been incorporated into

the study of American religion.

We must also define what we mean by sociological. Standard

dictionary definitions usually include words like social

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structure, institution, organization, and society. Such

definitions do not convey the richness of sociology as an

intellectual tradition. More helpful are such classics as Peter

Berger’s Invitation to Sociology (1963) and C. Wright Mills’ The

Sociological Imagination (1959). Such works depict sociology as a

style of thinking which questions taken-for-granted assumptions

about the social world. Taking a page from the late nineteenth

century masters of suspicion, Berger writes that the first truth

of sociology is that “things are not what they seem,” warning

that people “who prefer to believe that society is just what they

were taught in Sunday School” should beware. This interrogation

of taken-for-granted assumptions is at the center of Berger and

Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1967), a work that

highlights the ways people create their own worlds and promptly

forget that they have done so. There and elsewhere, the

sociological perspective is shot through with irony, emphasizing

the unintended consequences of social action. From Max Weber’s

account of Protestantism as its own gravedigger to David

Riesman’s lonely conformists, sociologists have highlighted the

ironic character of human social life.

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Historians pride themselves on their narrative artistry.

Yet, as James Spickard reminds us, sociologists are also

storytellers, recognizing that “data make sense only when they

are embedded in a story that gives them meaning.” Sometimes this

storytelling is expressed in grand narratives such as

secularization and the decline of community. While many of these

stories have fallen into disfavor, they continue to inspire

lively debates. More nuanced variants take into account the

diversity of national and cultural contexts, as well as the

insights of historians. Most of these stories are rooted in the

tradition of European sociology. Sociologist Margaret Somers

calls them the meta-narratives of modernity.

The European Inheritance

Sociology began as a response to the changes of modernity.

In The Sociological Tradition (1966), Robert Nisbet describes how the

founders of European sociology attempted to make sense of the

twin revolutions of democracy and industrialization. New words

like individualism, bureaucracy, and ideology provided the

conceptual buildings blocks for such classic sociological

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narratives as urbanization and modernization. These stories were

often told through paired opposites like tradition and modernity,

the individual and the community, and the sacred and the profane.

According to Joseph Gusfield, such dualisms offer dramatic

metaphors for sociological storytelling.

Almost all of these grand narratives were created to

describe European societies. Though nineteenth century America

had its own sociological thinkers, the Social Darwinism of

William Graham Sumner and the pro-slavery writings of Southern

agrarians have been largely forgotten. While progressive-era

Christian sociology reminds us of the Liberal Protestant impulse

in early American social science, it is more focused on

Christianizing society than on the study of American religious

institutions. Fortunately for the development of American

sociology, several European social thinkers incorporated American

religion into their most famous works. Such texts have played a

key role in adapting a European discipline to the American

context.

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During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European

travelers like Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Harriet Martineau,

and Anthony Trollope recorded their impressions of American

society. The most famous of these visitors was the French

aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville. Religion figures prominently

in Democracy in America (1835), Tocqueville’s seminal analysis of

American culture. During his 1831-32 tour, Tocqueville spoke

with an impressive range of Americans, including former president

John Quincy Adams, Catholic statesman Charles Carroll, and

William Ellery Channing, the same Unitarian thinker who caught

the imagination of the young Max Weber. Impressed by the

vitality of American churches and religious voluntary

organizations, Tocqueville did not emphasize the theme of

secularization, focusing instead on the progress of democracy.

One of the giants of European sociological theory, Weber

came to America in 1904, paying a visit to his cousins in North

Carolina. There in rural Appalachia, he witnessed an outdoor

baptism, commemorated in his famous essay on the Protestant

sects. Like Tocqueville, Weber was impressed by American piety.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), he portrayed

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America as the most modern of nations, describing the

transformation of Puritan asceticism into the iron cage of

capitalism. Quoting liberally from Benjamin Franklin, he argued

that capitalism had reached its apex in America. Some

sociologists believe that these masterworks of classical

sociology would not have been written without Weber’s American

sojourn. Without Weber, Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, and Karl

Marx, American scholars would have had fewer resources for

developing an indigenous approach to the sociology of religion.

Recurring Storylines in the Sociology of American Religion

Sociologists have used multiple stories to describe American

religion. Recognizing this diversity of approaches, James

Spickard discusses six storylines that dominate contemporary

scholarship: secularization, religious markets, fundamentalism,

religious reorganization, individualization, and globalization.

In Spickard’s analysis, the stories of fundamentalism and

religious markets are depicted as challengers to secularization.

Taking a similar approach, sociologist Nancy Ammerman focuses on

the rise and fall of the secularization narrative, calling it a

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central myth for the discipline. The decline of community has

also emerged as a key story in the sociology of religion and the

social sciences more broadly. Others have identified race,

immigration, and gender as fruitful sites for sociological

storytelling.

This article builds on these earlier treatments, focusing on

three sets of interrelated narratives: 1) secularization and religious

mobilization; 2) cultural conflict and class differences; 3) community and

individualism. Along the way, it describes their application to

American society, their most perceptive critics, and the efforts

of contemporary scholars to refine them for a new century.

Though by no mean exhaustive, this article provides a brief

overview of the sociology of American religion.

Secularization and Religious Mobilization

More than any other storyline, secularization has dominated

sociological analyses of American religion. Beginning with the

founders of the discipline, sociologists have highlighted the

tensions between religion and modernity, advancing an

evolutionary approach to the development of human culture.

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Often described as a single theory, secularization is best

viewed as a cluster of social processes that are loosely

connected to each other. These include such master concepts as

privatization (the confinement of religion to the private sphere),

differentiation (the separation of religion from other social

institutions), and rationalization (the triumph of economic and

scientific rationality).

Since its publication in 1969, Peter Berger’s The Sacred

Canopy has defined the secularization narrative in American

sociology. Drawing on European classical theory, Berger

chronicled the eclipse of the sacred in Judaism and Christianity,

repeating Weber’s claim that Protestantism contained the seeds of

its own destruction. He also focused on pluralism and diversity,

seeing competition as a threat to religious faith. In the 1960s,

Berger predicted the gradual decline of religious belief and the

disappearance of faith from public life.

Ironically, the golden age of secularization theory began

immediately following the post-war revival of religion. Though

the revival had waned by the mid-1960s, Americans continued to

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attend church at rates substantially higher than their European

counterparts. Belief in God remained well above 90 percent. As

early as 1972, the persistence of these high levels of

religiosity led Andrew Greeley to declare secularization a myth,

a claim repeated by Jeffrey Hadden in 1987. Though recent

scholarship suggests that American church attendance statistics

may be inflated, they are higher than in most of the developed

world.

Yet for many secularization theorists, it was never about

church attendance. Such scholars focused instead on the

decreasing significance of religion in American society. Those

adopting this definition emphasized the withdrawal of religious

symbols and meanings from government, higher education, science,

and the media. Still others have called attention to the secular

character of American religiosity. In The Noise of Solemn Assemblies

(1961), Berger took American churches to task for their

conformity to mainstream culture, echoing Will Herberg’s

indictment of the American way of life. Together with the

historian Martin Marty, they identified a central paradox: the

post-war religious revival took place in a society committed to

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this-worldly values. Influenced by neo-orthodox theology, such

scholars viewed the emergence of religion-in-general as an

idolatrous compromise with secular culture.

Well into the 1980s, sociologists and historians continued

to affirm the plausibility of the secularization narrative.

According to a 1993 Yale University survey, 55 percent of

American religion scholars agreed that secularization was a

dominant trend. Yet by the twenty-first century, it had fallen

on hard times. The rise of the new Christian right in the 1970s

and 1980s made it more difficult to accept secularization

theory’s emphasis on the declining influence of faith. The same

was true of the global resurgence of Islam. As Jose Casanova

documented in Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), religion had

escaped from the private sphere. In 1999 Rodney Stark published

“Secularization, R.I.P.” Far more damning was Berger’s

acknowledgment that his earlier predictions were mistaken.

In 1993 R. Stephen Warner proclaimed the emergence of a “new

paradigm” in the sociology of religion. In a landmark article,

Warner portrayed mobilization as the master process of American

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religion, and revival and routinization as master narratives. Instead

of comparing modern America with Medieval Christendom, Warner

turned his attention to the Second Great Awakening and subsequent

revivals. In A Church of Our Own (2005), he identified several new

paradigm histories, including Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of

American Christianity (1989), Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith (1992),

and Grant Wacker’s Heaven Below (2003). Such works stressed the

role of pluralism, adaptation, and innovation in American

religion.

In The Churching of America (1990 and 2005), sociologists Roger

Finke and Rodney Stark offered an controversial account of the

mobilization storyline. In a novel analysis of existing

statistical data (including the various waves of the United

States Census of Religious Bodies), they documented a 200 year

increase in American church membership, a finding that has been

disputed by several historians. Especially contentious was their

claim that American religious history should be told as a story

of winners and losers in a competitive market.

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Influenced by Finke and Stark, some scholars have used

economic theories to analyze American religion. According to this

market model, religion is most likely to flourish in situations

of vigorous competition and to languish under religious

monopolies. While many have embraced the market model, many

others have rejected its economistic view of human nature.

Though empirical evidence for its claims remains inconclusive,

books like Shopping for Faith (Cimino & Lattin, 2002) and Religion in a

Free Market (Kosmin & Keysar, 2006) continue to reflect this

approach. Such marketing can be seen in the realm of American

popular culture where entrepreneurs use new technologies to

promote religious faith. From the nineteenth-century to the

present, religion has influenced the development of the American

media.

Ironically, some scholars rejected secularization just as

more sophisticated versions of the theory became available. In

The Secular Revolution (2003), Christian Smith has provided a

historically-grounded account of the secularization of American

institutions, reconceptualizing this transformation as a social

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movement. In On Secularization (2005), David Martin has replaced the

grand narrative of secularization with several overlapping

stories. Expanding his comparative treatment of European and

American societies, he has highlighted the importance of

geography and religious tradition, echoing S.N. Eisenstadt’s

focus on multiple modernities. In the United States, this

realization has led to a greater focus on the regional variations

in American religion. More globally, it has led scholars like

Grace Davie to speak of European exceptionalism.

Today the secularization concept is largely absent from

textbooks in American religious history, though the same is not

true in sociology. In spite of its shortcomings, secularization

theory remains a dominant storyline. Even its critics

acknowledge that modern societies have undergone a process of

social differentiation, resulting in the segregation of religious

institutions from other parts of social life. What is more, new

data from the General Social Surveys and the American Religious

Identification Survey suggests that the percentage of Americans

with no religious affiliation may be growing. Such findings show

that claims of secularization theory’s demise may be premature.

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Cultural Conflict and Class Differences

Recent scholarship portrays the return of conservative

religion (Spickard’s fundamentalism storyline) as yet another key

disciplinary narrative. While the rise of evangelicalism has

spawned an enormous literature, it is rooted in two overlapping

narratives that have an even longer history in the discipline:

the story of cultural conflict and the story of class differences. According

to sociologist Thaddeus Coreno, these storylines represent two

ways of mapping American religious groups. While the “culture

model” stresses the beliefs and practices that divide Americans,

the “class model” ties these divisions to differences in social

standing. Very often these stories are combined. Though such

narratives have taken many forms, their origins lie in a century-

long conversation about the ways that religious organizations

relate to their social environments.

Beginning with Weber’s 1906 essay on “The Protestant Sects

and the Spirit of Capitalism,” sociologists have written about

the relationship between sectarian groups and the modern world.

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Impressed by the prosperity of North Carolina Baptists, Weber

described how Protestant sects bolstered the business reputations

of their members by embracing a strict morality. In The Social

Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912), German theologian Ernst

Troeltsch extended Weber’s analysis, contrasting the

countercultural attitude of sects with the looser ethics of more

established religions (which he and Weber labeled churches).

Troeltsch’s third category of mysticism described more

individualistic forms of religion that could be found outside

formal religious institutions. This comparison of sects, churches,

and mysticism paved the way for future maps of American religion.

Building on Weber and Troeltsch, the neo-orthodox theologian

H. Richard Niebuhr applied church and sect theory to the United

States. In The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929), Niebuhr linked

these organizational categories to social class, producing one of

the first socioeconomic rankings of religious groups. At the

bottom of the social ladder he put the more countercultural

sects, which he dubbed the “churches of the disinherited.”

Implicit in Niebuhr’s analysis was the assumption that Protestant

sects provided an emotional haven for the poor and oppressed.

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Following World War II, scholars developed this insight into

deprivation theory, locating the emergence of sectarian religious

groups in economic, political, and psychological distress.

According to Sean McCloud, deprivation became the dominant

framework for making sense of religion and social class, most

notably in analyses of Holiness and Pentecostal groups. In

recent decades, such scholarship has come under fire for its

condescending view of sectarian religion. Despite these

limitations, it had a major influence on such post-war classics

as Herberg’s Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955 and 1960). Both Herberg

and historian William McLoughlin were influenced by Union

Seminary President Henry Van Dusen’s articles on the third force in

American Christianity, which relegated Pentecostals and other

sectarian movements to the religious fringe. According to

Herberg, the sects would remain on the sidelines of religious

life, confined to the lower reaches of American society. Though

such scholarship proved spectacularly wrong, its focus on

conservative Protestantism anticipated the explosion of

scholarship on evangelicalism that emerged in the 1980s.

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One of the first scholars to take evangelicalism seriously

was Dean Kelley, an executive with the National Council of

Churches and the author of Why Conservative Churches are Growing (1972).

Arguing that strict religious groups were more likely to thrive,

Kelley cited earlier scholarship on American sects. According to

Kelley, sectarian groups had experienced the most dramatic

growth.

In American Evangelicalism (1983), James Davison Hunter used the

secularization storyline to analyze the accommodation of

conservative Protestants to contemporary culture. According to

Hunter, evangelicalism’s lower middle class location in the rural

South and Midwest had insulated it from the process of

modernization. Because of this demographic isolation,

evangelicals were able to maintain a conservative worldview. As

they moved into the college-educated professions, younger

evangelicals were destined to adjust their beliefs. Other

studies were more hopeful about the capacity of conservative

Protestants to thrive in twentieth-century America, including

Nancy Ammerman’s Bible Believers (1987). Seeing more room for

resistance, she documented the unwillingness of fundamentalists

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to separate faith from life. Likewise, Warner’s New Wine in Old

Wineskins (1991) portrayed evangelicalism as a dynamic movement,

capable of reviving American congregations from within. Locating

his study of a small-town church within the lineage of Weber,

Niebuhr, and Troeltsch, Warner argued that evangelicalism was

where the action was in American Protestantism. These works were

followed by Smith’s American Evangelicalism (1998), a book that

portrayed conservative Protestants as engaged yet distinctive.

According to Smith, sociologists need not see modern pluralism

and evangelical distinctiveness as incompatible. Instead, the

conservative Protestant encounter with religious pluralism has

made it stronger.

In sharp contrast to the vitality of evangelicalism, liberal

Protestantism has experienced a dramatic decrease in power and

visibility. This declension story has been told in countless

works on the crisis, decline, and disestablishment of the

Protestant Mainline (a tradition that includes such denominations

as the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the United

Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ). Explanations for

this decline have focused on the ambiguity of liberal theology,

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decreases in fertility, the gap between clergy and laity, and the

secularization of liberal Protestant colleges. Ironically, the

term “mainline” did not become popular until after the movement

was already losing its influence. Borrowed from a phrase

describing the affluent suburbs west of Philadelphia, it was a

shorthand way of describing the Protestant upper class. In The

Protestant Establishment (1964) sociologist E. Digby Baltzell

chronicled the rise and fall of the WASP elite. More recent

studies have found that liberal Protestants are still

overrepresented at the upper levels of American society and

maintain an active presence in American public life. Others have

focused on pockets of vitality in mainline denominations,

identifying clusters of practices conducive to strengthening

religious congregations.

The different trajectories of conservative and liberal

denominations have led sociologists to examine the internal

divisions within American Protestantism. Following earlier work

on American denominations, they have developed more sophisticated

maps of the Protestant spectrum. While rejecting church-sect

theory as conceptually unworkable, these cartographers have

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continued to be influenced by Weber and Niebuhr, emphasizing the

tensions between religion and American society. In American

Mainline Religion (1987) sociologists Wade Clark Roof and William

McKinney classified Protestant denominations into liberal,

moderate, and conservative camps, reporting systematic

differences in moral and political attitudes. Updating Niebuhr’s

ranking of religious groups, they traced the shifting

socioeconomic status of American denominations. Though

conservative Protestants improved their social standing between

1929 and 1987, they still ranked below adherents of more liberal

denominations. In The Restructuring of American Religion (1989), Robert

Wuthnow described the emergence of liberal/conservative divisions

within Protestant denominations. Many of these divisions were

attributable to differences in education, with college-educated

respondents reporting more liberal views.

While political scientists uncovered religious cleavages

within the electorate, sociologists analyzed conflicts over

morality and culture. Published in 1991, Hunter’s Culture Wars

depicted an America divided between orthodox and progressive

camps. This interpretation went on to shape American political

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discourse, including conservative Pat Buchanan’s speech to the

1992 Republican Convention. Many scholars have criticized the

culture wars storyline for missing the complexity of American

religion. Rejecting liberal-conservative conceptions of religion

and politics, they have constructed new maps which incorporate

multiple axes of comparison. Still others have attempted to

disentangle cultural conflicts from social class, emphasizing the

presence of conservative and liberal attitudes at all levels of

society. While Smith reports that self-identified evangelicals

have achieved socioeconomic parity with other religious groups,

Michael Lindsay has chronicled the emergence of an evangelical

elite. The growth of the evangelical left has further

complicated this debate.

It is an open question how well such maps fit non-Protestant

religious groups. In recent years, scholars have explored the

subcultures of the Catholic right and left. Yet, for the most

part, students of American Catholicism have focused on the vast

middle. While sociologist Andrew Greeley has acknowledged the

existence of a Catholic culture war, he has emphasized the

support of the laity for a pluralistic church. With the

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exception of an earlier literature on working class

authoritarianism, they have not attributed the conservatism of

the Catholic right to class.

Sociologists of American Judaism have frequently used a

left/right spectrum to map the continuum of Jewish denominations

(Reform, Conservative, Orthodox). Historically, these divisions

were correlated with social standing. Focusing on the nineteenth

century, scholars have noted the socioeconomic differences

between German-American Jews (who tended to be Reform) and their

Eastern European counterparts (who were frequently identified as

Orthodox). Sociological accounts of the rise of the Conservative

movement link this twentieth-century development to the growth of

the Jewish middle class. More recently, sociologists have used

the story of modernization to make sense of the resurgence of

Orthodox Judaism. In Tradition in a Rootless World (1993), Lynn

Davidman compares female converts to Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox

Judaism, showing how Jewish women combine aspects of tradition

and modernity.

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This emphasis on the traditional and modern aspects of

conservative religion can be found in more recent studies of

evangelical women. In God’s Daughters (2000), R. Marie Griffith

writes about the paradox of submission, emphasizing both its

liberating and its oppressive dimensions. Noting the emergence

of more egalitarian forms of evangelicalism, others stress the

fluid character of evangelical family life. While continuing to

endorse conservative gender roles, evangelical families defy

simple categorization. In Religion and Family in a Changing Society (2005),

Penny Edgell documents models of family life that transcend

left/right dichotomies.

Despite signs of convergence, real ideological cleavages

remain in American culture. A 2006 University of Minnesota study

documented negative attitudes towards atheism and agnosticism

among the general public, despite the growth in the religiously

non-affiliated. Likewise, social class continues to matter in

American religion. Several recent studies show that American

denominations remain divided by socioeconomic status. In this

sense, little has changed since the days of H. Richard Niebuhr.

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What has changed is the way that scholars approach these

divisions. While earlier studies focused almost exclusively on

the emotionalism of working class sects, more recent works

examine how marginalized groups use religion as a tool of

resistance. Research on religion and the civil rights movement

reveals the centrality of the black church in the struggle for

racial justice. In Faith in Action (2002), Richard Wood describes the

role of religious community organizers in fostering social

change. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, McCloud’s Divine

Hierarchies (2007) discusses the ways that social class both

constrains and enables religious groups. Such studies are a vast

improvement over the reductionist approaches of the past.

Community and Individualism

The decline of community narrative has been a part of the

sociology of American culture since the publication of Democracy

in America. To be sure, Tocqueville was not alone in chronicling

the demise of pre-modern communities. While Ferdinand Tönnies

wrote of the transition from gemeinschaft (community) to gesellschaft

(society), Emile Durkheim traced the shift from mechanical to

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organic solidarity. Likewise, Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the

Religious Life (1912) described the connections between ritual and

social solidarity, showing the ways that religion unites social

groups.

During the post-war era, a cottage industry of works

explored what Maurice Stein called the “eclipse of community.”

Such studies focused on factory towns and rural villages,

Southern communities and urban neighborhoods. In Community and

Social Change in America (1982), Thomas Bender described a similar

literature in the discipline of history. What they had in common

was the view that modernity was eroding the basis for social

connection and belonging, including religious institutions.

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville portrayed religion as an

antidote to individualism. The same approach can be found in Neo-

Tocquevillian accounts of American culture. In Habits of the Heart

(1985), Robert Bellah and his co-authors discuss the role of the

Biblical and civic republican traditions in counteracting

individualism. Such arguments recapitulate Bellah’s earlier work

on American civil religion, which portrayed the symbols and

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rituals of the nation as a source of shared meaning. This

approach could also be seen in sociologist R. Lloyd Warner’s Neo-

Durkheimian treatment of Memorial Day in The Living and the Dead

(1959).

Catholic communitarianism has long been viewed as a

counterweight to the dominance of Protestant individualism, an

argument most recently articulated in Greeley’s The Catholic

Imagination (2000). At the same time, many scholars question

whether American Catholics continue to hold to a communitarian

orientation, highlighting the impact of assimilation. Tracing the

journey of American Catholics from the urban, immigrant ghettoes

to the post-war suburbs, the sociological literature is full of

what Robert Orsi calls from-to narratives. This modernist

storyline can be found in scholarship on Post-Vatican II

Catholics, which describes the fluidity of belief in an

individualistic society. A similar literature has explored the

impact of individualism on American Jews, arguing that Jewish

identity is increasingly a private pursuit with little impact on

public life. Analyzing the influence of assimilation on the

grandchildren and great-grandchildren of European immigrants,

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others have chronicled the fading of ethnic identity. In Ethnic

Options (1990), Mary Waters discusses the emergence of optional

ethnicity, a form of belonging that demands little and offers less.

Exploring similar territory, Herbert Gans coined the terms

symbolic ethnicity and symbolic religion to describe the weak forms of

community he observed in post-war America.

Though rooted in the linear narrative of assimilation, such

changes could also be interpreted as an outgrowth of a wider

transformation in American culture from a “spirituality of

dwelling” to a “spirituality of seeking” (see Robert Wuthnow’s

After Heaven for a discussion of this shift). Since the 1990s,

sociologists have developed a more sympathetic analysis of

religious individualism, even as historians have rediscovered the

nineteenth-century roots of metaphysical and alternative

religions. In Spiritual Marketplace (2001) sociologist Wade Clark

Roof analyzed the spiritual quest of the baby boom generation,

arguing that Americans can remain anchored in tradition while

exploring a range of religious options. Taking a similar

approach, Michele Dillon and Paul Wink have explored the capacity

of Americans to combine religious commitment with personal

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autonomy. Focusing on the changing locus of religious authority,

Spickard groups such scholarship under the heading of the

individualization narrative.

Though community has often been considered a societal good,

many of the classics of post-war sociology warn of the dangers of

excessive conformity. Mourning the loss of Protestant

individualism, Riesman described the emergence of other-directed

individuals in The Lonely Crowd (1953). Similar anxieties can also

be found in such books as The Organization Man (Whyte, 1956) and The

Suburban Captivity of the Churches (Winter, 1961). During the 1960s and

1970s, this focus on the dark side of community led many to

discount the importance of local congregations. Such sentiments

led some to abandon traditional religious institutions in favor

of a focus on new religious movements. While NRMs were sometimes

portrayed as a response to the loss of community, other

scholarship depicted them as an expression of individualism.

In recent years, there has been a renaissance in

congregational studies. Much of this scholarship has focused on

the themes of community and civic engagement. In particular,

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Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2001) has spawned a whole literature

on the connections between religion and social capital. There

and elsewhere, Putnam portrays outward-looking churches as a boon

to civic life. Others have examined at the impact of religion on

volunteerism and civic engagement. Though many are skeptical

about the potential for faith-based social services, others

stress the efficacy of congregations in addressing poverty,

crime, and other social ills. Some of this research has focused

on new immigrant congregations. Because immigrants are often

disengaged from the political process, scholars are interested in

the ways churches and mosques foster civic participation.

It is unclear whether the stories of individualism and

community are helpful for understanding the religious lives of

America’s new immigrants. In particular, the rhetoric of options

and choice seems ill-suited for those immigrants constrained by

the category of race. Though Warner has emphasized the parallels

between post-1965 immigrants and their early twentieth-century

predecessors, Antony Alumkal and Russell Jeung have highlighted

the discontinuities between white European immigrants and people

of color. The literature on Asian-American and Latino religion

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has focused on the relative importance of race and ethnicity in

constituting religious communities. While some have noted the

capacity of congregations to move beyond ethnic differences (what

Gerardo Marti calls ethnic transcendence), others have focused on the

construction of new forms of racial identity. Research on multi-

racial churches has documented just how rare such congregations

continue to be. Other scholarship has revealed the struggles of

Hindus and Buddhists in a predominantly Christian political and

legal environment. Last but not least, recent studies of

American public opinion have revealed deep-seeded stereotypes of

Islam, evidence that it is not easy being Muslim in America.

Conclusion: Balancing Lived Religion and the Big Picture

This essay has offered a brief overview of sociological

approaches to the study of American religion, focusing on the

narratives of secularization and religious mobilization, cultural conflict and

class differences, and community and individualism. In concluding this

article, it is important to highlight scholarship that transcends

conventional approaches. While the sociology of religion remains

dominated by grand narratives, another tradition of sociological

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inquiry eschews sweeping generalizations in favor of the local

and particular. Practitioners of this approach strike a more

poetic tone, evoking the look and feel of the social world

through ethnographic empathy. Sociologist Andrew Abbott calls

this approach lyrical sociology. In the sociology of religion, this

more contextual mode of social scientific inquiry can be seen in

feminist scholarship and in recent studies of “lived” and

“everyday” religion.

In Feminist Narratives in the Sociology of Religion (2001), Mary Jo Neitz

argues that focusing on women’s experiences has exposed the

weaknesses of conventional sociological storylines. The British

sociologist Linda Woodhead concurs, noting that the turn to the

micro-level of social life coincided with the rise of third wave

feminism. In a recent essay, historian Ann Braude critiques the

gendered assumptions of secularization theory, arguing that its

emphasis on the public/private split ignores the religious lives

of women. In its place, she suggests a new meta-narrative: the

increasing power of women in America’s religious institutions.

Though some scholars have called for the integration of gender

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into the meta-narratives of sociology, others have emphasized the

importance of local stories.

Recent scholarship on lived religion goes beyond sociology’s

stock narratives, focusing on material culture, the body, and

popular spirituality. Critiquing the grand narratives of

secularization and rational choice theory, such scholars

recognize their inability to capture the subtleties of everyday

life. Books such as Ammerman’s Everyday Religion (2007) and Meredith

McGuire’s Lived Religion (2008) have pioneered this approach.

Courtney Bender’s Heaven’s Kitchen (2003) is another example of this

turn to practice, exploring the role of religion in a New York

City soup kitchen. By freeing themselves from the grip of

conventional narratives, such scholars have forged new paths in

the sociology of religion. Over the past decade, historians of

American religion have experienced a similar shift, summarized in

such volumes as David Hall’s Lived Religion in America (1997). As

sociologists move in the same direction, the possibilities for

convergence become all the more promising.

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Increasingly mindful of the role of religion in everyday

life, sociologists have not forgotten their discipline’s mission

to understand the big picture. By using survey research to

explore the diffusion of religious practices across American

society, quantitative sociologists can complement historical and

ethnographic scholarship. Though public opinion surveys often

miss the complexity of religion on the ground, they are essential

for exploring the national religious map. Articulating the need

for quantitative analysis, Robert Wuthnow has criticized the

literature on American religious history for giving the

“impression that Mesmerists were as widespread as Methodists and

serpent handlers as common as Baptists.” Today sociologists can

use the General Social Surveys, the American Religious

Identification Survey, the Baylor Religion Survey, and the

various Pew surveys to explore the religious make-up of the

country. While sometimes plagued by poor response rates and

inadequate question wording, they are some of the only tools we

have for understanding America’s shifting religious demography.

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What does the future hold for the sociology of American

religion? As the field enters a new century, the best

scholarship will be methodologically and theoretically

pluralistic, balancing the local with the global, the little

stories with the big stories, and the qualitative with the

quantitative. Only then will sociologists make sense of the

world of American religion.

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See also Civil Religion; Demographics; Denominationalism; Ecumenism; Emotion;

Ethnographic and Anthropological Approaches; Feminist Studies; Geographical

Approaches; Historical Approaches; History of Religions Approaches; Lived Religion;

Mainline Protestants; Marriage and Family; Material Culture Approaches; Philanthropy;

Polity; Popular Religion and Popular Culture entries; Psychology of Religion;

Religious Studies; Sexuality and Sexual Identity; Sociological Approaches; Unaffiliated;

Visual Culture entries; Women entries.

John Schmalzbauer

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ammerman, Nancy. Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Bellah, Robert. Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Berger, Peter L. A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural. New York: Anchor, 1970.

Chaves, Mark. Congregations in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Dillon, Michele, ed. Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Fenn, Richard, ed. Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion. Malden,MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001.

Gorski, Philip S. and Ates Altinordu. “After Secularization?” Annual Review of Sociology, forthcoming, 2008.

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Kniss, Fred, and Paul Numrich. Sacred Assemblies and Civic Engagement: How Religion Matters for America’s Newest Immigrants. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Lynd, Robert S., and Helen Lynd. Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1929.

Spickard, James. “What is Happening to Religion? Six Sociological Narratives.” Nordic Journal of Religion and Society 19(1)2006:13-29. Quotations are taken from a draft available at http://www.ku.dk/Satsning/Religion/indhold/publikationer/working_papers/what_is_happened.PDF

Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Williams, Rhys, ed. Cultural Wars in American Politics: Critical Reviews of a Popular Myth. New York: Aldine Transaction, 1997.

Wolfe, Alan. The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.

Wuthnow, Robert. “Presidential Address 2003: The Challenge of Diversity.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43(2)2004: 159-170.

Wuthnow, Robert. After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty- Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2007.

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