Search

While religion can be a source of legitimacy for politicians, it can turn into a restraint in the process of state administration. Four possible situations emerge from the intersection of religion and the state: religious politics with a religious state, secular politics in a secular state, secular politics with a religious state, and religious politics in a secular state. A religious state with religious politicsis often the most violent and should cause statesmen to seek alternatives. A secularstate with secular politics runs the risk of cultural sterility and vacuity. Some combination of the secular and religious is necessary to avoid these two poles.

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

L'article est tire d'une etude comparative globale d'une quinzaine de nations sur les rapports entre religion, politique et Etat. Les trois pays dont il est question ici peuvent paraitre plus peripheriques que centraux en Europe, mais tous les trois representent des aspects importants de l'experience europeenne de cette fin du 20eme siecle: les tensions entre religion et monde seculier en Pologne, le conflit entre protestants et catholiques en Irlande du Nord, le desetablissement de la religion en Suede. Tout en explorant ces differents scenarios, l'auteur devoile l'existence d'un phenomene de religion culturelle.

American religion is a major component of the triumphal exceptionalism that has long set the United States apart from other nations. Our frequent label as the world's most religious advanced nation has given pride to many citizens, if not to all. This article offers a reassessment of the claim in the context of a larger cross-national investigation of religion, politics, and the state in some 14 countries around the globe. With this as a comparative backdrop, the article examines three putative sources of uniqueness: our civil religion (versus our separation of church and state); our religious organizations and congregational style; and our high levels of individual religious belief and behavior. The article concludes that America's uniqueness is overstated and constitutes more a matter of kind than degree.

This paper makes a strategic return to an earlier sociological era as a way of charting where we have been and where we are heading. Specifically, it returns to the debate over functionalism as represented in a volume edited by the author and Richard Peterson in 1967 entitledSystem, Change and Conflict. The paper argues that little of that controversy remains, but that several key issues have taken on new forms and serve as the foci of new disputes. A comparable volume today would require a quite different title, perhaps “Culture, Choice, and Praxis.” The paper briefly reviews the three new movements referred to and the issues surrounding them. It concludes with remarks on the changing role of theory itself within sociology.

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).

Dans ces deux articles, les AA. debattent de l'hypothese de la secularisation de la societe americaine face au nombre croissant de personnes sans religion. Il est question ici des recherches de Hout et Fischer de 2002 concernant les explications du declin des grandes organisations religieuses

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.

La theorie du choix rationnel a provoque un debat entre les sociologues de la religion. L'A. s'attache aux aspects economiques du choix rationnel, puis aux autres. Ensuite, il utilise le debat sur la secularisation comme point de reference critique. Parce que la secularisation peut etre envisagee comme precurseur et condition necessaire d'une nouvelle etape de sacralisation, les tenants de la theorie du choix rationnel semblent avoir raison. En proposant sa theorie, L. Iannaccone pose trois questions importantes: celle de la theorie pour l'etude des religions, le role du choix dans la pratique, la nature de la rationalite impliquee dans ces recherches

This paper derives from a multi-method study of religion and politics in a mid-sized northeastern city. Whereas most assessments of secularization are oriented either to the individual or to broad societal trends, this one concerns the dynamics of religion and politics at the community level. After presenting a condensed ethnography, the article explores its theoretical implications with reference to the larger literature on secularization. As others before us have shown, secularization is not to be equated with religious disappearance; indeed, secularization and sacralization are often dialectically linked and more complementary than mutually exclusive. We pursue the oscillation between them through a series of ten conceptual distinctions derived from the case at hand.

Two themes in the political culture of the United States relate the nation's politics and government to religion. First 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 normative "separate spheres" argument distancing religion from political activity. That these seemingly contradictory themes coexist is evidence for the interpretive openness of American culture. We 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.

As recently as two decades ago the challenge of writing an annual review of research on religion would have been to find enough to fill it-that is, enough work that was more than a substantive sounding and represented a true theoretical or methodologi­ cal advance. Despite the classic statements by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and others, there emerged very few works on religion in the years between 1920 and 1955 that are now deservedly recalled; however, beginning in the middle 1950s, the field has undergone what can only be described as an accelerating revival. This was in part an ironic response to the end of a reported revival in religion itself. In addition, the renewed interest was a function of new theoretical and methodologi­ cal developments in sociology, developments that found fertile application in the realm of both conventional religion and the wider spheres of cultural belief systems, social mechanisms of integration, and individual pursuits of meaning and affiliation. In one sense, it was these broader themes that marked a return to some of the classic statements noted above. As we shall see, the ghosts of Weber and Durkheim con­ tinue to linger even as recent developments have extended and amended their legacies in sometimes radical fashions. This review 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 the sources of religious sentiment, and spans cross-cultural, structural, subcultural, and ethnic, as well as individual, differences in pursuit of a more sophisticated and viable model. The second major topic concerns the consequences of religious com­ mitment, including both interand intrareligious group differences stemming from Weber's thesis on the Protestant ethic. Finally, we are concerned with recent re­ search on old and emerging forms of religious organization. Here we include 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. In all of this, it is manifestly impossible to summarize the entire recent literature. Instead, we have highlighted empirical studies that mark significant conceptual

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.