FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON THE CHURCH-SECT DIMENSION.

The article presents a response of the author on comments made by sociologists N.J. Demerath and A.W. Eister on the church-sect dimension. I am provoked much more to agreement than to debate. There are, nonetheless, points which call for clarification and further conceptualization. We will begin with Eister's sweeping statements since his critique and my own are more complementary than contradictory. It is wrong, however, to infer that I am attempting to salvage the church-sect typology, to criticize only a part of it and to replace that part with an improved part, so that the basic edifice of church-sect will be retained. I must assert that the basic intention of my paper was to show how and why the church-sect dimension was faulty and to show this empirically. In order to offer an adequate critique of any theoretical tool, it has to be taken apart piece by piece, if nearly all the pieces are faulty as I would assert is true of church-sect then we are left with an unusable tool, one which must be either entirely remade, or discarded altogether. Eister suggests that this is too trivial and partial, that the tool ought to be smashed without reference to its component parts.