Search

This paper is an exercise in the applied sociology of religion. And yet it is not quite what the phrase implies. It does not offer advice to help religious organizations increase their members or fine-tune their services, nor is it quite in the spirit of Kemal Attaturk's reliance on Emile Durkheim's work in secularizing his nation and pushing through some of the most thorough and most enduring cultural changes of any country in the 20th century. In fact, the one similarity between Attaturk and the case at issue here is that both involve turkeys. With all due respect to our nation's leader, what follows includes an array of such jibes but there is no humor in its conclusions. As a hypothetical letter of response to a hypothetical request, it falls into the literary category of a conceit, and it illustrates how even sophomoric attempts at humor can be a palliative for despair. Apologies are certainly in order to those it may offend. The paper reviews both domestic and foreign religious issues implicated during President George W. Bush's administration. Domestically, these range across his public pronouncements on issues such as gay marriage, stem-cell research, and intelligent design, his faith-based initiatives, and the religious strategy behind his two Presidential campaigns. In foreign affairs, they include his wars on terrorism, Iraq, and Islam, as well as his policies concerning Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of a "culture war" has occasioned almost as much conflict among scholars as it depicts within societies. Although it should be more of a variable than an absolute, this paper argues that the phrase over-reaches as a description of the U.S. during and since the 2004 Presidential election. Not only does the U.S. fail to fulfill a criterion of "widespread polarization," but it also falls mercifully short of the kind of "concerted violence" and the pursuit of "illegitimate government control" that the notion of a war requires. The paper ends on a comparative note with brief accounts of research visits to four societies where culture wars have been fully realized as a lamentable fact of daily life: Northern Ireland, Guatemala, Israel, and India. These sketches -- like the argument itself -- are drawn from the author's recent book, Crossing the Gods (2001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mark Chaves: Introduction to the Symposium N.J. Demerath III: Diagnosing the Reverend Dr. Dumpty “After the Fall” Mary Jo Neitz: Eve, Lilith, and the Sociology of Religion: Comments on Zald Robert Wuthnow: Practice and Progress in the Study of Religion Mayer N. Zald: Where Are We in the Sociological Study of Religion? Continuing the Conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that the social scientific study of religion him long labored under a chafing constraint and a misleading premise. It suggests that our primary focus should he on the sacred, and that religion is just one among many possible sources of the sacred .Defining religion "substantively" but the sacred functionally helps to revolve a long-standing tension in the field Broadened conceptions of the sacred and of "sacralization" help to defuse the conflict among the two very different versions of secularization theory the "all-or-nothing" versus the "middle range "Meanwhile, a conceptual typo logy of the sacred pivots around tile intersections of two distinctions (compensatory vs confirmatory and marginal vs institutional,) Tins generates four distinct scenarios the sacred as integrative, the sacred as quest, the sacred as collectivity and the sacred as counter-culture The paper concludes wit/i three admonitions for research in the area [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on a global, 15-nation comparative study of religion, politics, and the state. The three countries at issue here may seem more peripheral than central to Europe, but all represent important aspects of the late 20th-century European experience-whether the tension between religion and secularity in Poland, the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or the final sigh of religious disestablishment in Sweden. While unpacking these different scenarios, the author uncovers a shared phenomenon of “cultural religion''... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decline of liberal Protestantism offers an important canvas upon which to portray a myriad of cultural and structural factors at work within religion, on the one hand, and organizations, on the other. Specifically, this paper argues that the decline represents the structural consequence of Protestantism's liberal cultural triumph on behalf of such values as individualism, freedom, pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and intellectual inquiry. As laudable as these values may be from other perspectives, they can be anathema to mobilizing and sustaining any organization that requires a loyal and disciplined membership. The paper puts religious "strictness" in a broader perspective and reviews several temporal models that specify the effects more closely. These are all at work within the most recent cycle of liberal cultural assertion followed by membership decline in the 1960s. The paper concludes with some strategic implications for the future as various "remnants' seek to stem the tide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, British and American sociology are divided by a common discipline. While similarities exist, the differences are instructive, particularly from the perspective of a sociology of sociology informed by concepts drawn from religion. It is argued that British sociology is suspended between the sacred and the profane, as these terms are broadly defined in the British social and academic context. The metaphor illuminates not only the intellectual development of the field but also its persistent marginality within both the world of the university and the world of government. While there is some prospect of secularization, major changes are difficult to foresee. Comparisons with the American case are not intended as invidious. After all, who is to say that it is better for a field to be suspended between the secular and the profane? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on trends in sociology as a profession and as a discipline. Many young scholars have been led to view the Ph.D., the first job, and even tenure, as part of their academic birthright--a function of perseverance as much as excellence. As the market contracts and is complicated further by such factors such as affirmative action, pressures toward unionization are understandable, as are pressures for increased involvement of the American Sociological Association (ASA). The most successful venture undertaken by the ASA in the 1970s concern teaching sociology--a program that may be single-handedly responsible for keeping the membership and coffers from plummeting. Teaching may become not only the bottom line, but the only line of academic performance. Again there are implications and parallels for the ASA. Originally founded to promote research, a major part of the budget is devoted to research journals in which there is declining membership interest. As the example of new programs for improving teaching attest, professional pressures and disciplinary needs can be symbiotic. Another example is sociology's shift in the direction of applied sociology and social policy. There is no doubt that applying sociology offers major intellectual benefits. In 75 years, as of 1891 the ASA has changed considerably, but in the next 75 years, it may change even more.

The article examines two themes in the political culture of the United States that relate the nation's politics and government to religion. The first theme is the sense of sacredness connected to the polity that is often termed "civil religion." Second is the institutional separation of church and state, often turned into a nonnative "separate spheres" argument distancing religion from political activity. That these seemingly contradictory themes coexist is evidence for the interpretive openness of the U.S. culture. The ambiguity of the separation of religion and politics has produced uneasy alliances and tensions, theoretically and historically. As a result, the U.S. civic culture is an open text that has incorporated coexisting and competing interpretations under different historical circumstances. Understanding how those interpretations are used in the politics of a mid-sized northeastern city is the focus of this article. The authors first examine the two themes, civil religion, and separation. Then they illustrate the ways that the themes coexist, conflict, and complement each other in the public politics of one community. The authors observe both themes in the public politics of a mid-sized, northeastern city and identify three ways that the tensions between these themes are "resolved," allowing the themes to coexist and providing cultural resources for those involved in civic politics.

This article describes the religious component of U.S. politics. It illustrates the interplay between religion and power in U.S. society as of January 1989. The article begins by noting several reasons to suppose that religion has been losing political power in the U.S. ever since the nation's inception. The authors mention three reasons--separation, secularization, differentiation--one would expect religion to wield low political power post-World War II. According to the authors, religion's relationship to power varies. In this article, they suggest a typology of religious influence to facilitate comparisons not only among cases within the U.S. but also on a more global basis.

This article examines the relations of church and state in the U.S. on a historical perspective, and its implications for religion, law and society. The term church is used for a range of phenomena, and even its relationship to religion is problematic. Cults, sects, denominations, ecclesia, civil religion, privatized religion--these represent semantic stations on a scholar's cross. Far from being neutral, the courts have exercised considerable influence over the forms and functions of sectarian religiosity and the courts have been aligned with the churches in their struggles against the sects. Churches in the societal mainstream have needed little formal support because of their informal power and leverage.

This essay describes a major shift that occurred in religion's perceived political prominence, especially following key events in 1979. It then describes a current project to investigate religion, politics, and the state in more than a dozen countries around the globe. But the article principally focuses on a somewhat serendipitous aspect of the project; namely, ways in which standard concepts in American sociology of religion take different meanings and connotations in other countries. Five examples involve religious identity, fundamentalism, churck-state relations, civil religion. and secularization and secularity. In each case, the changes required abroad are also salutary for analysis at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil religion denotes a religion of the nation, a nonsectarian faith that has as its sacred symbols those of the polity and national history. Recent scholars have portrayed it as a cohesive force, a common canopy of values that helps foster social and cultural integration, but this perspective may now be at odds with a complex reality. Ours is an increasingly differentiated society with the rise of group politics and subcultures. The forms of civil religion remain, but the cultural cohesion it purportedly reflects is dissolving. Civil-religious discourse has become a tool for legitimating social movements and interest-group politics. A critical examination of the current uses of civil religion must lead to a critical reanalysis of the society at large as well as the concept itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles the 1960s civil rights activists of the U.S. for a range of life style aspects, including age and education, home and family, work and income, lifestyles and life choices, and finally, value stability and the life course. Most of the 1960s activist generation was comprised of students in their twenties. Today, those former students are turning forty, and middle-aged. The article focuses on the fundamental social characteristics of these former activists present lives--their educations, families and occupations. Results suggest that these lives are indeed different when compared to similarly aged and educated national samples. The former activists have substantially fewer children, are less, likely to have ever married, are more likely to divorce, are much less likely to work in managerial occupations, and earn considerably less than would be expected. After examining some of the activists own explanations for these differences, the article argues for the importance of values in determining life choices, and present data comparing the underlying values of the activist sample with those of a similarly educated general public.

A scattering of recent research has studied the current political beliefs and attitudes of individuals identified as "1960s activists." In contrast to much of the treatment accorded such people in the popular media, this research tends to find most of these activists currently liberal on a wide variety of political topics. However, in the absence of panel data, most of this research has had to assess any change in the activists' attitudes either by assuming the activists' past positions or by trusting to their retrospective reports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Movies are used increasingly as teaching aids in sociology. This article ponders their potential and their limitations. By no means straightforward illustrations of sociological reality, movies can be pedagogical booby traps. In fact, the article offers six tips on how to watch a standard feature in order to avoid sociological distortion. It then goes on so consider several other possible reasons for using movies as teaching instruments, including film as a source of cultural influence over reality, film as a proxy for culture at large in its dialectical relation to reality, and film as similar to sociology itself in the eyes of students and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses recent strands in research in religion. It is primarily organized in terms of three major topics, each of which has seen the emergence of new answers to enduring questions. The first concerns sources of religious sentiment and spans cross-cultural, structural, sub-cultural and ethnic, as well as individual, differences in pursuit of a more sophisticated and viable model. The second major topic concerns consequences of religious commitment, including both inter-and intra-religious group differences stemming from sociology Max Weber's thesis on the Protestant ethic. Finally, the article is concerned with recent research on old and emerging forms of religious organization. It includes not only recent materials on church versus sect and problems of the clergy, but also a variety of emergent religious forms including youth movements and "civil" religion. The author states that there have clearly been major advances in recent years in both conceptualization and explanation of religious sentiment and styles, yet considerable ambiguity remains. The whole issue of multidimensionality continues to be examined with new data and new techniques.

The article focuses on changing conceptions of the new sociology. Until very recently most of the debate over the future course of sociology occurred, in sociologist Irving Horowitz's terms between the "occupationalists" and the "professionals," both within the "mainline" of the field. Now it is clear that a challenge is mounting from the "marginals," specifically from the anti-sociologists among students. The term "revolutionary movement" is apt in several respects. For one thing, it refers to an increasing demand to transform sociology from a discipline into an actual revolutionary movement in its own right. For another, the model of the revolutionary cadre is increasingly appropriate in understanding the nature and sources of the demand itself. And yet the term "revolution" is apt in another sense; namely, that suggested by Thomas Kuhn's work on "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Ironically, Kuhn's work is sometimes cited as support for the revolutionary cause at issue here, although Kuhn's use of the term has little in common with that of the dissidents and, in fact, the two types of revolutions may be mutually incompatible.

Using data collected in 1965 on white student civil rights workers in the South affiliated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, this paper seeks to probe the factors that underlie the subjective sense of success and failure in an episode of political activism. Focusing on some fifty local projects scattered from Virginia to Alabama, we find that success was only partially a function of gains in voter registration, the summer's principal objective. It was related as well to the degree to which projects had been able to penetrate barriers into the black community to build black organizations, the degree of project cohesiveness, and the extent of personal fulfillment of the volunteers as individuals. One last correlate involved the amount of time spent protesting, and the paper explores this in particular detail, focusing on the sense in which the summer might be described as a romantic venture. Finally, the paper offers a comparison between the white student New Left and some of its older predecessors, stressing a distinction between "sympathetic" and "self-interested" activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both critics and defenders tend to regard structural-functionalism as a single school with a distinct identity and a common strategy. This paper argues that the illusion of unity has obfuscated the debate. It suggests that structural-functionalism harbors at least two quite different approaches. While both are "legitimate," they lead to different conclusions and different vulnerabilities. Thus, it matters whether one is primarily concerned with the structural part or the systematic whole. In each case there are advantages and disadvantages, but charges of Panglossian unity, illusions of indispensability, static analysis, and ideological conservatism do not apply equally to both. Each is exposed to biases, but the biases are not the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the overall decline in institutionalized American religion, this paper investigates a probable, and predicted, surge of organized irreligion. However, historical and observational data regarding two such irreligious groups, the Society for Ethical Culture and the American Rationalist Federation, reveal instead a similar, even more serious disintegration among them than that which the churches are experiencing. Findings indicate a possible convergence underway between the organizational manifestations of both religion and irreligion. Furthermore, this convergence seems to entail the growth of the "religion-less church," an unanticipated phenomenon which introduces a new religious spirit beyond the boundaries of formerly organized religious and Irreligious groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comment on a previous paper Some Critical Observations on the Church-Sect Dimension, by Erich Goode, that appeared in the April 1967 issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. According to the author of this article, Erich Goode's paper has a double purpose in criticizing the wider legacy of the church-sect distinction. By and large, the author of this article concurs in his evaluation of the former, but perhaps understandably, the author has reservations about his appraisal of the latter. At the risk of overpersonizing the matter, the author wants to defend his own work, his book Social Class in American Protestantism, first before turning to the broader issue. The author appreciates the opportunity to speak offensively about the church-sect distinction in general and defensively about his own work in particular. Somehow the author had never expected more than cursory reviews of his book. In many respects, the analysis was an abortive attempt to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.

The article discusses the connections between religion and state, specifically those concerning the role of religion in major election campaigns, intelligent design, and civil response to the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandals. It argues that sociologists need to reconsider the role of religion in sociological studies, especially in situations that involve ethnic conflicts stemming from religious identities. The academic journal "Sociology of Religion" has published articles on topics that were discussed at the annual meeting for the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

This article comments on a paper by Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer published in the April 2002 issue of the American Sociological Review which investigates the reasons for the alleged growing proportion of U.S. adults who have no religious preference. Between 1990 and 2000, the proportion of U.S. adults who report that they have no religious preference has approximately doubled. In an interesting and informative analysis, Hout and Fischer consider three hypothetical reasons for this change. They make viable arguments in favor of two of them: Changing demographics, and the possibility that the relatively recent increase in right-wing political activism of visible church leaders has driven many politically liberal U.S. citizens away from organized religion. The authors conclude that the third causal hypothesis they consider, secularization, is false. The commenters however disagree. According to them, secularization is a complex and sometimes ideologically weighted concept that can be multidimensional, nonlinear, sometimes reversible, and applicable to any from of the sacred, religious or not. Raised in the context of why more U.S. citizens have no religious preference, according to the reviewers, they remain puzzled by the authors' refusal to take yes for an answer to the question of secularization.

Presents letters to the editor referencing articles and topics discussed in previous issues of "The American Sociologist." Article by Linda D. Molm asserting that the position of behavioral sociology is unassailable in sociology; Article by N. J. Demerath III which provided ruminations about British sociology and social policy.

This article comments on several reviews of books on postmodernism which are published in the January 1996 issue of Contemporary Sociology. The eight reviews of 16 recent books on postmodernism represents variety. Like the wider postmodernist literature, these works fall within two cross-cutting distinctions. First, there is postmodernism as epistemological screed versus societal diagnosis; second, within each, there are both celebrations and laments. Most of the books reviews champion the new epistemology. Conventional scholarship is portrayed ay anachronistic, mechanical and imperious. By contrast, postmodern projects reveal the dual urgency of personal agency and political agenda, as theory is more concerned with revaluing the world than explaining it. This can be found in the works of Patricia Clough, Steven Seidman and Brian Turner. But not all the epistemological analyses are approving as demonstrated by John O'Neill. Meanwhile, this cues the debate over postmodernism as substantive analysis and social diagnosis. While judgments differ as to which comes first, the postmodernity of the beheld, or the postmodernism of the beholder, there is no question that a new theory of theory is paralleled by a new theory of society.

The article presents a report of the Executive Officer of the American Sociological Association (ASA), a U.S. based independent research organization, on the activities undertaken by the Association in 1972. The author informs that there have been a number of changes within the Executive Office, many of which followed recommendations of the Committee on Long-Range Planning for the Executive Office, chaired by sociologist John Clausen. The Executive office has now taken over the entire task of soliciting and monitoring advertising for ASA journals, thus eliminating a middleman. It has also switched to a computerized membership roster, which, according to the author, will greatly ease the burden of billing, keeping abreast of membership trends, producing the biannual Directory, and servicing legitimate requests for subscription lists. It is also informed that there have been several changes in the Constitution and By-Laws of the Association. The first of these changes originated in the Committee on Rights and Privileges of Membership.

The article presents a response of the author on the comments made by sociologist Erich Goode in the article "Further Reflections on the Chruch-Sect Dimension." It is good to know that Goode and I are on the threshold of agreement. My only nagging doubts are whether agreement is desirable among properly disputatious scholars and, if so, agreement on whose terms? Goode replies to my challenge to present data on class and attendance in all religious groups by offering figures on liberal, conservative and fundamentalist denominations. These data do indeed support his proposition concerning participation in churches. But they are restricted to churches and do not seem to include the crucial sects. Even the Church of God is a "church", as both its title and sociologist Val Clear's organizational study make clear. Thus, I still wonder whether the middle-class members of Holiness sects, storefront groups and Millenerian movements also participate more in the formal rounds than do their lower-class brethren. It is possible and I even explored some possible reasons for it.