Religion and Class in America: Culture, History, and Politics [1 ed.] 9789047424734, 9789004171428

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Religion and Class in America: Culture, History, and Politics

International Studies in Religion and Society Editors

Lori Beaman and Peter Beyer, University of

VOLUME 7

Ottawa

Religion and Class in America: Culture, History, and Politics Edited by

Sean McCloud and William A. Mirola

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Religion and class in America : culture, history, and politics / edited by Sean McCloud and William A. Mirola. p. cm. -- (International studies in religion and society, ISSN 1573-4293 ; v. 7) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-17142-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. United States--Religion. 2. Social classess--United States. I. McCloud, Sean. II. Mirola, William A. (William Andrew) III. Title. IV. Series. BL2525.R453 2009 305.5’10882773--dc22 2008037560

ISSN 1573-4293 ISBN 978 90 04 17142 8 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ............................................................................vii List of Contributors ........................................................................... ix Introduction ........................................................................................ 1 Sean McCloud and William A. Mirola PART ONE

RECONSIDERATIONS OF AMERICAN RELIGION AND CLASS 1. Socioeconomic Inequality in the American Religious System: An Update and Assessment ............................................ 29 Christian Smith and Robert Faris 2. At Ease with Our Own Kind: Worship Practices and Class Segregation in American Religion .............................................. 45 Timothy J. Nelson 3. Sect Appeal: Rethinking the Class-Sect Link .............................. 69 Samuel H. Reimer 4. The Ghost of Marx and the Stench of Deprivation: Cutting the Ties That Bind in the Study of Religion and Class .............. 91 Sean McCloud PART TWO

CASE STUDIES IN AMERICAN RELIGION AND CLASS 5. Exploring the Class Cultural Anchors of Fundamentalism ...... 111 Thaddeus Coreno 6. Class Differences in Attitudes about Business, Economics, and Social Welfare among Indianapolis Catholics and Protestants ................................................................................. 133 William A. Mirola 7. Godly Riches: The Nineteenth-Century Roots of Modern Prosperity Gospel ...................................................................... 159 Ginger Stickney

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8. Sensing Class: Religion, Aesthetics, and Formations of Class in the Eastern Kentucky’s Coal Fields ...................................... 175 Richard J.Callahan, Jr. 9. William P. Fife, the Drummer Evangelist: Class and the Protestant Ethic in the Nineteenth-Century South ................... 197 Joe Creech Index ............................................................................................... 217

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project began its life in both North Carolina and Indiana as Sean and I quite independently nurtured our interests in reviving class analysis within our respective sub-disciplinary studies of American religion. My own interest was sparked during my doctoral work in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Many individuals have contributed their intellectual and moral support to this work. I would especially like to thank my friends and colleagues who participated with me in the Pew Charitable Trust’s Young Scholars in American Religion Program through the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture from 1997 to 1999, in particular Lori Beaman, Mike Emerson, Rich Wood, Sue Monahan, and Patty Chang. Much of my thinking about class and religion was shaped by them. I would also like to thank my research colleagues at the Polis Center at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, particularly Art Farnsley, Elfriede Wedam, Lynn Blake, Dawn L. Parks, and David Bodenhammer. They gave me the intellectual freedom to weave class issues into our collective study of religion in Indianapolis. Grants from a variety of sources afforded me the financial support to conduct the research investigations that yielded the data for my own chapter in this volume but also to minimize my teaching responsibilities in order to complete the project in a timely fashion. In particular, I wish to thank the Lilly Endowment, Inc. for their funding through the Religion and Urban Culture Project at the Polis Center at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, Indiana and the Marian College Professional Development Committee. Practical assistance came from many sources but I particularly want to thank my research assistants Lindsey Day, Janelle Scott, and James Wilson, students at Marian College for the many, many thankless tasks they helped me to accomplish in making this book and my chapter in it a reality. Lindsey worked tirelessly to code occupational data, to run statistical analyses, and to read and edit portions of the text. Janelle and James both worked to expand my command of the background literature by conducting library searches and doing advanced reading of key articles. Janelle also did extensive copy editing on the final draft of the manuscript.

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This book would be nothing without our colleagues from around the country who continue to demonstrate in their work that class matters in the study of religion. We thank all of the contributors to this volume for their interesting and useful chapters. Many other people provided comments on various stages of this project. Of special note, we thank Regine Reincke and Ingeborg van der Laan at Brill for their interest in this project and Lori Beaman, Peter Beyer, Rhys Williams, and the reviewers at Brill Publishers all gave very helpful critiques of this manuscript in whole or in part. Of course, though all of the aforementioned play significant parts in the completion of this research and its subsequent movement toward publication, the final responsibility for all the shortcomings of this work belong solely to us. Finally, both Sean and I wish to thank our families and friends for their love and support over the time it has taken to get this manuscript to press, especially my partner Jim LeGrand for all of the many kinds of support he has given over the years and Sean thanks Lynn, Sinead, and Joan, and he dedicates his portion of this in memory of Jasper and Mo. William Mirola Indianapolis, IN Sean McCloud Charlotte, NC May 2008

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Richard J. Callahan, Jr., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri, where he specializes in American religious history, culture, and folklore. He is the author of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust (Indiana 2008) and the editor of New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase (Missouri 2008). He is currently working to recover the religious worlds of nineteenth century whaling. Thaddeus Coreno is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, PA. He teaches courses on social problems, inequality, religion, and sociological theory. Coreno is currently working on a book that explores the interplay between class inequality and religious fundamentalism in the United States. Joe Creech is the Assistant Director of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History and Humanities at Christ College, the Honors College of Valparaiso University. He is the author of Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolution (Illinois 2006) and is currently working on the intersection of class, economics, and religion in nineteenth-century America. Robert Faris is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Davis. Sean McCloud is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is author of Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955–1993 (University of North Carolina Press 2004) and Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies (University of North Carolina Press 2007). He has written on contemporary American new religions, trends in modern American religion scholarship, and religion and popular culture. William A. Mirola is Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Marian College in Indianapolis, IN. He is co-editor (with Susanne Monahan and Michael O. Emerson) of Sociology of Religion: A Reader (Prentice Hall 2001) and

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co-author (with Susanne Monahan and Michael O. Emerson) of Religion Implicated: How Sociology Helps to Understand the Role of Religion in Our World (Allyn and Bacon 2009). He has published articles addressing religion and social class as well as religious dynamics in social movement activism. Timothy J. Nelson is a lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of Every Time I Feel the Spirit: Religious Experience and Ritual in an African American Congregation (2004). He is currently working with Kathryn Edin on a book on low-income non-custodial fathers in Philadelphia. Samuel H. Reimer is Professor of Sociology at Atlantic Baptist University. His research focuses on evangelicalism in Canada and the U.S. and more recently on demographics within U.S. Protestantism. He intends to shift his focus to study congregations and religious diversity in Canada. Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan Professor of Sociology & Director of the Center for the Sociology of Religion at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN. He holds MA and PhD degrees in Sociology from Harvard University and is former Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ginger Stickney is a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is currently researching media and memoir representations of Mormon Fundamentalism.

INTRODUCTION Sean McCloud and William A. Mirola

Class matters in American religion. This is hardly news to those outside of academia. Across the United States, living wage campaigns join the moral authority and political access of clergy and congregations to raise wages for low-wage city workers. The Charitable Choice provision of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act raises issues of class as congregations now become competitors for state and federal funds to expand social service programs. Interfaith coalitions on housing and jobs bring people of faith together across class lines, but class lines also shape the strategies, tactics, and goals these groups will focus on. Wealthy congregations who try to address the needs of poor neighbors confront hostility as much as gratitude from these neighbors. At a time when congregations are increasingly expected to address the local class and economic problems of poverty, joblessness, hunger, and homelessness that result from changing macro-economic conditions and inequalities, the significance of understanding how class position and religious belief and practice are mutually interactive is more crucial than ever. Even within congregations, class asserts itself. Congregations—like neighborhoods—tend to attract and hold economically similar members. So much so that, in paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous observation, people of faith are as likely to be segregated by social class as they are by race on Saturday nights or Sunday mornings. Further, class cultures find expression in religious services, church architecture, congregational music, pastoral sermons, assembly educational programs, and outreach ministries. Some congregations— helped by endowments and other legacies—express their class through wealth and sufficient financial resources, which are in turn used to build state of the art facilities, hire needed personnel, and create and maintain extensive social outreach ministries. Class differences in religious life are inevitably “felt” by both those in the pews and those on the outside looking in. Our goal in this volume is to start a long overdue discussion about how class matters—and does not matter—in American religion.

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In short, we suggest that class is indeed important, whether one examines it through analysis of events and documents, polls and interviews, or participant observation of religious groups. But conceptualizing the relevance of class to American religions is not simple. What do we even mean by the term “class”? Where does one find “class” to study? And, if it can indeed be located somewhere in the American religious landscape, how does one separate it from other crucial variables such as race, gender, age, place, or region? While these are not questions with which all of this book’s contributors explicitly engage, they are issues that all of the chapters address in some way. In what follows, we review significant past scholarship on religion and class, detail five summary points emerging from this volume, and describe the chapters to follow.

PAST SCHOLARSHIP ON RELIGION AND CLASS: AREAS OF STUDY Efforts to link religion and class in capitalist society are as old as the modern humanities and social sciences disciplines. Some scholars argued that religion, institutionally and ideologically, functioned as a means of control for the dominant classes. Others argued that religion was a site that could foment the protest and revolt of the masses. While some scholars have tried to force the social role of religion in capitalist society onto such a dichotomy of outcome, such an approach is fallacious and ahistorical. Analyzing religion as it is lived by individuals in a concrete time and place requires a modification of these approaches to account for the complex and often contradictory roles it plays within American society. Nevertheless, even contemporary scholars must confront the “ghosts” of the past. What follows is a brief summary of five scholarly areas to which the chapters in this volume respond in some way: “Classical Studies,” “Community Studies,” “Labor History,” “Quantitative Studies,” and “Sects, Cults, and Millennial Groups.” These subject areas reflect the diverse arenas that future scholars will encounter when answering the many calls for further research found herein. While this is not a comprehensive review of the academic literature, it does examine some of the more prominent analyses. Several contributors to this volume provide additional analyses and critiques of earlier research. In all, these areas of scholarship suggest complex and sometimes conflicting images of class and American religion.

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CLASSICAL STUDIES: MARX, WEBER, AND BEYOND Karl Marx and Max Weber loom large in the historiography of religion and class studies. Standard scholarly interpretations of Marxist and Weberian views of religion accept religion as an institution, linked to economic and political institutions, that mirrors and maintains class distinctions in society and religious beliefs as interpretive frames fundamentally connected to class position, occupation, or status groups that provide meaning to life experiences. Simply put, Marx provides a foundational theoretical view of how religion and class are linked. In Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Right, Marx articulates his famous statement that religion is “the opium of the masses” and details how it both legitimates and reflects the basic inequalities of class society in illusory terms. The real world conflict between classes is abstracted into a spiritual struggle between good and evil, God and Satan, etc. In doing so, religion diverts the attention of the poor and oppressed to a bliss-filled afterlife as comfort from their economic and physical pain, misery, and alienation in this life. Religious organizations, beliefs, and practices are tools wielded by the capitalist class that ensure workers’ docility (Marx 1986; Beckford 1989). For Marx, religion was an ideological problem that impeded class consciousness. For Weber, religion—Protestantism in particular—was less important as a means for controlling workers than as a means for capitalists to legitimate their own class interests. Weber is most noted for his argument in The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism that the emergence of Calvinist and Lutheran Protestant theology set the stage on which the rational economic behavior of capitalism emerged. Puritanism, by linking elements from reform theologies, held that having great power and wealth in capitalist society (assuming they resulted from hard work and frugality) was synonymous with being one of God’s elect because, the logic proceeded, God wouldn’t reward the wicked. Conversely, regarding the social conditions of the poor, it is clear not only that they are lazy, drink to excess, and waste the money they have, but they are also “spiritually” suspect. God would surely not punish someone with poverty, hunger, and disease if they were righteous. In Weber’s equation, an affinity emerged between religious belief, practice, and capitalist rationality which laid the foundation for the forms of economic behavior central to capitalism. Later studies took this Weberian notion to argue that different religious values move

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people to earn differently or to attain more or less education (Riccio 1979; Beyerlein 2004; Keister 2003). Though Weber is best known to religion scholars for The Protestant Ethic, he also developed an elaborate sociology of religion that examined the affinities between religion, class, and status. Among other things, he asserted that the social group within which a religion first developed left a lasting impression on it, and some of Weber’s work set forth to determine the connections between certain occupational groups and the theologies of various world religions. In his 1913 “Social Psychology of the World’s Religions,” for example, Weber made correspondences between different societal castes (intellectual, political, warrior, peasant) and certain types of religious beliefs (Gerth and Mills 1958, 267–301). Weber’s approach broadened Marx’s position by rooting capitalist economic behavior to religion. He also reframed Marx’s ideas of religion as false consciousness for workers by providing a broader understanding of religion as a means for legitimation for all class positions with his concept of “theodicy.” A theodicy is a religious frame that provides meaning to problematic experiences in life such as poverty, death, and deprivation. As such, a theodicy of privilege explains the power of the upper classes to themselves. John D. Rockefeller’s claim that God gave him his vast wealth and Andrew Carnegie’s non-theistic Gospel of Wealth are two examples. A theodicy of suffering provides a supernaturally legitimated defense of the deprivations experienced by lower classes. While subordinate groups often accept the belief that they are at fault for their low social standing, theodicies of suffering can potentially be used to interpret social arrangements as unjust and in need of change (Gerth and Mills 1958, 275 ff). In addition to Weber’s correspondences between theologies of suffering (theodicies) and class, Weber also focused on salvation (soteriologies). Among other things, Weber suggested that emotional, salvific, religion was often – though not exclusively – a focus of “disprivileged” classes, while more privileged groups were attracted to religions that theologically justified their good fortunes and status (Weber 1964,101, 107). Unlike Marx, however, Weber did not see religion as simply a reflection or function of material conditions. He suggested that religion was both influenced by and influenced social and economic conditions. “Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct,” Weber suggested, “yet very frequently the ‘world images’ that

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have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest” (Gerth and Mills 1958, 280). In addition to Marx and Weber, some scholars have utilized the ideas of the Italian writer and political prisoner Antonio Gramsci to discuss religion and class. Gramsci defines ideology in connection to religion as “a conception of the world that is implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity and in all manifestations of individual and collective life” (1971, 328). With this in mind, religious ideology is not merely the philosophical and theological premises of religion; rather, it is where these theoretical elements become the vehicle for activity in the social world. Ideology assists in the creation of understanding and meaning for events and for all kinds of action; be it economic, political, or cultural. For Gramsci, religion is a source of class power because that helps establish the cultural hegemony of the dominant class. As an institution, its organizations, beliefs, and practices support elites’ cultural, economic, and political position. While Marx, Weber, and Gramsci provide the classic theoretical terms and foundations for the study of religion and class, in the United States one of the most influential works was H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929). In it, he applied the sociology of Max Weber and Ernest Troeltsch, the author of The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches and developer of the church-sect classification (Troeltsch 1960). Writing as a theologian, Niebuhr saw denominationalism as the sacrifice of universal Christian ideals to the parochial class, political, and ethnic interests of specific groups. Favorably citing Troeltsch’s comment that “ ‘the really creative, church forming religious movements are the work of the lower strata,’ ” Niebuhr viewed “sects of the disinherited” as prime movers in a repeating cycle of Christian revitalization (Niebuhr 1929, 29). “So regarded,” he suggested, “one phase of the history of denominationalism reveals itself as the story of the religiously neglected poor, who fashion a new type of Christianity which corresponds to their distinctive needs, who rise in the economic scale under the influence of religious discipline, and who, in the midst of a freshly acquired cultural respectability, neglect the new poor succeeding them on the lower plane” (Niebuhr 1929, 28). For Niebuhr, the “rise of new sects to champion the uncompromising ethics of Jesus and to ‘preach the gospel to the poor’ has again and again been the effective means of recalling Christendom to its mission”

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(Niebuhr 1929, 21). In examples ranging from the first Christians to the Waldensians and Methodists, Niebuhr posited this recurrent cycle in which society’s disinherited, finding that the churches of the privileged did not address their needs, formed their own sects. He saw these sects more closely following the tenets of Christianity than those middle-class churches from which the dispossessed withdrew. If the new sects survived, they eventually became established churches which lost their ethical rigor, pushed out the lower class parishioners among them, and thus sowed the seeds of another sect.

COMMUNITY STUDIES From the 1920s through the 1960s, a series of now classic book-length studies detailed the diversity of American culture exhibited in local communities as varied as Newburyport, Middletown, Gastonia, Springdale, and Detroit (Warner and Lunt 1941; Lynd and Lynd 1929; Pope 1942; Vidich and Bensman 1958; and Lenski 1963). Though these studies typically did not set out to explore religion and social class, they nevertheless highlighted the manner in which they were related and they demonstrated how they impacted public life. Though not area studies per se, in the mid-1960s, other scholars returned to look specifically at the religious dimensions of American culture, including the role of social class differences in religion (Baltzell 1964; Herberg 1955; Demerath 1965). The findings in these works provided a foundation on which later researchers exploring religion and class, including those whose work follows in this volume, would build. Discussed here as two examples are Robert and Helen Lynds’ “Middletown” study of Muncie, Indiana and Liston Pope’s examination of Gastonia, North Carolina. Together, these cases studies show the myriad ways in which class and religion in local communities intertwine. In Middletown, the Lynds observed that a binary class divide between the business and the working class dominated community life. The Lynds highlighted the precariousness of working class life where families faced the chronic threat of layoffs and their attendant financial crises. For those in the business class, connections through clubs, lodges, churches, and shops provided a quality of life that ensured a steady, if gentle “slope upward” (Lynd and Lynd 1929, 68). The Lynds argued that—particularly for the business class—the church to which one

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belonged was directly tied to one’s identification as part of the town’s elite. The business class attended only six Protestant churches of the city’s forty-two white congregations. Though they did not specifically list the denominations to which these churches belonged, it was clear from other parts of their study that they included Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists. The Lynds also identified class differences in the mores and folkways of Middletown’s religious culture. In one of their many notes, for example, the Lynds described the class differences of religious conversations (Lynd and Lynd 1929, 317). They noted that religious discussion was largely taboo among the business class, but was a regular feature among the working classes – including labor organization meetings. They also found that sermon content generally differed by class. In sermon after sermon, business class church-goers were reminded of the importance of being a member, while working class people were exhorted to worship God, pray, and following the church’s teachings. The Lynds’ study well illustrates how religion reinforced Middletown’s class divides, both through divergent religious cultures and through the class segregation of members within single congregations and denominations. Subsequent studies found similar patterns, but with nuances reflective of the region where the towns under study were located. Examining social class and labor conflict in a southern mill town, Liston Pope observed more overt economic links between the elite and all of the churches in this company town. In “uptown” churches of the middle and upper classes of Gastonia, North Carolina, Pope found that religion provided a clearly communicated approval of prevailing economic arrangements. These churches reinforced, through theology and practice, the importance of respectability, charity, and honesty as these related to one’s business dealings. In focusing on good behavior, the culture of these churches never caused the elite to question the existing class inequalities in their own community. But religion and class were linked in more direct ways in this community. Mill owners paid clergy salaries directly and along with other upper class congregants contributed to clergy perks such as automobiles and holidays abroad. Not only did Pope document that Mill executives were found in specific denominations in Gastonia, he also noted that they held positions of authority in their congregations. Gastonia’s elite even exercised control in their workers’ Evangelical churches. They often owned the building and paid the ministers, often requiring them to pick up their pay at the mill offices.

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In detailing these two studies of the genre, one sees a pattern of findings that reproduced elsewhere: 1) there are class differences in denominationl affiliation, 2) these affiliational differences foment divergent religious cultures in local congregations, and 3) these class-cultural religious differences play out in religious beliefs, practices, styles and how they think about the dynamics of their community and world. In several of these studies—especially Lenski’s (1963) study of Detroit, Warner and Lunt’s (1941) study of Newburyport, and Pope’s (1942) study of Gastonia—the focus on the processes by which class and religion collectively shaped community responses during intense labor disputes played a small role in the emergence of the “new” labor history. This field was less rooted to narratives that solely analyzed the rise of the American labor movement in terms of economic and political forces, but also revised the significant role that institutions like religion played in mobilizing workers, opposing them, and in achieving a host of industrial reforms.

LABOR HISTORY The field of labor history also provides a rich source for evidence on the links between religion and class by illustrating the side of class conflicts on which specific religious groups came down and in demonstrating how different classes used their religious beliefs and practices in ways that intentionally supported or opposed a diverse range of industrial and labor reforms (Johnson 1978; Laurie 1980; Gutman 1966; Pope 1942; Foner 1982; Fantasia 1989; Fones-Wolf 1989; Mirola 2003a, 2003b; Murphy 1992; Lazerow 1995; Wilentz 1984; Cushman Wood 2004; Sterne 2000; 2003; Sutton 1998; Halker 1991; Zweig 1991). Several brief examples from research in labor history are sufficient to illustrate the empirical evidence that supports these assertions about religion and class. Much of the early research tended to focus on the singular manner in which religion, especially Protestant Christianity, worked against efforts to mobilize workers for change. Labor historians Mike Davis (1986) and Philip Foner (1982), in their respective works, both take this view. Foner (1982), in his History of the Labor Movement in the United States, concluded Protestant clergy at best held up class collaboration as the ultimate and only acceptable goal for nascent labor organizations. As noted above, Liston Pope’s analysis traced the linkages between

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church leaders and the striking textile workers in 1929 North Carolina. He argued that “Gastonia ministers were willing to allow the power of religious institutions to be used against those who challenged this economic system, and themselves assisted in such use. At no point did they stand in opposition to the prevailing economic arrangements or to the drastic methods employed for their preservation. In no significant respect was their role productive of change in economic life—they contributed unqualified and effective sanction to their economic culture” (Pope 1942; 330). For American religious historians, Paul Johnson’s much debated argument in A Shopkeeper’s Millennium well illustrates such approaches. He suggested that antebellum revivals in Rochester, New York, aided the ownership classes to the detriment of working people. The Evangelicalism of the Second Great Awakening revivals, Johnson argued, “was order-inducing, repressive, and quintessentially bourgeois (Johnson 1978, 138). Gary Gerstle similarly sums up what can only be described as fearful inertia of many nineteenth century religious leaders: “French-Canadian clergy, the trusted spokesmen of the French-Canadian communities who knew well the hardships experienced by those who toiled in mills ten to twelve hours a day, might have called upon the corporatist values of their ethnic culture, emphasizing the primacy of group loyalty over individual advancement and of communal welfare over pecuniary gain, to develop a critique of industrial capitalism. But they chose not to” (Gerstle 1989; 35). While much early historical scholarship focused on how religion reinforced class inequality, more recent work argues that religious beliefs and practices can occasionally create a “culture of solidarity” among workers (Fantasia 1989). Some elite late nineteenth century Protestants feared and opposed working class movements, but some Protestant reformers led calls for labor reform in theological contexts, such as the Social Gospel movement, and in political contexts, such as Progressivism (Hopkins 1940; May 1963; White and Hopkins 1976; Curtis 1991). American Catholics too moved to support labor reform following the release of Rerum Novarum, the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII that gave official support to labor unions as defensive organizations for protecting working rights (Cort 1988; Hobgood 1991). Contemporary labor history also highlights the many ways that American workers themselves used religious values and symbols with which they were familiar to articulate broader calls for social justice (Thompson 1966; Fones-Wolf 1989; Fantasia 1989; Billings 1990;

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Fuechtmann 1989; Nelson 1991; Mirola 2003a). From the earliest days of industrialization, the American labor movement routinely used the religious culture and resources of its members to articulate a vision of a moral economy where the whole community shared the productive wealth created by labor as an alternative to the spreading capitalist vision of an economy where accumulation of profit by any means necessary was the only moral. The consequences of failing to appreciate the class salience of religion for workers could be costly to anyone trying to organize them as well. For example, local union representatives from Appalachian coal-mining regions left the National Miner’s Union movement in 1932; taking over a thousand rank-and-file miners with them, when they encountered atheism in the communist labor partyline (Gaventa 1980). What this brief sketch of labor history tells us is that religion-class links have consequences beyond observed patterns of class segregation in American religion for many aspects of community life. These links both spurred and slowed industrial reform efforts, labor organizing, growth of regulations on industrial growth and development, as well as many other features of American economic and political life. Today, people of many faiths are once again finding themselves joining picket lines in support of immigrant labor rights, challenging corporate efforts to minimize the power of unions, and working with local campaigns to enact Living Wage Ordinances all the while other equally-committed believers stand in opposition to these same reforms. Shaping both efforts are the same class dynamics seen for the last 150 years that spurs some denominations and congregations to enact policies to support and other to oppose class-based economic reforms.

QUANTITATIVE STUDIES In sociology, quantitative studies of class and religion aim to demonstrate the statistical relationships that exist between the two using a wide range of models and analytical techniques. Early studies were largely based on correlations and cross-tabulations, while later researchers use regression analyses to test how robust a relationship exists between one’s social class position and various measures of religious affiliation, belief, and practice. In measuring class position and assessing class differences, sociologists of religion have employed

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standard socio-economic status measures based on annual household income, level of education attained, and occupational status employed individually or in combination. By far, the vast majority of the research in this area tests the relationship between these three measures of socio-economic status and religious and denominational affiliations. This is perhaps understandable given the lingering debate over the continued vitality of the Protestant establishment and the presumed upward mobility of other religious groups, most notably American Roman Catholics and Evangelicals. Reflected in the qualitative as well as quantitative data included in the aforementioned community studies, clear relationships show that high income, high levels of education, and high occupational status have historically been associated with being Episcopalian, Presbyterian, United Methodist, and United Church of Christ, four of the “seven sisters” of Mainline Protestantism (Pope 1948; Lenski 1963; Demerath, 1963; Batzell 1964; Lazerwitz 1961 and 1964; Wuthnow 1988). Unitarian-Universalists and Jews also are represented among the elite classes. Prior to the 1970s, Roman Catholics, Black Protestants, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Fundamentalists all continued to report low income, low levels of education, and low occupational status (Demerath 1963; Jackson, Fox, and Crockett 1970). In the 1970s, however, researchers brought forth new data to argue that Catholics, Black Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, and Fundamentalists were no more likely to be working class or poor than other denominational groups and were increasingly likely to be found among elite (Riccio 1979; Greeley 1976). At this same time, class analysis had generally fallen out of favor in sociology of religion, with more attention being directed to shifts in the social sources of denominational affiliation: race, ethnicity, and gender. Some scholars offered occasional challenges to the assumption that class no longer mattered to American religion, but recently a small cadre of researchers reintroduced important findings suggesting that social class differences were alive and well in American churches, despite evidence of some upward mobility among some religious groups (Roof 1979; Coreno 2002; Pyle 2006; Smith and Faris 2005). Moving beyond analyzing relationships between class and denomination, fewer studies have used class measures to predict differences in religious belief and practice or social attitudes among believers and even then, socioeconomic differences tend to be buried in the data.

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In fact, there seems to be little class differences in church attendance, belief in God, prayer, etc. The place where these differences arise in attitudes related to specific religious teachings or in attitudes on the role of religion in politics, policy, and other forms of social activism (Demerath 1963; Mock 1992). For instance there are clear links between lower levels of education and the likelihood that individuals believe the Bible to be the literal word of God (Roof and McKinney 1987; Wuthnow 1988). Smith (2001) studied the inner city poor and found that, contrary to expectations that the poor would exhibit the most religious devotion, over half of his sample were not church members, did not attend church more than five times a year, nor had they even been contacted by local churches. In terms of class differences in attitudes about the political or community role of religious groups, several examples illustrate the kinds of findings that exist if you look closely enough. Hoge and Faue (1973) found high levels of education to be an important positive predictor of social reform actions by congregations among clergy but a positive predictor of opposition to such action among laypeople (see also Mock 1992; Tamney and Johnson 1990). In Wedam’s (2003) analysis of elite congregations in Indianapolis, elite members of these congregations did not expect their churches to be political messengers and tended to emphasize charitable giving over political action.

SECTS, CULTS, AND MILLENNIAL GROUPS Though less unified in method and subject than labor history or quantitative sociological studies, McCloud has argued that twentieth century historical and social scientific studies of so-called “sects,” “cults”, and “millennialist” groups had much influence in providing theoretical links between class and religion (McCloud 2007). By the 1960s, a plethora of studies suggested that such religious movements were havens of the dispossessed, nests of the needy who sought symbolic salves for their social and material deprivations (Clark 1965; Glock 1964; LaBarre 1962; Lanternari 1963; Mathison 1960; Wallace 1966; Worsley 1968). Like the “cultural crisis” and “nativistic” movement theories from whence they materialized, deprivation models most frequently featured the usual suspects: the so-called “sects” and “cults” of the poor, minority, and indigenous (Barber 1940; Holt 1940; Linton

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and Howell 1943). While there are many examples of such scholarship, two will suffice here: Elmer Clark’s study of American “sects” and Robert Mapes Anderson’s history of Pentecostalism. In The Small Sects of America (1965), Elmer Clark utilized the churchsect typology built by Ernst Troeltsch and developed by H. Richard Niebuhr to argue that all denominations began as sects and in “the background of nearly all sects there is an economic influence (Clark 1965, 16). Clark suggested that “these groups originate mainly among the religiously neglected poor, who find the conventional religion of their day unsuited to their social and psychological needs” (Clark 1965, 16). His sect formation chronology was Niebhur’s: complacent middle-class churches fail to address the needs of their lower class parishioners, who then break off to form a sect of the disinherited. Clark asserted that in these sects, members “elevate the necessities of their class—frugality, humility, and industry—into moral virtues and regard as sins the practices they are debarred from embracing” (Clark 1965; 17). For Clark, sects were always “refuges of the poor” (Clark 1965; 218). Today, Pentecostalism is the fastest growing style of Christianity in both the United States and the world. Historically, it has also been the movement most targeted by deprivation theorists. As noted by the historian Grant Wacker, “the presumption that Pentecostalism arose as a more or less functional adaptation to social and cultural disequilibrium has acquired the status of an orthodoxy …” (Wacker 1982; 19). Sociological, historical, and psychological studies concurred in suggesting that Pentecostalism was a religion of the dispossessed. Such arguments were based upon a combination of factors, including the movement’s history and practices. Pentecostal rhetoric, which often touted the movement’s pariah status in the world, also fueled deprivation theory’s fire. Deprivation theory played the framing role in Robert Mapes Anderson’s historical narrative, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism. He argued that the movement, which was born in the early twentieth century, “may be viewed as one small part of a widespread, long-term protest against the whole thrust of modern urban-industrial capitalist society” (Anderson 1979; 223). A protest perhaps, but for Anderson it was an inherently ineffective one. “Pentecostalism,” he argued in a manner common to the genre, “deflected social protest from effective expression, and channeled it

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into the harmless backwaters of religious ideology” (Anderson 1979; 239). The most thorough history of Pentecostalism of its era, Vision of the Disinherited told what had become a familiar story of the rural agrarian poor who had been thrust into an urban industrial environment. Cultural shock and national economic decline fomented material circumstances that molded a group of people who were predisposed to join an ecstatic millennialist movement. “For the Pentecostals, as for many adherents of similar religious movements,” Anderson suggested, “ecstasy was a mode of adjustment to highly unstable circumstances over which they had little or no control” (Anderson 1979; 231). For Anderson, speaking in tongues and other ecstatic religious practices were responses to harsh material conditions which believers could do little to ameliorate. “When men cannot adjust to their environment by reason and action,” Anderson argued, “they fall back upon symbolic manipulation and the inner world of desire and imagination” (Anderson 1979; 231). Anderson similarly asserted that Pentecostal millennialism also “was inimical to the real life interests of the Pentecostals” (Anderson 1979; 240). Anderson mirrored many deprivation studies of religion and class that came before him when he concluded that “the radical social impulse inherent in the vision of the disinherited was transformed into social passivity, ecstatic escape, and finally, a most conservative conformity” (Anderson 1979; 240).

FIVE POINTS TOWARD THE FUTURE STUDY OF RELIGION AND CLASS The authors in this volume have trained in different fields, including religious studies, history, quantitative and qualitative sociology, and cultural studies. Their subjects, approaches, and conclusions with regard to religion and class differ. As editors, our goal was not a volume with one voice and argument, but rather a collection that represented the current state of religion and class scholarship. While we provide no grand interdisciplinary synthesis, reading the volume’s chapters together does suggest at least five summary points that we hope readers will take away. First, class is not a stable concept with a single, fixed, meaning. Rather, its connotation shifts in different time periods, places, and contexts in American history. As discussed by the historian Martin Burke, the term class replaced “orders,” “ranks,” and “sorts” during the revolutionary

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era as the primary moniker for social differentiation (Burke 1995). But, as several chapters herein demonstrate, the meaning of class continues to vary by region, time, and even contextual usage. Joe Creech’s chapter, for example, shows that class was inherently intertwined with race in nineteenth century North Carolina, while Ginger Stickney’s chapter points to the moral judgments some placed upon individuals’ class status. Academic conceptions of class have been no less certain, as Sean McCloud’s chapter demonstrates, because different scholars have worked with different base assumptions about what the term entailed and how it could be measured, classified, and systemized. A second point is that focusing on the cultural dimensions of class and religion are crucial in the study of American religion. Timothy Nelson’s discussion is one of the few recent efforts to spell out exactly how class makes itself felt in the culture of congregations. Thaddeus Coreno’s work on the class culture components of fundamentalism also illustrates this link, as does William Mirola’s study of how class culture, reflected especially through measures of education and occupation, impacts the attitudes of churchgoers in Indianapolis about the role of congregations in shaping local economic and social welfare policy. What is most significant about these authors’ essays is that they all point to the crucial observation that sometimes “money doesn’t matter that much” (Fussell 1992, 28). Income and wealth are not the sole variables involved in how class shapes religion. Cultural dimensions rooted in one’s educational background, work, and lifestyle reinforce and perpetuate status differences within American congregations. A third conclusion emerging from the volume is that, in the United States’ context, religion and class exist in a symbiotic relationship. Class foments and shapes religious identities, but religion also aids in constructing class identities. The chapters by Smith and Faris, Coreno, Reimer, and Mirola all show that religious affiliations continue to reflect class differences. Some of these chapters and others suggest that the reasons for this are complex. Sam Reimer points to individual congregational factors and social networks to explain the link between some groups and class, while Timothy Nelson’s chapter uses Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus concept to interpret congregational worship styles as products of both the structural constraints of class position and the strategic agency of practitioners. Together, the volume’s chapters suggest that the relationship between class and religion is mutually affective and resulting influences are multiple and interactive.

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A fourth conclusion readers of this volume will garner is that class in the United States also exists in a symbiotic relationship with other variables such as race, gender, and place. As recent works by McCloud and Evans—as well as Higginbotham’s classic study discussed by McCloud herein—suggest, race and class have been closely intertwined in American religion and religious studies scholarship (Evans 2008; McCloud 2007; Higginbotham 1993). Likewise, the same stereotypes of emotionality and “naturalness” with which scholars and religious detractors categorized African American religions have also been applied to working class and women’s religiosity. Less frequently examined in the cultural history of the study of American religions, but no less prominent, is how academic and popular writers connected class, religion, and region. See, for example, Mary Swetnam Mathews’ examination of how popular early twentieth century media linked the lower classes, Fundamentalism, and the American South (Mathews 2006). While these examples concern scholarship and popular media representation, chapters in this volume by Nelson, Coreno, McCloud, Mirola, Callahan, and Creech speak to some of the ways that the everyday, lived, practices of religious Americans are simultaneously classed, racialized, and regionalized. A fifth and final point that we hope readers will take away from the volume suggests that because class is both material and representational, individual and corporate, it must be examined on multiple levels. The relationship between religion and class in the United States can be discovered in individual religious gestures: the grandmother’s holiness service testimonial, the cadence of a Pentecostal teenager’s glossolalia, the clothing of an Episcopalian parishioner, and the dayto-day lifestyle consumption choices made by a New Age practitioner. The relationship between religion and class in the United States can also be examined through large sociological assessments, such as the shared SES characteristics of particular denominations. It even appears in how religious writers, journalists, and scholars imagine and represent the class components of religious belief and practice. All of these foci reveal something important about religion and class, but none alone are sufficient to provide a comprehensive view of the subject. The chapters herein make it abundantly clear that class relates to theologies, practices, beliefs, and group affiliations. While this volume does not provide a neat interdisciplinary synthesis, its juxtaposition of scholars with quantitative, theoretical, and historical approaches provides a very modest step toward such a possibility.

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CHAPTER DESCRIPTIONS This work consists of nine chapters, divided into two sections. Section I, “Reconsiderations of American Religion and Class,” includes four chapters that ask us to think differently about the terms and theories we utilize. The first chapter is a reprint of Christian Smith’s and Robert Faris’s 2005 study of “Socioeconomic Inequality in the American Religious System: An Update and Assessment.” In their examination of General Social Survey data from the 1980s and 1990s, Smith and Faris conclude that American religion at the end of the twentieth century reflected major socio-economic differences between denominations. These differences, they argue, were patterned by theology, race, ethnicity, and liturgical style. Specifically, the higher ranked socioeconomic groups were theologically liberal denominations with hierarchical church organizations and formal liturgical styles. These included Unitarian Universalists, Episcopalians, and mainline Presbyterians. The lower-ranking socio-economic denominations were characterized by theological conservatism and sectarianism, congregational polity, and more informal and emotional styles of worship. This group included Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, black Baptists, and Southern Baptists. In addition, the more highly ranked groups tended to have more white members, while lower-ranked ones included more racial minorities, particularly African Americans and Latin Americans. Smith and Faris argue that the socioeconomic differences characterizing American religion reflected a high degree of stability in reproducing itself in the 1980s and 1990s. Even more, they suggest that the post-World War II denominational mobility that earlier studies identified had slowed down. In other words, social class differences among denominations reflected the larger trends of slowing mobility and increasing class differences seen in the United States over the past three decades. In the second chapter, “At Ease with Our Own Kind: Worship Practices and Class Segregation in American Religion,” Timothy Nelson points out that the correlation between styles of religious worship and the social class of worshippers in the United States has long been noted. At the same time, a detailed analysis of exactly how these styles differ, how they may relate to other cultural practices within the same class/status group, and a coherent sociological explanation of the system as a whole has yet to be written. In this chapter, Nelson takes

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a step in this direction, first through a meta-analysis of existing congregation and community studies that describe the worship practices and lifestyles of particular class and status groups and, second, by examining the results through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Bringing Bourdieu’s concept into play proves a valuable exercise for understanding how a group’s religious practices are influenced by their social location without relying on reductionist explanations that abound in the historical literature. In his examination of field data, Nelson illuminates and refines the idea of habitus. This is crucial, because Bourdieu’s central organizing concept accounting for class-based cultural practices is one that can be maddeningly abstruse. One of Bourdieu’s central emphases is on the struggle between classes and class fractions regarding the evaluation of their cultural practices. Nelson argues that practitioners are very aware of how their worship styles are evaluated by the larger community. This is a point consistently ignored by social theorists who explain worship styles as a simple reflection of psychological needs endemic to the life situations of particular classes. As such, the arena of religious ritual represents an ideal match between data and theory, as they illustrate both the influence of class location (Bourdieu’s emphasis on structure) coupled with the articulation of a set of strategies within a larger social context (his emphasis on agency). Nelson analyzes data from three types of ethnographies: 1) community studies which discuss multiple social classes and congregations, 2) community studies focused on one particular social class and the congregations within it, and 3) congregational studies with some discussion of both worship practices and the social class of participants. In chapter three, “Sect Appeal: Rethinking the Class-Sect Link,” Sam Reimer notes how, since at least Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929), explanations for sectarian affiliation and formation have been based primarily on social class differences. Since alternative explanations are few, class theory has become the default. While Reimer notes that it is true that class still influences denominational choice, he argues that its effect is often trumped by more powerful factors. Because of this, he points to the need to expand theories and rethink existing class-sect links. While he proffers that the intrinsic qualities of sects—otherworldliness, strictness, tension, ecstatic worship, etc.—may appeal to the lower class more than the high class,

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Reimer finds evidence to suggest that this appeal is not the best explanation for the abiding correlation between sectarian groups and lower class. In this chapter, he argues that class differences in denominations have much to do with congregational factors and relational networks. He ends by proposing new ways to think about the complex relationship between social class and sectarian affiliation. In the fourth and final chapter of section I, “The Ghost of Marx and the Stench of Deprivation: Cutting the Ties That Bind in the Study of Religion and Class,” Sean McCloud argues that scholars must dramatically break with much past scholarship and take the study of religion and class in new directions. First, McCloud argues for new, interdisciplinary, definitions of class that acknowledge it as simultaneously related to and formed by both material conditions and cultural representations. Second, McCloud argues that American religious historians move beyond the topics of religion and labor by focusing on the representational aspects of class, examining how certain religious groups, beliefs, and practices came to be associated with specific socioeconomic classifications. Finally, McCloud suggests several ways that a renewed focus on class might further scholarship in the growing arena of contemporary lived religion research. The book’s second section, “Case Studies in American Religion and Class,” provides focused historical and sociological examinations of class in American religions. In chapter five, “Exploring the Class Cultural Anchors of Fundamentalism,” Thaddeus Coreno explores how class inequality impacts the division between fundamentalists and mainliners. Some sociologists of religion in the past believed that the social changes (especially secularization) associated with modernity triggered radically traditionalist religious movements like fundamentalism. Scholars built up a large body of research that identifies the various social anchors of religious affiliation, although they disagreed about which parts of modernity actually catalyze this schism. Recently, a few sociologists have reported persistent class differences between American religious groups. In this chapter Coreno introduces a “Class Culture Model” of religious affiliation that revisits earlier deprivation and cultural crisis models of religion and class. Coreno’s class culture model of religious affiliation posits the existence of class-based religious subcultures and analyzes how the class structure helps to produce the social conditions that make fundamentalism an appealing worldview. Additionally, he explores how the growth of economic

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inequality— as well as the expanding social influence of corporate power—has exacerbated contemporary class inequality. As a consequence, a significant segment of the population experiences a pronounced sense of alienation. Fundamentalism is one response to that alienation. Coreno argues that fundamentalism offers its followers an experience of community that is lacking outside of its subculture. The movement’s traditionalist critique of secularization helps members make sense of the contradictions, strains, and inequalities that are rampant in a society dominated by corporate capitalism. Coreno uses survey data to test several hypotheses that predict high levels of alienation and fundamentalist commitment among the working-class. Consistent with Smith and Faris, the data source for his investigation is the General Social Survey. In the sixth chapter, “Class Differences in Attitudes about Business, Economics, and Social Welfare among Indianapolis Catholics and Protestants,” William Mirola uses data from a five-year study of religion and community life in Indianapolis to examine contemporary class differences in local congregations and how these differences shapes members’ and clergy attitudes about the role of congregations in their city. Denominational affiliation and social class continues to be closely linked in Indianapolis, though some changes are evident with more Roman Catholics and Evangelicals falling in the upper income brackets and attaining higher levels of education than was true in earlier periods of our history. In examining the class effects on attitudes about public policy in Indianapolis, Mirola offers a unique contribution in focusing on economic and social welfare policy. His data show that while most respondents believe it is important for congregations to help the poor and needy, doing that in structural ways that involve changing the relationships between churches, the state, and the local economy typically is supported most by those from low income groups. Few among upper income respondents saw it as appropriate for congregations to be involved in business development, in raising the minimum wage, working for social and political change or for them to receive government funds to expand social programs while two thirds or more of those from lower income groups did. In chapter seven, “Godly Riches: The Nineteenth Century Roots of Modern Prosperity Gospel,” Ginger Stickney critiques the ahistorical and journalistic view of the supposedly “new” prosperity gospel by examining its close theological links to nineteenth century ministers

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such as Henry Ward Beecher and Russell Conwell. Specifically, Stickney argues that Henry Ward Beecher’s “Individual Responsibility” and Russell Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds” sermons share three intersecting components: individualism, God-sanctioned wealth, and the sin of poverty and concomitant danger of charity. She compares these ideas with those in the contemporary Word of Faith movement and to the popular prosperity gospel preachers Joel Osteen and T. D. Jakes. Stickney utilizes the social theorist George Thomas’s work to demonstrate how these ideas are not just religious theologies, but larger discourses embedded within the rhetoric of the wider culture. Stickney suggests that by portraying prosperity theology as new, contemporary scholars and journalists exoticize the movement and thus deflect attention from its entanglement with other aspects of American capitalist culture. In the eighth chapter, “Religion, Aesthetics, and Formations of Class in Eastern Kentucky’s Coal Fields,” Richard Callahan explores the questions of class and its relation to religion in the setting of eastern Kentucky’s coal fields in the twentieth century. Specifically, he examines the formation of class distinctions in the context of the development of industrial coal mining. Drawing from oral histories, missionary reports, newspapers, and other primary sources, Callahan tracks the ways that styles and aesthetics of religious practice and worship defined contours of social belonging and difference. Callahan suggests that “religion” emerged in these distinctions as something embodied, felt, and lived in particular ways that informed identity and community boundaries. Callahan’s case study shows that religion and class are mutually implicated in the broad texture of experience and expression that is part of the formation of identity, community, and orientation that cannot be abstracted from the everyday rhythms, senses, and relations of working life in a particular time and place. Rather than two reified variables (“religion” and “class”), Callahan understands these terms as emergent, contested, dynamic, and thoroughly intertwined as people make social distinctions in concrete social settings, produce and reproduce ways of life, and orient themselves to forces and powers (whether natural or supernatural) that impact their worlds. In the ninth and final chapter, “William P. Fife, the Drummer Evangelist: Class and the Protestant Ethic in the Nineteenth Century South,” Joe Creech examines the intertwining languages of class and

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racial difference in the post-Civil War American South. He begins with an 1892 series of church meetings led by the Reverend William P. Fife. Known as “the Drummer Evangelist” (he was a former tobacco drummer), Fife’s sermons at a large and prosperous church in Tarboro, NC, excoriated the town’s “aristocrats” for their spiritual darkness. Creech asks what “aristocrats” Fife had in mind and how his denunciations of them reflected and contributed to class identity among late nineteenth century southern Evangelicals. He argues that labeling certain folks “aristocrats” was one among many exercises in the formation of class identity for Evangelicals such as Fife. Drawing on Biblical and national narratives of meaning, some southern Evangelicals imagined themselves to be the innocent salt of the earth who made war against the Pharisees or “aristocrats” in the name of spiritual, economic, and political liberty. Creech reveals how this class identity masked a number of material and structural power relationships and produced contradictory intellectual, social, or political trajectories among folks who positioned themselves as “in,” but not “of,” the world. Our goal here is to provide a collection that represents the current state of the field, with all of its directions, promises, and ambiguities. While the authors herein don’t always agree, they all share a belief in the importance of bringing class back into the study of American religions. It is our hope that this volume will help encourage others to explore the diverse ways in which religion and class interact.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Robert Mapes. 1979. Vision of the disinherited: The making of American Pentecostalism. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers. Baltzell, E. Digby. 1964. The Protestant establishment: Aristocracy and caste. New York: Random House. Barber, Bernard. 1941. “Acculturation and messianic movements.” American Sociological Review 6(5): 663–669. Beckford, James A. 1989. Religion and advanced industrial society. London, Unwin Hyman Publishers. Beyerlein, Kraig. 2004. “Specifying the impact of conservative Protestantism on educationala ttainment.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43(4): 505–518. Billings, Dwight B. 1990. “Religion as opposition: A Gramscian analysis.” American Journal of Sociology 96(1): 1–31. Burke, Martin J. 1995. The conundrum of class: Public discourse on the social order in America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Clark, Elmer T. 1965. The small sects of America. Revised Edition. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

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Coreno, Thaddeus. 2002. “Fundamentalism as class culture.” Sociology of Religion 63: 335–360. Cort, John. 1988. Christian Socialism: An informal history. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Curtis, Susan. 1991. A consuming faith: The Social Gospel and modern American culture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Cushman-Wood, Darren. 1989. Blue collar Jesus. Santa Ana: Seven Locks Press. Darnell, Alfred and Darren E. Sherkat. 1997. “The impact of Protestant fundamentalism on educational attainment.” American Sociological Review 62: 306–315. Davis, Mike. Prisoners of the American dream. 1986. New York: Verso. Demerath III, N. J. 1965. Social class in American Protestantism. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company. Evans, Curtis J. 2008. The burden of Black Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Fantasia, Rick. 1989. Cultures of solidarity: Consciousness, action, and contemporary American workers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foner, Philip. 1982. The history of the labor movement in the United States. New York: International Publishers. Fones-Wolf, Ken. 1989. Trade union gospel: Christianity and labor in industrial Philadelphia, 1865–1915. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Fuechtmann, Thomas G. 1989. Steeples and stacks: Religion and the steel crisis in Youngstown. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fussell, Paul. 1992. Class: A walk through the American status system. New York: Touchstone. Gaventa, John. 1980. Power and powerlessness: Quiescence and rebellion in an Appalachian valley. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Gerstle, Gary. 1989. Working-Class Americanism: The politics of labor in a textile city, 1914– 1960. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gerth, H. H. and C. Wright Mills, eds. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Glock, Charles Y. 1964 “The role of deprivation in the origin and evolution of religious groups.” In Religion and social conflict, ed. Robert Lee and Martin Marty, 24–36. New York: Oxford University Press. Goldthorpe, John and Gordon Marshall. 1992. “The promising future of class analysis: A response to recent critiques.” Sociology 26: 381–400. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Greeley, Andrew. 1976. Ethnicity, denomination, and inequality. Beverley Hills, CA: Sage Publications Inc. Gutman, Herbert. 1966. “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian spirit in the gilded age.” American Historical Review 72: 74–101. Herberg, Will. 1960. Protestant Catholic Jew. Second Edition. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. 1993. Righteous discontent: The women’s movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hobgood, Mary E. 1991. Catholic social teaching and economic theory. Philadelphia: Temple University. Holt, John. 1940. “Holiness religion: Cultural shock and social reorganization.” American Sociological Review 5: 740–747. Hopkins, Charles Howard. 1940. The rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jackson, Elton; William S. Fox, and Harry J. Crockett, Jr. 1970. “Religion and occupational achievement.” American Sociological Review 35(1): 48–63. Johnson, Paul. 1978. A Shopkeeper’s millennium: Society and revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837. New York: Hill and Wang.

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Keister, Lisa A. 2003. “Religion and wealth: The role of religious affiliation and participation in early adult asset accumulation.” Social Forces 82(1): 175–207. Kingston, Paul W. 2000. The classless society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. La Barre, Weston. 1962. They shall take up serpents. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lanternari, Vittorio. 1963. The religions of the oppressed: A study of modern messianic cults, Trans. by Lisa Sergio. New York: Knopf. Laurie, Bruce. 1980. Working people of Philadelphia, 1800–1850. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lazerow, Jama. 1995. Religion and the working class in antebellum America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Lazerwitz, Bernard. 1961. “A comparison of major United States religious groups.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 56: 568–579. Lenski, Gerhard. 1963. The religious factor. New York: Doubleday. Linton, Ralph and A. Irving Howell. 1943. “Nativistic movements.” American Anthropologist 45: 230–240. Lynd, Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd. 1929. Middletown: A study in American culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company. Marx, Karl. 1986. The German ideology. New York: International Publishers. Mathison, Richard R. 1960. Faiths, cults, and sects of America: From atheism to Zen. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Mathews, Mary Beth Swetnam. 2006. Rethinking Zion: How the print media placed Fundamentalism in the south. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. May, Henry. 1963. Protestant churches and industrial America. New York: Octagon Books. McCloud, Sean. 2007. Divine hierarchies: Class in American religion and religious studies. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Mirola, William A. 2003a. “Asking for bread, receiving a stone: The rise and fall of religious ideologies in Chicago’s eight-hour movement.” Social Problems 50: 273–293. ——. 2003b. “Religious protest and economic conflict: Possibilities and constraints on religious resource mobilization and coalitions in Detroit’s newspaper strike.” Sociology of Religion 64: 443–461. Mock, Alan K. 1992. “Congregational religious styles and orientations to society: Exploring our linear assumptions.” Review of Religious Research 34(1): 20–33. Murphy, Theresa Anne. 1992. Ten hours’ labor: Religion, reform, and gender in early New England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Nelson, Bruce C. 1991. “Revival and upheaval: Religion, irreligion, and Chicago’s working class in 1886.” Journal of Social History 25:2, 233–253. Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1929. The social sources of denominationalism. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Pope, Liston. 1942. Millhands and preachers: A study of Gastonia. New Haven: Yale University Press. ——. 1948. “Religion and class structure.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 256: 47–60. Pyle, Ralph. 2006. “Trends in religious stratification: Have religious group socioeconomic distinctions declined in recent decades?” Sociology of Religion 67(1): 61–79. Riccio, James A. 1979. “Religious affiliation and socioeconomic achievement.” In The religious dimension: New directions for qualitative research, ed. Robert Wuthnow, 199–228. New York: Academic Press. Roof, Wade Clark. 1979. “Socioeconomic differentials among white socio-religious groups in the United States.” Social Forces 58(1): 280–289. Roof, Wade Clark and William McKinney. 1987. American mainline religion: Its changing shape and future. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Smith, Christian and Robert Faris. 2005. “Socioeconomic inequality in the American religious system: An update and assessment.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44: 95–104. Smith, Drew. 2001. “Churches and the urban poor: Interaction and social distance.” Sociology of Religion 62(3): 301–313. Sterne, Evelyn Savidge. 2000. “Bringing religion into working-class history.” Social Science History 24(1): 149–82. ——. 2003. Ballots and bibles: Ethnic politics and the Catholic church in Providence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sutton, William R. 1998. Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical artisans confront capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Thompson, E. P. 1966. The making of the English working class. New York: Vintage. Troeltsch, Ernst. 1960. The social teaching of the Christian churches. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Vidich, Arthur and Joseph Bensman. 1958. Small town in mass society: Class, power, and religion in a rural community. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wacker, Grant. 1982. “Taking another look at the Vision of the Disinherited.” Religious Studies Review 8(1): 15–22. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1966. Religion: An anthropological view. New York: Random House. Warner, W. Lloyd and Paul S. Lunt. 1941. The social system of a modern community. New Haven: Yale University Press. Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Unwin Hyman. Wedam, Elfriede. 2003. “The religious ‘district’ of elite congregations: Reproducing spatial centrality and redefining mission.” Sociology of Religion 64(1): 47–64. White, Jr., Ronald C. and C. Howard Hopkins, eds. 1976. The Social Gospel: Religion and reform in changing America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wilentz, Sean. 1984. Chants democratic: New York City and the rise of the American working class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press. Worsley, Peter. 1968. The trumpet shall sound: A study of ‘cargo’ cults in Melanesia. New York: Schocken Books. Wuthnow, Robert. 1988. The restructuring of American religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

PART ONE

RECONSIDERATIONS OF AMERICAN RELIGION AND CLASS

CHAPTER ONE

SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITY IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SYSTEM: AN UPDATE AND ASSESSMENT* Christian Smith and Robert Faris

American religion has from the beginning of its history been stratified by education, income, and occupational status. Since colonial days, religious differences have played a role in constructing social differentiations that sustained socioeconomic inequalities. As the American religious system grew increasingly pluralistic over time, socioeconomic disparities between different religious communities transformed and persisted. American sociology has for decades documented and theorized these persistent inequalities between religious communities. Many distinguished works—including H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929), Liston Pope’s Millhands and Preachers (1942), Gerhard Lenski’s The Religious Factor (1961), W. Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City (1963), E. Digby Baltzell’s The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (1964), and N. J. Demerath’s Social Class in American Protestantism (1965)—have analyzed socioeconomic inequality in American religion (also see Cantril 1943; Lazerwitz 1961; Pope 1948; Schneider 1952). More recently, Finke and Stark (1992), Emerson and Smith (2000), Greeley (1989, 76–80), Ammerman (1997), and others have examined various aspects and influences of inequality in American religion. Socioeconomic inequalities between religious groups have also played an important role in many sociological theories about religion and society. Marx, for example, is famous for theorizing religion’s ideological role in legitimating economic inequality and exploitation (Marx 1978a, 1978b [1843, 1845]). Status differences within and * Originally publised in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44(1): 95–101. It is reprinted here with the permission of Blackwell Publishing. Copyright 2005 Blackwell Publishing.

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between religious groups were important features of Weber’s analysis of religion (1978). According to Finke and Stark’s (1992) religious economies theory, educational disparities significantly influenced the historical course of religious diffusion in America. Hunter (1983, 49–60) theorizes that socioeconomic differences between religious groups explain the persistence of conservative religion in modern society. And Wuthnow (1988) argues that educational mobility was key in the 20th-century restructuring of the American religious system. Given both the historical stratification of American religion and its significant role in helping to define and sustain economic and political inequality more broadly (Swartz 1996), one would expect scholars to have paid close attention to tracking socioeconomic differences in the American religious system. But we generally have not. In fact, the last, best, systematic empirical analysis of American religious stratification (Roof and McKinney 1987, for earlier research, see Greeley 1976; Riccio 1979; Roof 1979) was published 18 years ago, and was based on General Social Survey data collected between 1972 and 1982, in comparison to data from the 1940s (note that Kosmin and Lachman’s [1993, 251–77] interesting analysis, which covers 1989–1990 data, is somewhat similar, but fails to distinguish many conservative vs. mainline Protestant groups, fails to separate out certain black from white Protestant groups, lacks a job prestige measure, employs a religion categorization scheme that mixes up denominations with self-identities, and reports a survey refusal rate but not a true response rate). Although Roof and McKinney’s analysis shows striking social class disparities among American religious groups, their larger discussion emphasizes the “fluid and dynamic” changes affecting inter-religious inequality during the decades of the mid-20th Century (1987, 107–17). They point particularly to the upward mobility of Catholics, Mormons, and evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, concluding that: The [social] sources of denominationalism identified by [H. Richard] Niebuhr…are still important for understanding the social bases of American religion. The nation’s faith communities continue to be divided along lines of social class.… We should not, however, minimize the changes that have occurred during [the last fifty years]. The religious map of America is much different today from the time when Niebuhr wrote.… The ascriptive bases of the religious communities have declined, creating a more fluid and voluntary religious system (1987,144–45).

These findings, however, are now decades old. Much more recently, Thaddeus Coreno (2002) and Jerry Park and Samuel Reimer (2002) have published research on religion and

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31

socioeconomic inequality. Coreno (2002) finds that white U.S. Protestant mainliners and fundamentalists represent different class cultures, the two groups are significantly separated by social class and status differences. Park and Reimer (2002) note what they see as a “slow convergence” of different religious groups toward more similar social class positions between 1972 and 1998, noting at the same time, however, the major class differences that remain between different faith communities. We are pleased to see new research published on religion and socioeconomic inequality, but believe further study is warranted. For one thing, both of these articles group religious believers by the major tradition categories of fundamentalist, evangelical, mainline, African-American Protestant, etc.—not by the more specific denominational type we use below. Major religious tradition categories are often very useful analytically but can also obscure dynamics that may occur and be evident with more fine-grained groupings. The consequence of the “slow convergence” Park and Reimer observe may also be rather trivial, in view of the large socioeconomic differences that still separate different religious groups and the fact that nearly any observed change over time would almost inevitably be statistically significant given the very large Ns of their religious categories (e.g., 8,932 evangelical Protestants, 9,502 Catholics). Moreover, neither article reports on changes in the occupational prestige of different religious types over time, which we do below. In sum, we may be seeing early signs of renewed scholarly interest in religion and socioeconomic inequality (also see Keister 2003), but more research is clearly warranted. This research note is an attempt to update our descriptive knowledge about socioeconomic inequalities among American religious groups. Here we seek to track educational, income, and status stratification in U.S. religion over a 15-year period, from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, in order to assess the extent and structure of social stratification in the American religious system. Our intention is to assess how much, if any, change has taken place, and which religious groups have gained and lost in socioeconomic standing.

DATA AND METHODS Data for this analysis comes, as it did with Roof and McKinney (1987), from the General Social Survey, a biennial national survey of U.S. noninstitutionalized adults featuring demographic, socioeconomic,

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and attitudinal data (Davis, Smith, and Marsden 2001). Our approach in the following analysis is to calculate mean values for religious denominations for four socioeconomic indicators: years of education, college degree, job prestige, and household income. For income, we use the GSS-imputed income measure, “REALINC,” which is adjusted to 1986 dollars. Job prestige is measured using the Hodge-Siegel-Rossi prestige rating of U.S. Census occupations. Data from the 1980s use the 1970 occupational codes, and data from the 1990s use the codes from the 1980 census. Because some religious denominations are small, to obtain large enough Ns for analysis, we merged the 1983 and 1984 data together and the 1998 and 2000 data together. The correct income variable was unavailable after 1996, so this analysis relies on 1996 data only, rather than 1998 and 2000 data (see http://www.icpsr.umich .edu/GSS/ for details). The reader should note that certain groups in particular years reflect low Ns, and so any interpretation of data on them must be somewhat circumspect, particularly when findings reflect big changes or when they diverge from what other studies show. However, rather than deleting them from analysis, this article includes some lower N cases, with the understanding that readers will use care in interpreting them. In particular, readers should note the Ns for Unitarians (eight in 1983/1984) and some other groups which in some years have Ns in the teens. Fluctuations in Ns across the two time periods may be the result of the geographical-cluster sampling method used by the GSS. Two comments on religious denominations and groupings. First, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) was formed officially in 1988 out of a merger of several mainline Lutheran bodies, all of which are grouped together as “ELCA” for our 1983/1984 analyses. Second, we categorized certain religious groups analyzed here (e.g., conservative Methodist, black Baptist, etc.) by grouping close families of churches and denominations that share a similar religious heritage (e.g., Wesleyan, Free Methodist, etc. churches comprising the group “conservative Methodist”). Mean values for each religious denomination or tradition are presented in Tables 1–4 as percentages, ranked by status in 1998–2000. Tables 1–4 includes the Ns for each combined set of years, mean percentages for 1983/1984 and 1998/2000 (except for Table 3, which uses 1996 data), the percent change for the intervening years, and the change in ranking for each religious denomination. Table 5 then

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SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITY IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SYSTEM

compares the average ranking for the four socioeconomic variables, comparing 1983/1984 to 1998/2000 (and 1996 for Table 3), in order to assess overall ranking change for the intervening time period. Tables 1–5 group the religious denominations and traditions into three clusters, showing the top third, middle third, and bottom third. RESULTS Table 1 reveals major disparities between American religious traditions in the percent of adherents who have earned college degrees. At the Table 1: Percent with college degree, by denomination, 1983 to 2000 (ranked by ’98–’00 status) Denomination

N/N ’83–’84 % ’98–’00 % Change in Change in ’80’s / ’90’s College College % College Rank

Unitarian Jewish Episcopal Presbyterian USA UCC LDS

8 / 18 70 / 113 65 / 112 134 / 151 14 / 17 66 / 32

Non-religious 224 / 794 United Methodist 126 / 374 Missouri / Wisconsin 32 / 104 Lutheran Conservative 22 / 25 Methodist ELCA 40 / 148 American Baptist 16 / 41 Catholic 814 / 1384 Black Baptist 34 / 136 Southern Baptist 107 / 500 Non-denominational 22 / 31 Conserv. Protestant Adventist 16 / 25 Assembly of God 16 / 29 Other Pentacostal 91 / 157 Jehovah’s Witness 23 / 43

75.0% 55.7% 50.8% 31.3% 21.4% 19.7%

61.1% 60.2% 45.5% 39.7% 35.3% 28.1%

− 13.9% + 4.5% − 5.2% + 8.4% + 13.9% + 8.4%

0 0 0 0 +4 +4

25.9% 23.0% 9.4%

27.1% 27.0% 24.0%

+ 1.2% + 4.0% + 14.7%

−2 −1 +8

22.7%

24.0%

+ 1.3%

0

25.0% 12.5% 14.3%

23.6% 22.0% 21.7%

− 1.4% + 9.5% + 7.5%

−5 +3 0

14.7% 10.3% 13.6%

19.9% 16.4% 12.9%

+ 5.1% + 6.1% − 0.7%

−2 +1 −2

18.8% 0.0% 3.3% 0.0%

12.0% 10.3% 7.0% 7.0%

− 6.8% + 10.3% + 3.7% + 7.0%

−6 +1 +1 0

Source: General Social Survey, 1983, 1984, 1998, 2000.

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CHRISTIAN SMITH AND ROBERT FARIS

top, more than 60 percent of Unitarian and Jewish Americans, 46 percent of Episcopalians, and nearly 40 percent of Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (PCUSA) believers in 1998/2000 hold college degrees. By contrast, seven different religious denominations in 1998/2000 had less than 20 percent of members with earned college degrees. Overall, the highest formal education appears associated with more liberal traditions (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints being one exception), and the lowest with more conservative, sectarian, Pentecostal, and black church groups. Most, but not all, groups increased in percent with college degree, most typically by 4–8 percent when a few low-N outliers are excluded. Few groups shifted in ranking by more than a few ranks in the approximately 16 years between 1983/1984 and 1998/2000. Table 2 presents educational attainment not in percent with college degree, but as average years of education, allowing for the influence of varying distributions to shape the reported number. The rankings in 1998/2000 are very similar to those in Table 1, with the top six and bottom six denominations matching in both. Again, more liberal groups cluster at the top, and more conservative, sectarian, Pentecostal, and black church groups cluster at the bottom. The disparity in total mean years of formal education completed, however, is not as large as with percent college degree. The top denominations in 1998/2000 reflect an average of about 14.5 years; the bottom denominations an average of about 12.5 years. These variations, however, suggest the difference between at least some college education and a high school diploma as the typical educational experience of adherents. Again, almost all groups enjoyed modest increases in mean years of education. And while a few groups jumped in ranking dramatically, the overall picture in Table 2 is one of stability in educational attainment between 1983/1984 and 1998/2000. Table 3 presents means and over-time changes in household income for the different religious groups. In the top third for 1996, Jews, Unitarians, Latter Day Saints, Episcopalians, and members of the PCUSA are joined by nondenominational conservative Protestants (evangelicals), who fared lower in the education tables. Many, but not all, of the same groups who are low in education are, not surprisingly, also low on income. The income variance between the top and the bottom is significant, with top third groups earning nearly twice as much on average as bottom third groups ($51,871 and $22,153 being

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SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITY IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SYSTEM

Table 2: Mean adult education, by denomination, 1983 to 2000 (ranked by ’98–’00 status) Denomination

Unitarian Jewish Episcopal Presbyterian USA UCC United Methodist ELCA Non-religious LDS Adventist Conservative Methodist American Baptist Catholic

N/N ’83–’84 ’98–’00 Change in Change in ’80’s / ’90’s Mean Years Mean Years Mean Years Rank 8 / 18 70 / 113 65 / 112 134 / 151

16.38 14.80 14.43 13.59

16.39 15.69 14.84 14.59

+ 0.01 + 0.89 + 0.41 + 1.00

0 0 0 0

14 / 17 126 / 374

13.07 13.23

13.82 13.65

+ 0.75 + 0.42

+3 +1

40 / 148 224 / 794 66 / 32 16 / 25 22 / 25

13.25 12.87 13.41 12.75 11.59

13.59 13.58 13.50 13.44 13.32

+ 0.34 + 0.72 + 0.09 + 0.69 + 1.73

−1 +2 −4 +2 +6

16 / 41

11.69

13.24

+ 1.56

+2

814 / 1384

12.32

13.15

+ 0.84

0

12.91

13.10

+ 0.19

−5

11.41 11.65 12.82

12.59 12.58 12.52

+ 1.18 + 0.93 − 0.30

+4 −1 −6

11.48

12.19

+ 0.71

0

10.63 10.20

12.17 11.81

+ 1.55 + 1.62

−3 0

Missouri / 32 / 104 Wisconsin Lutheran Black Baptist 34 / 136 Southern Baptist 107 / 500 22 / 31 Non-denomi national Conserv. Protestant Jehovah’s 23 / 43 Witness Assembly of God 16 / 29 Other Pentacostal 91 / 157

Source: General Social Survey, 1983, 1984, 1998, 2000.

the extremes for 1996). Compared to education, we also see greater variance in the change in mean income, ranging from a decline of $7,476 for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, to an increase of $14,261 for Latter Day Saints (again, low-N groups should be

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CHRISTIAN SMITH AND ROBERT FARIS

Table 3: Mean household income, by denomination, 1983 to 1996 (ranked by 1996 status) Denomination

N/N ’83–’84 ’80’s / ’90’s Mean Income

1996 Mean Change in Change in Income Mean Rank Income

Jewish 70 / 68 Unitarian 8/7 LDS 66 / 27 Episcopal 65 / 79 Presbyterian USA 134 / 63 Non-denominational 22 / 20 Conserv. Protestant

50,579 39,842 29,254 48,523 36,481 28,059

51,871 46,158 43,515 42,953 40,300 38,901

+ 1,292 + 6,317 + 14,261 − 5,571 + 3,820 + 10,843

0 +2 +6 −2 +1 +4

Missouri / Wisconsin Lutheran Catholic United Methodist UCC Assembly of God Adventist Non-religious

32 / 59

26,683

37,686

+ 11,003

+5

814 / 685 126 / 190 14 / 8 16 / 23 16 / 16 224 / 339

31,122 31,789 40,481 18,848 25,577 27,963

35,788 33,893 32,269 30,346 30,094 29,086

+ 4,666 + 2,105 − 8,213 + 11,498 + 4,517 + 1,123

0 −2 −7 +9 +1 −2

40 / 99 107 / 273 23 / 17 34 / 69 16 / 28 91 / 64 22 / 15

36,520 25,802 20,819 23,342 19,476 19,708 24,029

29,044 28,528 27,081 23,793 23,321 23,174 22,153

− 7,476 + 2,726 + 6,262 + 451 + 3,845 + 3,466 − 1,876

−9 −1 +1 −1 +1 −1 −5

ELCA Southern Baptist Jehovah’s Witness Black Baptist American Baptist Other Pentacostal Conservative Methodist

Source: General Social Survey, 1983, 1984, 1996.

interpreted with caution here). Except for a few lower-N outliers, the overall ranking of groups between 1983/1984 and 1996 shifted only modestly. Table 4 examines differences in occupational prestige ranked by 1998/2000 data. The religious groups range from a high of 52.05 for Jews to a low of 39.53 for American (Northern) Baptists. All but these two groups have mean occupational prestige scales in the 1940s, although differences between the groups roughly track differences noted in education and income (notable exceptions being the Assemblies of God and conservative Methodists in the top third on prestige, and the United Church of Christ being in the bottom third). As with the

SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITY IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SYSTEM

37

Table 4: Mean occupational prestige, by denomination, 1983 to 1998 (ranked by ’96–’98 status) Denomination

N/N ’80’s / ’90’s

’83–’84 Mean Prestige

’98–’00 Mean Prestige

Change in Change in Mean Rank Prestige

Jewish 70 / 113 Unitarian 8 / 18 Episcopal 65 / 112 Assembly of God 16 / 29 Presbyterian USA 134 / 151 Conservative Methodist 22 / 25

49.50 51.38 45.79 36.13 45.53 38.45

52.05 49.44 49.35 48.41 47.69 47.00

+ 2.5 − 1.9 + 3.6 + 12.3 + 2.2 + 8.6

+1 −1 +1 + 12 0 +7

United Methodist Adventist ELCA Non-denominational Conserv. Protestant LDS Non-religious Catholic

126 / 374 16 / 25 40 / 148 22 / 31

43.02 41.56 42.51 38.32

46.42 46.13 46.08 44.83

+ 3.4 + 4.6 + 3.6 + 6.5

−1 0 −2 +4

66 / 32 224 / 794 814 / 1384

39.98 40.58 39.76

44.41 44.12 44.02

+ 4.4 + 3.5 + 4.3

0 −3 −1

UCC Missouri / Wisconsin Lutheran Southern Baptist Black Baptist Jehovah’s Witness Other Pentacostal American Baptist

14 / 17 32 / 104

47.25 40.23

43.29 43.06

− 4.0 + 2.8

− 11 −5

107 / 500 34 / 136 23 / 43 91 / 157 16 / 41

36.68 32.78 34.14 31.37 34.27

42.86 42.10 41.24 40.15 39.53

+ 6.2 + 9.3 + 7.1 + 8.8 + 5.3

−1 +2 0 +1 −3

Source: General Social Survey, 1983, 1984, 1998, 2000.

previous tables, with the exception of a few outliers, most groups moved only a few ranking places for occupational prestige between 1983/1984 and 1998/2000. Finally, Table 5 attempts to summarize the socioeconomic changes observed in Tables 1–4 by calculating the average rank in education, income, and job prestige for each religious group, and comparing between the 1983/1984 and 1998/2000 average ranks to calculate the average rank change for the intervening time period. We see that the majority of religious groups, 16 of the total 20, changed ranks on average no more than two places; 12 of those groups in fact moved less than one ranking place. Overall, Table 5 suggests a picture of over-time

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CHRISTIAN SMITH AND ROBERT FARIS

Table 5: Average change In SES ranking, 1983 to 2000 (ranked by average rank change) Denomination

Average Rank ’80’s

Average Rank ’90’s

Average Rank Change ’80’s to ’90’s

Assembly of God Conservative Methodist LDS American Baptist Black Baptist Missouri / Wisconsin Lutheran

17.75 13.75 6.25 16.25 16.50 12.00

13.00 11.75 7.25 15.50 15.75 11.25

+ 4.75 + 2.00 + 1.00 + 0.75 + 0.75 + 0.75

Presbyterian USA Jehovah’s Witness Jewish Unitarian Non-denominational Conserv. Protestant Other Pentecostal Catholic

4.75 18.25 1.50 1.50 12.25

4.50 18.00 1.50 1.50 12.25

+ 0.25 + 0.25 0.00 0.00 0.00

19.00 11.50

19.25 11.75

− 0.25 − 0.25

Episcopal Southern Baptist United Methodist Non-religious UCC Adventist ELCA

3.00 15.00 6.75 8.75 5.75 11.00 6.00

3.25 15.50 7.50 10.00 8.50 7.50 10.25

− 0.25 − 0.50 − 0.75 − 1.25 − 2.75 − 3.50 − 4.25

Source: General Social Survey, 1983, 1984, 1996, 1998, 2000.

stability in overall socioeconomic ranking. As to gainers and losers, to the extent that their somewhat low Ns do not introduce sampling error here, the Assemblies of God were the biggest gainers and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ECLA), Adventists, and the United Church of Christ Americans were the biggest socioeconomic losers between the early 1980s and late 1990s. The gainers, with a few exceptions, tended to be those at the bottom of the rankings, and thus had more upward room for mobility between the two periods of measurement. Most of those ranked at the top of the scales tended neither to gain nor to lose much in rankings, but simply maintained their high positions.

SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITY IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SYSTEM

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DISCUSSION This analysis is a response to the continuing need for an updating and reassessment of our knowledge about socioeconomic inequalities between American religious groups. The findings in the tables above suggest the following general observations. 1. The American religious system at the end of the 20th Century reflected major socioeconomic differences between groups within that system. Certain religious groups—particularly Unitarians, Jews, Episcopalians, and mainline Presbyterians—consistently enjoyed significantly higher levels of education, income, and occupational prestige than most of the groups below them. Likewise, other religious groups—especially members of Jehovah’s Witness, black Baptist, Southern Baptist, and other Pentecostal churches—displayed significantly lower levels of socioeconomic status than many other groups. Certain religious groups, on the other hand, reveal noticeable levels of status inconsistencies. Assemblies of God members, for example, appear to have relatively low levels of education, moderate levels of income, and relatively high occupational prestige scores. Nondenominational conservative Protestants, similarly, reflect lower levels of education, higher levels of income, and moderate levels of job prestige. But on the whole, socioeconomic inequality across measures depicts a great deal of consistency in stratification. The structure of interreligious inequality that Roof and McKinney (1987) mapped of the 1970s and early 1980s continues to hold. 2. The system of socioeconomic inequality that characterized American religion at the end of the 20th century reflects a high degree of stability in reproducing itself over the years between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. Although some specific group mobility is evident in the tables above, there is much more continuity than change in the system of inequality. Despite the longest period of economic growth in the nation’s history during the 1990s, with few exceptions, the groups that were ranked highest in 1983/1984 were also ranked highest in 1998/2000, and those ranked lowest in the first set of years were also ranked lowest in the second. Since Roof and McKinney’s (1987) analysis of 1970s and early 1980s data, then, not a great deal has changed in the overall socioeconomic stratification of American religious groups. And although our comparative time frame is shorter, it may appear that the changes within the system that they observed for the

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CHRISTIAN SMITH AND ROBERT FARIS

mid-20th century have slowed down to produce a more stable system at the end of that century. Further investigation is needed to determine how our findings comport with those of Park and Reimer (2002). 3. The socioeconomic inequality evident in the American religious system appears to be patterned by theology, race and ethnicity, and liturgical style. As a generalization, the higher ranked religious groups tend to be more theologically liberal denominations and traditions, while the lowest ranked tend to be more conservative and sectarian. The highest ranked tend toward more hierarchical and federated church polities, whereas the lower ranked tend to represent more “low-church,” congregational, or “believer’s church” traditions. Socioeconomically higher ranked religious groups also tend to involve more formal, liturgical, tradition-oriented styles of worship; while lower ranked groups tend toward more openly expressive, informal, emotional, and “Spirit-filled” styles of worship. Finally, we know from the racial composition of religious communities that more highly ranked groups tend to have high percentages of whites as members, while lower ranked groups tend to include more racial minorities, particularly black Baptists and Pentecostals and non-Catholic Hispanic Pentecostals. Most of this follows similar observations by Roof and McKinney (1987) about the 1970s and early 1980s. Explaining exactly how and why socioeconomic inequalities map onto and reproduce themselves within the American religious system will require further research, which cross-sectional survey data such as that analyzed here will not be able to address. Some of the forces at work, such as race, very likely have little directly to do with religion. As African-Americans, for example, are socioeconomically disadvantaged in America’s racialized society, and African-Americans cluster in African-American religious denominations, then African-Americans’ socioeconomic disadvantage inevitably shows up in their religious denominations (see Sherkat and Ellison 1991). And since both socioeconomic inequality and religious affiliation operate by similar forces of social reproduction and homophily, it is not surprising that the socioeconomic stratification of American religion persists over time. At the same time, following Weber (1958), we might suppose that religious factors also help to sustain and reproduce some of the socioeconomic inequalities noted above. It may be that different theologies and worship styles are more comfortable for people with

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41

different levels of education or different kinds of occupations (Demerath 1965; Fukuyama 1960). Fully entering into an Episcopal liturgical service of worship, for instance, requires a greater appreciation for historical tradition and elegant precision in the English language— both arguably associated with higher education—than most Southern Baptist or Pentecostal services. Religious belief systems and moral orders may also socialize members in ways that directly shape their educational and occupational aspirations. Beyerlein (2004) and Darnell and Sherkat (1997), for example, have argued that Pentecostal and fundamentalist Christianity discourages their adherents from pursuing advanced degrees in higher education. Given what we know about network effects in reproducing business and political elite statuses and in searching for jobs, it is likely that religious congregational involvement plays a significant role in generating advantage and disadvantage. Future longitudinal survey, ethnographic, and community-studies research might pursue a number of related questions to understand better the dynamics of socioeconomic stratification in American religion. (1) To what degree do religious believers who over time experience upward socioeconomic mobility switch to new religious traditions that correspond to their new levels of education, income, or job prestige (see Roof 1989; Sherkat 1991)? (2) How do religious believers who are well above or below the socioeconomic averages of their own religious traditions manage the identity tensions and discrepancies in cultural capital resulting from the status differences? (3) In what ways do the religious cultures of faith traditions themselves help to socialize members to reproduce the socioeconomic status of their religious group (see Beyerlein 2004; Darnell and Sherkat 1997)? (4) How does divorce and interreligious marrying interact with the socioeconomic positions of the divorcing and uniting spouses to affect spouse’s status mobility and the socioeconomic outcomes of their children (see Lawton and Bures 2001; Musick and Wilson 1995)? (5) How do religious denominations, such as the Assemblies of God, that may be experiencing upward socioeconomic status mobility, negotiate the internal cultural evolutions in identity, discourse, belief, and practices that such mobility sets into motion? (6) How do socioeconomic locations and theological orientations interact to sustain each other, in ways perhaps suggested by Marx (1978a, 1978b) and Hunter (1983)? (7) How do interracial congregations negotiate possible issues arising around socioeconomic status as they affect religious culture and practices (see DeYoung et al., 2003)?

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CONCLUSION American religion has from the beginning been stratified socioeconomically. American sociology has long documented and theorized persistent inequalities between religious communities. Socioeconomic inequalities between religious groups have also played an important role in many broader sociological theories about religion and society. Since the publication of a collection of important works published in the mid-20th century, however, the social stratification of American religion has been a curiously understudied topic. This research note is an attempt to help update our descriptive knowledge about socioeconomic inequalities between American religious groups. Tracking educational, income, and job status inequality over a 16-year period, from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, we have found that socioeconomic inequality in the American religious system has been persistent and stable—suggesting that the mid-20th century’s significant mobility within this system may be declining. Further ethnographic, longitudinal survey, and community-studies research is needed to better understand the causal forces and cultural dynamics of the socioeconomic stratification of American religion, and how inequality between religious groups may interact with and help to sustain the larger system of socioeconomic inequality in the United States. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ammerman, N. 1997. Congregation and community. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Baltzell, E. D. 1964. The Protestant establishment: Aristocracy and caste in America. New York: Random House. Beyerlein, K. 2004. “Specifying the impact of conservative Protestantism on educational attainment.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 43 (December): 505–18. Cantril, H. 1943. “Educational and economic composition of religious groups.” American Journal of Sociology. 47 (March): 574–79. Davis, J., T. W. Smith, and P. Marsden. 2001. General Social Surveys, 1972–2000: [CUMULATIVE FILE] [Computer file]. 3rd version. Chicago, IL: National Opinion Research Center [producer]. Storrs, CT: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut/Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributors]. Demerath, N. J. 1965. Social class in American Protestantism. Chicago: Rand McNally. DeYoung, C., M. Emerson, G. Yancey, and K. Chai. 2003. United by faith: Multiracial congregations as a response to the problem of race. New York: Oxford University Press. Emerson, M. and C. Smith. 2000. Divided by faith: Evangelical religion and the problem of race in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Finke, R. and R. Stark. 1992. The churching of America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

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Fukuyama, Y. 1960. “The major dimensions of church membership.” Review of Religious Research. 2(4): 159. Greeley, A. 1976. Ethnicity, denomination, and inequality. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. —— . 1989. Religious change in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hunter, J. D. 1983. American evangelicalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Keister, L. 2003. “Religion and wealth: The role of religious affiliation and participation in early adult asset accumulation.” Social Forces. 82(1): 175–207. Kosmin, B. and S. Lachman. 1993. One nation under God. New York: Harmony Books. Lazerwitz, B. 1961. “A comparison of major United States religious groups.” Journal of the American Statistical Association. 56 (September): 568–79. Lawton, L. and Regina B. 2001. “Parental divorce and the ‘switching’ of religious identity.” The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 40(1): 99. Lenski, G. 1961. The religious factor. Garden City: Doubleday. Marx, K. 1978a [1843]. “Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction.” In The Marx-Engels reader, ed. Robert Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton. —— . 1978b [1845]. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In The Marx-Engels reader, ed. Robert Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton. Musick, M. and J. Wilson. 1995. “Religious switching for marriage reasons.” Sociology of Religion. 56(3): 257–71. Niebuhr, H. R. 1929. The social sources of denominationalism. New York: Meridian. Pope, L. 1942. Millhands and preachers. New Haven: Yale University Press. —— . 1948. “Religion and the class structure.” Annals of the American Academy of Political Science and Social Science. 256 (March): 84–91. Riccio, J. 1979. “Religious affiliation and socioeconomic achievement.” In The religious dimension: New directions in quantitative research, ed. Robert Wuthnow. New York: Academic Press: pp. 199–228. Roof, W. C. 1979. “Socioeconomic differentials among white socioreligious groups in the United States.” Social Forces. 58 (September): 280–289. —— . 1989. “Multiple religious switching.” The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 2(4): 530–36. Roof, W. C. and W. McKinney. 1987. American mainline religion. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Schneider, H. 1952. Religion in twentieth century America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sherkat, D. 1991. “Leaving the faith: testing theories of religious switching using survival models.” Social Science Research. 20(2): 171–88. Sherkat, D. and C. Ellison. 1991. “The politics of black religious change: disaffiliation from black mainline denominations.” Social Forces. 70(2): 431–55. Swartz, D. 1996. “Bridging the study of culture and religion.” Sociology of Religion. 57(1): 71–85. Warner, W. L. 1963. Yankee city. New Haven: Yale University Press. Weber, M. 1978. Economy and society. Berkeley: University of California Press. —— . 1958. The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Charles Scribners. Wuthnow, R. 1988. The restructuring of American religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER TWO

AT EASE WITH OUR OWN KIND: WORSHIP PRACTICES AND CLASS SEGREGATION IN AMERICAN RELIGION Timothy J. Nelson

Theoretically, no obstacle keeps lower-class people out of the Christian Church, but “they wouldn’t feel comfortable there.” –James West, Plainville, U.S.A. (1964, 160) [T]he religious segregation of mill workers was not due to the desire of fashionable uptown churches or conservative rural churches to exclude them… The lives of the mill operatives were different from other people, leading them to desire churches of their own in which they could feel perfectly at ease. –Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers (1942, 72–3) For most Protestants, theology plays a minor role in selection of a church. They go where they find their own kind of people. –W. Lloyd Warner et al., Democracy in Jonesville (1964, 166–7)

The relationship between social class and religious behavior is one of the oldest and most well-established areas of inquiry in the field of sociology. Beginning with Marx’s comments on religion, alienation, and class ideology, Weber’s analyses of religious styles among different social strata, and continuing with eighty years’ worth of empirical studies in the United States, it is safe to say that this disciplinary path is a well-trodden one. Although some recent studies have downplayed the role of class in American religion (Roof and McKinney 1987; Park and Reimer 2002), choosing instead to emphasize what they see as an unmooring of organized religion from its traditional social sources, the evidence clearly suggests that class is still a powerful force that continues to shape religious identification and behavior (Smith and Faris 2005; McCloud 2007). Documenting the correlation between social class and various forms of religious behavior is one thing, however, but explaining them is quite another. In the pages that follow, I briefly summarize the four major

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empirical findings concerning class and American religion, narrow the focus of this paper to just one of these, and review the most prominent theory that has been offered to explain it. After critiquing this explanation, I then develop an alternative theoretical approach drawn from Pierre Bourdieu’s work on class and cultural consumption, focusing on his concept of habitus. Dividing the worship service into three dimensions—aesthetic, linguistic and physical—I review a selection of ethnographic studies of American religion to see how they support and illuminate this alternative approach. SOCIAL CLASS AND AMERICAN RELIGION Over seventy-five years ago, H. Richard Niebuhr (1929) published his hugely influential work The Social Sources of Denominationalism. With the ethical force of an Old Testament prophet, Niebuhr (1929, 25) denounced Protestant denominations in America as “represent[ing] the moral failure of Christianity” by their conformity in reproducing the social order of classes and castes. While never reducing religion to an epiphenomenon of class, he emphasized that the energies, goals and motives of religious movements are channeled by social factors, particularly race and class, into particular forms that reflect their position in society (Niebuhr 1929, 27). That same year, the Lynds’ seminal study of a “typical” American community was published as Middletown and received great public acclaim, including a laudatory front-page review in the Sunday New York Times and immediate best-seller status (Lynd and Lynd 1957). Originally intended as a survey of religious life in a “typical” American community, the Lynds took an explicitly anthropological approach to religion by situating it within its broader social context—particularly the two-fold division they found in Muncie, Indiana, between the “business class” and the “working class.” In their analysis, the Lynds repeatedly stressed the influence of this class division in shaping the religious behavior, attitudes, and organizations of Muncie—to the extent that the foundation which had sponsored the study deemed it to be “anti-religious” and ultimately “unpublishable” (Connolly 2005). These two influential works, one historical and one anthropological, set the agenda for the following decades of research on the link between social class and religious expression. In the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, over a dozen studies of various American communities showed conclusively that local congregations had a distinctive and recognizable

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class element to them, not only in terms of who attended, but also in the culture of the organization itself and the style of its activities. Overlapping these qualitative studies and continuing into the 1960s, those working in the newly developing field of survey research also documented the powerful influence of class on the type of church one affiliated with, the frequency of church attendance (or whether one attended religious services at all), and even how much interest one expressed in religion (Cantril 1943; Pope 1948; Bultena 1949; Lazerwitz 1962; Dillingham 1965; Goode 1966; Lenski 1953). At the same time, sociologists showed that social classes tended to differ not only in where Americans went to church and how often, but also in the forms of their religious involvement. Working primarily with the then-dominant concept of church and sect as distinctive forms of religious organization, Dynes (1955), Demerath (1965), Estus and Overington (1970), and Stark (1972) all found that the lower classes displayed what Demerath termed more “sect-like” involvement in organized religion, while the upper classes favored a “church-like” approach (Demerath 1961). In other words, while the upper classes attended church more frequently and had higher levels of organizational involvement, lower class members were more bounded by their association with the church, both socially in terms of friendship networks, and ideologically in their adherence to orthodox doctrine and its authority over their everyday lives. By the beginning of the 1970s the empirical support for the connection between social class and religious behavior in America was fairly well established for the following relationships: 1. Among the general population, higher social status is positively related to both membership in and identification with any organized religious group. 2. Among church members, higher status is associated with higher rates of church attendance, with assumption of leadership positions within congregations and higher levels of religious knowledge. 3. Among church members, lower status is associated with more concentration of one’s friendship network within in the congregation, more personal devotionalism, higher rates of doctrinal orthodoxy and reported rates of religious experience. 4. Among church members, differences in social status are associated with membership in particular kinds of religious organizations (especially for Protestants) and these associations have remained stable for many decades.

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In sum, these studies showed that the American population is recruited selectively by social class into any form of religious organization and that possessing a religious identity varies according to social status. Those lower status persons who do belong to or identify religiously participate in quite different ways than do higher status persons, and there is a marked tendency toward segregation by class into different kinds of religious organizations. It is this last element—the propensity of the church-affiliated public to identify with different religious organizations based, at least in part, upon social class that I want to focus on in this paper. I do so because, of the four findings listed above, it is the most consistently supported empirically, and it is the aspect of class and religion that is most amenable to the theoretical perspective to be developed below. Before doing so however let me briefly discuss why I think a new theoretical approach is necessary. EXPLAINING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN CLASS AND RELIGIOUS PREFERENCE To understand the inclination of social classes to separate into different religious organizations, sociologists have taken note of which particular religious groups tend to draw from which social classes. These patterns are not only robust but have also shown remarkable stability since they were first systematically observed. In their examination of pooled data from multiple waves of the General Social Survey, Smith and Faris (2005) conclude that the ranking of American religious groups by the educational attainment, household income and occupational prestige of its members has remained remarkably steady since the 1970s, despite the sustained period of economic growth in the mid-to-late 1990s. The groups at the top of their list—Unitarians, Jews, Episcopalians, and mainline Presbyterians—“consistently enjoyed significantly higher levels of education, income, and occupational prestige than most of the groups below them,” and these same religious groups have maintained this position for decades (Smith and Faris 2005, 100). The groups at the other end of this hierarchy—Jehovah’s Witnesses, black Baptists, Southern Baptists, and Pentecostals—have also captured the lower portions of the class continuum for a long period of time. What needs to be accounted for then, is not just the fact of class segregation into different religious groups, but the apparently strong affinity between specific classes and particular religious traditions.

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However, explaining this connection is complex because religious organizations are multi-faceted and several dimensions could be operative in attracting different classes through their front doors. Is it the congregation’s theology, moral code, bureaucratic form, history and tradition, or set of worship practices that are drawing people from one side of the tracks or the other? Smith and Faris (2005, 102) note that as a generalization: [T]he higher ranked religious groups tend to be more theologically liberal denominations and traditions, while the lowest ranked tend to be more conservative and sectarian. The highest ranked tend toward more hierarchical and federated church polities, whereas the lower ranked tend to represent more “low-church,” congregational, or “believer’s church” traditions. Socio-economically higher ranked religious groups also tend to involve more formal, liturgical, tradition-oriented styles of worship; lower ranked groups tend toward more openly expressive, informal, emotional, and “Spirit-filled” styles of worship.

An empirical generalization like this, while certainly useful as a broad summary of findings, is not a theory; it cannot tell us exactly what it is about the theological orientations, polities, or worship styles (or other, perhaps still unmentioned and unexamined factors) that are operative in attracting different classes into different religious organizations.1 Given the stability of the link between social class and particular religious organizations over many decades, one might expect that some hypotheses have been developed to account for this phenomenon. And they have—but in a systematically uneven and therefore inherently distorted fashion. The reason for this is that instead of examining the class attributes of religious groups across the entire class spectrum, they have tended to focus almost exclusively on the religious beliefs and practices of the lower classes, usually framed as a deviation from the implicit norm of middle class belief and behavior. This has led to the development of particularistic explanations based solely upon circumstances thought to be unique to the poor and working class (and these have been usually based on middle class prejudice more than empirical evidence).

1 Of course, one way to deal with this is to attribute these status differentials, not to any particular aspect of these religious groups at all, but rather to historical accident. Thus Roof and McKinney (1987, 109) assert that, “the hierarchy rests largely upon time of entry into the system and subsequent pace of assimilation.” Johnstone (1992, 180) makes the same argument as well.

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The literature on lower class religion tends to be scattered across several disciplines and most published works focus on single historical or ethnographic case studies. Nevertheless, there is an almost ubiquitous mechanism in the explanations for the “fit” between lower class position in society and religious styles of worship. This common mechanism is what I have referred to elsewhere under the label of “psychological functionalism,” and which can be characterized as a hybrid approach loosely based upon aspects of both Marxist and Freudian theory (Nelson 1996). The essential argument goes something like this: the unique situation of the lower class (material deprivation, oppression, low self-esteem, alienation, lack of control over life circumstances, etc.) creates a strong impetus for psychic relief from these supposedly unbearable pressures. Particular forms of religion (as well as their functional equivalents such as excessive alcohol consumption, drug use, promiscuous sex, rowdy public behavior and other typically “lower class” behaviors) offer one such avenue of relief—hence their appeal to this class. The form of relief offered by these religious groups varies according to the particular needs emphasized by different writers. So, for example, Liston Pope (1942, 134) emphasizes the dreariness and repetition of mill work along with the workers’ lack of control over most aspects of their lives. The function of their “frenetic religious services,” then, is “release from psychological repression … fulfilling a need for self-expression.” One finds many examples of these explanations, particularly in works published before the 1970s. But this approach is certainly not limited to older studies. Several decades ago, Wilson and Clow (1981, 249) argued that the appeal of Pentecostalism to the working class rested upon anxieties over “a fall into a poverty level which robs them of self control,” and that “dancing in the Spirit” is a way that these anxieties are expressed symbolically, and thus dealt with subconsciously. Even more recently, Coreno (2002, 357) contended that for the working class (and for lower-tiers of the professional and managerial classes who experience “relative deprivation”), fundamentalism offers a way to “fend off alienation, a by-product of economic and status insecurity and other experiences of subordination.” The problem with this approach lies in the normative assumptions it makes about both class and religion, assumptions which have the effect of labeling lower-class religious forms as deviant, and then explaining this deviation in terms of the author’s own (usually biased) views of the

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nature of lower class life. I won’t take the time here to present extensive evidence for this argument, but support for this assertion can be seen simply in how the practices and beliefs associated with lower-class religion are characterized and how they are contrasted to an implicit norm—those of the middle class. To give one small example, taken from Niebuhr himself: “Religious enthusiasm declined in the later days because Methodist Christianity became more literate and rational and because, with increasing wealth and culture, other escapes from the monotony and exhaustion of hard labor became available” (Niebuhr 1929, 63, my emphasis).

THE RELIGIOUS HABITUS Because the alternative approach to class and religious practice I develop here is based on Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus,” in this section I first define what Bourdieu means by this term, discussing the role it plays in his explanation of class-based cultural patterns and the social processes by which a specific class habitus is formed. Then I extend the discussion to encompass religious practices, particularly as they relate to worship, and offer some predictions and areas for further exploration. As one of the central and recurring concepts in Bourdieu’s formidable and influential oeuvre, there has been much debate swirling about the idea of habitus in the theoretical literature, most of which I will not concern myself with here. Bourdieu himself was very consistent in defining and defending this concept in terms similar to this definition offered in his article “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” “habitus is both a system of schemes of production of practices and a system of perception and apperception of practices. And, in both of these dimensions, its operation expresses the social position in which it was elaborated” (Bourdieu 1989, 19). Or, more concisely, “the habitus is both the generative principle of objectively classifiable judgments and the system of classification of these practices” (Bourdieu 1984, 170). In other words, habitus is a mechanism, internalized within the individual and usually preconscious, which generates both patterns of action and patterns of likes and dislikes for different forms of cultural objects and practices (tastes). These tastes are principles of selection that not only influence one’s own actions, but are also judgments on

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the tastes of others. The habitus thus incorporates both a predisposition for selecting some kinds of cultural objects and practices over others, as well as a scheme for evaluating and ranking one’s own preferences relative to all other perceived options. In addition, Bourdieu argues that the habitus is transposable, that is, the choices one makes in any single field of cultural consumption are not independent but systematically linked to one’s choices in all other areas of cultural preference. “Systematicity … is found in all the properties—and property—with which individuals and groups surround themselves, houses, furniture, paintings, books, cars, spirits, cigarettes, perfume, clothes, and in the practices in which they manifest their distinction, sports, games, entertainments, only because it is the synthetic unity of the habitus, the unifying, generative principle of all practices” (Bourdieu 1984, 173). What gives the habitus such a powerful uniformity in its effects across such diverse areas of cultural consumption? It is the influence of one’s cumulative experiences due to social location—particularly class—as well as the recognition of one’s place in the status hierarchy. These class-based experiences and perceptions (predominantly those anchored in the formative stages of the life course) profoundly shape one’s dispositions regarding cultural choices, even later in life, and even in the face of intragenerational class mobility. For Bourdieu, “experience of the particular class position that characterizes a given location in social space imprints a particular set of dispositions on the individual” (Weininger 2005, 92). Bourdieu’s (1984) analysis of French cultural tastes and lifestyles in his work Distinction roughly identifies four social types (defined according to the amount of economic and cultural capital they possess) and their corresponding habitus, characterized rather tersely by Swartz (1997, 109) as “ostentatious indulgence and ease within the upper class, aristocratic aestheticism among intellectuals, awkward pretension by middle-class strivers, and anti-pretentious ignorance and conformity within the working class.” These more general orientations are embodied within particular fields of cultural consumption and Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural practices places special emphasis on preferences in the realms of art, music and literature because these areas are the most closely tied to the uneven distribution of cultural capital within the social hierarchy. The capacity to fully appreciate “high” cultural objects and practices (e.g. opera, abstract art, or poetry) is typically acquired either through

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one’s family or through the formal educational system. The subordinate classes are relatively excluded, due to family background and poor or truncated schooling, from acquiring the “decoding” tools necessary to appreciate these “high” cultural forms. While not as socially valorized as the fields of music, art and literature, Bourdieu argues that tastes in furniture, clothing, vacation spots, movies, restaurants, and other forms of cultural expression are also structured according to class habitus. The end result of these processes is that each social class adopts similar sets of tastes and practices across a wide range of cultural fields. This not only predisposes members of the same class to experience feelings of affinity for one another based upon similar lifestyles and preferences, but to feel hostile to, ridicule or reject the cultural choices of those unlike themselves. This “class racism” (Bourdieu’s term) is the inevitable result of the clash of styles and preferences held by each class and class fraction and leads, ultimately, to reproduction of the social order.

HABITUS AND WORSHIP PRACTICES Although Bourdieu’s approach to class and culture was inspired by Max Weber’s writings on religion, Bourdieu himself spent little time on the topic and never gave it much serious attention (Swartz 1997, 41; Verter 2003). Fortunately, several scholars have begun to take Bourdieu’s own approach and apply it to religion, focusing particularly on his concepts of field and cultural capital (Swartz 1996; Verter 2003). The current paper attempts to further this important work by showing the utility of the concept of habitus as it is applied to social class and religious practices. In order to extend Bourdieu’s approach in this way, several assumptions must be accepted. First, because Bourdieu’s approach is based upon the notion of a market of cultural goods and practices (which further implies at least limited freedom of choice), one has to accept the idea that religious practices can be usefully analyzed within a market framework, and that individuals or families have at least some freedom to choose their religious affiliations. I won’t belabor this point, as there seems to be general agreement here among theorists of different orientations that this is indeed the case, at least as far as the contemporary American situation is concerned.

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More importantly (and, perhaps, more controversially), this approach encourages an alternative way of conceptualizing religious practices as not simply the result of religious beliefs or traditions, but also as forms of cultural consumption or production with a relatively precise social value on local prestige markets. This is not a class determinist theory. The religious practices themselves may derive from religious sources such as Biblical texts, prophetic revelations, church traditions or whatever sources of authority are normative for each group. But when these practices are performed, they take on a social valuation in the eyes of both the practitioners and others who have knowledge of them, whether by participation or by reputation. For example, the practice of speaking in tongues derives from Pentecostal theology and tradition, but it has taken on an additional meaning that locates its practitioners in social space, both for those who esteem it and for those who disdain it. Third, though religious practices may be performed by individuals either in private or within view of others outside of their religious orientation (praying before meals, street or door-to-door evangelism, etc.), the primary location of religious practice remains within the context of the local congregation. More specifically, the majority of religious practices are performed within the congregational worship service or other communal gatherings, such as Sunday School, Bible studies, or small groups. These are what I refer to, however imperfectly, as “worship practices,” which is a subset of a larger category of religious practices done both inside and outside of the communal context. Applying Bourdieu’s approach to this arena, one would expect that worship practices are filtered (adopted, rejected, or modified) through the dominant class habitus of particular social groups (congregations and denominations) in a way that is homologous to their cultural practices in other domains. Some of these differences will be preconscious and not articulated as part of an explicit system of tastes, although they will still serve to segregate classes into different religious organizations (based upon a more instinctual reaction like revulsion or discomfort). Other practices will be known, recognized and articulated as distinctions tied to a status hierarchy—with the same result of relative religious segregation by class. Following Bourdieu’s own analyses and his emphases on particular cultural domains, I suggest the following three broad areas for an initial

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investigation of worship practices: the aesthetic, the linguistic, and the physical (as far as it involves bodily expression). If my alternative approach has any explanatory utility, one should be able to identify distinct patterns of religious practices across these three dimensions. First, there should be a correlation between a religious group’s general class location and the dominant aesthetic, linguistic, and bodily practices within their worship services. Further, these particular religious practices should be homologous to those within the more secular cultural domains of that class. Third, at least some of these practices should have an explicit salience regarding the class/status hierarchy. In other words, people should express taste preferences regarding these practices and use them as a basis for making distinctions between their own group and those of groups with different class compositions. This process of making distinctions based on taste is crucial, Bourdieu argues, to misrecognizing and therefore reproducing the class system. The ideal empirical investigation of this approach would be a set of participant-observation studies of the worship practices in one or more class-diverse communities. The community approach is crucial because such a study would have to encompass the whole range of available religious options and capture the sorting processes within a more-orless self-contained religious ecology. The field observations should first assess the degree to which different social classes are in fact sorted into the area’s local congregations, and then determine the patterns of variation within the three dimensions mentioned above. Finally, qualitative interviews with congregants from across the class spectrum would explore whether there is indeed a class-based set of taste preferences operating to sort people into particular congregations. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, such a study does not exist. But there is a set of data that can give us a sense of whether this theoretical approach may be a useful one. For roughly three decades, from the mid 1920s until the mid 1950s, sociologists and anthropologists conducted over fifteen in-depth studies of various American communities that include the basic social class composition of individual congregations and at least some description of their worship practices (see Table 1). Although imperfect in many ways (including a tendency toward a strong middle-class bias in descriptions of lower-class religion), I use these studies as a kind of data set, and code them for patterns that illuminate the issues under consideration here.

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Table 1: Community studies, ordered by date of fieldwork with names of communities studied 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Lynd and Lynd, Middletown Warner, The Social Life of a Modern Community Powdermaker, After Freedom Davis, Gardner, and Gardner, Deep South Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town Drake and Cayton. Black Metropolis Pope, Millhands and Preachers West, Plainville, U.S.A. Hollingshead, Elmtown’s Youth Warner, Democracy in Jonesville Rubin, Plantation County Morland, Millways of Kent Lewis Blackways of Kent Seeley, Sim, and Loosely, Crestwood Heights Vidich and Bensman. Small Town in Mass Society Gallaher, Plainville Fifteen Years Later

1924–1925 1930–1934

Muncie, IN Newburyport, MA

1932–1934 1933–1935

Indianola, MS Natchez, MS

1935–1936

Indianola, MS

1936–1941

Chicago, IL

1938–1939 1939–1941 1941–1942 1940

Gastonia, NC Wheatland, MO Morris, IL Morris, IL

1947–1948 1948–1949 1949 1948–1953 1951–1953

Wilcox County, AL York, SC York, SC Forest Hill Village, Toronto, CAN Candor, NY

1954–1955

Wheatland, MO

AESTHETICS I begin with surfaces because, although they are furthest from the core of worship practices, these are the elements first encountered by potential participants and thus are essential to the first impressions sustained. The aesthetic dimension of the worship service includes several diverse elements. First, there is the physical space in which the ritual takes place—its architecture, décor, and physical surroundings, including the neighborhood in which it is located. The clothing, hair, and makeup styles of participants are a second element to consider here, and finally, there are the stylistic aspects of the ritual action itself, particularly regarding the music used in the service.

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As collective social events, worship services occur in physical space, usually in a building owned by the congregation or the denomination it is affiliated with. Even today’s televised religion includes this element, as most are simply broadcasts of services taking place in a specific time and place (and the “PTL” style programs must have a set with furnishings and decorations). Although some worship services are held in rented space or in public areas, there is still ample opportunity for stylistic expression through means other than architecture and décor. As W. Lloyd Warner (1941) and his team discovered decades ago in “Yankee City,” the part of town in which a structure is located is also a very important component of social prestige, but one which may be the most difficult for congregations to alter (although the massive relocation of churches and synagogues to the suburbs in the post-World War II era shows that this strategy is far from rare). St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton (1962, 632), studying the African American scene on Chicago’s South Side, note that “[The lower-class African American] religious praise the Lord in vacant stores and in houses, abandoned theaters, remodeled garages, and halls. These small churches tend to be concentrated on run-down, low-rent, business streets and in generally undesirable residential areas.” But what about the buildings themselves? As with residential houses, church buildings tend to reflect the financial resources of the congregation. The Lynds (1952, 336) wrote that in Middletown: The economic and social considerations which appear to be becoming more potent in marking off one religious group from another are … reflected in the houses of worship. Some of these buildings are imposing structures of stone and brick, while others, particularly in the outlying sections inhabited by the poorer workers, are weather-beaten wooden shelters little larger or better built than the poorer sorts of dwellings.

However, according to the approach being developed here, the congregation’s level of cultural capital should be almost as important as its economic capital in influencing the architectural style. Unfortunately, none of these community studies compared architectural styles of various church buildings, or interviewed people about their opinions on the matter. There is also a confounding factor: while urban church structures tend to be “recycled” and may have several owners over the years (thus not accurately reflecting the aesthetic preferences of its current occupants), the construction of new churches is mostly confined to the suburban middle class neighborhoods.

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Given the greater freedom of innovation—and at far less expense— to individual congregations, class contrasts may appear more strongly in interior decoration than in architectural style or church location. The comparison to residential homes is instructive here as well, and it has been almost a century since social scientists developed an index of social class based upon observations of home furnishings (Lasswell 1965). Working within an explicitly Bourdieuian framework, Douglas Holt interviewed respondents in one community, some with high cultural capital (HCC) and some with low cultural capital (LCC), and uncovered several dimensions of aesthetic cultural preferences (Holt 1997, Holt 1998). Specifically, he found that LCCs evaluate everyday objects like clothing and furniture according to utilitarian properties (durability, ease of care), favored known and unified styles (“Victorian,” “Country”) in their interior decorating, and aspired to a lifestyle of material abundance and luxury (“having the good things of life”). In contrast, HCCs approached these aesthetic choices from a more eclectic and subjective perspective, valorizing the idiosyncratic over the mass-produced, quality over quantity, and spiritual over material aspects of consumption. Once again, unfortunately, the community studies do not take the time to describe the interiors of the churches they observed. The one possible exception is Drake and Cayton’s summary opinion that in black churches of Chicago’s south side, “Upper class church buildings tend to be small, but are very well cared for and artistically decorated,” while in contrast, the store front churches are full of “tasteless ornamentation” (Drake and Cayton 1962, 539, 633). Without a more objective description, of course, this doesn’t do us much good. There is more evidence, though, on a matter that gets a little bit closer to the substance of the worship ritual: the style of music used in the service. The most important dimension here is the division between more “classical” styles and “folk” or popular styles. In the time period these community studies were done, the popular jazz form was considered a lower-class musical style and was found more often in the working and lower-class congregations. Morland (1964, 120) observes that in the white churches of York, South Carolina: There is more of such clapping and tapping of feet at the Church of God than in the Wesleyan Methodist and the hymns are more jazzy. … The music of these hymns, especially in the Church of God, have a definite beat and a fast, swingy rhythm. Most of the songs are “happy” but a few are reminiscent of the blues for example, “If You Ever Leave

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Me Jesus, I’ll Die.” Others tell a story in ballad fashion, almost mountain style. The pianist plays all of these hymns in a jazz manner, with numerous off-beats, runs, and trills.

Drake and Cayton (1962, 678) also note that “appeals to middle-class members … take on the form of ‘good’ music rendered by a well-trained choir singing anthems and other classical religious works.” They also describe the strategies used by some larger African American congregations to appeal to all class segments on the South Side of Chicago (Drake and Cayton 1962, 676): Other features of a Sunday worship service other than the sermon have this dual class appeal. All of Bronzeville’s churches have an adult or senior choir, and many have a junior choir. These present ordinary hymns and anthems. Some are highly trained choral groups. But, in addition to these choirs, most Bronzeville churches also have one or two “gospel choruses”—a concession to lower-class tastes. A gospel choir is not highly trained, but it is usually loud and spirited. […] Chorus members often shout while they sing. In many lower-class churches, there is no choir other than the gospel chorus.

Even more importantly, several of their interviews with South Side residents reveal that musical style is an important factor in sorting classes into different congregations. One middle-class respondent was indignant over the musical styles used in lower-class churches: “I like good music, but I don’t like the songs these gospel choirs in the storefronts sing—these jazz tunes. I think it is heathen-like to jazz hymns” (Drake and Cayton1962, 671). From the opposite side, a recent lowerclass migrant from the South told why she had decided to leave the larger, more middle-class congregation she had initially affiliated with to join a small store-front church. After explaining that she sometimes couldn’t understand the big words the preacher at her former church used, she added, “I couldn’t sing their way. The songs was proud-like. At my little church I enjoy the services” (Drake and Cayton 1962, 634). LINGUISTIC STYLE A more central aspect of the worship service is its linguistic component. Prayers, testimonies and, of course, sermons or homilies come immediately to mind as primary linguistic elements in the ritual, but we should not forget the words to hymns and other religious songs, as

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well as greetings, announcements, instructions and other less sacred elements of the service. Bourdieu emphasizes that like art, music, and literature, language is closely tied to success in the formal educational system and a dominant, “correct,” way of speaking is often imposed upon the lower orders from above. Even amidst ordinary social occasions, the bourgeois linguistic style has a tendency toward “abstraction, formalism, intellectualism and euphemistic moderation” in contrast to the “expressiveness or expressionism of working-class language, which manifests itself in the tendency to move from particular case to particular case, from illustration to parable” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977, 16, quoted in Swartz 1997, 199). “In language, [we have] the opposition between popular outspokenness and the highly censored language of the bourgeois, between the expressionist pursuit of the picturesque or the rhetorical effect and the choice of restraint and false simplicity” (Bourdieu 1984, 176–7). This set of linguistic contrasts—between the abstract and the concrete, the suggestive and the emphatic, the intellectually detached and the emotionally heartfelt—should be apparent in how different class churches express themselves in liturgical language. The ethnographic evidence on this point is intriguing. Consider the contrast between the middle and upper class emphasis on the ideational or intellectual content of discourse and the working and lower class emphasis on concrete and graphic depictions, often set in a gripping narrative. Hortense Powdermaker (1993, 241), in describing a sermon in a lower-class African American church in Indianola, Mississippi, in the early 1930s, wrote that the when the preacher talked about heaven, “he describes [it] graphically in literal Bible terms: the golden streets, the pearly gates, the songs of angels.” Liston Pope (1942, 86) compares the songs sung in the high status downtown churches of Gastonia, North Carolina, to the working-class mill churches and finds the latter’s music “more concrete and more rhythmic; it conjures up pictures rather than describes attitudes or ideas.” And Morland (1958, 121) also observing a working-class white congregation in South Carolina, was struck that many of the songs “tell a story in ballad fashion, almost mountain style.” Regarding their observations of African American worship services in Depression-era Chicago, Drake and Cayton (1962, 624) wrote that a sermon in a lower-class church: “is primarily a vivid, pictorial, and imaginative recounting of Biblical lore. […] A good preacher is a good raconteur of religious tales. His highly embroidered individual variations are accepted as pleasing

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modifications of an original story with which both the preacher and audience are familiar.” John Dollard (1957, 232) who also studied Indianola, Mississippi, in the 1930s, gives the best example of this, recounting over several paragraphs the long, symbol-laden story the preacher gave during the sermon in a lower-class black church, each detail graphically described. Lower and working class linguistic style also relies more heavily on stock, repetitive phrases (taking the form of clichés in ordinary conversation) rather than on discourse which follows a more expository pattern, a contrast that has some resonance to Bernstein’s distinction between elaborated and restricted codes (Bernstein 1975). This contrast has been remarked upon by many observers, who often seem unable to censor their own point of view as they comment on these church services. Dollard (1957, 242), for example, wrote of one working-class church he observed in Indianola, Mississippi, “the preacher, of course, does not make such a connected discourse as would be expected by a better educated audience. He is allowed to repeat himself without fear of reproach and he utters frequent stereotyped phrases while he is collecting his thoughts.” He describes a testimonial service, “various of the members stood up and told how they had been saved, on what day, and how grateful they were. Each went through a little pattern, for the testimony is highly conventional, with many “Amens” and ‘Thank Gods” from other members” (Dollard 1957, 235) Like others with higher levels of cultural capital, Pope (1942, 87–8) seems to interpret this linguistic style as an indication either of a lack of intellectual curiosity or of prowess: Mill workers show no interest in theological questions as such; they simply accept notions coming from a wide variety of sources and weld them together without regard for consistency. The following statements, taken from “testimonies” made by them at services and from comments in private conversation, illustrate the ideas and phrases that recur when they attempt to describe their religious beliefs: “Jesus saves, and the way grows sweeter.” “I’m so glad my name is written in the Book of Life.”…“I was a backslider once, but praise God I’m back on the glory road now.” […] I’m glad I got the old-time religion and am on my way to glory land.”

Interestingly, while Morland observed a similar pattern in his South Carolina churches, he took the opposite evaluative stance, judging the higher status church services from the standpoint of the more lower-class emphasis on emotional resonance and sincerity. Regarding his observations in the most educated congregation, he writes, “the

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congregation sits apparently unmoved during sermons, which seem to be primarily a juggling of verbal symbols and an exercise in semantics without visibly touching those listening” (Morland 1958, 115). The final aspect to touch upon here is the contrast between a working-class “folk” culture based on oral tradition and middle-class “literate” culture based upon formal education. In the worship service this is translated into a working-class emphasis on spontaneous verbal performance (which often relies heavily on memorized stories, phrases, and images) and the middle-class reliance on more authoritative discourse (which often relies on more literary sources). James West (1964, 154–5) who studied the community of Wheatland, Missouri, around 1940, observed (with undisguised bias) that “sermons preached in the [higher status] Christian Church are usually prepared in advance and are coherent, but many revival sermons [in lower-status churches] are utterly incoherent. […] The words vary but are always rhythmic.” Drake and Cayton (1962, 624) note this same pattern among African Americans on the South Side of Chicago, but evaluate it somewhat differently, “in ‘breaking the bread of life’ (a phrase referring to preaching), an uneducated minister has a distinct advantage over an educated preacher, for the typical lower-class sermon is an ‘unprepared message.’ ” They note this same spontaneous approach to praying as well (Drake and Cayton 1962, 620): Lower-class church people look with scorn upon “book prayers,” for praying is an art, and a person who can lead his fellows to the throne of grace with originality and eloquence gains high prestige. […] Though each person makes up his own prayer, there is a common stock of striking phrases and images which are combined and recombined throughout the Negro lower-class religious world.

PHYSICAL EXPRESSION The final dimension I will examine is that of physical expression—the use of the body—in worship practices. This is a topic which certainly sparked the most comment from the authors of these community studies and the strongest feelings from their respondents as well, indicating that this dimension is probably the most potent one in separating the classes into different congregations. Bourdieu argues that the attitudes and dispositions of the individual toward their own bodies takes on a characteristic element of each class,

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which he analyzes in the realms of sports, in the selection of food and in the process of eating. For example, commenting on the middle-class emphasis on table manners, he exclaims (Bourdieu 1984, 196): It is the expression of a habitus of order, restraint and propriety which may not be abdicated… It is also a whole relationship to animal nature, to primary needs and the populace who indulge them without restraint; it is a way of denying the meaning and primary function of consumption, which are essentially common, by making the meal a social ceremony, and affirmation of ethical tone and aesthetic refinement.

Similarly, each of the classes is predisposed toward particular kinds of sports based upon their unconscious views of the body and its relationship to the social self, “a sport is in a sense predisposed for bourgeois use when the use of the body it requires in no way offends the sense of high dignity of the person, which rules out, for example, flinging the body into the rough-and-tumble of ‘forward-game’ rugby or the demeaning competitions of athletics” (Bourdieu 1984, 219). On the whole, then, we might expect that middle class worship services would first of all de-emphasize the physical in favor of the intellectual, and second, that any demands upon the body during worship will be in keeping with this sense of “high dignity” identified by Bourdieu. We might also expect that working and lower class worshippers would have a more instrumental relationship to their own bodies (as they are instruments of labor) and would use them for “authentic” expression of emotion and commitment with less concern for dignity and restraint. This is what every community study has found to be the case. I will give just a few examples to illustrate the point. In the extended quote below, Liston Pope (1942, 130–2) gives a “composite and impressionistic” picture of the more active and emotional lower class groups: The atmosphere is expectant and informal: members of the congregation move about at will, and talk in any tone of voice that suits their fancy. […] A band, including three stringed instruments and a saxophone, plays occasional music. […] The stanzas [of a hymn] are punctuated with loud shouts of “Hallelujah,” “Thank you, Jesus,” “Glory,” and the rhythmic clapping of hands and tapping of feet. Almost immediately, various members of the congregation begin to “get the Holy Ghost.” One young woman leaves the front row of the choir and jerks about the pulpit, with motions so disconnected as to seem involuntary, weird. A man’s head trembles violently from side to side. […] Then comes a prayer, with everybody kneeling on the floor and praying aloud at the same time, each in his own way. Some mutter with occasional shouts;

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others chant, with frequent bendings backward and forward; the volume of sound rises and falls, without unified pattern or group consternation. […] The preacher begins a sermon; more precisely, he enunciates verbal symbols that arouse immediate response from the congregation. […] Then there is a testimony meeting in which a large number of the more faithful testify to their personal experience and joy in religion, some mutteringly, some loudly, fervidly. […] The man who had been indulging in the intoxicated laugh defends his right to laugh in church, saying that his religion makes him feel good all over and is not like the stiff coldness of the Methodist church.

Hortense Powdermaker (1993, 244), describing a lower-class rural congregation, writes, “[the preacher] waves his arms, he chants, he shrieks, he tells jokes. His congregation responds with vigor, laughing, continually breaking into ‘Amens,’ keeping time with their feet.” In contrast, the higher status congregations are always characterized by their relative lack of movement and restrained behavior. Morland (1964, 113) also noted that during the service at the higher status Baptist church in York, South Carolina, “the congregation remains seated, no one kneeling or saying ‘Amen’ during the prayer.” Dollard (1957, 246–7) too observed that among the African American churches in Indianola, Mississippi, “The middle-class churches in town are much more reserved and have much more the frozen, restrained characteristics of the white churches. Hylan Lewis (1955, 138) notes that the highest status African American congregation in York, South Carolina, was “the only one of the three churches where the active emotional display known as ‘shouting’ does not occur. ‘Encouragement’ for the minister is meager and restrained. The members tend to be proud of their restrained patterns and particular denominational affiliation; with reference to some of the practices of the other churches, members have been heard to say, ‘We just don’t do things that way.’ ” Later, Lewis comments on the range of worship practices in this community, and note how closely his words echo those of Bourdieu, “the quality of the expression ranges from the most passive and perfunctory to the highly active and emotional…The restrained behavior of the more sophisticated is in keeping with their conceptions of themselves and their emotional demands. Similarly, the active, emotional behavior of older, less sophisticated, and marginal persons has meaning in terms of their traditions, statuses, and needs (Lewis1955, 153). Like Lewis, most of the authors of these community studies explicitly associate the social status of local congregations to the extent of physical display in their worship services. Powdermaker (1993, 234)

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notes that in Indianola, “the Methodists and the Baptists look down upon the sanctified, considering their noise and dancing somewhat heathenish.” Gallaher, in his mid-1950s re-study of the same community James West had studied a decade and a half earlier, writes that, “the Holiness group, like certain Baptist and Methodist families, ranks low in prestige because of its “emotional” type of worship.” Although the behavior exhibited in these services is so distasteful to some middle class members of the community that it “[connotes] mental instability,” they can tolerate it as long as they worship in their own congregations. As one man told Gallaher, “you have to have a church for people like that … that kind don’t fit in regular churches” (Gallaher 1961, 215). Such comments by community members were far from rare. Consider some of the opinions elicited by Drake and Cayton from middle-class African Americans in Chicago. One person stated, “I don’t believe in shouting and never did. I like a church that is quiet. I just can’t appreciate clowning in church” (Drake and Cayton 1962, 671). Another respondent was even more emphatic, first characterizing store front churches as encouraging “jumping-jack” religion, then declaring, “I think those people are in the first stages of insanity” (Drake and Cayton 1962, 671). Perhaps the most vitriolic statements were collected among African Americans in Natchez, Mississippi, in the early 1930s by Allison Davis and her colleagues (1941, 232), “upon occasion, upper-class [African-Americans] spoke their thoughts about the lower class with equal frankness. […] Church members who disliked revivalistic ritual spoke of the members of lower-class churches as being ‘ignorant as hogs,’ ‘wallowing in superstition,’ ‘just like African savages,’ or simply ‘black and dumb.’ ” From the other end of the spectrum, lower-class church members often characterized the worship services of the higher status churches as being “stiff” and “cold.” James West reports that in Wheatland, Missouri, “[Holiness people] consider worship in the Christian Church as too ‘cold’ to properly be called religion. The same criticism of the Christian Church as cold and worldly is offered by Baptists and Methodists, who poke fun, however, with the rest of the community, at the ‘ignorant goings-on’ of Holiness meetings” (West 1964, 143). Morland (1958, 107) observed this same continuum in York noting that, “The Wesleyans attracted people who desired Holiness doctrine but felt that the Church of God was too undignified, and who, at the same time, did not like the ‘coldness’ of the Cromwell Baptist Church.”

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As these quotes make clear, preferences over worship styles were not just matters of opinion but actively worked to sort different classes into separate congregations. The account of one young man interviewed by Drake and Cayton (1962, 538) offers a clear example of this, and is also important for the way it illustrates the variation that can be found across local religious ecologies: “When I first came to Chicago I was a member of the Baptist Church. But I never joined a church here because I did not like the way people exhibited their emotions. At home, in the church I belonged to, people were very quiet; but here in the Baptist churches I found people rather noisy. For that reason I tried to find a church that was different, and in visiting the various churches I came across the Presbyterian Church, which I joined. I have remained a member ever since.”

CONCLUSION Several decades before Bourdieu developed his theory of social reproduction through class habitus, Art Gallaher summed up his study of the churches in Wheatland, Missouri, this way, “the significance of religion, then, as a criterion for social status, lies mainly in the behavior of the individual in his worshipping” (Gallaher 1961, 215). As we have seen, this observation was overwhelmingly corroborated by every one of the 15 community studies under consideration here. Although the evidence was more abundant about the role of physical expression (particularly the activities of shouting, speaking in tongues and vigorous congregational response) and linguistic patterns in sorting different class groupings into different congregations, there was some support for the role of purely aesthetic considerations as well. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernstein, Basil. 1975. Class, codes and control: Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language. New York: Schocken Books. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —— . 1989. “Social space and symbolic power.” Sociological Theory 7(1): 14–25. Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1977. Reproduction in education, society and culture. London: Sage. Bultena, Louis. 1949. “Church membership and church attendance in Madison, Wisconsin.” American Sociological Review 14(3): 384–389. Cantril, Hadley. 1943. “Educational and economic composition of religious groups: An analysis of poll data.” American Journal of Sociology 48(5): 574–579.

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Connolly, James J. 2005. “The legacies of Middletown: Introduction.” Indiana Magazine of History 101(3): 211–225. Coreno, Thaddeus. 2002. “Fundamentalism as a class culture.” Sociology of Religion 63(3): 335–360. Davis, Allison, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner. 1941. Deep south: A social anthropological study of caste and class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Demerath, Nicholas J. 1961. “Social stratification and church involvement: The church-sect distinction applied to individual participation.” Review of Religious Research 2(4): 146–154. —— . 1965. Social class in American Protestantism. Chicago: Rand McNally. Dillingham, Harry C. 1965. “Protestant religion and social status.” American Journal of Sociology 70(4): 416–422. Dollard, John. 1957. Caste and class in a southern town New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. Drake, St. Clair, and Horace R. Cayton. 1962. Black metropolis: A study of negro life in a northern city. New York: Harper & Row. Dynes, Russell R. 1955. “Church-sect typology and socioeconomic status.” American Sociological Review 20(5): 555–560. Estus, Charles W. and Michael A. Overington. 1970. “The meaning and end of religiosity.” American Journal of Sociology 75(5): 760–778. Gallaher, Art Jr. 1961. Plainville fifteen years later. New York: Columbia University Books. Gans, Herbert J. 1999. Popular culture and high culture: An analysis and evaluation of taste. New York: Basic Books. Goode, Erich. 1966. “Social class and church participation.” American Journal of Sociology 72(1): 102–111. Hollingshead, August B. 1965. Elmtown’s youth: The impact of social classes on adolescents. New York: Wiley & Sons. Holt, Douglas B. 1997. “Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu’s theory of tastes from its critics.” Poetics 25: 93–120. —— . 1998. “Does cultural capital structure American consumption?” Journal of Consumer Research 25: 1–25. Johnstone, Ronald L. 1992. Religion in society: A sociology of religion, Fourth Edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lasswell, Thomas E. 1965. Class and stratum: An introduction to concepts and research. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Lazerwitz, Bernard. 1962. “Membership in voluntary organizations and frequency of church attendance.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 2(1): 74–84. Lenski, Gerhard E. 1953. “Social correlates of religious interest.” American Sociological Review 18(5): 533–544. Lewis, Hylan. 1955. Blackways of Kent. New Haven: College and University Press. Lynd, Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd. 1957. Middletown: A study in modern American culture. New York: Harvest/HBJ Publishers. McCloud, Sean. 2007. Divine hierarchies: Class in American religion and religious studies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Morland, John Kenneth. 1958. Millways of Kent. New Haven: College and University Press. Nelson, Timothy J. 1996. “Sacrifice of praise: Emotion and collective participation in an African American worship service.” Sociology of Religion 57: 379–396. Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1929. The social sources of denominationalism. New York: Holt. Park, Jerry Z. and Samuel H. Reimer. 2002. “Revisiting the social sources of American Christianity 1972–1998.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41(4): 733–746. Pope, Liston. 1942. Millhands and preachers: A study of Gastonia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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—— . 1948. “Religion and the class structure.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 256: 84–91. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1993. After freedom: A cultural study in the deep south. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Roof, Wade Clark and William McKinney. 1987. American mainline religion: Its changing shape and future. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Rubin, Morton. 1963. Plantation County. New Haven, CT: College and University Press. Seeley, John R., R. Alexander Sim, and Elizabeth W. Loosely. 1956. Crestwood Heights: A study of the culture of suburban life. New York: Basic Books. Smith, Christian and Robert Faris. 2005. “Socioeconomic inequality in the American religious system: An update and assessment.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44(1): 95–104. Stark, Rodney. 1972. “The economics of piety: Religious commitment and social class.” In Issues in Social Inequality, ed. Gerald W. Thielbar and Saul D. Feldman, 483–502. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. Swartz, David. 1996. “Bridging the study of culture and religion: Pierre Bourdieu’s political economy of symbolic power.” Sociology of Religion 57(1): 71–85. —— . 1997. Culture and power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Verter, Bradford. 2003. “Spiritual capital: Theorizing religion with Bourdieu against Bourdieu.” Sociological Theory 21(2): 150–174. Vidich, Arthur J. and Joseph Bensman. 1958. Small town in mass society: Class, power and religion in a rural community. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Warner, W. Lloyd. 1941. The social life of a modern community. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. —— . 1964. Democracy in Jonesville: A study in quality and inequality. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Weininger, Elliot B. 2005. “Foundations of Pierre Bourdieu’s class analysis.” In Approaches to Class Analysis, ed. Erik Olin Wright, 82–118. New York: Cambridge University Press. West, James. 1964. Plainville, U.S.A. New York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, John and Harvey K. Clow. 1981. “Themes of power and control in a Pentecostal assembly.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 20(3): 241–250. Wuthnow, Robert. 1988. The restructuring of American religion: Society and faith since World War II. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER THREE

SECT APPEAL: RETHINKING THE CLASS-SECT LINK Samuel H. Reimer

In The Social Sources of Denominationalism, H. Richard Niebuhr (1929) lamented the fact that American denominationalism reßected the social structure in society. Class, race, ethnicity and regionalism shaped religious subcultures and were the primary source of divisions in American Christianity. Niebuhr found that societyÕs ÒdisinheritedÓ were overrepresented among sectarian religious groups, just as the wealthy populated the established religious groups. Following Niebuhr, but also others like Weber (1963) and Troeltsch (1931), class explanations have been foundational to sociological theories of sectarian afÞliation and formation (Demerath 1965; Dynes 1955; Hunter 1983; Kosmin and Lachman 1993; Lazerwitz 1961; Lenski 1961; Montgomery 1996; Pope 1942, 1953; Roof and McKinney 1987; Shibley 1996; Stark 1972; Stark & Bainbridge 1985; Stark and Glock 1968; Wilson 1959). Historically, theorists evinced a rigid class-sect link based on the intrinsic qualities of the sects themselves. Sects were understood to be attractive to the lower classes and the poor because of their otherworldly beliefs, strict moral codes, austere practices, etc. While these historic explanations are a necessary part of our theoretical repertoire, they are not sufÞcient. They are insufÞcient partly because the link between class and religious afÞliation is weakening over time. It is also because the class-sect correlation is more complex than direct links with the (orthodox) doctrine and (austere) practices of the group themselves, and probably always has been. There is growing empirical evidence of a looser coupling or weaker correlation between class and sects, even if the sect does not show evidence of accommodation. This evidence requires additional linkages, some of which I brießy outline below. I begin with a short recounting of some established theories, and then cite some recent studies that suggest a weakening class-sect link in the U.S. Finally, I draw from other sociological theory to suggest alternative explanations of the enduring class-sect link. Since these class-based explanations have been best articulated by Stark and

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Bainbridge (1980; Stark and Bainbridge 1985), I use their deÞnition of a sect, which is a schismatic religious group that is in relatively high tension with its surrounding society. Of course, the degree of tension varies over time and with groups, but the denominations coded as sects here match those groups coded as sects by Stark and Bainbridge. These groups include Churches of God, Churches of Christ, Nazarenes, Assemblies of God, Seventh-Day Adventists and other smaller conservative Protestant denominations.1 ESTABLISHED THEORIES OF THE CLASS-SECT LINK Since Weber, Troeltsch, and Niebuhr, sociological explanations of sectarian formation and afÞliation have emphasized class explanations. These class-based explanations are widely cited and seem to have a unique explanatory legitimacy. Sometimes these theories are stated in rigid form (as I show below), which assumes a strong and fairly invariant correlation between certain sectarian characteristicsÑdistinctive beliefs and practices that tend to be otherworldly, moral strictures that promote separation from the dominant culture, and the likeÑand a lower class constituency. While it is often not clearly stated how strong or invariant this correlation is, the fact that there have been few competing explanations (until recently) has added to its perceived sufÞciency and rigidity. Theories of compensation for deprivation are not as widely accepted today (Sherkat 2000, Iannaccone 1988), even if there is still scholarly deference to them. In the sixties, Glock (1964; Glock and Stark 1965) argued that people who face economic, social, organismic, ethical and/or psychic deprivation often seek religious ways to compensate for these perceived deÞciencies. Sects are more likely to be spawned by economic deprivation, while churches often stem from social deprivation and

1 The data discussed below have a variety of sources, but are most commonly based on the 1972Ð2004 General Social Survey with 39,085 White respondents, of which 2206 are coded ÒsectarianÓ Protestant based on denominational criteria. Sectarian denominations with more than Þve respondents include: Independent Bible, Chr. & Missionary Alliance, Advent Christian, Assemblies of God, Free Methodist, Free Will Baptist, Holiness (Nazarene), Brethren Church, Church of Christ, Churches of God, Full Gospel, Four Square Gospel, Mennonite, Nazarene, Pentecostal Assembly of God, Pentecostal Church of God, Pentecostal, Holiness Pentecostal, Salvation Army, Seventh-Day Adventist, Wesleyan, Missionary Baptist, Other Fundamentalist, Charismatic, and Missionary Church.

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cults from psychic deprivation (Glock and Stark 1965). In Liston PopeÕs (1942, 147) words, sects Òsubstitute religious status for social status.Ó Max Weber (Weber 1963,113) called the sectarian tendency to turn economic disadvantage into virtue a Òtheodicy of disprivilegeÓ or a Òtheodicy of escapeÓ, just as the rich use a Òtheodicy of good fortuneÓ to justify their privileged position. The otherworldliness of sects (ie. the poor will receive greater reward in the afterlife) helps provide this compensation. Along a different line of argument, theories of separation make a link between sectarian separation and lower class membership. ÒSeparation from the world,Ó a core sect tenet, creates an intra-group dynamic where members only tend to interact with co-religionists and to create boundaries that exclude outsiders (encapsulization). Sectarian ÒstrictnessÓ acts as an important cultural means for maintaining this separation. The strict rules that separate sectarians from mainstream society are argued to be more costly for the privileged because these rules hinder Òtheir association with others in their (social) classÓ (Stark and Finke 2000, 204). Separation from society would limit the upward mobility of those who seek to improve their position in society. In this way, sectarian boundaries serve as an impediment to social advancement, making sects unattractive for those who value secular economic rewards. In IannacconeÕs (1988) widely-cited church-sect model, sectarian groups attract the poor because they have less capacity to maximize secular commodities, so they tend to choose those religious commodities that diverge signiÞcantly from secular norms but offer higher religious rewards. In other work, Iannaccone connects low class to a religious groupÕs ÒstrictnessÓ or the costs associated with membership in that group, which stem from behavioral prohibitions (Iannaccone 1994; Olson and Perl 2001). In The Future of Religion and elsewhere, Stark and Bainbridge (1985, 103) make a rather rigid connection between class and religious afÞliation and formation by claiming that religious groups form along class lines because of the need for otherworldly compensators for the poor competes with the need for justiÞcation of worldly rewards for the rich. [StratiÞcation] constitutes an inevitable basis for dispute over whom the religious group is to serve and how. To the extent that a religious group emphasizes the otherworldly dimension of commitmentÉ, it must deemphasize the worldly dimension. Religious movements can supply

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really efÞcacious otherworldly compensators only if they are in a relatively high state of tension with the surrounding society. But such tension is contrary to the interests of more powerful members.

In other words, churches cannot serve two ÒmastersÓÐboth the high and low class simultaneouslyÐbecause they cannot emphasize both otherworldly compensators and this-worldly compensators at the same time. This leads Stark and Bainbridge (1985, 153) to predict that the higher the level of sectarian tension, the greater the proportion of deprived members. Their explanation of the class-sect link is based on the tension between sect and society that is created by the sectÕs deviant beliefs, practices, and moral attitudes. However, such a rigid link does not Þt some recent evidence. RECENT EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE In the last two decades, several major works have suggested that there is a weakening link between class and denominational afÞliation in the U.S. (Hunter 1991; Wuthnow 1988; Stark and Finke 2000). Wuthnow (1988, 87), for example, argues that Òconvergence [between denominations] has taken place on measures of social status,Ó and that sectarian religious groups are not as economically marginalized as they once were, although some status differences remain. Others have demonstrated that historically, conservative Protestant groups in the US are Òcatching upÓ to their non-sectarian co-religionists (Everton 2005; Park and Reimer 2002; Sherkat 2001a; Sherkat and Ellison 1999), although the denominational hierarchy remains largely in tact (Pyle 2006; Smith and Faris 2005) and conservative Protestants and fundamentalists remain under-represented in the upper echelons of society (Darnell and Sherkat 1997; Glass and Jacobs 2005; Keister 2003; Lehrer 2004; Sherkat and Darnell 1999). Still others have noted the increasing middle class status of the JehovahÕs Witnesses (Stark and Iannaccone 1997), Mormons (Mauss 1994), Pentecostals (Cox 1995), Black sectarians (McRoberts 1999) and fundamentalists (Wuthnow and Lawson 1994). Of course, such status gains may simply mean that historic sects are losing their sectarianism and are thus attracting more upper class members (ie. NiebuhrÕs sect-to-church transformation), and there is some evidence for this. Many conservative Protestant groups have reduced their separation from society and have become fully engaged in society after spending decades encapsulated in their fundamentalist

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enclaves (Smith et al., 1998). However, the growing evidence points beyond accommodation to a looser class-sect connection. First, there is evidence to suggest that conservative Protestants and other historically sectarian groups are not following a trajectory of linear accommodation as Hunter (1983; Hunter 1987) proposes, but of contested and shifting boundaries as Smith (Smith et al., 1998) proposes. While they have softened strictures on drinking, dancing, going to theatres, etc., they have not accommodated on many doctrinal and behavioral issues (Penning and Smidt 2002) and even show retrenchment on some issues in the last thirty years. These claims are supported by data from the 1972Ð2004 cumulative Þle of the General Social Survey (GSS), a highly-representative yearly (or bi-yearly) survey of American adults. Attitudes toward such sectarian characteristics as abortion and sexual mores have become slightly more conservative over time among Protestant sects (Pentecostal and smaller conservative Protestant denominations) and evangelicals (larger, more established conservative Protestant denominations), while most other available measures (belief in a literal bible, witnessing, and being Òborn againÓ) have remained stable over time and across cohorts. In addition, the correlation between socio-economic status and sectarian characteristics themselves are also weakening over time and across cohorts in the U.S. For example, the correlation between socio-economic status (a measure combining income, education and occupational prestige) and pro-life attitudes has decreased from −.213 to −.097 for conservative Protestant sects across the three decades of the GSS. A similar trend of weakening correlations exists for evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Catholics and all (white) Americans over time and across cohorts.2 This indicates a growing diversity in the social class of those who espouse such tenets. Second, research by Sherkat and his co-authors (Sherkat 1991; Sherkat and Wilson 1995; Ellison and Sherkat 1995) have demonstrated that class is a predictor of religious preferences, but it is not the most important one. Socialization, social networks, and past religious consumption are much stronger causal factors. Even back thirty years, we were aware that the effects of denominational subculture and socialization were Òvastly more powerfulÓ effects on religious involvement and choice than economic factors (Stark 1972, 501). 2

Tabulated results are available from the author on request.

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Third, some evidence suggests that there is more class variation within denominations than between denominations (Reimer 2007). This is partly because congregations within the same denomination can serve different class niches, so that there are a minority of low class liberal congregations and high class sectarian congregations. Moreover, congregations themselves are diverse. On a diversity scale that ranges between zero and one (where one is maximum diversity), Dougherty (2003) found that congregations averaged .694 on education diversity and .680 in income diversity, while the race diversity mean was .137. Schwadel found that education and income diversity averaged between .8 and .9 (scale range from 0 to 1) in the three congregational data sets he studied. He concluded that congregations show high levels of class diversity in the U.S. (Schwadel 2005). Using DoughertyÕs methods to compare the Þve denominations (Assemblies of God, Southern Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, and Presbyterian USA), in Hoge et al.Õs (1996) 1993 American Congregation Giving Study, I found that the sectarian Assemblies of God congregations were signiÞcantly less educationally diverse on average than the Catholics and Presbyterians, although the Southern Baptists are no less diverse. In income diversity, there were no signiÞcant differences, indicating that the sectarian denominations were as diverse in terms of income as the mainline Protestants and Catholics. Similarly, the National Congregational Study shows a similar pattern of slightly less diversity for sectarian groups only in education, not in income (Chaves 1999).3 AfÞliates of denominations are diverse with regard to SES. Recently Stark and Finke (2000, 198) emphatically stated that Òit is past time that we accepted the unanimous results of more than Þfty years of quantitative research that show that although class does somewhat inßuence religious behavior, the effects are very modest, and most religious organizations are remarkably heterogeneous in terms of social status.Ó Clearly such intradenominational and intra-congregational class diversity does not mesh well with explanations that connect low class with orthodox beliefs and moral strictures, since the high-tension/strict religious messages that appeal to the poor would be constant at the congregational level.4 3 My thanks to Kevin Dougherty for the use of the SPSS syntax for his entropy measures of congregational diversity for the AGCS and for his tabulations of NCS entropy means. For more information about his measures, see Dougherty (2003). 4 However, there is still some evidence that higher SES adherents to sects are less likely to espouse certain sectarian beliefsÑlike belief in a literal Bible, or the belief

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Fourth, denominational switching for status reasons has declined. In the past, research has suggested that high status religious groups have beneÞted from ÒstatusÓ switching and the Òup and outÓ hypothesis, where switchers move to denominations with higher SES and then into apostasy (Newport 1979; Stark and Glock 1968). However, evidence for this weakened by the 1980s (Hadaway 1991; Roof and McKinney 1987; Whitt, Crockett and Babchuk 1988). SherkatÕs (2001b; Sherkat 2002) work on switching indicates that mainline and liberal Protestants may have beneÞted from status switching in pre-1944 cohorts, but there is little evidence for this now.5 When sectarians switch, they are more likely to move to other sectarian denominations, and liberal and mainline Protestants are more likely to switch into conservative sects than vice versa (see also Hout, Greeley, and Wilde 2001). Changes in switching patterns may be related to weakening (perceived) status distinctions between denominations. Status switching is important for established sect-class theories, because sectarians are expected to join sects when their need for otherworldly compensators is most acute, or when they are at Òabnormally low points in their livesÓ (Stark and Bainbridge 1985, 155). The strong class-sect link leads Stark and Bainbridge (1985, 157) to predict that Òpersons who join sects as adults will be of lower mean SES than persons who were born into the sect,Ó a hypothesis they support based on data from the 1960s. However, GSS data from 1994Ð2004 show that those who switched into conservative Protestant sects are not signiÞcantly different in SES from those who have not switched (switchers SES = 35.75, non-switchers SES = 36.16), and evangelical switchers actually outpace non-switchers (switchers SES = 38.93, non-switchers SES = 36.81, difference is statistically signiÞcant at the .001 level). Fifth, sectarian formation and joining research shows that a minority of adherents to sectarian groups are privileged (Stark and Finke 2000). The historical record in the U.S. demonstrates that, in some cases,

that people are untrustworthy, unfair and unhelpful. Even here, the relationship between SES and adherence to sectarian beliefs is not strong. For example, among younger (born from 1956Ð1986) conservative Protestant sectarians in the GSS, SES was positively correlated with belief that the world is evil, belief that humans are corrupt, and strict sexual views (although not signiÞcantly). Other items (witnessing, pro-life views) showed insigniÞcant negative correlations. 5 However, there is still evidence that educational disparity relative to oneÕs religious group of origin promotes switching (cf. Sherkat 1991).

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high-tension sects have historically attracted the middle and even upper classes (although they tended to attract a lower class constituency). For example, the growth of evangelical religion fueled by the revivals attracted both the rich and poor ( Johnson 1978; Laurie 1980; Wallace 1978). LaurieÕs (1980) study of Philadelphia in the 1800s, for example, revealed that sectarian Protestant groups brought different classes of people together. Finally, some research suggests that tension, otherworldliness and sectarian afÞliation are more loosely coupled than is suggested in some established theories. The historiography on sect to church transformations makes it clear that the class-sect link weakens after the Þrst generation of sect formation, even if the sect does not lose tension with society. Hatch (1989) demonstrates that several U.S. sects increased in SES even though tension with society did not decrease, as does Blumhofer (1993) with the Assemblies of God, Anderson (1979) with Pentecostals, Wigger (1998) with Methodists, and Goodwin (1997) with Canadian Baptists. Furthermore, some sectarian groups have long been concerned with this-worldly issues. Pentecostals and sectarian Black Protestants engage in social activism and ecumenical unions (a Òworldly,Ó not ÒotherworldlyÓ emphasis) and are increasingly attracting afÞliates from the middle and upper classes without evidence of declining orthodoxy (Calhoun-Brown 1998; Cox 1995; Lincoln and Mamiya 1990; McRoberts 1999; Hunt 1998). Wacker (2001) argues that Pentecostals balanced this-worldly and other-worldly emphases from their start at Asuza Street, indicating that this-worldly tendencies are not a result of growing secularity or status gains. Also, a tight tension-(low) class link does not mesh with the evidence that high status members are attracted to cults, which are often high tension, high-cost religious groups (Dawson 1996; Stark and Finke 2000). Lastly, the notion that sects compensate for economic deprivation with otherworldly compensators does not Þt the fact that sectarian afÞliates who attend regularly are higher class than those who attend rarely. According to the cumulative GSS, this has been true for thirty years, and it is not only true of sects, but also for evangelicals, Mainline Protestants and Catholics. In fact, the correlation between socio-economic status and church attendance is becoming stronger with younger cohorts according to GSS data. This is true across major religious groups. One would predict that those most in need of compensation offered by sects would attend most often.

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ADDITIONAL THOERETICAL LINKS PROPOSED The growing evidence for a moderate yet weakening class-sect link points to the complexities of religious afÞliation. The links suggested below focus are indirect explanationsÐthose theoretical links that require intervening variables between low class and sectarian choice. Indirect links between class and sectarian afÞliation and formation provide better explanations for the variability in the class-sect correlation since a complex array of factors come into play. The theoretical links below also seek to answer two related but analytically distinct questions. First, why are Þrst-generation sectarians predominately poor? In other words, the dynamics of the class-sect link, including the formation of sects, is addressed. Second, why do sects remain disproportionately poor over generations, even if the correlation weakens somewhat over time? This question relates to the stability of the class-sect link. Due to space limits, the theoretical ideas below are articulated brießy (and inadequately). I base my theoretical links on the following assumptions, which are drawn from a variety of published theoretical work. First, relational ties are central to explaining group joining and adherence. People will join sects for many of the same reasons that they join any other group. The literature consistently points to the primary importance of relationships to joining behaviors and religious choice, and thus should factor into any class-sect theory. Second, religious groups are attractive because they supply supernatural products desired by humans, regardless of social position. Since the human experience raises questions (about death and the afterlife, suffering, ultimate purpose, etc.) that have no ÒearthlyÓ answers, supernatural products are desired. Third, religions offer efÞcacious rewards, both natural and supernatural. Religions not only answer ultimate questions, they also provide community, identity, and networks which in turn provide psychic, social and even economic rewards. Fourth, sectarian tensions with society are created where salient boundaries are perceived to be under attack by the secular society. As a result, areas of tension ebb and ßow as the sect repositions itself vis-ˆ-vis secular society (Smith et al., 1998). 1. The Interaction between Numerical Growth and Sectarian Values (Dynamics) While many newly formed sects do not grow and therefore do not last long (Stark and Bainbridge 1985; Stark and Finke 2000), there is an

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inherent conßict between processes of growth and the convictions of many sectarians. With numerical growth usually comes increased diversity among adherents that in turn leads to decreased consensus on group goals and norms (Blau 1970; Carley 1991; Mark 1998). Growth (congregational and denominational) also undercuts ÒstrictnessÓ because itÕs easier for Òfree-ridersÓ to hide in the crowd, thus challenging the sectarian value of virtuous religiosity (Finke 1994; Iannaccone 1992; Schaller 1983). Also, groups tend to bureaucratize and institutionalize, which includes formalization of rules and norms, specialization of roles and increased social distance between leaders and laity, and more control in the hands of the elite (Mott 1965; Scott 1998; Robbins and Langton 2001; Finke and Dougherty 2002; see especially Johnstone 1997). This growth process breeds schism if the founding principles of the religious group are antithetical to these changes, as is the case for Protestant sects. Protestant sects were founded on the Reformation principles of the priesthood of all believers, where each individual is directly responsible to God, with minimal ecclesiastical authority over a congregation. Furthermore, sects separate to maintain or return to the doctrinal purity of yesteryear. Thus, increased control by a theologically-liberal, seminary-trained elite breeds intra-group tension and division (Poloma 1989). Greater size, congregational polity and elite/laity differences have all been pinpointed as sources of schism by previous research (Liebman, Sutton and Wuthnow 1988; Takayama 1975; Wood 1981) although causes of conßict are diverse (Becker et al., 1993). Thus, sects can be seen as groups who resist the near inevitabilities of numerical growth. There is a lack of Þt between their protest(ant) ideals and the dynamics of growth.6 2. The Adaptable, Grassroots Nature of Sects (Dynamics) Sects often start with lower class adherents because they are adaptable, grass-roots religious movements that tend to have democratic polity, and this is attractive to the poor, particularly in Protestant America. Like all organizations, religious organizations must be adaptable to succeed over time (Parsons 1956; Hannan and Freeman 1981). Churches and denominations are most successful when they maintain the precarious 6 Of course, it is true that upper class members tend to take positions of authority as groups institutionalize, and may seek to move the group toward less tension, which may alienate the less fortunate and drive them toward schism. However, it is far from inevitable, suggesting a looser class-sect link.

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balance of avoiding accommodations on symbolic issues that provide religious meaning and identity, while adapting to the felt needs of the constituency. Of course, sectarian groups tend to require inßexible adherence to certain beliefs and practices, but this lack of adaptability is balanced by institutional ßexibility. Sects often form small congregations, have simple core propositions and a distinctive subculture, all of which support institutional adaptability (Carley 1991). Congregations can adapt their music or worship styles, sermon topics, interpretations of certain scriptures, pastoral qualiÞcations, length of services, etc. to match the setting. Those traditions that have extensive educational requirements for clergy, have centralized power structures, and establish rigid ritual forms (prayer books, liturgies) are less adaptable, and are less likely to appeal to diverse groups. Evangelicalism has been argued to be adaptable to various settings because it espouses a parity of central tenets, is individualistic, and is not bounded by rigid institutionalization or stylistic requirements (Noll 1997; Hexham and Poewe 1997; Poewe 1994). The adaptability of certain sectarian groups (like the Pentecostals, for example) may help explain some of their success across countries and among racial and ethnic minorities. Second, and related to its adaptability, sects tend to be populous movements with grassroots leadership and democratic polity. Grassroots leaders understand the life experiences of their constituency and can provide religious goods that resonate with them. The product, then, is not dictated by elite hierarchical leaders or delivered by an elite clergy that may be out of touch with the felt needs of the people. In addition, congregational polity means that leaders are directly responsible to the congregants, and not (primarily) to denominational heads. These factors sponsor a mutual accountability between leader and laity. The leaders attract and inßuence the constituents, just as the constituents attract and inßuence the leader. Congregational polity also preserves sectarian tension, just as elite leadership tends to move religious groups in a churchly direction (Dudley and Roozen 2001). This argument is not new. Historians such as Nathan Hatch (1989) in The Democratization of American Christianity have linked class and the grassroots nature of sects. HatchÕs study makes clear that the grassroots leadership of sect movements in the early American republicÐincluding the Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, the Christian movement, and many Black churchesÐattracted the common people with a sectarian religion that was contextualized to resonate with their life experiences.

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American pioneers wanted Òtheir leaders unpretentious, their doctrines self-evident and down-to-earth, their music lively and singable, and their churches in local handsÓ and the sect leaders offered a religion that brought Òinsurgent groups to the foreÓ (Hatch 1989, 9). Finke and Stark (1992) in The Churching of America, 1776–1990 demonstrate the grassroots nature (i.e., itinerant preachers) and contextualization (particularly innovation in method, like camp meeting and promotion of revivals) of the Òupstart sects,Ó whether the Methodists, Baptists, or Catholics. Elite clergy and hierarchical leadership led to lost tension and market share. 3. Regression toward the Mean (Dynamics/Stability) Stark and BainbridgeÕs (1985) Òregression toward the meanÓ theory is applicable here, since sectarians often become less poor with time, partly through the sect itself. Like all religious groups, sects provide some general, supernatural products that appeal to all (universal compensators). They tend to preserve the supernatural better than lowtension religions and they avoid the discreditable magic in some cults. If a sect offers attractive supernatural products, they appeal to those who seek supernatural solutions to their felt needs. If the supernatural products are efÞcacious, the individualÕs felt needs are ameliorated. Even if the root of these felt needs is actually ÒearthlyÓ (economic, social, etc), and thus better met by natural instead of supernatural products, the sect offers support, empowerment and networking that often alleviates these needs as well. The overall effect, as Stark and Bainbridge note, is often increased status (both in heaven and on earth) and commitment to the sect. 4. Socialization and Investment (Stability) The class-sect link endures, not primarily because poor people are uniquely attracted to strict rules or otherworldly compensators, but because socialization, investment, and relational networks preserve the link. Religious choices may not be made based on theological reasons, but because social sanctions limit choices (Sherkat 1997), to the degree that some religious choices can be considered Òsemi-involuntaryÓ (Ellison and Sherkat 1995; Hunt and Hunt 1999). While preferences for certain religious goods are inßuenced by class, they are also inßuenced by socialization and social networks. Regarding socialization, Sherkat has demonstrated that it has a much greater effect on religious

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choice than social class (Sherkat and Wilson 1995; Sherkat 1998; Sherkat 2000; Hayes 1996). Sectarians are often raised as sectarians, and sects do a comparatively better job of holding their own with few defectors (Sherkat and Ellison 1999). Those raised as sectarians may stay in sects even when their SES changes, because they have been socialized to value what the sect offers. Sherkat and Wilson (1995) argue that supply side theories provide limited understanding of religious choice without an understanding of how demand is constrained by socialization, investment, and relationships. They maintain that there is a direct causal link between class and sect,7 although class indirectly affects afÞliation through past consumption. Status explanations of religious choice are inadequate for Sherkat and Wilson because cultural preferences change, and are subject to inßuences besides class. Thus, Òone can be a devout conservative Protestant, orthodox Jew, or Mormon and still enjoy all of the material aspects of secular lifeÓ (Sherkat and Ellison 1999, 384). When people invest time, money and energy in a religious group, they generate religious and social capital that inhibits switching or apostasy (Iannaccone 1988; Sherkat and Wilson 1995; Myers 2000). Sects, partly because they are demanding, encourage commitment through investment. Sectarians internalize beliefs, gain religious knowledge, develop friends, align behavior to match their convictions, and gain familiarity with rituals, language, and experiences. Sects, like other religious groups, provide identity, belonging and purpose. Thus, if sects start with poor people, then it will continue to be disproportionately poor partly because people stay for reasons of religious and social capital. 5. Relationships and Networks (Stability/Dynamics) People stay with the group not only because they have collected capital in the group (Myers 2000), but because their relational networks constrain their choices. Relationships limit social choices to the degree that there is Òconsolidation of [social] tiesÓ with few competing ties that draw them away from the group (Sherkat and Wilson 1995, 1000). 7 Sherkat and Wilson (1995) link class with the cost, strictness and otherworldliness of sects, partly because parents imbue their children with preferences for religion that conforms to their status, which includes otherworldly and strict religious goods. Poor children, they argue, prefer these goods partly because they are taught obedience to authority rather than personal autonomy (see also Ellison and Sherkat 1993a, 1993b).

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When class mobility (or other forces) distinguishes some sectarians from others in their sect, competing networks can create Òniche overlapÓ, which may draw them from the sect (Popielarz and McPherson 1995). Sects are also known for active recruitment, and those converted to the sect will tend to be from a similar social class as those within the group. Since social networks tend toward homophily (Blau 1977; McPherson and Smith-Lovin 1987; McPherson, Popielarz, and Drobnic 1992; Sherkat 2000; Smith-Lovin 1999; Stark and Bainbridge 1985), sectarian recruiters will convert others from their class, maintaining the class of the sect or congregation. In general, the literature on joining, switching, and conversion support the importance of relationships (Loßand and Stark 1965; Rambo 1993; Snow and Machalek 1984; Stark and Bainbridge 1980). People join groups, particularly religious groups, because friends and family encourage them to join (Dawson 1996; Sherkat 2000; Stark and Bainbridge 1980; Snow et al., 1986). Sherkat (1997, 68) notes that Òreligious markets are much more thoroughly embedded in social relationships than are other markets,Ó and that Òthe most inßuential sources of preference learning will be close social contactsÓ (Sherkat 2000, 3). The stronger the relationships within the sect and the weaker the competing relationships (Cress, McPherson, and Rotolo 1996), the more likely one is to join or convert. Naturally then, marriage is a common reason for switching (Musick and Wilson 1995; Sandomirsky and Wilson 1990). Similarly, people convert because of strong affective bonds with those inside the group (Rambo 1993; Snow and Phillips 1980). The stability of the class-sect link is partly maintained through the intervening variable of relational networks. 6. Location (Stability) Location will stabilize the class composition of a sect to the degree that congregations are in class-stable neighborhoods, and to the degree that the people are immobile (they cannot easily travel long distances to church) and intransient (they tend not to move out of the neighborhood). If the sect is growing, the class composition of the neighborhoods (town, city, area) where new congregations are planted will also affect the stability of the class-sect link ( Johnstone 1997). I should also note that national religious milieus are factors in sectarian tension and formation. For example, the U.S. context is more amenable to congregational polity and Protestant schism than say, the

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Canadian or British one. While the class-sect link has been shown to be widespread, it is likely that the strength of the correlation varies based on national and local context. 7. Realigning Sectarian Boundaries (Stability) Sectarian tension, strictness, and fortiÞed symbolic boundaries can limit growth and adapting to social change andÐas a resultÐmany sects do not survive. Sects increase their chance of survival if they avoid unnecessarily limiting their market appeal and remain somewhat ßexible. Since organizations need money, alienating the wealthy greatly limits funds for building new churches, evangelism, paid clergy, etc., which in turn limits the stability of the sect. Sects reposition their tensions vis-ˆ-vis their milieu (Smith et al., 1998) and this repositioning is affected by institutional resource needs and by like institutions in their Þeld (Powell and Dimaggio 1991). Lawson (2001), for instance, has shown that sects resist or accommodate to changing views depending on their degree of tension and on their perception of the issuesÕ importance to their mission. Flexible boundaries and religious products allow individual congregations to adapt their religious goods to meet a niche that is context-appropriate. The adaptability of religious boundaries coupled with the desire to convert and keep privileged members means religious groups emphasize or deemphasize areas of tension selectively. As a result, many congregations simply donÕt speak about money issues ( Wuthnow 1993). Unlike the Protestant Reformers, conservative Protestant leaders avoid speaking on the evils of wealth, but instead speak against greed and avarice (Smith 2000). Many even promote prosperity. Instead, sectarian groups focus their tension on sexual morality and other issues that are less likely to alienate the rich. Even if the homophily of relational networks promotes same-class conversions, the sectarian emphasis on conversion and growth (at least among established sects), works against class-speciÞc products. For a sect afÞliate, all humans need to be saved, whether rich or poor. 8. Worship Style Class affects tastes for cultural products including worship style (Mark 1998). ChavesÕ (2004) study of congregations shows a strong link between worship styles and social class. Not surprisingly, he Þnds that those with low education/income are much more likely to engage in

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enthusiastic worship while high education/income afÞliates more likely to participate in ceremonial worship. He notes that Òdenominations are more dissimilarÉin their worship practices than in their demographic compositionÓ (Chaves 2004, 164) and encourages readers to conceptualize religious groups in terms of a Òcultural ecologyÓ, not just a socio-demographic one. While an enthusiastic worship style is an intrinsic characteristic of many sects, this worship-class connection provides greater ßexibility than previous theories. Worship styles vary between congregations in the same denomination, giving us one way to explain denominational class diversity. Additionally, many churches have multiple services with different worship styles, providing a link to class (and often age) variance within the same congregation. Furthermore, as Chaves argues, ceremonial and enthusiastic worship styles are not mutually exclusive, but can exist in the same religious organization. In summary, sects schism not only because of the link between class and orthodoxy/orthopraxy, but because of the dynamics of growth. Sects attract poor people partly because they are adaptable, grass-roots organizations. Sects may become less poor over time, not only because of lower tension/accommodation, but because they regress toward the mean, and because they realign their sectarian boundaries such that economic austerity is less salient to those boundaries. Sects maintain a lower-class constituency not only because of their tension or strictness, but because of socialization, relational networks, and location can promote a stable class-sect link. While worship style and social class are correlated and can help explain the class-sect link, the diversity of worship styles present within denominations and even congregations helps explain the some of the class diversity within these organizations. Overall, these factors indirectly link class with sect, providing more ßexibility in the connections between class and sect.

CONCLUSION My goal in this paper is not to dismiss all previous theoretical efforts to connect class and sect, since some are still applicable and important. Instead, I have tried to present some additional class-sect links that better account for the ßexibility of the class-sect link. Additional links give a more sufÞcient explanation of the complex causes that connect class and sect, even though this list is not exhaustive. Furthermore, additional theoretical links allow us to better explain the variability in

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the class-sect correlation. Sectarian groups are class diverse both within denominations and within congregations. Those who regularly attend sectarian denominations (and all religious groups) tend to be higher class than those who rarely attend. Historic sects, on the one hand, are making status gains, yet on the other hand, are still disproportionately poor. Status gains do not always implicate accommodation or loss of tension. These additional connections attempt to explain these changing dynamics and yet account for the enduring (low) class-sect link. Of course, these theories are not new, but have been borrowed from related literature and applied directly to the class-sect link. What is now needed are data that will allow for the empirical testing of these and other proposed theories. To that end, more research is encouraged. BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Robert. M. [1979] 1992. Vision of the disinherited: The making of American Pentecostalism. Henderickson Publishing. Becker, Penny. E., Stephen J. Ellingson, Richard W. Flory, Wendy Griswold, Fred Kniss and Timothy Nelson. 1993. ÒStraining at the tie that binds: Congregational conßict in the 1980s.Ó Review of Religious Research 34: 193Ð209. Blau, Peter M. 1970. ÒA formal theory of differentiation in organizations.Ó American Sociological Review 35: 201Ð18. ÑÑ . 1977. Inequality and heterogeneity: A primitive theory of social structure. Free Press. Blumhofer, Edith W. 1993. Restoring the faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism and American culture. University of Illinois Press. Calhoun-Brown, Allison 1998. ÒWhile marching to Zion: Otherworldliness and racial empowerment in the Black community.Ó Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37: 427Ð39. Carley, Kathleen. 1991. ÒA theory of group stability.Ó American Sociological Review 56: 331Ð54. Chaves, Mark. 1999. The national congregations study. Machine-readable data Þle and codebook. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona, Department of Sociology. ÑÑ . 2004. Congregations in America. Harvard University Press. Cox, Harvey. 1995. Fire from heaven. New York: Seabury Press. Cress, Daniel M., J. Miller McPherson and Thomas Rotolo. 1996. ÒCompetition and commitment in voluntary memberships: The paradox of persistence and participation.Ó Sociological Perspectives 40: 61Ð79. Darnell, Alfred and Darren E. Sherkat. 1997. ÒThe impact of Protestant fundamentalism on educational attainment.Ó American Sociological Review 62: 306Ð315. Dawson, Lorne L. 1996. ÒWho joins new religious movements and why: Twenty years of research and what have we learned?Ó Studies in Religion 25: 141Ð161. Demerath, N. J. 1965. Social class in American Protestantism. Chicago: Rand MacNally and Company. Dougherty, Kevin D. 2003. ÒHow monochromatic is church membership? Racial and ethnic diversity in religious community.Ó Sociology of Religion 64: 65Ð85. Dudley, Carl S. and David A. Roozen. 2001. Faith communities today: A report on religion in the United States today. Hartford, CT: Hartford Institute for Religion Research, Hartford Seminary. Dynes, R. 1955. ÒChurch-sect typology and socioeconomic status.Ó American Sociological Review 20: 555Ð560.

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Ellison, Christopher G. and Darren E. Sherkat. 1995. ÒThe semi-involuntary institution revisited: Regional variations in church participation among Black Americans.Ó Social Forces 73: 1415Ð37. Everton, Sean F. 2005. ÒSocial mobility and sect formation: Testing the regressionto-the-mean hypothesis.Ó Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion. 1: Article 9. Finke, Roger. 1994. ÒThe quiet transformation: Changes in size and leadership of Southern Baptist churches.Ó Review of Religious Research 36: 3Ð22. Finke, Roger and Kevin D. Dougherty. 2002. ÒThe effects of professional training: The social and religious capital acquired in seminaries.Ó Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41: 103Ð120. Finke, Roger and Rodney Stark. 1992. The churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and losers in our religious economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Glass, Jennifer and Jerry Jacobs. 2005. ÒChildhood religious conservatism and adult attainment among Black and White women.Ó Social Forces 84(1): 555Ð79. Glock, Charles Y. 1964. ÒThe role of deprivation in the origin and evolution of religious Groups.Ó In Religion and social conflict, ed. Robert Lee and Martin Marty, 24Ð36. New York: Oxford University Press. Glock, Charles Y. and Rodney Stark. 1965. Religion and society in tension. Chicago: Rand McNally. Goodwin, Daniel C. 1997. Ò ÔThe footprints of ZionÕs kingÕ: Baptists in Canada to 1880.Ó In Aspects of the Canadian evangelical experience, ed. G. A. Rawlyk, 191Ð207. Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press. Hadaway, C. Kirk. 1991. ÒDenominational switching, social mobility and membership trends.Ó In A case study of mainstream Protestantism: the Disciples’ relation to American culture, 1880–1989, ed. D. Newell Williams, 491Ð508. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishers. Hannan, Michael T. and John Freeman. 1981. ÒThe population ecology of organizations.Ó In The sociology of organizations: Basic studies (2nd ed.), ed. O. Grusky and G. A. Miller, 176Ð200. New York: Free Press. Hatch, Nathan O. 1989. The democratization of American Christianity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hayes, Bernadette C. 1996. ÒGender differences in religious mobility in Great Britain.Ó British Journal of Sociology 47: 643Ð56. Hexham, Irving and Karla Poewe. 1997. New religions as global cultures. Westview Press. Hoge, Dean R., Charles Zech, Patrick McNamara, and Michael Donahue. 1996. Money matters: Personal giving in American churches. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Hout, Michael, Andrew Greeley and Melissa J. Wilde. 2001. ÒThe demographic imperative of religious change in the United States.Ó American Journal of Sociology 107(2): 468Ð500. Hunt, Larry L. 1998. ÒReligious afÞliation among Blacks in the United States: Black Catholic status advantages revisited.Ó Social Science Quarterly 79: 170Ð92. Hunt, Larry L. and Matthew O. Hunt. 1999. ÒRegional patterns of African American church attendance: Revisiting the semi-involuntary thesis.Ó Social Forces 78: 779Ð91. Hunter, James D. 1983. American evangelicalism. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. ÑÑ . 1987. Evangelicalism: The coming generation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ÑÑ . 1991. Culture wars. New York: Basic Books. Iannaccone, Laurence R. 1988. ÒA formal model of church and sect.Ó American Journal of Sociology 94: S241ÐS268. ÑÑ . ÒSacriÞce and stigma: Reducing free-riding in cults, communes and other collectivities.Ó Journal of Political Economy 100(2): 271Ð92. Johnson, Paul E. 1978. A shopkeeper’s millennium: Society and revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837. New York: Hill and Wang. Johnstone, Ronald L. 1997. Religion in society: A sociology of religion (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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Keister, Lisa A. 2003. Religion and wealth: The role of religious afÞliation and participation in early adult asset accumulation. Social Forces 82(1): 175Ð207. Kosmin, Barry A. and Seymour P. Lachman. 1993. One nation under God: Religion in contemporary American society. New York: Crown Publishers. Laurie, Bruce. 1980. Working people in Philadelphia, 1800–1850. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lawson, Ronald. 2001. ÒSectarian groups and social issues: Broadening church-sect theory.Ó Paper presented at the meeting of the Religious Research Association, Columbus, OH. Lazerwitz, Bernard. 1961. ÒA comparison of major United States religious groups.Ó Journal of the American Statistical Association 56: 568Ð79. Lehrer, Evelyn. 2004. ÒReligiosity as a determinant of educational attainment: The case of conservative Protestant women in the United States.Ó Review of Economics of the Household 2(2): 203Ð219. Lenski, Gerhard. 1961. The religious factor. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Liebman, Robert C., John R. Sutton, and Robert Wuthnow. 1988. ÒExploring the social sources of denominationalism: Schisms in American Protestant denominations, 1890Ð1980.Ó American Sociological Review 53: 382Ð52. Lincoln, C. Eric. and Lawrence Mamiya. 1990. The Black church in the African American experience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Loßand, John and Rodney Stark. 1965. ÒBecoming a world-saver: A theory of conversion to a deviant perspective: American Sociological Review 30: 863Ð74. Mark, Noah. 1998. ÒBeyond individual differences: Social differentiation from Þrst principles.Ó American Sociological Review 63: 309Ð30. Mauss, Armand. 1994. The angel and the beehive. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. McPherson, J. Miller, and Lynn Smith-Lovin. 1987. ÒHomophily in voluntary organizations: Status distance and the composition of face-to-face groups.Ó American Sociological Review 52:370Ð79. McPherson, J. Miller, Pamela Popielarz and Sonja Drobnic. 1992. ÒSocial networks and organizational dynamics.Ó American Sociological Review 57: 153Ð70. McRoberts, Omar M. 1999. ÒUnderstanding the ÒnewÓ Black Pentecostal activism: Lessons From ecumenical urban ministries in Boston.Ó Sociology of Religion 60: 47Ð70. Montgomery, James D. 1996. ÒDynamics of the religious economy.Ó Rationality and Society 8: 81Ð110. Mott, Paul E. 1965. The organization of society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Musick, Mark, and John Wilson. 1995. ÒReligious switching for marriage reasons.Ó Sociology of Religion 56: 257Ð70. Myers, Scott M. 2000. ÒThe impact of religious involvement on migration.Ó Social Forces 79: 755Ð783. Newport, F. 1979. ÒThe religious switcher in the United States.Ó American Sociological Review 44: 528Ð52. Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1929. The social sources of denominationalism. New York: Holt. Noll, Mark A. 1997. ÒCanadian evangelicalism: A view from the United States.Ó In Aspects of the Canadian evangelical experience, ed. George A. Rawlyk, 3Ð20. Toronto: McGill-QueenÕs University Press. Park, Jerry Z. and Samuel H. Reimer. 2002. ÒRevisiting the social sources of American Christianity, 1972Ð1998.Ó Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41: 733Ð746. Parsons, Talcott. 1956. ÒSuggestions for a sociological approach to the theory of organizations, I.Ó Administrative Science Quarterly 1: 63Ð85. Penning, James M. and Corwin E. Smidt. 2002. Evangelicalism: The next generation. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Poewe, Karla 1994. ÒThe nature, globality, and history of charismatic Christianity.Ó In Charismatic Christianity as global culture, ed. Karla Poewe, 1Ð32. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

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Poloma, Margaret. 1989. The Assemblies of God at the crossroads: Charisma and institutional dilemmas. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Pope, Liston. 1942. Millhands and preachers. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ÑÑ . 1953. ÒReligion and the class structure.Ó In Class, Status, Power, ed. Reinhold Bendix and Seymour M. Lipset, 316Ð23. Glencoe: Free Press. Popielarz, Pamela A. and J. Miller McPherson. 1995. ÒOn the edge or in between: Niche position, niche overlap, and the duration of voluntary association memberships.Ó American Journal of Sociology 101: 698Ð720. Powell, Walter W. and Paul J. DiMaggio, ed. 1991. The new institutionalism in organizational analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pyle, Ralph E. 2006. ÒTrends in religious stratiÞcation: Have religious group socioeconomic distinctions declined in recent decades?Ó Sociology of Religion 67(1): 61Ð79. Rambo, Lewis R. 1993. Understanding religious conversion. New Haven: Yale University Press. Reimer, Samuel H. 2007. ÒClass and congregations: Class and religious afÞliation at the congregational level of analysis.Ó Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 46(4): 583Ð594. Robbins, Stephen P. and Nancy Langton. 2001. Organizational behaviour: Concepts, controversies, applications (2nd Canadian ed.). Toronto: Prentice Hall. Roof, Wade Clark, and William C. McKinney. 1987. American mainline religion: It’s changing shape and future. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Sandomirsky, Sharon, and John Wilson. 1990. ÒProcesses of disafÞliation: Religious mobility among men and women.Ó Social Forces 68: 1211Ð29. Schaller, Lyle E. 1983. Growing pains. Nashville: Abingdon. Schwadel, Phillip. 2005. ÒNeighbors in the pews: An empirical analysis of social status and racial diversity in religious congregations. Unpublished paper. Scott, W. Richard. 1998. Organizations: Rational, natural and open systems. 4th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Sherkat, Darren. E. 1991. ÒLeaving the faith: Testing sociological theories of religious switching using survival models.Ó Social Science Research 20: 171Ð87. ÑÑ . 1997. ÒEmbedding religious choices: Preferences and social constraints into rational choice theories of religious behavior.Ó In Rational choice theory and religion, ed. Lawrence A. Young, 66Ð85. New York: Routledge. ÑÑ . 1998. ÒCounterculture or continuity? Competing inßuence on baby boomersÕ religious orientations and participation.Ó Social Forces 76: 1087Ð1115. ÑÑ . 2000. ÒToward synthesizing social psychological social movement theories: Integrating rational actor, frame analytic, and structuration Theories.Ó Unpublished paper. ÑÑ . 2001a. ÒInvestigating the sect-church-sect cycle: Cohort speciÞc attendance differences across African American denominations.Ó Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 40: 221Ð233. ÑÑ . 2001b. ÒTracking the restructuring of American religion: Religious afÞliation and patterns of religious mobility, 1973Ð1998.Ó Social Forces 79: 1459Ð1493. ÑÑ . 2002. ÒAfrican-American religious afÞliation in the late twentieth century: Cohort variations and patterns of switching, 1973Ð1998.Ó Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41: 485Ð93. Sherkat, Darren E. and Alfred Darnell. 1999. ÒThe effect of parentÕs fundamentalism on childrenÕs educational attainment: Examining differences by gender and childrenÕs fundamentalism.Ó Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 38(1): 23Ð35. Sherkat, Darren E. and John Wilson. 1995. ÒPreferences, constraints, and choices in religious markets: An explanation of religious switching and apostasy.Ó Social Forces 73: 993Ð1026. Sherkat, Darren E., and Christopher G. Ellison. 1999. ÒRecent developments and current controversies in the sociology of religion.Ó Annual Review of Sociology 25: 363Ð94.

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Shibley, Mark. 1996. Resurgent evangelicalism in the United States. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Smith, Christian, with Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy and David Sikkink. 1998. American evangelicalism: Embattled and thriving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Christian and Robert Faris. 2005. ÒSocioeconomic inequality in the American religious systemÑAn update and assessment.Ó Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 44(1): 95Ð104. Smith, Gary Scott. 2000. ÒEvangelicals confront corporate capitalism: Advertising, consumerism, stewardship, and spirituality 1880Ð1930.Ó In More money, more ministry, ed. Larry Eskridge and Mark A. Noll, 39Ð80. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Smith-Lovin, Lynn. 1999. ÒCore concepts and common ground: The relational basis of our discipline.Ó Social Forces 78: 1Ð23. Snow, David A., and Richard Machalek.1984. The sociology of conversion. Annual Review of Sociology 10:167Ð190. Snow, David A., and Cynthia Phillips. 1980. ÒThe Loßand-Stark conversion model: A critical reassessment.Ó Social Problems 27: 430Ð47. Snow, David A., E. Burke Rochford, Steven K. Worden and Robert D. Benford. 1986. ÒFrame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation.Ó American Sociological Review 51: 464Ð81. Stark, Rodney. 1972. ÒThe economics of piety.Ó In Issues in social inequality, ed. by G. Thiebar and S. Feldman, 483Ð503. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. Stark, Rodney and William S. Bainbridge. 1980. Sectarian tension. Review of Religious Research 22: 105Ð24. ÑÑ . 1985. The future of religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stark, Rodney and Roger Finke. 2000. Acts of faith: Explaining the human side of religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stark, Rodney and Charles Glock. 1968. American piety. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stark, Rodney and Laurence R. Iannaccone. 1997. ÒWhy the JehovahÕs Witnesses grow so rapidly: A theoretical application.Ó Journal of Contemporary Religion 12: 133Ð56. Takayama, K. Peter. 1975. ÒFormal polity and change of structure: denominational assemblies.Ó Sociological Analysis 36: 17Ð28. Troeltsch, Ernst. [1912] 1931. The social teaching of the Christian churches. NewYork: Macmillan. Wacker, Grant. 2001. Heaven below: Early Pentecostals and American culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wallace, Anthony F. 1978. Rockdale: The growth of an American village in the early industrial revolution. New York: Knopf. Weber, Max. 1963. The sociology of religion. Boston: Beacon Press. Whitt, Hugh P., Harry J. Crockett, Jr., and Nicholas Babchuk. 1988. ÒReligious switching: An alternative model.Ó Social Science Research 17: 206Ð18. Wigger, John H. 1998. Taking heaven by storm: Methodism and the rise of popular Christianity in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Bryan R. 1959. ÒAn analysis of sect development.Ó American Sociological Review 24: 3Ð15. Wood, James R. 1981. Leadership in voluntary organizations: The controversy over social action in Protestant churches. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Wuthnow, Robert. 1988. The restructuring of American religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ÑÑ . 1993. Christianity in the twenty-first century. New York: Oxford University Press. Wuthnow, Robert and Matthew P. Lawson. 1994. ÒSources of Christian fundamentalism in the United States.Ó In Accounting for fundamentalisms, ed. M. E. Marty and R. S. Appleby, 18Ð56. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE GHOST OF MARX AND THE STENCH OF DEPRIVATION: CUTTING THE TIES THAT BIND IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION AND CLASS Sean McCloud

After years of neglect, class has slowly resurfaced in the last decade’s discussions and research about American religion (Coreno 2002; Hackett, Maffly-Kipp, Moore, and Tentler 2005; McCloud 2007a; Pyle 2006; Schantz 2000; Smith and Faris 2005). As this volume suggests, a growing number of religious historians, sociologists, ethnographers, and theorists are coming to see that “class,” however it is variously conceived, continues to play some role in American religious institutions, practices, and beliefs. In this chapter, I argue that scholars must break with much past scholarship and take the study of religion and class in new directions. In suggesting this, I focus on three arenas crucial to such a task: definitions and theories of class, American religious history, and studies of contemporary, “lived religions.” DEFINING AND THEORIZING CLASS AND RELIGION Those interested in examining religion and class must carefully define what exactly it is that they want to investigate. Class, like “religion,” is a term whose definition dictates how it is studied. Defining what religion is determines what scholars can research as religion. Must religion include supernatural beings? Does it pertain to groups, individuals, or both? Is it best defined by describing its elements or explaining its functions? Similarly, a definition of class will determine the range of questions and subjects we might pursue. Is one’s class location determined by their position within the means of production, one’s cultural consumption, or by the ascribed status leveled by the community in which one exists? Is class based primarily in experiences and relationships fomented by material circumstances, or is it largely a matter of symbolic and rhetorical representation? Is class simply the combination of four variables: income, education, occupation, and wealth? The

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answers one gives to these questions inevitably will determine if and how they see class and religion interacting. There is no current scholarly consensus on what class is. This is likely one of the reasons that class has been absent in much religious studies scholarship until recently. Class connotes a range of meanings, and the sociological works debating the importance or irrelevance of class often start with different definitions and engage in dissimilar methods to support their arguments (Goldthorpe and Marshall 1992; Kingston 2000; Pakulski and Waters 1996; Savage 2000). But in the study of religion, one could borrow a phrase from the historian of sociology Albert Salomon to suggest that it wasn’t just Max Weber who had the ghost of Karl Marx standing over his shoulder, but the majority of twentieth century scholars writing about religion and class (Christiano, Swatos, and Kivisto 2002, 128). Marx’s conception of class as something tied to one’s place within the means of production, as well as his understanding of religion as a consciousness-deadening opium of the masses, hovered behind historians, social scientists, and others who tried to understand how social positions and material conditions related to religious beliefs, practices, and affiliations (Marx and Engels 1964). For those in the humanities, Marx has influenced the study of religion and class in at least two ways. First, class has frequently been tied to “class consciousness,” a term associated with Marx. This concept assumes that people actively think of and mobilize themselves as a socioeconomic class. Those studying American religion often made it a crucial component of their analysis. Their concern with whether certain religions fomented or—more often—prohibited class consciousness contributed to moralistic discussions of the supposed oppressive aspects of such groups as Pentecostals, Holiness churches, African American new religions, and a host of religions piled together under the categories of “sects,” “cults,” and “nativistic movements” (Anderson 1979; Barber 1941; Clark 1965; Holt 1940; La Barre 1970; Worsley 1968). A second and closely related way that Marx influenced American studies of religion and class lies in his conception of religion as false consciousness, which contributed to the development of deprivation theories. Elsewhere I have argued that deprivation theories of religion emerged from earlier cultural crisis, revitalization, and nativistic movement studies to become a major—if not the major—explanatory trope in the 1960s and 1970s (McCloud 2007a). Deprivation theories suggested that religion served as an ineffective symbolic salve to treat the hurts of the poor, dispossessed, and marginalized. In such theories,

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certain religions acted, in the words of 1960s religion journalist Richard Mathison, as “refuges for the poor” in which “unfortunates can turn away from the world and from a cult draw hope that some cosmic mechanism will in the near future place them above the rich and powerful” (Mathison 1960, 34). For some scholars this, of course, was the reason they dubbed certain religions oppressive. Examining the judgments of deprivation scholarship, one could expand the historian Robert Mapes Anderson’s condemnation of Pentecostalism to encompass most religions of the disinherited: as otherworldly ointments that dampened the fires of revolt, redirected “social protest from effective expression, and channeled it into the harmless backwaters of religious ideology” (Anderson 1979, 239). One response to such problematic scholarship of the past has been to drop the subject of class altogether and refocus attention on the variables of gender and race. What is needed now is a theoretical language and approach that considers class in relation to these and other crucial variables. To build a new conception of class for use in religious studies, we should start by breaking apart the old one. I have previously argued that class needs detached from a number of past associations (McCloud 2007a, 13–15). Here I revisit, elaborate on, and add to those. First, examinations of class and religion need not imply or find the existence of class consciousness. Studies suggest that people tend to downplay the role of socioeconomics in their lives. The sociologist Mike Savage bluntly states that there are no “class actors” in contemporary capitalism (Savage 2000, 149). By this he means that “the structural importance of class to people’s lives appears not to be recognized by people themselves” (Savage 2000, xii). “Culturally, class appears not to be a self-conscious principle of social identity,” he writes, “structurally, however, it appears to be highly pertinent” (Savage 2000, xii). Rather than class consciousness, the social theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s term, “class unconscious,” may be more apt when discussing the importance of material conditions in people’s lives (Bourdieu 1985, 728). In other words, the variables sociologists often mark as making up social class (income, occupation, education, and wealth) play a large role in one’s life trajectory. At the same time, individuals tend to not consciously identify themselves as members of a distinctive social class, nor do they perceive “how classes are instantiated in people’s life histories” (Savage 2000, xiii). Second, scholars should severe the naturalized connections between the working class, maleness, whiteness, and public, collective action.

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As noted by the social historian Sonya Rose, the “quintessential worker” of class analysis has most frequently been imagined as white, male, and working in the public sphere (Rose 1997). Any new definition of class must recognize its influence outside traditional sites such as shop floors, factory assembly lines, docks, and coal mines. It must also be analyzed in places such as homes, streets, churches, and private spaces such as bedrooms. It must include women, children, the elderly, and nonwhites. It must also offer some ideas as to how race, gender, age, religion, and class interact in such particular places, spaces, and times. Third, as noted by the scholar Kathryn Oberdeck (1999, 6), historians have often divided along the lines of locating class in language and culture or in “objective” material conditions. Yet class is “in” both, because the material and representational are not opposed, but joined. Simply put, the division of the material and representational is problematic, if not false. But given that such binary language is common academic parlance for American religious historians, any definition of class must acknowledge that it is simultaneously related to and formed by both material conditions and cultural representations. Class is certainly a status grounded in material conditions. One is both constrained and enabled by the material circumstances in which she/he resides. One’s future life trajectory, social networks, cultural preferences, habituated ways of thinking and acting in the world, and even health and well-being are related to one’s socioeconomic situation. How long one lives, where they live, who they befriend, what jobs they work, how they vote, who they marry are all influenced by—and help constitute—class. The material circumstances fomented by and constitutive of class also produce demonstrable physical and psychological effects, and whether those be pain, sorrow, happiness, hunger, comfort, discomfort, illness, pride, confusion, or otherwise, they are just as “real” as one’s occupation or religious affiliation. Class is about material circumstances and their effects. It is also an identity rhetorically and symbolically made and unmade through representation and discourse, keeping in mind that discourse and representation are themselves material in origin and consequence. Social theorist Beverley Skeggs (2004, 117) is right to suggest that “understanding representation is central to any analysis of class.” In addition to being a social location based in material circumstances, class is also about the narratives, motifs, characteristics, and the “amalgam of features of a culture that are read onto bodies as personal dispositions— which themselves have been generated through systems of inscription

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in the first place” (Skeggs 2004, 1). As a representational and symbolic discourse, class can be ascribed to others or assigned to oneself as a tool of self-definition. But social, economic, racial, and gender power differentials assure that the playing field is never level. The ability to represent self and others is entwined with social, cultural, economic, and political capital. Skeggs (2004, 99–100) notes, for example, that “excess”—in fashion, sexuality, body types, emotions, and popular culture tastes—has historically been linked in the bourgeois imagination and the dominant popular culture to the poor and working-classes, while the middle-class has been identified with restraint and denial. The working classes also have been viewed as “authentic” and “appropriable” by middle-class and more elite groups (Skeggs 2004, 106). Simply put, those with more power and access to various mass mediums have the advantage in what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “specifically symbolic struggle to impose the definition of the social world most in conformity with their interests” (Bourdieu 1977, 115). And those who wield more power may (sometimes consciously but more frequently unwittingly) ascribe classed identities to themselves and “others,” identities that seem natural and have deleterious effects that compound those outcomes already provoked by other material circumstances. Fourth, class matters, and attempts to claim its insignificance fall in the face of mounting social research. At the same time, it should never be viewed as the sole, deterministic, basis of everything. Class always matters, but sometimes it matters less than other things. It certainly plays a role in determining religious and other cultural preferences. At the same time, the extent of its role cannot be easily measured because class is a variable that is difficult to separate from related aspects of social location like race, gender, place, age, and access to various mass mediums. Any new definition of class for use in religious studies must provide a new language for weighing these interrelated positions and identities. Finally, the study of class is not solely the study of the poor, the working-class, the dispossessed, and the disinherited. Looking at the history of scholarship on religion and socioeconomic position, one finds that the focus was almost exclusively on the sects, new religions, and fundamentalisms attracting society’s most downtrodden. We should not repeat the often unwitting political and symbolic violence enacted in past scholarship by keeping the scope narrowly focused on the disinherited. Scholars debate the number of classes in the United States and set up classificatory categories to map them. Within all of

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these “classes on paper,” as Bourdieu calls them, exist individuals who engage in religious activities, hold certain beliefs, and participate in religious communities (Bourdieu 1985, 725). Any contemporary consideration of class and religion must consider the full range of social locations and material conditions in which religious people find themselves. Detaching class from these five associations can free researchers from the weight of problematic past scholarship and open the path to new conceptions of how religion and class interact in the American context. But what new topics and questions might American religion scholars pursue? Below I offer some initial thoughts on what subjects may open discussion on the complex connections between human agency, cultural constraint, material conditions, social locations, symbolic and cultural representations, and religion. CLASS IN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS HISTORY The most traveled paths for examining class in American religious history have focused intensively on issues of labor and religion (McCloud 2007a). How did different religious groups view laborers, managers, and the developing capitalist economy? How did workers depend upon, or discard, religious ideas in their quest for rights? American religious historians often asked whether “religion” was supportive of or oppressive toward labor and the working classes. Much of this scholarship was fomented by the cultural Marxism of scholars such as E. P. Thompson, whose classic study The Making of the English Working Class suggested that certain religious theologies—specifically Methodism— ambivalently supported the status quo while simultaneously being “indirectly responsible for a growth in self-confidence and capacity for organization of working people” (Thompson 1966, 42). In the American context, one of the most well-known of these studies is Paul Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium. He argues that antebellum revivals in Rochester, New York, aided the ownership classes and disadvantaged working people. Johnson dubbed Second Great Awakening Evangelicalism “order-inducing, repressive, and quintessentially bourgeois” ( Johnson 1978, 138). Evangelical revivalism’s belief that “every man was spiritually free and self-governing,” he asserted, “enabled masters to present a relationship that denied human interdependence as the realization of Christian ideals” ( Johnson

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1978, 138). A more nuanced argument can be seen in Herbert Gutman’s study of Protestantism and labor in the Gilded Age. While Gutman notes that much support of laissez-faire capitalism can be found among nineteenth century religious leaders, he adds that Protestantism was something that “offered the discontented nineteenthcentury American worker a transcendent and sanctioning ‘notion of right.’ ” (Gutman 1966, 80). Other historians have examined how workers in nineteenth century Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Providence responded to emergent capitalism through religious idioms and institutions (Fones-Wolf 1989; Sutton 1998; Sterne 2003). In sum, these studies reveal that simple statements about religion and labor cannot be made. Simply put, religion played a significant role in both promoting and obstructing labor concerns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (McCloud 2007a, Mirola 2003). Another route taken by studies of class in American religious history examines the influence of religion in developing class distinctions and class consciousness among what would become nineteenth-century working- and middle-class Americans. Historians Jama Lazerow (1995) and Teresa Anne Murphy (1992), for example, have examined the influential religious culture of antebellum working-class New Englanders. Mark Schantz (2000, 2) similarly has suggested that religious culture “played a decisive role in the process of class formation in antebellum Providence, Rhode Island.” Like the former studies noted, these works ask important questions and provide intriguing answers. At the same time, they remain centered on the issues of religion, labor, and class consciousness. Here I suggest a few topics and questions that move away from such concerns. Focusing on the representational aspects of class, one could ask how certain religious groups, beliefs, and practices came to be associated with specific socioeconomic classifications. In other words, how did movements such as Fundamentalism come to be “classed” as poor, while Protestant Modernists were ascribed with a more elite identity? How did certain religious gestures, such as the Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues, come to be denigrated by Mainline Protestant ministers, journalists, and scholars as an act of the illiterate, degenerate, and depraved (Cutten 1927)? What about the classing of religious clothing and music (Crane 2000; Kilsdonk 2001)? Such questions succeed in moving the study of American religion and class outside of religion and labor studies and into realms of private piety, notions of

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civility and comportment, and the development of American cultural and religious hierarchies (Kasson 1990; Levine 1998). Another approach to the study of religion and class in American history—and one that Stickney has taken in this volume—is to identify some recurrent religious explanations of social differentiation. How, in other words, did writers utilize religious idioms to account for America’s socioeconomic inequalities? Elsewhere, I have dubbed such cosmologies “theologies of class” (McCloud 2007a, 105–134). One recurrent theology of class, for example, was that of “divine hierarchies.” Perhaps best represented in Puritan John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, “Model of Christian Charity,” this theology of social differentiation suggested that socioeconomic differences were divinely ordained. “God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence,” Winthrop began, “hath so disposed of the condition of mankind as in all times some must be rich, some poor; some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection” (Miller 1956, 79). The Calvinism of Winthrop and the New England Puritans possessed an “elective affinity” with the theology of divine hierarchies. Their predestinarian beliefs suggested that God made humans with no free will to act on their own. Before the world existed, God had determined who would be rich, poor, saved, and damned. All were dependent upon God’s grace and that good news was that, if it was offered, none could resist it. But at the same time, if you were divinely destined to deprivations on earth and hell after death, there was similarly nothing that could be done. For the Puritans, the poor of material means and the poor of spirit would always be part of God’s divinely ordained hierarchy (McCloud 2007a, 110–111). But it wasn’t just Puritans. The belief in the divine origins of social inequality has long standing in Christian history. As noted by Gary Day, Augustine suggested that human inequalities stemmed from Adam and Eve’s “Fall” in the Garden of Eden. “From that fateful event,” Day writes, “came the division of mankind into masters and servants, the institution of private property and its consequent inequalities, and the impossibility of ever realizing a truly harmonious society without the need for laws” (Day 2001, 4). But what about American Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, and New Age practitioners? What theologies of class do various religious groups and individuals utilize in giving meaning and explanation to the inequalities wrought by American capitalism? How have religious interpretations of class inequality paralleled American secular accounts of social differentiation?

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Scholars interested in “theologies of class” must look across denominations—and even religions—to ascertain the myriad ways Americans have and continue to explain social inequality. Regardless of the topics and questions, American religious historians concerned with class must examine it with attention to its interaction with other crucial variables such as race, gender, and place. Perhaps the best example of such a work to date is Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church (Higginbotham 1993). The American religious historian Laurie MafflyKipp dubs it the “most sophisticated take so far” in terms of examining the intertwining of various social locations (Hackett, Maffly-Kipp, Moore, and Tentler 2005, 14). Such accolades are well-deserved, as it provides a good model for scholars seeking to reinsert class into American religious history. Higginbotham’s subject is black women’s influence on the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., and the rise of parallel black Baptist women’s conventions. She views late nineteenth and early twentieth century African American churches as contested arenas of discourse. She focuses on the “multiple consciousnesses” of African American women within Baptist churches by examining the diverse motives and rhetoric taking place between them, white Baptist women, and black Baptist men. What emerged from these interactions was a “politics of respectability” in which African American Baptist women mixed a desire to spread white Victorian middle-class values together with an equally strong urge to gain empowerment and autonomy for their sex and race. “Arguments over the accommodationist versus liberationist thrust of the black church,” she argues, “miss the range as well as the fluid interaction of political and ideological meanings represented within the church’s domain” (Higginbotham 1993, 18). Throughout Righteous Discontent, Higginbotham presents the reader with a complex of multiple and often conflicting discourses and outcomes, all related to the intertwining of race, gender, and social class. “Their allegiance to middle class values,” Higginbotham writes, “if evidence of white cultural domination, was no less evidence of their commitment to transcend oppression” (Higginbotham 1993, 97). She views the politics of respectability as simultaneously conservative and radical, counter-racist and classist. “By claiming respectability through their manners and morals,” she writes, “poor black women boldly asserted their will and agency to define themselves outside the parameters of prevailing racist discourse” (Higginbotham 1993, 192).

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At the same time, however, they reinforced those discourses by their comments on and attitudes toward the masses of poor African Americans who didn’t adhere to the white Victorian middle class value system. Higginbotham suggests that the politics of respectability served as a concessionary act of “politeness” calculated to garner racial selfempowerment. Her work serves American religious historians well as a model for examining the discursive interactions of power, class, race, and gender.

CLASS IN CONTEMPORARY “LIVED RELIGIONS” For historians, sociologists, and others studying American religion, a growing academic trend is to focus on “lived,” “practiced,” or “everyday” religions (Ammerman 2007; Hall 1997; Maffly-Kipp, Schmidt, and Valeri 2006). The center of such research is religion as people actually practice it in their everyday lives, as opposed to scholarship directed at or based exclusively upon texts or polling data. It asks what people believe and do in the course of their days that they, or we as scholars, call “religion” or “religious.” For those interested in the “lived religion” of Americans today, the landscape is changing rapidly and dramatically. Scholars of contemporary American religion have noted significant changes since the 1960s. These include expanding religious diversity, the explosive rise in theologically conservative and liberal religions and the concomitant decline of the theologically moderate “mainline” denominations, the growing number of people who “switch” religious affiliations, and the increasing visibility of combinative styles of spiritual practice and belief (Cimino and Lattin 1998; McCloud 2007b, Roof 1999; Wuthnow 1998). Some writers suggest that we are presently living in a post-traditional, “late modern” period in which self-identity, community, and the codes we live by are no longer ascribed, but reflexively made and remade (Giddens 1991). In such a milieu, the sociologist Wade Clark Roof (1999, 75) asserts, religion becomes a cultural resource in a “spiritual marketplace” of meaning and identity as “responsibility falls more upon the individual— like that of a bricoleur—to cobble together a religious world from available images, symbols, moral codes, and doctrines, thereby exercising considerable agency in defining and shaping what is considered to be religiously meaningful.”

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Despite such myriad changes, recent sociological studies suggest a continuing and enduring relationship between social class and religious affiliation in the contemporary United States (Smith and Faris 2005; Pyle 2006). Simply put, most U.S. denominations continue to be dominated by the same social classes that they have throughout the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In their study of General Social Survey data from the 1980s and 1990s, the sociologists Christian Smith and Robert Faris conclude that the “American religious system at the end of the twentieth century reflected major socio-economic differences between groups within that system” (Smith and Faris 2005, 100). These differences, they note, are patterned by theology, race, ethnicity, and liturgical style. Specifically, the higher ranked socioeconomic groups are theologically liberal denominations with hierarchical church organizations and formal liturgical styles. These include Unitarian Universalists, Episcopalians, and mainline Presbyterians. The lower-ranking socio-economic denominations are characterized by theological conservatism and sectarianism, congregational polity, and more emotive and ecstatic styles of worship. This group includes Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, Black Baptists, and Southern Baptists. There are likely many reasons for the persistence of class differences in American religious groups—among them the influence of family and social networks, migration patterns, and the local and regional dominance of certain religions. For the scholar interested in studying contemporary Americans’ changing and unchanging religious lives, the persistence of class differences begs attention. How might attention to class be incorporated into the study of contemporary religions? The study of religion and class—just as the study of lived religions—demands fieldwork attuned to differences within denominations and among individuals inside single congregations. Such foci will stimulate questions about religious practices, beliefs, and languages. How, if at all, does social class correspond to religious practices? Many religious studies scholars have assumed that the religions of the elite tend to be controlled, even cerebral, affairs while the religions of the poor and working classes were emotive and experienceoriented. How much are such characterizations the result of the stereotypical class discourses noted by Skeggs (2004) and how much are they actually demonstrated through ethnographic observations? Is denominational identity and theology the most important factor in determining the variant styles of religious practice? If so, do

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middle-class Pentecostals speak in tongues and dance in the spirit similarly or differently than working-class Pentecostals? What about other identity-related variables, such as race, region, gender, and age? How do class and these other social locations combine or even contradict each other in terms of religious practices? The same questions may be posed about religious languages and beliefs and their relationship to class and other social locations. In understanding the complex ways that class may or may not influence lived religion, I see value in the sociologist Fred Rose’s utilization of the term “class culture.” Rose defines class culture as “beliefs, attitudes, and understandings, symbols, social practices, and rituals throughout the life cycle that are characteristic of positions within the production process” (Rose 1997, 472). As noted elsewhere, my exception to this definition is that narrowly tying the concept to the Marxian definition of class as inherently about “positions within the production process” underestimates important and primary class variables such as education, wealth, and income. I slightly adapt “class culture” to mean the range of cultural repertoires (styles, objects, tools, and strategies) found among a particular group of people who are related by similar social locations and material conditions (McCloud 2007a, 163). For Rose, “social class shapes social movements through the medium of class culture,” but classes are not homogenous and “class is not correlated with any one set of ideas or politics” (Rose 1997, 487, 475). Instead, Rose’s class cultures—like the sociologist Ann Swidler’s concept of “cultural repertoires”—work more on the level of structure, strategy, and form rather than content (Swidler 2001). In other words, members of a specific class culture may not have similar political, social, or religious views. Instead, Rose argues that class “delineates the form that movements take rather than any particular political content” (Rose 1997, 488). In terms of religion, then, the ethnographer pondering the influence of social class would not exclusively look for “classed” theologies and gestures, but also the strategies of religious action, the structures of group worship, and the extent to which religious symbols, beliefs, and languages are comparatively elaborated or constricted. In my own work, I have used the class culture concept to compare two Holiness Pentecostal assemblies within the same city (McCloud 2007a, 135–166). I suggested that the differences observed between the two churches might partly be interpreted as an instance of diverging class cultures. While both churches had similarly modest historical origins in twentieth century Appalachian migration, one assembly, .

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which I called “Brown Hill,” had followed the national denomination with which it was affiliated in its numerical growth, attraction of middle-class members, and loosening of restrictive holiness behavioral and dress codes. It was also less ecstatic in ritual practice, meaning that speaking in tongues, dancing in the spirit, and other Pentecostal “gifts of the spirit” were uncommon or relegated to particular members. The other church, which I called “Holiness Road,” was smaller, stagnant in growth, apparently more class homogenous, and kept the holiness codes. It was also much more ecstatic in worship style, with “spirit-filled” services being common. In comparison with Holiness Road’s demographic stasis, Brown Hill’s changes corresponded to loosened community boundaries and elaborated religious language. As Brown Hill was growing more diverse in terms of people from non-Holiness Pentecostal and more middleclass backgrounds, community boundaries became more permeable through the institution of changes such as less restrictive holiness codes. Recalling Rose’s argument that working-class social movements tend to entail more sharply defined insider/outsider boundaries than more inclusive middle-class ones, one might see Brown Hill’s less restrictive community boundaries and behavioral codes as something spurred by a combination of national denominational change and the local influx of more middle-class congregants (McCloud 2007a, 164). The arrival of new participants at Brown Hill, coming from a variety of social locations, also correlated to more elaborated worship and sermon language. Whereas speech, sermon, and testimony at Holiness Road tended toward less detailed discussions of faith, fate, and prophecy, Brown Hill sermons followed what Bernstein called a more middle-class “elaborated” language (Bernstein 1975). The minister’s sermons and worship speech, for example, tended to explain and suggest to participants what appropriate worship behaviors were. Holiness Road speech was much less detailed. No one told worshipers to raise hands, shout praise, or speak in tongues. The primary reason for this is presumably that no one had to (McCloud 2007a, 164). The idea that the working classes are likely to have fewer diverse social networks means that the language they speak can be less elaborate. As Swidler (2001, 52) notes in discussing Basil Bernstein’s research, working-class children spoke in “concrete terms, because they take for granted a small, known world of others who share the same references and assumptions.” Middle-class children, on the other hand, “develop elaborated codes, both more explicit and more abstract, that allow

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them to communicate in a public sphere with diverse others who do not necessarily share their particular experiences and points of reference” (Swidler 2001, 52). In this manner, then, the more detailed public speech at Brown Hill and the more restrictive talk at Holiness Road may point to a combination of class differences and congregational diversity relating to new members (McCloud 2007a, 164–166). Overall, the class culture concept suggested by Rose illuminated how class influenced group boundaries, worship styles, and restricted versus elaborated languages of faith and worship in the two Holiness Pentecostal churches I studied. To briefly provide an example of how Rose’s “class culture” concept might be applied to contemporary American spirituality outside of religious denominations, one could examine the increasingly visible trend of combinative religions. “Combinative,” in this usage, refers to the improvisatory picking, mixing, and combining of beliefs and practices from a variety of religious traditions. For example, a 2003 Harris Poll showed that 27% of all Americans believed in reincarnation, including 40% of all 25–29–year-olds (Harris Poll 2003). This is a much higher figure than the number of Americans belonging to religions that feature reincarnation doctrines, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. But does class play a role? Is the propensity to pick, mix, and combine religious beliefs and practices more possible for those who come from social locations that allow more network diversity and accompanying cultural knowledge? Or is combinative spirituality common across all class locations, but more elaborated among higher classes and more restricted among lower ones? Perhaps Americans of all classes similarly pick and mix, but does the selection of religious beliefs and practices from which they blend differ in ways that Rose’s class cultures would predict? In other words, an extrapolation of Rose’s model suggests that those from more elite backgrounds may combine from a larger pool of religious resources, while less elite combiners utilize a smaller set of mostly European and African (versus world-wide and elite occult) traditions. How, then, might this play out with specific religious resources such as different forms of Buddhism in America, popular occult literature such as the Oprah-made bestseller The Secret, or beliefs such as reincarnation and the existence of ghosts? Only new research attuned to the issue of class and other social locations can begin to answer such questions.

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CONCLUSION In this chapter, I argued that scholars should cut the ties that bind them to past scholarship and begin the work of conceiving class and its connections to religion anew. I then offered some topics and questions for the study of American religion and class. There are, of course, many other good—and likely better—questions to pose and pursue. But regardless of the specific issues and directions we wish to take, we all share the need to become acquainted with scholarship outside of our immediate fields. Historians, religious studies scholars, theorists, sociologists, and religious ethnographers can all benefit from examining each other’s work on the subject, which will in turn benefit the future study of class and American religion. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ammerman, Nancy, ed. 2007. Everyday religion: Observing modern religious lives. New York: Oxford University Press. Anderson, Robert Mapes. 1979. Vision of the disinherited: The making of American Pentecostalism. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers. Barber, Bernard. 1941. “Acculturation and messianic movements.” American Sociological Review 6(5): 663–669. Bernstein, Basil. 1975. Class, codes and control: Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language. New York: Schocken Books. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. “Symbolic Power.” In Identity and structure: Issues in the sociology of education, ed. Denis Gleason, 112–119. Dimiffield, UK: Nefferton. ——. 1985. “The social space and the genesis of groups.” Theory and Society 14 (November): 723–744. Christiano, Kevin, William Swatos, Jr., and Peter Kivisto. 2002. Sociology of religion: contemporary developments. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Cimino, Richard and Don Lattin. 1998. Shopping for faith: American religion in the new millennium. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Clark, Elmer T. 1965. The small sects of America. Revised Edition. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Coreno, Thaddeus. 2002. “Fundamentalism as class culture.” Sociology of Religion 63 (3): 335–360. Crane, Diana. 2000. Fashion and its social agendas: Class, gender, and identity in clothing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cutten, George Barton. 1927. Speaking with tongues: Historically and psychologically considered. New York: Yale University Press. Day, Gary. 2001. Class. New York: Routledge. Fones-Wolf, Ken. 1989. Trade union gospel: Christianity and labor in industrial Philadelphia, 1865–1915. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Goldthorpe, John and Gordon Marshall. 1992. “The promising future of class analysis: A response to recent critiques.” Sociology 26: 381– 400. Gutman, Herbert. 1966. “Protestantism and the American labor movement: The Christian spirit in the gilded age.” American Historical Review 72: 74–101. Hackett, David, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, R. Laurence Moore and Leslie Woodcock Tentler. 2005. “Forum: American religion and class.” Religion and American Culture 15: 1–29. Hall, David, ed. 1997. Lived religion: Toward a history of practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Harris Poll. 2003. “The religious and other beliefs of Americans 2003.” Harris Interactive (26 February): http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID = 359. Higginbotham, Evelyn B. 1993. Righteous discontent: The women’s movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Holt, John. 1940. “Holiness religion: Cultural shock and social reorganization.” American Sociological Review 5: 740–747. Johnson, Paul. 1978. A shopkeeper’s millennium: Society and revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837. New York: Hill and Wang. Kasson, John F. 1990. Rudeness and civility: Manners in nineteenth-century urban America. New York: Hill and Wang. Kilsdonk, Edward J. 2001. “Scientific church music and the making of the American middle class.” In The middling sorts: Explorations in the history of the American middle class, ed. Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnson, 125–35. New York: Routledge. Kingston, Paul W. 2000. The classless society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. La Barre, Weston. 1970. The ghost dance. New York: Doubleday. Lazerow, Jama. 1995. Religion and the working class in antebellum America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Levine, Lawrence. 1988. Highbrow/lowbrow: The emergence of cultural hierarchy in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Maffly-Kipp, Laurie, Leigh Schmidt, and Mark Valeri, eds. Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian life in America, 1630–1965. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1964. On religion. New York: Schocken Books. Mathison, Richard R. 1960. Faiths, cults, and sects of America: From atheism to Zen. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. McCloud, Sean. 2007a. Divine hierarchies: Class in American religion and religious studies. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. —— . 2007b. “Liminal subjectivities and religious change: Circumscribing Giddens for the study of contemporary American religion.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 22(3):295–309. Miller, Perry, ed. 1956. The American Puritans: Their prose and poetry. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Mirola, William A. 2003. “Asking for bread and receiving a stone: The rise and fall of religious ideology in the Chicago’s eight-hour movement.” Social Problems 50(2):273–293. Murphy, Theresa A. 1992. Ten hours’ labor: Religion, reform, and gender in early New England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Oberdeck, Kathryn. 1999. The evangelist and the impresario: Religion, entertainment, and cultural politics in America, 1884–1914. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pakulski, Jan and Malcolm Waters. 1996. “Misreading status as class: A reply to our critics.” Theory and Society 25: 731–736. Pyle, Ralph. 2006. “Trends in religious stratification: Have religious group socioeconomic distinctions declined in recent decades?” Sociology of Religion 67(1): 61–79. Roof, Wade Clark. 1999. Spiritual marketplace: Baby boomers and the remaking of American religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rose, Fred. 1997. “Toward a class-cultural theory of social movements: Reinterpreting new social movements.” Sociological Forum 12: 461– 494.

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Rose, Sonya O. 1997. “Class formation and the quintessential worker.” In Reworking class, ed. John R. Hall, 133–166. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Savage, Mike. 2000. Class analysis and social transformation. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Schantz, Mark. 2000. Piety in Providence: Class dimensions of religious experience in antebellum Rhode Island. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Skeggs, Beverley. 2004. Class, self, culture. New York: Routledge Press. Smith, Christian and Robert Faris. 2005. “Socioeconomic inequality in the American religious system: An update and assessment.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44 (1): 95–104. Sterne, Evelyn S. 2003. Ballots and Bibles: Ethnic politics and the Catholic Church in Providence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sutton, William R. 1998. Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical artisans confront capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of love: How culture matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, E. P. 1966. The making of the English working class. New York: Vintage. Worsley, Peter. 1968. The trumpet shall sound: A study of ‘cargo’ cults in Melanesia. New York: Schocken Books. Wuthnow, Robert. 1998. After heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press.

PART TWO

CASE STUDIES IN AMERICAN RELIGION AND CLASS

CHAPTER FIVE

EXPLORING THE CLASS CULTURAL ANCHORS OF FUNDAMENTALISM1 Thaddeus Coreno

America is one of the most religious countries in the world. The American faithful rank at or near the top on almost any measure of religiosity (for example, belief in God, church afÞliation, church attendance, and frequency of prayer). Many sociologists view this type of data as evidence that refutes the secularization thesis, one version of which argues that industrialization will diminish the role of religion in any given society. But the United States also has one of the highest levels of economic inequality among the industrialized nations. In addition to the great abundance and afßuence generated by the American economy, there is an underside of high poverty, growing gaps in income and wealth, a surge in low-wage job creation, and at least 47 million people without health care. Norris and Inglehart (2004) explore this connection and link AmericaÕs high rates of religiosity to the disparities in economic resources across the class system. They Þnd that people are more religious in countries with high degrees of economic inequality, and conclude that economic inequality is a very good predictor of religious behavior in and across nations. This chapter examines the impact of social class conditions shaped by contemporary capitalism on the continuing bond between the working class and poor and fundamentalist religion as well as between the middle and upper classes with Mainline Protestantism in the U.S. Sociologists have compiled an extensive record of research that shows an association between social class and religious afÞliation (Roof and McKinney 1987; Kosmin and Lachman 1992). These studies Þnd that religious groups are embedded in environments divided by social class. Even though the class structure and most religious institutions have changed in many important ways over the last century, a class 1 Portions of this chapter appeared in an article I authored that is entitled ÒFundamentalism as a Class CultureÓ which was published in Sociology of Religion (2002).

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stratiÞed denominational hierarchy continues to stand. This pattern has been monitored and empirically validated during most of the twentieth century. However, sociologists lost their focus on class inequality during much of the 1990s. Smith and Faris (2005) point out that two landmark studies of inequality and denominational afÞliation examined data that was collected between 1972 and 1982 (Roof and McKinney 1987) and in 1990 (Kosmin and Lachman 1992). Recent studies reafÞrm these arguments by updating and extending earlier efforts (Park and Reimer 2002; Coreno 2002; Smith and Faris 2005; Pyle 2006). These more recent Þndings show that religious denominations continue to be arranged, to a great extent, according to the class location of their members. Today, of course, entire denominations are typically made up of many classes and rarely mirror only one class. The denominational hierarchy is stratiÞed into religious groups that share a common theological orientation, typically characterized as liberal, moderate, or conservative, but which also reßect class boundaries. Liberal denominations (Episcopalians, Jews, Presbyterians) are composed primarily of upper and upper middle class followers. Moderate denominations (Methodists, Lutherans, Roman Catholics) appeal to solidly middle class congregations and conservative denominations (Baptists, Assembly of God, Pentecostals, and other evangelical and fundamentalist groups) are made up of lower-middle and working class adherents. Sociologists assume that this arrangement is built upon an afÞnity between particular theological rationalizations of a groupÕs status in the world, what Max Weber (1993) called theodicies, and the class position of the people who embrace it. The most widely cited study that looked at class inequality and religion is Roof and McKinneyÕs (1987) investigation which showed a reduction of class differences across religious groups between 1942 and 1982, due in part to increasing levels of education and occupational mobility improving the status levels of all groups, especially evangelicals and fundamentalists. Nevertheless, Roof and McKinney also concluded that the denominational map in America between 1972 and 1982 remained marked by a signiÞcant degree of stratiÞcation by class. Smith and Faris (2005) and Pyle (2006) show that the basic pattern reported by Roof and McKinney continues to hold. It also appears that the upward mobility of religious conservatives (evangelicals and fundamentalists) may have stabilized. One of the more interesting story lines of this literature follows the continuing relationship between belonging to the working classes or being poor and holding a fundamentalist religious afÞliation. In past

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research, sociologists have looked for the factors that account for the appeal and growth of such a radically traditional form of religion but typically look for aspects within fundamentalist theology and practice to explain these trends. Sociologists of religion rarely begin by looking at the objective class conditions of the working class and poor as explanatory factors. Instead, they take for granted alienating class conditions rather than seeing them as driving forces for getting people into fundamentalist religious groups and keeping them there over time.

MODERNITY AS A RELIGIOUS PROBLEM Most sociologists of religion agree that the social changes accompanying modernity gave birth to traditionalist religious movements like fundamentalism (Marsden 1991; Ammerman 1991; Riesebrodt 1993; Almond, Sivan and Appelby 1995). These changes, especially those linked with secularization, industrialization and urbanization, have altered the religious landscape in profound ways and have been identiÞed as the main culprits behind contemporary alienation, moral confusion, and spiritual malaise. Furthermore, the overlapping effects of modernization threatened Protestant hegemony at the turn of the century. These pressures split Protestants into fundamentalist and modernist camps. In response to varied assaults on the Bible, fundamentalists broke away from established denominations and formed their own churches and communities. Fundamentalists have been resisting the secular parts of modernity by defending radical traditionalism ever since the onset of the schism. To this day, fundamentalists guard a quarantined traditionalist culture inside a network of church-based institutions. They nourish their enclave communities by separating themselves, as much as possible, from mainline churches in particular and secular culture in general. Fundamentalists see moral decay all around them and attribute this to withering Christian value commitments and the rise of human-centered, secular ones. Consequently, they organize against the tide, especially in defense of the ÒfamilyÓ which they see as the primary casualty of secular humanism. They hope to keep traditional religious creeds and ways of life sacred and, thus, view divorce, abortion, homosexuality, drug abuse, pornography, and crime as evidence of moral collapse in the modern era. The fundamentalist worldview is grounded in the Bible, which is seen as the source of personal salvation, literally revealed to its authors word for word. These insular alliances and biblically

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based value systems help fundamentalists to preserve their moral milieu within the conÞnes of an enclave culture (Ammerman 1991; Almond, Sivan, and Appleby 1995). While scholars continue to disagree about which aspects of modernity actually gave birth to fundamentalism, nevertheless a large body of research identiÞes various social anchors of denominational afÞliation especially among fundamentalists (Roof and McKinney 1987; Kosmin and Lachman 1992; Coreno 2002). So far, two models seem to be in use. The Culture Model, rooted in Durkheim (1915) and ParsonsÕ (1951) work, explores the impact of particular cultural environments on afÞliation. The focus in this model is on the values, norms and morals that give shape to distinct regions, places of residence, age cohorts, socialization experiences, religious practices and gender experiences. An important assumption of this model is that the symbolic representations that characterize a cultural environment can integrate or establish social bonds with people across social structural (class, in particular) boundaries. Smith (1998) argues in favor of the idea of evangelical subcultures which he describes as religious communities grounded in value systems which establish strict moral codes, maintain sharp boundaries between in-group (evangelicals) and out-group (nonevangelicals), and nurture a very unique personal identity as one of the saved. In this model, what deÞnes religious group membership is adherence to a value system, not the class position of individuals. Some research based on this model consequently shows that fundamentalists are found fairly evenly dispersed across the class structure (Coreno 2002). The alternative Class Model, derived from the works of Marx and Weber, examines the impact of class inequality on denominational afÞliation and posits a link or afÞnity between social class positions and theological beliefs (Tucker 1978; Gerth and Mills 1946; Weber 1993). In other words, a personÕs class experience primes him or her for a particular theological ideology. The lower classes (which includes the working and lower middle classes) experience exploitation (Marx) as well as domination and status deprivation (Weber), thus making them good candidates for ascetic or traditionalist religion. Fundamentalism is an appealing brand of religion because of the comfort that comes from its promise of spiritual salvation and deliverance from earthly suffering as well as its absolute moral certainty that comes from literalist interpretations of the Bible. For example, fundamentalism appeals to a speciÞc social class or classes, notably the lower middle and working

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middle classes, and may not be equally as well received across the class structure (Greeley and Hout 2006; Pyle 2006; Shibley 1996; Coreno 2002; Hunter 1983).

THE CLASS CULTURE MODEL OF FUNDAMENTALIST AFFILIATION Elsewhere I argue that both class and culture are signiÞcant and meaningful predictors of fundamentalist afÞliation (Coreno 2002). A class culture can be thought of as a subsection of the class structure in which distinct moral commitments are articulated and shared by a community. In this ÒClass Culture ModelÓ of afÞliation, I posit the existence of discrete, class-based religious subcultures that share unique beliefs and social practices. The Class Culture approach also assumes that class fractions may be important social fault lines in the social structure. Sociologists usually look for differences between broad class categories such as those between the working and middle classes, but these might mask equally important differences between intraclass segments too. Each class can be thought of as being composed of segments that differ in terms of educational credentials and positions in authority hierarchies (Wright 1998, 2005). Ideological cleavages also may divide the upper and lower tiers of the same class. In other words, subpopulations can be deÞned in terms of class fractions that are marked off by differing cultural afÞliations such as political ideology, religious afÞliation, and racial attitudes. Class fractions are important vectors for identifying the contradictions and divisions within classes that are implicated in the emergence and reproduction of distinct cultural belief systems including fundamentalist afÞliation. A few sociologists have shown how class fractions make up one important source of religious afÞliation (Roof and McKinney 1987; Riesebrodt 1992; Coreno 2002). The division between the upper middle and lower middle (or some have designated this dichotomy the new middle/old middle classes) is mirrored in divergent religious beliefs and other ideological afÞliations. The new middle class (another label for this fraction is the new class) is composed of managers, scientists, and other professionals who produce, interpret, and apply information, data, knowledge, and ideas. The lower middle class is made up of the lower tiers of supervisory, managerial, and professional occupations (including the old middle class of small business owners and a wide spectrum of lower status entrepreneurs, and other independent

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professionals). The division between the upper and lower middle classes is an important one because it directly impacts fundamentalist afÞliation. The upper middle classes possess more power, prestige, and inßuence than the lower middle classes. More importantly, the new middle class promotes secularization, bureaucratic rationalism, and materialism-three processes that signal to religious traditionalists such as fundamentalists that society is in moral decline. But whether the origins of fundamentalism are rooted in class, culture, or both, it is imperative to pay attention to the strains, inequalities, and contradictions in the social structure of contemporary capitalism because they continue to be important sources of fundamentalism. These Òsocial ÞssuresÓ in the social structure tend to foster relative deprivation. Class fractions and the class cultures that deÞne them are good illustrations of social structural disjuncture. The lower tier groups (classes and class fractions) whose share of social rewards situates them below more advantaged segments are more likely to embrace traditionalist religious solutions to their felt sense of relative deprivation (Almond, Sivan, and Appleby 1995). A strong case can be made for the argument that class differences in America are becoming more pronounced. The empirical support for such a claim is quite impressive and furnished by scholars from across disciplines (Kerster 2000; Danziger and Gottschalk 1995; Blau 1999; Palley 1998; Gordon 1996; Galbraith 1998; Phillips 2002). More recently, Mishel, Bernstein, and Allegretto (2007) have summarized inequality trends over the past few decades. Their Þndings are clear: wage and wealth inequalities continue to create difÞculties for middle and low-income families. Despite increasing productivity, growth, and low unemployment, most families lost economic ground between 2000 and 2005. This marked the reversal of a trend between 1995 and 2000 during which wage inequality lessened a bit and workers saw some economic improvement. Yet, indicators suggest that, except for the late 1990s, a clear pattern of worsening inequality began in 1973. Families in the top 20% of the income distributionÑand especially the top 1%Ñhave shown tremendous improvements. The economic circumstances of most lower and middle wage earner families, however, have either stagnated or diminished relative to earlier historical periods (beginning with the post-World War II era). Weeden, Kim, DiCarlo and Grusky (2007) have shown that income inequalities have become more pronounced both between large class categories as well as within particular occupational groupings in the same class. The inequalities

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by wealth are even more severe. The richest 1% of families has seen dramatic increases in wealth accumulation over the last 40 years (Mishel, Bernstein and Allegreto 2007). This small portion of the population wields tremendous power over capital assets. Further, the top segment continues to increase its distance from the rest of the population across time. Additional evidence suggests that class divisions continue to make themselves felt in everyday life for millions of Americans, even those Þrmly stationed in the middle class. Forty-seven million Americans do not have healthcare and tens of millions more are ÒcoveredÓ by limited policies. Corporations are requiring employees to pay more of their healthcare and pension plans while at the same time many large Þrms beneÞt from huge tax cuts that favor the top 10% of the economic ladder. These conditions are further aggravated by a record degree of personal debt racked up by the middle class, which has added more pressure on families as they manage their budgets (Leicht and Fitzgerald 2007). At the same time, state and local taxes have been climbing as federal taxes for the wealthy have been contained. The deregulation of industry has also enhanced the power of the wealthiest class. Less government regulation has encouraged more corporate concentration of wealth. Increasingly, over the past thirty years or so large businesses have been less constrained by government restriction and thus freer to make decisions with a diminished sense of social concern. Corporate proÞts and managerial salary perks have exploded during this time. The ratio of CEOÕs share of corporate proÞts relative to the average worker has increased dramatically (Leicht and Fitzgerald 2007; Hacker 2006). The cultural climate promoted in these institutional arrangements also plays a role in legitimating class disparities and as a result the American public, including religious fundamentalists, has become increasingly less happy and more distrustful during this period (Lane 2000).

ALIENATION, RATIONALIZATION, AND ANOMIE AS EFFECTS OF A STRATIFIED WORLD But religious fundamentalists are not the only people who have wrestled with the economic disturbances caused by modernity and globalization. Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim analyzed the effects of living in a society shaped by inequality and agreed that one possible

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consequence for people is some form of estrangement or dislocation from the self, the community, or meaningful work. For Marx, when workers produce things that are controlled by others and then sold for a proÞt an essential element of their being is distorted. Capitalism puts workers in a difÞcult bind because they typically encounter social arrangements that threaten to deform a basic part of their personality. Satisfaction and self-actualization are denied to workers who must labor with little or no input into or control over a production process geared towards extracting a proÞt. Workers tend to become Òalienated,Ó disillusioned, and deßated in this type of system (Turner 1991; Geyer and Heinz 1992). Max Weber also critiqued the social organization of industrial capitalism. For Weber, the main problems plaguing modern society were associated with the rationalization process, a matrix of strategies designed to attain a goal in the most efÞcient way possible. This orientation fuels the engines of industrialization and the bureaucracies that manage them. The toxic by-product of this unfolding is the penetration of means-ends reasoning into all forms of human interaction and for Weber this fact carries with it the most serious ramiÞcations because people treat each other like objects or tools to achieve some goal. Social relationships of all kinds will eventually take on the cast of the business deal or the Þnancial operation as all interactions come to be shaped by the practical application of the rules of technological efÞciency. People become more likely to use each other to attain some end-in the same way that they are used at work. The values spawned by the rationalization process become so pervasive that they trap people in an Òiron cageÓ that constrains their freedom to the extent that it subordinates their individuality to the logic of scientiÞc calculations, bureaucratic rules, and norms of economic efÞciency. Impersonality is the ethos of modern people because it is the ethos of the modern organization that dominates them in every sphere of their lives (Lowith 1993). Sometimes alienation is manifested in the form of a sense of meaninglessness or confusion about the legitimacy of norms. For Durkheim, anomie is a societal state of normlessness that creates an inner turmoil for people who must endure the destructive consequences of weak social bonds. This kind of dissatisfaction with prevailing social currents suggests some personal estrangement from existing norms, values, and social practices. The anomie in social life can be a repercussion of dysfunctional economic relationships in the division of labor (Schweitzer 1991). The economic inequalities discussed above qualify

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as some of the pathological circumstances that can break down the ties that keep the division of labor functioning in a stable manner (Schweitzer 1991). These descriptions of alienation, rationalization, and anomie show how inequality weakens the bonds between people. Further, the dangers of alienation are not conÞned to the workplace. The goals of accumulation, exploitation, and proÞt making can be transposed into a broad collection of social values, norms, moral codes, political policies, and attitudes that impact many social relationships. The separation of the worker from the labor process (Marx) or the demoralization and disenchantment of the worker (Durkheim, Weber) eventually degrades the nature of other interpersonal relationships in so far as the rules and norms that legitimate the extraction of proÞt come to guide social interaction outside of the workplace. In other words, social environments such as the family and local community can also be affected by the moral rationalizations that are used to legitimate the labor process. Thus, alienated parents, neighbors, citizens, and voters come to populate a community (Oldenquist and Rosner 1991; Lowith 1993). One of the challenges facing alienation researchers is specifying its many meanings. Alienation is a multifaceted concept and many scholars have urged caution when employing it as a variable. There are two primary forms of alienation that need to be considered: o-alienation and s-alienation (Seeman 1991; Schact 1994). The objective component of alienation (o-alienation) refers to the structural arrangement of social classes or some kind of hierarchically organized system of power and authority. If social class relations are erected on a foundation of exploitation, a chain of subordinate classes will be established. These classes are, by deÞnition, alienated, to varying degrees, if people in them are denied control over the work process. S-alienation, the subjective element of alienation, concerns the social-psychological outcomes that are associated with positions in the class system. These can be thought of as the personal consequences that often accompany subordination. Seeman (1959, 1991) spells out Þve types of subjective alienation that highlight the different ways it can be experienced by individuals. Powerlessness reßects the conviction that a personÕs actions will not have the desired effect and that they lack control, especially over economic and political concerns. Meaninglessness is evident when a personÕs moral code no longer provides a way to Þgure out which course, path, or worldview is the best approach to a problem or contingency because their existing answers

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fail to produce predictable consequences. People in an anomic environment cannot rely on shared rules to sustain social order. As a result, relationships between people are more likely to be characterized by egoism and self-interest. In fact, some may believe that deviance is the only way to reach legitimate goals. Isolation is also a form of alienation involving a rejection of accepted goals and a desire to establish new ones. Finally, self-estrangement means that oneÕs roles are not inherently satisfying because they are carried out primarily for the sake of others. Alienation for Seeman (1959, 1991) is a multidimensional notion denoting a subjective state that reßects a response to a number of problematic social conditions characterized by a breakdown in the efÞcacy of social relationships and/or the disintegration of moral regulations. I will use alienation as a term that incorporates all of these ideas throughout the rest of the chapter. The primary source of alienation is asymmetrical arrangements of social classes and authority relations. These problematic social relationships produce an uneven playing Þeld complete with an evolving repertoire of moral conßicts and distressed psychological states. Many tensions appear in a society that is committed to both a market economy, with its ethos of self-interest and attendant inequalities on the one hand, and a democratic political culture that valorizes equality and social justice, on the other hand. The ensuing social problems and psychological maladies reßect deeply embedded contradictions in a system that sanctions exploitation, high levels of economic inequality, and low levels of social responsibility for the powerful while it simultaneously promotes a life of hard work, social Darwinism, and personal responsibility for those with limited political or economic inßuence. A signiÞcant part of the American value system celebrates and rewards greed, egoism, and aggressive competition (Derber 2005). Fundamentalism counters these ambiguities and contradictions of modern life with a message of spiritual salvation from destructive individualism that is shared and nurtured within the walls of it own communal enclave.

FUNDAMENTALISM AS AN ANTIDOTE TO ALIENATION The work of Shibley (1996) and Ault (2004) sheds some light on the appeal of fundamentalism to those classes experiencing the effects of alienation most acutely. ShibleyÕs study pinpointed the sources of evangelical church growth, especially outside of its southern strong-

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hold. His data supports the idea that the key to this growth lies in the fact that most evangelical churches provide spiritually-based outreach groups that comfort and aid those going through some kind of personal crisis (measured in terms of divorce, illness, death of a spouse or relative, unemployment, or weak social ties). One of the great strengths of evangelical churches is the way they foster bonds between adherents in tightly-knit communities. Likewise, AultÕs (2004) ethnographic study of a small, independent fundamentalist Baptist church in Worcester, NH, conÞrms ShibleyÕs argument. The religious community Ault studied was anchored in very strong social ties between members, especially in kin-based and Òkin-likeÓ networks. These relationships were formed and preserved in many activities that were played out both inside and outside of worship services. For example, the church community was able to create a family atmosphere in Bible study groups, youth programs, marriage counseling, and in many other social service-type settings, providing responses to people in need (a job, a sick relative, a Þnancial need, a struggling marriage). In fundamentalist settings like these, the moral certitude that comes from a literalist interpretation of scripture helps to foster a sense of conÞdence, security, and empowerment. Followers believe and feel that they are defending a threatened but sacred moral order by following a strict set of religious guidelines that help to structure life in a changing and unpredictable world. In earlier studies, both Smith (1998) and Ammerman (1987) also showed that evangelical and fundamentalist subcultures offer their members Òsacred umbrellasÓ (SmithÕs phrase) in the form of a religious worldview that spells out the moral codes that provide a pathway to salvation within the conÞnes of small, close-knit groups working together as members of a meaningful community. The central argument of this chapter then is that fundamentalism is a religious subculture that represents, in part, a response to various forms of alienation which have been generated by persistent class inequality. Alienation, however, is usually a problem more commonly encountered by people in the lower segments of the class system. Consequently, fundamentalism should be more appealing to those in less well-off classes and class fractions precisely because it so effectively helps its carriers to construct and sustain cognitive and emotional responses to alienation through interpersonal relationships that are not only grounded in a unique religious belief system but also in strong communal bonds. Therefore, two hypotheses are tested in this study:

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Hypothesis 1: Fundamentalists are more likely to reside in the lower tiers of religious class cultures than mainliners. Hypothesis 2: Fundamentalists situated in lower tier class fractions are more likely to experience alienation than mainliners. DATA AND METHODS This study explores the Class Culture Model of religious afÞliation and seeks to show that it is associated with measures of fundamentalism and alienation. The data source for this investigation is the General Social Survey, 1972–2006. The time period covered is 1984Ð2006. I have included some of the variables in continuous form in the t-test analyses only because these are easier to interpret. Three dependent variables are used as indicators of alienation. These tap into a personÕs beliefs about fairness, trusting other people, and self-centeredness. The questions are phrased in the following way: ÒDo you think people would try to take advantage of you or would they be fair?Ó (fairness). ÒWould you say that most of the time people try to be helpful or are they looking out for themselves?Ó (helpful). ÒGenerally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you canÕt be too careful in life?Ó (trust). These variables are coded in the following way: 1 = would take advantage of you (fair), 1 = just look out for themselves (helpful), 1 = canÕt be too careful (trust). The independent variables are categorized in terms of class, culture, and religious orientation and measured as follows. This study uses a modiÞed version of Erik Olin WrightÕs (1998, 2005) formulation of the class structure which is derived from both Marxian (exploitation) and Weberian (domination) dimensions of social class.2 I have transformed

2 WrightÕs class formulation is a close approximation of the class relations articulated in the Class Model and by many others (Mills 1951; McDermott 1991; Derber 1982; Derber 1990; Ritzer 1996; Perucci and Wysong 2004). WrightÕs class framework is ideal for exploring the connections between religious afÞliation and structural inequality because it synthesizes Marxian and Weberian models. Class location depends on both exploitation (extraction of surplus as spelled out by Marx) and domination (authority in organizations, according to Weber) and is determined by various combinations of: the ownership of property, control of organizational assets (decision-making and control of personnel in Þrms), and knowledge/skills (educational credentials). Five classes are constructed using these criteria. The capitalists (and small businesses) own capital (means of production, hire workers, appropriate surplus, and control all decision-making concerning allocation and use of resources). The middle class is nestled between capitalists and workers. Their structural position resembles both of these

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ÒoccupationsÓ into class relationships. Five classes are reconÞgured using two variables: employment (self/other) and the 1970 and 1980 Census Occupational Categories. The classes are deÞned in the following way: upper business class is composed of self-employed respondents in the executive, administrative, managerial, professional, technical and sales categories; managers work for someone else in the executive, administrative and managerial occupations; professionals work for someone else in professional, technical, and sales occupations; the lower business class is made up of the self-employed but in the administrative support, service farming, or precision, production, craft, operators, laborers, and repair occupations; and the working class is composed of those who work for someone else in the administrative support, service, precision, production, craft, repair, operators and laborers categories. In the analysis that follows, then, the class variable includes education, 1 = 2 or more years of college, income, 1 = $26,000 or more, in 1986 dollars, class, 1 = lower business class and the working class. The culture variables are region, 1 = South, city size, 1 = small town, sex, 1 = female, age, 1 = 40 and older, church attendance, 1 = more than once a week, fundamentalist/mainline afÞliation, 1 = fundamentalist. Denominational afÞliation and biblical literalism are measures of fundamentalism and orthodoxy that have been used frequently in the literature (Ammerman 1982; Hunter 1981). I used Roof and McKinneyÕs (1987) classiÞcation of Protestant denominations. Mainliners are made up of both liberal and moderate Protestants: Episcopalians, United Church of Christ, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Disciples of Christ, Northern Baptists, and Reformed. Fundamentalists include Southern Baptists, Churches of Christ, evangelicals/fundamentalists, Nazarenes, Pentecostals/Holiness, Assemblies of God, Churches of God, and Adventists. The sample includes non-Hispanic whites only. Four logistic regression models are tested in this study. The Þrst model tests the class culture model of fundamentalist afÞliation. Class polarized classes. Managers and supervisors occupy a contradictory class location, which means that they help coordinate the exploitation of subordinate classes but are at the same time in a subordinate position relative to the capitalists. They do not directly engage in exploitation, but control, to varying degrees, the activities of the workers. Professionals (including experts) are also in a contradictory class location. They possess high levels of skill/credential assets, which enables them to have more self-direction and autonomy at work, but do not control capital or workers. The petty bourgeoisie (selfemployed) own capital but do not employ workers. The working class does not own capital, controls no organizational assets, and possesses limited skills/credentials and is composed of a large contingent of blue and white collar workers.

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and culture variables are used as predictors of fundamentalist afÞliation. This model determines whether class and culture are both signiÞcant predictors of afÞliation. This is a test of hypothesis number one. The next three models make up the empirical validation of hypothesis number two, namely, that both class and culture predict three different measures of alienation (fairness, helpfulness, and trust). The version of the Class Culture Model in Models 2 through 4 now include fundamentalist afÞliation as an independent variable, which becomes an additional cultural factor. Finally, class and cultural predictors of the fairness variable are explored across Þve social classes using t-tests. This strategy provides a closer look at the class and culture inßuences operating within each class. RESULTS Table 1 shows the t-tests, means, and standard deviations for fundamentalist afÞliation. The data show that fundamentalists tend to have attained fewer years of education, earned lower incomes, work in the Table 1: Fundamentalist afÞliation by class, alienation, and culture variables Variables

Mean Education Income ( $) Class Fairness Trust Helpful Attendance Region City Size Sex Age

Mainliners (59%)/N = 1964

Fundamentalists (41%)/N = 1396

12.27 27.9 K 4.16 .42 .64 .47 5.22 .52 .40 .59 49.97

S.D.

N

2.69 22.6 K 1.23 .49 .47 .49 2.58 .49 .49 .49 17.85

1395 1256 1319 801 869 811 1390 1398 1339 1398 1396

Mean

S.D.

N

T-Sig

14.07 39.6 K 3.67 .21 .45 .31 3.74 .31 .27 .57 50.44

2.68 32.1 K 1.34 .41 .48 .46 2.37 .46 .44 .49 17.68

1965 1822 1884 1074 1181 1085 1943 1966 1889 1966 1964

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