THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY 9781032230726, 9781032234656, 9781003277743

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THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY

The Routledge International Handbook of Sociology and Christianity examines the intersection of the sociology of religion – a long-standing focus of sociology as a discipline – and Christianity – the world’s largest religion. An internationally representative and thematically comprehensive collection, it analyzes both the sociology of Christianity and Christian approaches to sociology, with attention to the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant branches of Christianity. An authoritative, state-of-the-art review of current research, it is organized into five inter-connected thematic sections, considering the overlapping emergence of both the Christian religion and the social science, the conceptualization of and engagement with Christianity by sociological theory, the ways in which Christianity shapes and is shaped by various social institutions, the manner in which Christianity resists and promotes various forms of social change, and the identification, diagnosis, and correction of social problems by sociology and Christianity. This volume is an invaluable collection for scholars and advanced students, with special appeal for those working in the fields of sociology and social theory, as well as religious studies and theology. Dennis Hiebert is a semi-retired professor of sociology teaching at the University of Manitoba, Canada, with special interest in public sociology. He is Past President of the Christian Sociological Association, current editor of the Journal of Sociology and Christianity and author, most recently, of Rationality, Humility, and Spirituality in Christian Life.

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THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY

Edited by Dennis Hiebert

Cover Image: Kayla Hiebert, Chez Koop First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Dennis Hiebert; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Dennis Hiebert to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032230726 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032234656 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003277743 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743 Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For those who practice grace



v

CONTENTS

List of Figure and Tables xi List of Contributors xii Acknowledgments xvii Introduction to the Handbook: The Intersection of Sociology and Christianity

1

PART 1

The History of Christianity and Sociology

19

Introduction to Part 1: The History of Christianity and Sociology

21

1 Sociological Perspectives on First Century Christianity Anthony J. Blasi

23

2 Civilizational Analysis in Historical Sociology: Christianity in World History Yulia Prozorova

34

3 Orthodox Christian Diasporas in the West: Grounding the Tradition Marco Guglielmi

47

4 Saint-Simon, Saint-Simonism, and the Triumph of Comte’s Vision of Sociology Joseph A. Scimecca

59

5 Definitions of Religion in Classical Sociology: Transcendence in Durkheim and Weber Evan F. Kuehn



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Contents

6 The Rise of Public Religion in Countries of Catholic Tradition Joseba García Martín and Benjamín Tejerina

80

7 A Social History of Christofascism Steven Foertsch and Christopher M. Pieper

93

PART 2

Contemporary Sociological Theory and Christianity

101

Introduction to Part 2: Contemporary Sociological Theory and Christianity

103

8 Individualism, Collectivism, and Christianity Tsung-I Hwang

105

9 The Spatial Turn in the Study of Religion Jeffrey Robert Thomas

118

10 Post-Critical Sociology and Christianity Henry Kwok

130

11 Sociology, Christianity, and Critical Realism Brad Vermurlen

141

12 De-colonization, Sociology, and Christianity Henry Kwok

153

13 The Ethics of Globalization Clinton E. Stockwell

165

14 Ethics and Society: A Theory of Comparative Worldviews Tong Zhang

177

PART 3

Social Institutions and Christianity

191

Introduction to Part 3: Social Institutions and Christianity

193

15 Current Research on Religious Socialization in the Global North David Rohall

195

16 Theologically Informed Family Theory Todd F. Martin

207

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17 Marriage Payments among Christian Communities in Southern India Sristi Mondal and Anand Ranjan

219

18 Megachurches in the United States: Co-Sanctified Lexicons as Worldviews Valerie Hiebert

230

19 Contemporary Christian Music and Contemporary Worship Music Ibrahim Abraham

242

20 The Impact of Western Christianity on Trade Unionism Theodore Koutroukis

254

21 Faith on the Ballot, Faith in the Ballot: The Democratic Process in Kenya Martin Munyao and Sylvia W. Muriuki

266

PART 4

Social Change and Christianity

275

Introduction to Part 4: Social Change and Christianity

277

22 Poverty in Working Classes and Christian Social Movements in Britain Victoria Turner

279

23 The Social Gospel Movement in the United States Clinton E. Stockwell

290

24 Liberation Theology in Latin America Madeleine Cousineau

301

25 Black Christianity and Black Liberation Movements in the United States Shaonta’ E. Allen

313

26 Peacebuilding in Fragile, War-Torn Societies in Africa Anne Kubai

326

27 The Construction of Online Christian Sacred Space in Indonesia Izak Y.M. Lattu

339

28 The Cultural Turn from Religion Toward Spirituality in the Global North Dennis Hiebert

351

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Contents PART 5

Applied Sociology and Christianity

365

Introduction to Part 5: Applied Sociology and Christianity

367

29 Applied and Clinical Sociology: A Christian Perspective Joshua D. Reichard

369

30 Seeking Ethical Discernment in Christian Legality and Community Laura R. Ford

380

31 Christianities and Socialisms Joerg Rieger

391

32 The Relevance of Christian Ethics to the Ethic of Care Sanja Ivic

403

33 Theological Influences on Mobilization of Opposition to Modern Slavery Matthew C. Clarke

415

34 Christianity and Human Rights Olga Breskaya and Giuseppe Giordan

427

35 The Recurring Christian Debate about Social Justice Dennis Hiebert

440

Author Index Subject Index

453 455

x

FIGURE AND TABLES

Figure

6.1 Political reorganization of the laity in the process of religious de-privatization 84 Tables

8.1 8.2 14.1 15.1

The attributes of collectivism and individualism 107 Two types of individualism classified by Edward E. Sampson (1988:16) 108 Classification of some major worldviews 184 Article themes by journal, 2010-2019 (citations may cover multiple categories)197 26.1 South Sudan: Key peace agreements since the civil war began in December 2013 331 2 6.2 Burundi. Main peace agreements/initiatives 334 26.3 Key peace agreements/initiatives in the Central African Republic (CAR) 336



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CONTRIBUTORS

Ibrahim Abraham is Lecturer in Sociology at Federation University Australia and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University. He is the author, most recently, of Race, Class and Christianity in South Africa (2021) and Evangelical Youth Culture (2017) and editor of Christian Punk: Identity and Performance (2020). Shaonta’ E. Allen is a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth College, USA. Her research examines how Black resistance to racial inequality varies across social institutions, specifically within religion, higher education, and pop culture and sport. She has been published in Sociology Compass, Humanity & Society, and Sociological Perspectives. Anthony J. Blasi has retired from Tennessee State University, USA, and has served as president of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, associate editor of Sociological Analysis/ Sociology of Religion, and editor of the Review of Religious Research. His recent books include Social Science and the Christian Scriptures: Introductions and New Translation (2017). Olga Breskaya is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education, and Applied Psychology at University of Padova, Italy. Her research focuses on the sociology of human rights and the comparative study of religious freedom. She recently co-edited a volume of the Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Religious Freedom: SocialScientific Approaches (2021). Matthew C. Clarke is Principal Researcher for the Freedom Keys Research Project, an independent initiative near Sydney, Australia which generates and tests innovative ideas for ending modern slavery with a particular emphasis on understanding and engaging with perpetrators. Having published two books on theological topics, his interests focus on social change, international development, and cross-cultural peacemaking. Madeleine Cousineau is a retired professor of sociology. She taught full-time at Mount Ida College in the United States and held adjunct positions at Boston University and the University of Massachusetts as well as a Fulbright research/lectureship in Brazil. She is the

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Contributors

author of 12 journal articles and five books, mainly on religion and activism for social change. Steven Foertsch is a doctoral student in the Sociology of Religion program at Baylor University, USA. His research focuses on the intersection between politics and religion, socio-political philosophy and ontological belief, and emergent religious groups. He recently published "An Organizational Analysis of the Schismatic Church of Satan" in the Review of Religious Research (2022). Laura Ford is Associate Professor of Law at Faulkner University, USA. Her research interests include law and religion, economic sociology, social theory, and historical sociology. Her publications include articles in Qualitative Sociology, Max Weber Studies, and Theory & Society, as well as chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber (2019) and the Routledge Handbook on Max Weber (2022). Giuseppe Giordan is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education, and Applied Psychology at University of Padova, Italy. His research interests include spirituality, religious pluralism, conversion, inter-faith dialogue, Eastern Orthodoxy, and religious freedom. He has recently co-edited Religious Freedom: Social-Scientific Approaches (2021) and Global Eastern Orthodoxy: Politics, Religion, and Human Rights (2020). Marco Guglielmi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education, and Applied Psychology at the University of Padova, Italy. He has specialized in the sociology of religion within an international PhD program, and his research interests include Orthodox Christianity, religion and migration, religion and human rights, and inter-religious dialogue. Dennis Hiebert is a semi-retired professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba, Canada, with special interest in public sociology. He was President of the Christian Sociological Association and is currently editor of the Journal of Sociology and Christianity and the author, most recently, of Rationality, Humility, and Spirituality in Christian Life (2020). Valerie Hiebert has been Professor of Sociology for the past two decades and is currently teaching at the University of Manitoba, Canada. She has published on children and media violence and inter-sex persons and the church. A community justice activist, her research interests include food democracy, simpler living, cultural anthropology, language and culture, and gender. (No relation to editor Dennis Hiebert) Tsung-I Hwang is a former faculty member at Central Taiwan Theological Seminary, a current adjunct PhD supervisor at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, and the director of T. I. Hwang’s Cross Theology Classroom. A professional in Christian ministry, including pastoring, church planting, and theological education, he has expertise in systemic theology, apologetics, ethics, inter-cultural and inter-religious studies. Sanja Ivic is Research Fellow at the Institute for European Studies, Serbia, who has worked on her post-doctoral project at Paris Nanterre University, France. She is editor of ISFP Books and a board member of the International Society for Philosophers. Her recent booklength publications are Paul Ricoeur's Idea of Reference (2018) and EU Citizenship (2019).

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Contributors

Theodore A. Koutroukis is Associate Professor in Industrial Relations, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. His main research interests include employee relations, sociology of work, and people management, and his latest book is Contemporary Employee Relations (2022). Anne Kubai is Associate Professor of World Christianity and Interreligious Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden, with additional affiliations with two universities in South Africa. Her work has focused on peacebuilding and reconciliation after mass violence and grave violations of human rights, with an interest in the way religions shape social–political developments, post-conflict social reconstruction, and sustainability discourse. Evan F. Kuehn is Assistant Professor of Information Literacy at North Park University, USA. His research focuses on nineteenth to twentieth century Protestant thought, theology and social theory, and knowledge organization, and his most recent publications include Troeltsch’s Eschatological Absolute (2020) and (with Matthew Ryan Robinson) Theology Compromised: Schleiermacher, Troeltsch, and the Possibility of a Sociological Theology (2019). Henry Kwok is Research Fellow at Griffith University, Australia. His research interests include social justice and education, Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education, global educational reform movement, the politics of “post-truth,” and post-structuralism. He has published in the Journal of Education Policy, British Journal of Sociology of Education, and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. Izak Y. M. Lattu is Associate Professor in inter-religious studies and sociology of religion at Satya Wacana Christian University and Visiting Professor at the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies, Gadjah Mada University, both in Indonesia. His book, Rethinking Interreligious Dialogue: Orality, Collective Memory and Christian-Muslim Engagements in Indonesia, will be published in 2023. Joseba García Martín is Post-Doctoral Researcher of the Basque government at the University of the Basque Country, which has included a research stay at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Previously, he was Margarita Salas post-doctoral researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His interests include the sociology of religion, social movements, and collective identities. Todd Martin is Provost at Trinity Western University, Canada, where he has taught in the areas of sociology and family studies. He has published more than a dozen journal articles, has co-authored  Families Across the Life Course  and  Family Theories: An Introduction (2019), and is the managing editor of the Journal of Comparative Family Studies. Sristi Mondal is Doctoral Fellow and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. She is a recipient of the Junior Research Fellowship awarded by the University Grants Commission, government of India. Her research interests include sociology of marriage, technology studies, family, ethnography, gender and sexuality, and urban sociology. Martin Munyao is Lecturer in the Department of Peace and International Studies at Daystar University, Kenya. He recently co-edited The African Church and COVID-19: Human Security, the Church, and Society in Kenya (2022) and co-authored "Whiteness in

xiv

Contributors

Christianity and Decoloniality of the African Experience: Developing a Political Theology for ‘Shalom’ in Kenya" (2021) Religions 12(11):1006. Sylvia W. Muriuki is Lecturer in the Department of Peace and International Studies at Daystar University, Kenya. She is a trainer and consultant, with interests in diplomacy, governance, democracy, gender, and conflict management. Christopher Pieper is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Undergraduate Program at Baylor University, USA. His research interests include political sociology, social theory, religion, and technology/media. Most recently, he has published The Sociological Vision (2021) and Sociology as a Spiritual Practice: How Studying People Can Make You a Better Person (2015). Yulia Prozorova is Senior Research Fellow at the Sociological Institute of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include historical sociology, civilizational analysis, modernity, and post-Soviet transformations in Russia. Anand Ranjan is Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies, the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. He is a recipient of the Prof. D.W.D. Shaw fellowship awarded by the University of Edinburgh and the Junior Research Fellowship awarded by the University Grants Commission, government of India. His research interests include the anthropology of religion specific to Hinduism. Joshua D. Reichard is President and CEO of Omega Graduate School, the American Centre for Religion/Society Studies (ACRSS), an independent, non-profit, faith-based institution focused on “changing the world through social research.” He is an organizational leader, an interdisciplinary scholar, and a certified clinical sociologist. Joerg Rieger is Distinguished Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt University, USA. He is also Founding Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice and Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair in Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. His most recent books include Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity (2022) and Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God (2018). David Rohall is Professor and Dean of Campus and Community Relations at Ohio University Eastern, USA. His current research emphasizes the ways that social conditions impact individuals’ faith lives, and his most recent books include Social Psychology: Sociological Perspectives (forthcoming) and Symbolic Interaction in Society (2020). Joseph A. Scimecca is Professor of Sociology at George Mason University, USA. His area of specialization is the history of sociological theory, and his most recent book was Christianity and Sociological Theory: Reclaiming the Promise (2019). He is currently working on a book defining a new vision of the Christian sociology first proposed by Albion Small. Clinton E. Stockwell is Adjunct Faculty member at the National Louis University and the University of Chicago. He was formerly Executive Director of the Chicago Semester program. He teaches in the areas of American history and the social sciences, particularly as they relate to themes of urbanization, intellectual history, social reform movements, and cultural pluralism.

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Contributors

Benjamín Tejerina is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Collective Identity Studies at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. His preferred research topics include social movements, collective identity, sociology of youth, and sociological theory. His recent publications include Sharing Society (2019) and Crisis and Social Mobilization in Contemporary Spain: The 15M Movement (2018). Jeffrey Robert Thomas is Lecturer and Module Leader with Waverley Abbey College, United Kingdom, who lives in Oxford, UK. At present, he is preparing his thesis “Religion and the Public Sphere: The Spatial Theory of Michel de Certeau and Religious Space” for publication. Victoria Turner is PhD Candidate in World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh and a Tutor at the University of Stirling. Her research explores how missional theology from the non-Western world influenced mission practice in Britain, and she has published about ecumenism, practical theology, political theology, youth studies, and Scottish church history. Brad Vermurlen is Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. His research interests span social and political theory, culture, American religion, Christian thought, philosophy of social science, and cognitive sociology. He is the author, most recently, of Reformed Resurgence: The New Calvinist Movement and the Battle Over American Evangelicalism (2020). Tong Zhang is Assistant Professor at BI Norwegian Business School. His research interests include sociology of religion, economic sociology, sociology of science, and philosophy of social science. The central theme of his work is to introduce theism into social science and to establish the fundamental role of morality in determining social evolution.

xvi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I was rather surprised when Neil Jordan, Senior Editor at Routledge, invited me to compile and edit this international anthology. It was truly a high honor to be asked and an unnerving responsibility to accept supervision of producing another volume in the distinguished Routledge International Handbook series. As cliché as it is to say, what you have in your hands would simply not exist without the bold initiative, careful oversight, and finishing touches of Neil Jordan, Commissioning Editor, Alice Salt, Editorial Assistant, and Gemma Rogers, Editorial Assistant – Sociology. My first thanks must go to them and the Routledge team. Though I have been a person of Christian faith all my life, I only came to sociology in mid-life, after a first career in an unrelated field. Being welcomed into the faculty fraternity of Providence University College, a small, private, Christian liberal arts college in Canada, was a formative professional experience for which I will be forever grateful, but one that took several years to understand. Being part of a small department responsible for teaching a full range of sociology courses shaped me into a disciplinary generalist instead of a specialist and propelled me into interdisciplinary scholarship. Instead of being enmeshed in a large disciplinary department in which everyone views the world through the same lens, speaks the same academic language, and focuses on a subdisciplinary specialty, almost all my colleagues were from entirely other academic disciplines. I rubbed shoulders with non-sociologists every day, and when I wanted to access expertise from other fields such as theology, humanities, natural science, or professional studies, I could literally walk down the hallway and knock on the office door of Cameron McKenzie, Rebecca Dielschneider, Patrick Franklin, Brianne Collins, Michael Gilmour, Heather Macumber, Luann Hiebert, or others. This was a relatively unique blessing I did not fully appreciate at first, but it enabled me to become someone who knows a little about a lot instead of someone who knows a lot about a little. Many Providence students, plus those during my short teaching stints in Ukraine, Kenya, and Russia, absorbed the brunt of my pedagogical passions but also prompted me to refine them. So, my second thanks goes to my Providence faculty colleagues and students over the many years. Beyond Providence University College, I have been sustained and invigorated both personally and professionally by the Christian Sociological Association (CSA). As both an informal network of social support and a formal platform for scholarship at the intersec

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Acknowledgments

tion of sociology and Christianity, it has provided friends and colleagues beyond the walls of my institutional affiliation and constantly reminded me that I am far from alone at that crossroads. Furthermore, I have, since 2016, been privileged to edit the biannual Journal of Sociology and Christianity (JSC) co-sponsored by the CSA, which has provided another network of scholars at the intersection of sociology and Christianity, energized most by Matthew Vos. Two chapters in this Handbook first appeared as research articles in the JSC, two members of the JSC Editorial Board have contributed original chapters to this Handbook, and other board members have provided feedback on other aspects of this Handbook. The overlap is strong and strongly valued. As a compendium of works by a collection of professional scholars, this volume is also obviously entirely dependent on all who have contributed chapters to it. Routledge made it very clear from the beginning of this project that they did not want it to be merely EuroAmerican scholars talking to each other, and I have done my best to select a sampling of chapters from around the world from the original 65 proposals I received, while recognizing the disproportionate presence of both sociology and Christianity around the world. Many of the contributors are more accomplished professionally than I am, and I have learned a lot. Furthermore, because this volume was compiled during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many contributors had to withstand debilitating personal circumstances, and not a few had to withdraw altogether. Thus, extra thanks are due those contributors who stepped up late in the process to contribute chapters not originally planned and those who even doubled up on chapters to maintain the breadth of coverage. Finally, and most personally, I must thank my colleague and friend Valerie Hiebert (no kin relation) for being my primary dialogue partner about all things sociological the past 25 years. She, perhaps more than anyone in my private circle, understood the magnitude of this project, and beyond being my principal interlocutor, enthusiastically supported me throughout, always and in all ways. But my greatest thanks are reserved for my life-long partner, my home, Judy. Also a career professional educator, she understood fully what absorption in a project like this requires and readily made room for it to fit into and, at times, even disrupt our everyday life together. Her openness to all things sociological and to her Christian faith journey inspire me. All that follows reflects her character as much as any other contributor’s. Dennis Hiebert March 2023

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INTRODUCTION TO THE HANDBOOK The Intersection of Sociology and Christianity

The field of sociology is frequently introduced to newcomers as the development of what C. Wright Mills described as the sociological imagination, the “vivid awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society” (1959:5), the comprehension of relations between biography and history. As a social science, sociology can also be understood more broadly or philosophically as what Charles Taylor termed a modern Western social imaginary, a “common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (2004:23). By including “images, stories, and legends,” social imaginaries are more than mere social theories and “the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality.” In this sense, Christianity is, likewise, a social imaginary of “the deeper normative notions and images that underlie expectations” (Taylor 2004:23). Indeed, Christianity is also a “way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings” (Taylor 2004:23) but one that long pre-dates and dwarfs sociology. Notably, inasmuch as Christianity has historically conceptualized both virtue and vice as attributes predominately of individuals, not social structures, it has, to that extent, lacked a sociological imagination.

History Presumably, humans have always theorized, scrutinized, and moralized about the character of their existence in general and their relationships with each other, in particular. Long before Christianity took form two millennia ago and sociology took form two centuries ago, social theories about reality, social observations about actuality, and social ethics about morality, however informal and unrefined, guided human life. Ironically, as many scholars have documented, the rise of modern Western science was impelled by the Christian social imaginary. The Book of Nature, a religious and philosophical concept originating in the Latin Middle Ages, viewed the earth as a tome to be read for advancing knowledge and understanding. Thus, in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon famously wrote of God’s two books: God’s Word (scripture, special revelation, God’s workings in the world) and God’s Works (creation, general revelation, the workings of God’s world), the latter to be read via scientific research to better comprehend and admire not just the world but also its divine author. Robert Merton (1938) argued that it was English Puritanism and German DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-1

1

Introduction to the Handbook

pietism, in particular, that drove the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries via the significant synergy between ascetic Protestant values and those of modern science. When science turned its scrutiny onto humans themselves, the Christian social imaginary, if not always the specific doctrinal beliefs of Christianity, remained formative of the new social sciences. Western science had, from its beginnings, been birthed by the rationality of the Scholastics of the twelfth century and nursed by the Enlightenment “science of man” but also by Christian moral philosophy (Scimecca 2019). That the new empirical science of sociology was soon and severely weaned from Christian moral philosophy neither negates sociology’s genealogy nor its future potential to “reclaim its promise” in post-modernity (Scimecca 2019) by being re-imagined (Chiareli 2019). Nevertheless, as the young social science grew throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, there were attempts in England and the United States to deliver “Christian Sociologies” each with their own social carriers, philosophical bases, and social and intellectual climates and each confronting what would become perennial issues of philosophical anthropology, ethics, and epistemology (Lyon 1983a). In Britain, a tension emerged “between religious sociology, in which sociology is put to serve faith, and the secular sociology of religion, where religion is studied scientifically, [though] the secular sociology of religion eventually replaced early religious sociology” (Brewer 2007:7). In the United States, “between 1865 and 1915 … religious and secular spheres were not clearly segregated within American social thought or American higher education. Social gospel, social reform, and social science burgeoned; all went by the name sociology” (Henking 1993:49). In Canada, the history of English language sociology bore “the substantial institutional footprint of so-called ‘social gospel’ sociology in Canada’s Protestant universities and religious colleges, 1889–1921” (Helmes-Hayes 2016:1). After sociology was more firmly secularized in the second quarter of the twentieth century, both Catholic and Protestant Christian sociology separated and organized more overtly in the second half of the century, though an identifiable Catholic sociology did not survive the century. In the United States, the American Catholic Sociological Society was founded in 1938 but was renamed the Association for the Sociology of Religion in 1970, just as the quarterly American Catholic Sociological Review was renamed Sociological Analysis in 1973 and then the Sociology of Religion in 1993 (Kivisto 1989). Similarly, in Europe, the International Conference of Religious Sociology, established in 1948 in Belgium, was Catholic in ethos, but by 1989, it had transformed into the secular International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) because of the ambivalent response of the churches in Western Europe to sociological analysis of religion and continuing distrust by Orthodox Christianity of reductionist, positivist, or Marxist analyses of religion. Faced with mounting tensions and a strained relationship with Rome because of the attempt by the Catholic Church to control its outputs, the ISSR abandoned Catholicism and linked up with mainstream sociology instead (Dobbelaere 2000). Meanwhile, within Protestantism, both the Ilkley Group in Britain and the Christian Sociological Society (CSS) in the United States were conceived in the 1970s and are still active today, providing a personal network and supportive forum for Christian sociologists. In 1976, the Association of Christians Teaching Sociology (ACTS) emerged out of the CSS, because “CSS and ACTS originated out of overlapping yet distinctly different needs … ACTS is similar to an academic or scholarly wing of CSS” (Moberg 2015:60). In 2015, ACTS was renamed the Christian Sociological Association (CSA) to mirror the American 2

Introduction to the Handbook

Sociological Association (ASA), and it became the organizational co-sponsor of the newly named biannual Journal of Sociology and Christianity (Hiebert 2016a, 2016b). Though the secular sociology of religion, in which religion was approached scientifically, had come to dominate the academic discipline, Christian sociology was very much alive. Beginning in the 1980s, the explosion of publications exploring the interface of sociology and Christianity was further evidence of its resurgent vitality. Multiple definitive analyses of the Christian–sociology nexus emerged (e.g., Lyon 1983b; Gaede 1985; Perkins 1987; Fraser and Campolo 1992), and multiple collections of readings exemplifying the same were collated (e.g., De Santo, Redekop, and Smith-Hinds 1980; Grunlan and Reimer 1982; Swatos 1987; Leming, DeVries, and Furnish 1989). By the twenty-first century, Nancy Ammerman opined that “Christian scholars have important opportunities to participate in the re-framing [of sociology] that is now underway” (2000:694). Textbooks used in introduction to sociology courses were published from a Christian perspective (e.g., Tweedell 2003; Kim 2022), and some popular Christian writers, such as Brian McLaren (2007; 2021; McLaren, Padilla, and Seeber 2009), unabashedly exercised a vigorous sociological imagination. In sum, throughout the two centuries they have shared, sociology and Christianity have fluctuated from combining to colliding to colluding and back to combining again (Brewer 2007). From the 1881 publication of John Henry W. Stuckenberg’s Christian Sociology during the origins of the social gospel movement, to sociology’s fixations on secularizing itself and on its secularization thesis of society for most of the twentieth century, to when “the sociological imagination proved a revelation in theology and biblical studies” (Brewer 2007:21) toward the end of the century, the relationship of sociology and Christianity has continually evolved. One manifestation of the latter was the significant extent to which socio-critical approaches to exegetical studies of the Bible, and especially to the beginnings of Christianity, had become an avant-garde tool of hermeneutics relative to the historical– critical approaches inherited from the nineteenth century (Turcotte 1992).

Challenges Needless to say, many luminaries have expounded on the complementary relationship of religion and science in general. From a scientific perspective, Albert Einstein asserted that “science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind” (1954:46). While it is clear that, from this context, he did not have Christianity in mind (Coyne 2013), it is at least ironic that Matthew 21:14 reports that “The blind and the lame came to [Jesus] in the temple, and he cured them.” From a religious perspective, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks contended that “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean” (2014:284). And from a Christian perspective, in a letter to Father (Fr) George Coyne, Society of Jesus (SJ), the director of the Vatican Observatory, Pope John Paul II once wrote that “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish” (1988). In imagining a sacramental imagination, Marilynne Robinson proposed that “[i]t is a triumph of science to have, in some degree, described the electron, and preposterous to suggest it has been explained” (2015:5). However, this professed complementarity of religion and science is more complicated and problematic between the relatively neighboring disciplines of theology and the human social sciences than between the more distant disciplines of theology and the non-human, 3

Introduction to the Handbook

natural, physical sciences. It is also far from a categorically all or nothing complementarity. David Entwistle (2021) elucidates and evaluates six models of relationship between theology and social science practiced in sociology’s sister science of psychology that reveal finer, more nuanced points across the spectrum and are equally applicable to sociology. The Enemies model views each other as mutually exclusive, antithetical, irreconcilable combatants, locked in inevitable, unending mortal conflict, each rejecting the other as a source of truth. Spies scope out the territory of the other camp, selectively plundering that which might prove useful for their own camp but never engaging in actual open hostilities. Colonialists claim dominion over a supposedly inferior foreign land, extracting what is useful while transforming it in an imperial process that reduces the other to dependency. Rebuilders recognize the value of empirical approaches but are critical of modernist definitions and claims of objectivity and seek to recover a unique Christian framework and perspective. Neutral parties do not breach the other’s boundaries, being content to live in segregated or compartmentalized peace, each respecting the other without trying to become like or change the other much less unite with the other. Allies as subjects of one sovereign view truth as unified but existing in two equal forms, neither of which is worthy of the allegiance due only to God who reigns over both. Examples of each of these six relationships between sociology and theology could readily be identified, but historical Christian sociology, as described here, is that of either the rebuilders model or the allies as subjects of one sovereign model. Nevertheless, several challenges linger at the intersection of sociology and Christianity, each of which are mitigated when they are viewed as allies. One challenge is the Weberian account of Christianity as a rejection of “the world,” which includes not only all the domains and dynamics of the human social realm which sociology examines but also as a modern social science – sociology itself. Thus theology, insofar as it articulates the original radical template of Christianity, is against, and  sociology  is with, “the grain” of the world … [T]he template of Christianity implicitly provides a sacred reference point for a whole civilization, whatever people's dogmatic commitments or lack of them. (Martin 2005:159) Yet, contra Weber, many contemporary expressions of Christianity do not reject the world, but rather increasingly reflect this-worldly concerns as much as other-worldly concerns, welcome sociology as an ally subject to the same sovereign, and foster a sociological imagination. Second, regarding their respective modes of operation, theology and sociology employ contrasting methods of knowing that prevent full integration and which can, at times, create discomfort with each other. Jürgen Habermas (1971) delineated between the distinct knowledge systems of analytic science built on systematic observation, humanistic knowledge built on interpretation, and critical knowledge built on dedication to social change. While sociology in the respective traditions of Durkheim, Weber, and Marx utilizes all three systems and methods, theology is clearly not scientistic. And it is the methodological naturalism or atheism of science that, for certain reasons and in certain circumstances, renders it suspect to theology. Methodological atheism or “bracketing God” in the sociology of religion, as first labeled by Peter Berger (1967), has since been critiqued as “both untenable and injurious to sociology’s aims” (Porpora 2006:57) and as performing “no 4

Introduction to the Handbook

proper normative function in the academic study of religion; it fabricates, trivializes, and renders inexplicable religious experience; it is not neutral or objective; and the argument for its normativity improperly legitimates a secular worldview” (Cantrell 2016:373). In contrast, the “methodological agnosticism” already employed by much of the psychology of religion is more truly neutral and actually more in accord with what Berger meant (Porpora 2006). And when used as a helpful tool with acknowledged limitations, not adopted as a comprehensive worldview, methodological agnosticism can readily serve as an ally. A third challenge is ascertaining and accepting the relative epistemological and disciplinary status of sociology and theology. Does one rule over the other, or are they equal allies capable of true dialogue? In the High Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas argued that theology not only is a science, but “from every standpoint … is nobler than other sciences” (Aquinas 2018:5). Some Christian scholars today continue to pay such homage to theology, arguing that theology is “the queen of the sciences” while all others serve as handmaidens (Porter 2010), that the sciences must serve theology in a ministerial rather than a magisterial capacity (McGrath 2001a), or that theology should disregard the social sciences entirely because they are hopelessly modern, secular, and plebeian (Milbank 2006). For them, theology always plays a governing, regulating, and controlling role; always retains the right to critique the sciences in ways the sciences are not permitted to reciprocate; and always preserves the privilege of having the last word.

Dialogue Such a regal view of theology as imperial colonizer effectively negates constructive dialogue between theology and sociology. Only when theology and social science are viewed as equally collective, human, interpretive enterprises (Postman 1988) can more than mere conversation, that is, true dialogue occur. For a conversation to be a dialogue, each party must fully recognize the other as equal, place self at stake, be open to truth, and seek fusion (Gadamer 2000). Refusal to do so is simply will to mastery. Dialogues must remain in the present and ongoing, neither totalizing nor capitulating, each holding the other accountable and, thereby, providing a system of epistemic checks and balances. For truly, the social sciences are at bottom “no more than narrated interpretations of reality which possess no privileged status permitting them to judge or police others” (McGrath 2001b:119). So, too, is theology (Hiebert 2008). Examples of fruitful dialogue between sociology and Christianity are myriad and multifarious, as the following illustrate. Beginning with Christianity’s sacred text itself, English Bible translations have been examined for whether they tend to justify the destruction of Indigenous cultures via colonialism and imperialism or serve to preserve and support Indigenous cultures (Adrian 2007). Recent research has documented how Bible translation is an ever-dynamic product of interpretive communities and, thus, a product of temporal cultural reproduction and power by actors with vested interests. For example, Samuel Perry (2020) has detailed how conservative complementarian gender ideology was systematically inserted into the English Standard Version (ESV), a contemporary evangelical revision of the Revised Standard Version (RSV), and how the same translation also whitewashed the text “by progressively re-translating lexically ambiguous terms and introducing footnotes to obviate the Bible’s ostensible promotion of slavery and antisemitism” (2021:612). Overall, Bible translations, whether they pursue “’formal correspondence’ (prioritizing literalness) 5

Introduction to the Handbook

or ‘functional equivalence’ (prioritizing meaning),” are markers of religious subcultures (Perry and Grubbs 2020:319) that shape choice of beliefs, practices, and general religiosity. Examples of disciplinary dialogue at the micro, (inter)personal level include Christian Smith’s (2007) emotions-focused phenomenological account of why Christianity “works,” in which he “explicates the recurrent, characteristic, and subjective experiences of many Christians that help to explain their ongoing commitment to and involvement in the faith” (2007:165). But perhaps the most influential sociological analysis of Christianity of the last generation has been Grace Davie’s thesis of “believing without belonging” (1990). Based on data from 20 European countries 30 years later, this new form of religiosity is said to constitute not so much a de-institutionalization of Christianity but, rather, a spiritualization of religion (Tromp, Pless, and Houtman 2020). Diana Butler Bass (2012), for one, expanded Davie’s thesis to posit a cultural “Great Reversal” around the turn of the millennium from the prescribed chronological order of first believing, then behaving, and eventually belonging that institutionalized religion mandated to the experiential chronological order of first belonging, then behaving, and eventually believing that lived spirituality fostered. Unpacking and reordering such aspects of faith also calls into question whether Christianity consists primarily of the right doctrine of orthodoxy, the right practice of orthopraxy, or the right affections of orthopathy. Theology has traditionally favored belief as definitive, whereas sociology currently favors practice as definitive (Smith 2017), and philosophy occasionally favors affection as definitive (Smith 2016). Increasingly, the love of neighbor is seen to matter more than the truth of apologetics (Hiebert 2016c). Examples of disciplinary dialogue at the meso-, community, and organizational levels include analyses of church and para-church organizations, what makes them “work” or not work, and their effects on both their individual members and their surrounding community. All the basic sociological questions apply: What is the nature of various Christian group phenomena? What are the constituent elements? What are the types and categories? What actually happens? By what process? Under what conditions? What are the spiritual versus social causes and consequences? For example, from a Protestant perspective, pastor–theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s first doctoral dissertation was entitled “Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church” (1998). From a Catholic perspective, theologian Gregory Baum (2006) drew on Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Toennies to understand Christianity as both a source and a product of alienation. In disciplinary response, George Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis (2015) has been employed to examine how Protestant organizations have become so rationalized, so devoted to efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control that they have become alienating (Hiebert 1999). Examples of disciplinary dialogue at the macro-, (inter)national level include theologian Walter Wink’s unmasking of (1986) and engaging with (1992) the “principalities and powers” of the world – power being a concept central to sociology. In Robert Osburn and Ksenafo Akulli’s (2013) theological assessment, Christianity as a power mechanism has historically served more to aggregate power for the political and religious establishment—the Roman Empire, the Crusades, and colonialism—than to distribute power and empower the people, as is theologically intrinsic to Christianity. Today, the rise of what is variously termed Christian nationalism, Christian dominionism (Clarkson 2016; Ladner 2022), and sometimes simply Christianism (Sullivan 2006) is drawing much attention. “Right-wing populisms in Europe and the USA … [have] demonstrated a remarkable potential for mobilising the sacred through relentless sacralisations of nationhood … [and a] reliance 6

Introduction to the Handbook

on Christian imaginaries and symbols for predominantly and possibly exclusively secular purposes” (Van der Tol and Gorski 2022:492). Overall, there are many "hidden threads" of Christian principles woven into sociological theories and the fabric of society (Heddendorf and Vos 2010) and countless examples of dialogue between sociology and Christianity, even expressions of theology as sociology and sociology as theology (Wheeldon 2016). Nevertheless, Evans and Evans conclude that “the influence of Christian theology on mainstream sociology has been almost nothing compared to the influence of mainstream sociology on theology” (2012:351). Meanwhile, as Robin Gill asserted in his three-volume Sociological Theology (2012a, 2012b, 2013), “the proper work of a sociologist is to sniff cautiously at everything, sociology included” (2013:3). So too, the proper work of a theologian is to sniff cautiously at everything, theology included.

Post-Secularity Several binary concepts are common in the sociology of religion. While the relatively recent sacred/profane distinction is usually traced to Durkheim, the transcendent/immanent distinction is a legacy of the Axial Age BCE, the religious/secular distinction is a product of Western European Christianity, and the religious/post-secular distinction is descriptive of the current cultural ethos (Beriain 2015). The consensual contention is that, whereas the pre-modern world was religious, the modern world then became secular, and the postmodern world has now become post-secular, at least in the Global North. For much of the twentieth century, most sociologists considered secularization wrought by modernity to be an irresistible force; the inevitability of increasing faithlessness became an article of their faith. At the macro-level, religious decline in the Global North was attributed “to institutional differentiation, to the spread of instrumental rationality, to pluralism, and to religious privatization” (Spickard 2016:107). At the meso-level, much research has documented the diminished health and gradual decline of Christian congregations and organizations in the Global North because of size disparities, aging memberships, generational changes, and more diverse religious contexts (Thumma 2021) or, more profoundly, because of simple religious disaffiliation – becoming religious “nones.” Nonetheless, many sociologists today reject the secularization thesis, preferring the concept of “deChristendomization” instead (Larsen 2006), or pointing out that, while religion in the Global North continues to wane, the Global South remains “as furiously religious as it ever was” (Berger 1999:2). Furthermore, at the micro-level, private belief in the reality of a supernatural divine and individual spiritual longing for connection with the transcendent persist and are, in many ways, resurgent globally, often as “a backlash against modern life” (Spickard 2016:108). Clearly, long-term cultural trends are, at the very least, more complex than simple, uniform, linear, religious decline and disappearance (Dobbelaere 2002). Despite some dubious optimism about “the next Christendom” in the Global South (Jenkins 2011), the culture of the Global North is, by now, unquestionably and thoroughly post-Christendom. The geopolitical state of Christendom forged in the fourth century under the Roman Emperor Constantine began to crumble and disintegrate eras later when confronted by the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the rise of the nation-state in the nineteenth century, and the turn to consumerism of the broadest, even non-material sense in the twentieth century (Hall 2002). Christendom gradually lost its religious monopoly to religious pluralism and its political authority to political secularism. Now, in post-Chris7

Introduction to the Handbook

tendom, Christian ideals and values no longer overtly ground public thought and action, Christian ethics no longer overtly guide social institutions, and the Bible no longer overtly governs morality with any collective authority. Though post-Christendom is often conflated with post-Christian, the latter is best understood as something other – that is, as a society in which there is no longer a significant percentage of Christians, much less a significant Christian presence. A post-Christian culture denotes that most collective expressions of and personal commitments to Christianity have been abandoned and that Christianity has, therefore, become essentially absent. In this sense, it is entirely possible for a society to be post-Christendom without yet being postChristian, which, in fact, best describes current culture in the Global North (Hiebert 2020). What is meant by post-secularity is the return of religion to law, politics, and other aspects of public life after being stringently sequestered to the private realm by modernity and democracy (Lombaard, Benson, and Otto 2019). Most simply, it is “the persistence, reformulation, or resurgence of religion in the public sphere” (Beaumont and Eder 2019:7). More specifically, post-secular societies are neither religious nor secular, they do not prescribe or privilege a religion, but neither do they actively and intentionally refrain from doing so. They are neither for nor against religion(s). … For them, religion has ceased to be something to which a society or a state has to relate in embracing, rejecting, prescribing, negating, or allowing it, … and hence there is no need for them to be secular anymore. (Dalferth 2010:317) More subtly, in the context of multiple modernities, post-secularity is seen as, “in fact, a type of secularism (perhaps ‘late’ rather than ‘post’) in neoliberal societies” (Possamai 2017). For example, in the United States, where church and state are separated, “religious enlightenment is taken to be the right to believe and for those beliefs to count in public affairs,” whereas in Europe, where church and state are more closely aligned, “religious enlightenment is taken to be the right not to believe” and to restrict religion to the private sphere (Brewer 2007:9). However, given the failure of secularized society to meet human existential needs, post-secularity could potentially not only de-privatize religion, but even re-center religion in public life (Phillips 2020). The contemporary post-secular climate will likely fragment society, emphasize the place of the individual in the Christian church, and require it to contend with fundamentalism and civil religion (Beyers 2014). But it is also a considerable opportunity to re-invigorate and advance dialogue between sociology and Christianity, to re-ignite the sociological imagination of theology and the theological imagination of sociology to see what they can possibly learn from each other (Burdziej 2014). This new era also opens possible epistemological shifts in the sociological study of religion itself (Johansen 2013). Another corollary of post-secularity is the need for a post-colonial sociology of Christianity, because “expanding sociology’s conceptual canon to include insights from other historical-cultural locations is more than just an ethical matter. It is also epistemological” (Spickard 2018:1).

Pluralities A further qualification of both the secularization and post-secularity theses is the more recent contention that they are not singular global phenomena but, rather, “multi-dimen8

Introduction to the Handbook

sional” phenomena (Dobbelaere 2002) comprised of “multiple secularities.” Secularities are “the institutionalized and lived nonreligious spaces and their relationships to whatever religious forms are prominent in a particular place and time” (Spickard 2016:108). Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt developed a Weberian ideal-typical “fourfield-matrix” of secularities based on either 1) secularity for the sake of individual rights and liberties; 2) secularity for the sake of balancing/pacifying religious diversity; 3) secularity for the sake of societal or national integration and development; [or] 4) secularity for the sake of the independent development of functional domains of society. (2012:889) In seeking “to de-center sociology’s overemphasis on Western modernization while still retaining the secular as an analytic category” (Spickard 2016:109), examination of the variant secularities in India, Japan, Africa, the Arab world, and post-communist countries reveals how secularities are shaped differently in different cultural contexts (Burchardt et al. 2015). Russia is another example of how “societies that arrive at  secularity  may arrive there from very different points of departure and by following very different secularization paths, and the particular paths taken are of considerable consequence” (Marsh 2016:123). These multiple secularities are outcomes of Shmuel Eisenstadt’s (2000) founding concept of “multiple modernities,” which has been debated for the past two decades. Recognizing the historical precedence of Western patterns of modernity as fundamental points of reference for other modernities, he argued that each country defines its individual path to modernity  through its own internal conflicts; modernity, in its multiple dimensions, is a continual mechanism of re-appropriations and re-interpretations of the idea of modernity. But the precondition of all modernities, according to Weber, is emancipation from traditional concepts of authority, which empowers members of society to an ongoing contestation of the status quo. Eisenstadt consistently applied this to religion as well; the relationship between religious traditions and social dynamics was at the very heart of his thought. “Once we treat modernities as multiple, the specificity of each modernity opens up the spectrum of religious alternatives that flourish in every geo-cultural area. … [Such as] the growing diversity of popular religious expressions in the Global South” (Parker 2019:565). Likewise, Christianity also consists of many different dimensions and can be defined in many ways: institutionally, doctrinally, liturgically/pragmatically, spiritually/experientially, moralistically, missionally, demographically, politically, socially, or linguistically (McLaren 2021). And though Christianity has historically been addressed as a singular entity, the theological, organizational, and personal reality of Christianity has long been plural; Christianity is far from uniform or isomorphic. The Great Schism of the eleventh century and the Reformation of the sixteenth century differentiated the three historic Christianities: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant. The latter protestors seeking to reform the faith were themselves differentiated as Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, or Anabaptist Christianities, before they, too, differentiated into tens of thousands of denominational Christianities by the end of second millennium. Add to this all the sectarian Christianities and the multiple theologies and movements within each Christianity as elucidated by Weberian church-sect typology, and it becomes impossible for sociology to analyze Christianity as if 9

Introduction to the Handbook

it were one instead of multiple (Kollman 2012). All that can be addressed are particular, regional, and sometimes even local Christianities. For example, evangelicals are best understood as an array of disparate theologies, movements, and “evangelical Christianities” that have “shifted political realities, split historical denominations, and altered global perspectives on Christianities … [and have] developed in relation to changes in views on gender identities, political identities, multiculturalism, and religious diversity” (Forster 2019:267). Furthermore, the anti-intellectualism that characterizes evangelicals in general (Noll 2022) is clearly not true of evangelical intellectuals. As James K.A. Smith noted, scholarly, intellectual endeavors are flourishing in evangelical institutions … But we simply have to recognize and confess how utterly disconnected all of this is from the vast majority of evangelical congregations … The voices that command evangelical attention are often horrendously unreflective, parading their anti-intellectualism as a badge of being “real Americans” and fomenting the worst of evangelicalism’s populist impulses … Because of this continued disconnect … evangelicalism is a mission field for evangelical scholarship. (2018:142–48) It is in this sense that sociology can be prophetic instead of priestly for Christianity, speaking to the Christian establishment from its margins, instead of speaking for the Christian establishment from its center (Hiebert 2013). Lastly, given its multiple theoretical perspectives and research methodologies, and the extensive breadth of its reach from micro- to macro-social phenomena, sociology is itself plural, perhaps more so than any other academic discipline. Michael Burawoy (2021) has articulated a two-by-two matrix of “four sociologies” based on two questions: knowledge for what and knowledge for whom. Table 1  Four sociologies (Burawoy 2021:36) Knowledge for Whom?

Knowledge for What?

Instrumental Knowledge Reflexive Knowledge

Academic Audience

Extra-Academic Audience

Professional Sociology Critical Sociology

Policy Sociology Public Sociology

When knowledge is means-to-an-end instrumental and generated for an academic audience, it is professional sociology – theoretical/empirical knowledge that follows scientific norms by solving puzzles in research programs. When knowledge is still instrumental but generated for an extra-academic audience, it is policy sociology – concrete knowledge that serves clients by solving problems defined by those clients. When knowledge is reflexive and generated for an academic audience, it is critical sociology – foundational knowledge with a moral vision that elucidates and interrogates the underpinnings of professional sociology. And when knowledge is still reflexive but generated for an extra-academic audience, it is public sociology – communicative knowledge defined by its relevance to publics that generates public discussion about the overall direction of society. “While professional and policy 10

Introduction to the Handbook

sociologies answer narrowly defined questions, critical and public sociologies uncover the value foundations such questions eclipse” (Burawoy 2021:36). There is no substantive sense in which professional sociology can be practiced “Christianly” or “anti-Christianly,” just as there is no meaningful way in which a musical instrument can be played Christianly or anti-Christianly. But just as playing a musical instrument can be used for Christian or anti-Christian purposes, so, too, can policy sociology, as has been demonstrated in various regions of the world throughout its lifespan. However, perhaps the greatest intersection Christianity has with the respective sociologies is with both critical and public sociology. Though sociology has frequently engaged in reflexive disciplinary self-critique – the sociology of sociology (e.g., Gouldner 1970) – Christianity is that much better positioned outside sociology to critique it effectively. For example, Charles Taylor (1999) argued that secular modernity, of which sociology is one artifact, is, at its heart, a championing of Christian social ethics in secular terms. In The Sacred Project of American Sociology, Christian Smith noted “how closely sociology’s sacred, spiritual project parallels that of (especially Protestant) Christianity in its structure of beliefs, interests, and expectations” (2014:18), a parallel to which some Christians vehemently object as “the religion of activism” and “ideology masquerading as scholarship” (Riley 2019:9). As for public sociology, which is a counterpart to “public religions” (Casanova 2008), there is no greater sphere of the mutual engagement of sociology with Christianity for the betterment of the human condition and experience. Both have recently been freed and empowered to do so, sociology escaping confinement in the academy, and Christianity once again expanding beyond the private realm of life in post-secularity. Both sociology and theology can and must bring their truths to seek together solutions to human problems within the scope of their mutual concern, and at all levels, from personal alienation to interpersonal conflict to institutional discrimination to international poverty (e.g., Vos 2022). Failure to become socially active is hardly sociologically responsible, just as failure to bring a message of hope and a ministry of healing to the world is hardly Christian. For professional sociology purists to argue that social activism is beyond the supposed “value-freedom” of science is tantamount to saying social activism is also beyond the raison d’etre for being Christian. Sociological knowledge, like being Christian, is not an end in itself intended only for the cognitive benefit of the smug knower. As long as there are human needs in this world, being a sociologist and/or Christian is a call to do something in and for this world. Personal epiphanies are unnecessary; the need itself constitutes the call. In the end, the intersection of sociology and Christianity is unsurprising for those invested in both and, indeed, more organic than commonly intuited. As social imaginaries, their similarities brought them together in the Christian sociologies of the nineteenth century, their differences drove them apart during the secularization of the sociology of religion in the twentieth century, before their likenesses reunited them toward the end of the century. Despite the persisting challenges of being for or against the world, utilizing different methods of knowing, and vying for epistemological authority, true dialogue between sociology and theology has now been achieved at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of analysis. This interchange has been facilitated by the current cultural ethos of postsecularity which welcomes both religious and secular viewpoints into the public sphere while acknowledging the pluralities of multiple secularities, modernities, Christianities, and sociologies. The compendium in hand assumes this cultural context and pursues this disciplinary engagement. 11

Introduction to the Handbook

Overview This handbook is a collection of analyses from scholars around the world of selected aspects of the intersection of the relatively young, modern social science of sociology understood by a tiny minority of global citizens, and the old, metamodern world religion of Christianity understood at least cursorily by a vast majority of global citizens. As two respective social imaginaries or standpoints, this collection includes both sociological perspectives of Christianity – an application of the more general, classical subdiscipline of the sociology of religion to the world’s largest religion – as well as Christian perspectives of sociology or at least of social issues/problems of mutual concern. The former are the etic perspectives of the “objective,” universal, “non-native,” social scientific outsider, whereas the latter are the emic perspectives of the “subjective,” local, “native,” religious insider (Harris 1976). At times, a third standpoint is taken to observe the similarities, differences, and relationship between the two standpoints of sociology and Christianity. The intent is to avoid excessively favoring any one perspective over the others. This volume is divided into five distinct parts, each opening with its own short Introduction to its theme and the seven respective chapters included. Part 1: The History of Christianity and Sociology provides a sociological perspective of early Christianity, comparative world religions, as well as the main branches of Christianity. It then elucidates Christian influences on early sociology before examining current Christian influences on public religion and nationalism. Part 2: Contemporary Sociological Theory and Christianity explicates Burawoy’s professional and critical sociologies intended for academic audiences. Going beyond the standard theoretical perspectives of sociology, it offers more philosophical perspectives of both sociological topics and sociology itself. Part 3: Social Institutions and Christianity expounds on what Auguste Comte, in his early formulation of sociology as “social physics,” termed the “social statics” of social institutions that form part of social structure. The character and role of selected micro-, meso-, and macro-social institutions are examined. Part 4: Social Change and Christianity expounds on what Comte termed the “social dynamics” of social change. It details selected Christian responses intended to mitigate social inequalities and injustices of social class and race, mollify war and disease, and respond to cultural change from religiosity to spirituality. Finally, Part 5: Applied Sociology and Christianity explicates Burawoy’s public and policy sociologies intended for extra-academic audiences. After introducing professional applied sociology, it relates applied sociology to law and community, socialisms, and modern slavery, all in the context of the ethics of care, human rights, and social justice. Certain types of chapters appear across all five parts of the volume. One category is that of case studies of social phenomena that have occurred in particular countries or regions of the world (Chapters 6, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, and 28). The titles of these chapters specify the location of the case study, which then suggest further future research about how those phenomena play out in other time periods, cultural contexts, geographical regions, and Christianities around the world. A second category of chapters is original empirical research published here for the first time (Chapter 15 on religious socialization; Chapter 18 on megachurches; Chapter 27 on sacred space; Chapter 33 on modern slavery). Third, the most common chapter type is a summary of research and application of theory, though there is even one chapter articulating original theory (Chapter 14 on ethics and society). Fourth, some chapters are more overtly theological perspectives of sociological topics or social issues (Chapter 16 on family theory; Chapter 24 on liberation theology;

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Introduction to the Handbook

Chapter 33 on modern slavery), while some are more overtly from a Roman Catholic (Chapters 6 and 24), Protestant (Chapters 18, 19, and 23), or Eastern Orthodox perspective (Chapter 3). Furthermore, some chapter topics are more closely related to other chapter topics, occasionally in other parts of the handbook. For example, Chapter 13 on globalization is closely related to Chapter 32 on the ethic of care and Chapter 35 on social justice. Chapter 22 on social movements in Britain is closely related to Chapter 23 on the social gospel in the United States and Chapter 24 on liberation theology in Latin America. Chapter 33 on modern slavery is closely related to Chapter 34 on human rights and Chapter 35 on social justice. Chapter 6 on public religion is related to Chapter 7 on Christofascism; Chapter 9 on the spatial turn is related to Chapter 27 on sacred space in Indonesia; Chapter 16 on family theory is related to Chapter 17 on marriage payments; Chapter 20 on trade unionism is related to Chapter 31 on socialisms; Chapter 27 on sacred space in Indonesia is related to Chapter 32 on the ethic of care. Unlike disciplinary dictionaries or encyclopedias which have shorter entries, a handbook with longer chapters cannot hope or pretend to be comprehensive in coverage of its topic. Several significant topics at the intersection of sociology and Christianity are not addressed directly and thoroughly in this compilation or are addressed only in the context of other concerns. For example, environment and ecology are addressed as one ethical aspect of globalization. Perhaps the most regrettable absences are a chapter on gender, sexuality, and feminism; another on deviance and crime; and a third on technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Also missing are chapters on the social institutions of education, health and medicine; media and popular culture; and sports and the arts. Chapters on symbolic interactionist perspectives of the self, the body, and emotions would have carried the dialogue that much further. Additional work in the future is vital to fill these gaps. The aim of this volume is to set a research agenda on selected topics for the immediate future of scholarship globally, redefine existing areas within the context of international multi-disciplinary research within these two fields, highlight emerging areas within them, and provide upper undergraduate and graduate students with ideas and encouragement for future research activity. May the reader find it effective in doing so.

References Adrian, William. 2007. “Is Bible Translation “Imperialist?” Challenging another Anti-Christian Bias in the Academy.” Christian Higher Education 6:289–297. Ammerman, Nancy T. 2000. “Christian Scholarship in Sociology: Twentieth Century Trends and Twenty-First Century Opportunities.” Christian Scholar’s Review 29(4):685–694. Aquinas, Thomas. 2018. Summa Theologica Complete in a Single Volume. Claremont, CA: Coyote Canyon Press . Bass, Diana Butler. 2012. Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. New York: HarperOne. Baum, Gregory. 2006. Religion and Alienation: A Theological Reading of Sociology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Beaumont, Justin, and Klaus Eder. 2019. “Concepts, Processes, and Antagonisms of Postsecularity.” Pp. 3–24 in The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity, edited by Justin Beaumont. London: Routledge. Berger, Peter L. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday.

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Introduction to the Handbook Berger, Peter L., ed. 1999. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Beriain, Josetxo. 2015. ““Affirmative Genealogy” of Religion from a Sociological Perspective.” Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas 151:3–20. Beyers, Jaco. 2014. “The Church and the Secular: The Effect of the Post-Secular on Christianity.” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 70(1):1–12. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 1998. “Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church.” Vol. 1, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, edited by Clifford J. Green. Translated by Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Brewer, John D. 2007. “Sociology and Theology Reconsidered: Religious Sociology and the Sociology of Religion in Britain.” History of the Human Sciences 20(2):7–28. Burawoy, Michael. 2021. Public Sociology: Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia. Medford, MA: Polity Press. Burchardt, Marian, Monika Wohlrabsahr, and Matthias Middell, eds. 2015. Multiple Secularities Beyond the West: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age. Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter. Burdziej, Stanislaw. 2014. “Sociological and Theological Imagination in a Post-secular Society.” Polish Sociological Review 186:179–193. Cantrell, Michael A. 2016. “Must a Scholar of Religion Be Methodologically Atheistic or Agnostic?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84(2):373–400. Casanova, José. 2008. “Public Religions Revisited.” Pp. 101–119 in Religion: Beyond a Concept, edited by Hent de Vries. New York: Fordham University Press. Chiareli, Antonio A. 2019. “Constructing a “Christian Sociological Re-Imagination:” Creation, Fall, and Redemption as a Unifying Analytical Framework.” Journal of Sociology and Christianity 9(1):27–47. Clarkson, Frederick. 2016. “Dominionism Rising: A Theocratic Movement Hiding in Plain Sight.” The Public Eye. Coyne, Jerry A. 2013. “Einstein’s Famous Quote About Science and Religion Didn’t Mean What You Were Taught.” The New Republic. Dalferth, Ingolf U. 2010. “Post-secular Society: Christianity and the Dialectics of the Secular.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78(2):317–345. Davie, Grace. 1990. “Believing without Belonging: Is This the Future of Religion in Britain?” Social Compass 37(4):455–469. De Santo, Charles P., Calvin Redekop, and William L. Smith-Hinds, eds. 1980. A Reader in Sociology: Christian Perspectives. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press. Dobbelaere, Karel. 2000. “From Religious Sociology to Sociology of Religion: Towards Globalization?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39(4):433–447. Dobbelaere, Karel. 2002. Secularization: An Analysis at Three Levels. Bern: Peter Lang. Einstein, Albert. 1954. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Three Rivers Press. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2000. “Multiple Modernities.” Daedalus 129(1):1–29. Entwistle, David N. 2021. Integrative  Approaches to  Psychology and Christianity, 4th ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Evans, John H., and Michael S. Evans. 2012. “Sociology and Christianity.” Pp. 344–355 in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, edited by J. B. Stump and Allan G. Padgett. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. Fraser, David A., and Tony Campolo. 1992. Sociology Through the Eyes of Faith. New York: HarperCollins. Forster, Dion Angus. 2019. “New Directions in Evangelical Christianities.” Theology 122(4):267–275. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2000. Truth and Method 2nd rev. ed. New York: Continuum. Gaede, S. D. 1985. Where Gods May Dwell: On Understanding the Human Condition. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Gill, Robin. 2012a. Theology in a Social Context: Sociological Theology Volume 1. New York: Routledge. Gill, Robin. 2012b. Theology Shaped by Society: Sociological Theology Volume 2. New York: Routledge. Gill, Robin. 2013. Society Shaped by Theology: Sociological Theology Volume 3. New York: Routledge. Gouldner, Alvin. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books.

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Introduction to the Handbook Grunlan, Stephen, and Milton Reimer, eds. 1982. Christian Perspectives in Sociology. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press. Hall, Douglas J. 2002. The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Harris, Marvin. 1976. “History and Significance of the Emic/Etic Distinction.” Annual Review of Anthropology 5:329–50. Heddendorf, Russell, and Matthew Vos. 2010. Hidden Threads: A Christian Critique of Sociological Theory. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Helmes-Hayes, Rick. 2016. “Building the New Jerusalem in Canada’s Green and Pleasant land”: The Social Gospel and the Roots of English Language Academic Sociology in Canada, 1889–1921.” Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie 41(1):1–52. Henking, Susan E. 1993. “Sociological Christianity and Christian Sociology: The Paradox of Early American Sociology.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 3(1):49–67. Hiebert, Dennis. 1999. “The McDonaldization of Protestant Organizations.” Christian Scholar’s Review 29(2):261–279. Hiebert, Dennis. 2008. “Can We Talk? Achieving Dialogue Between Sociology and Theology.” Christian Scholar’s Review 37(2):199–214. Hiebert, Dennis. 2013. “Problems and Possibilities of Sociology as Prophetic.” Christian Scholar’s Review 43(1):11–20. Hiebert, Dennis. 2016a. “On Change.” Journal for the Sociological Integration of Religion and Society 6(1):1–3. Hiebert, Dennis. 2016b. “A Re-Visioned Journal.” Journal of Sociology and Christianity 6(2):1–5. Hiebert, Dennis. 2016c. “Truth and Love in Christian Life.” Journal for the Sociological Integration of Religion and Society 6(1):30–35. Hiebert, Dennis. 2020. Rationality, Humility, and Spirituality in Christian Life. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Jenkins, Philip. 2011. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Johansen, Birgitte Schepelern. 2013. “Post-Secular Sociology: Modes, Possibilities, and Challenges.” Approaching Religion 3(1):4–15. John Paul II. 1988. “Letter of His Holiness John Paul II to Reverend George V. Coyne, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory.” Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Kim, Henry Hyunsuk. 2022. A Brief Introduction to Sociology from a Christian Perspective. San Diego, CA: Cognella Academic Publishing. Kivisto, Peter. 1989. “The Brief Career of Catholic Sociology.” Sociology of Religion 50(4):351–361. Kollman, Paul. 2012. “Analyzing Emerging Christianities: Recent Insights from the Social Sciences.” Transformation 29(4):304–314. Ladner, Keri. 2022. “The Quiet Rise of Christian Dominionism.” The Christian Century. November, 48–52. Larsen, Timothy. 2006. “DeChristendomization as an Alternative to Secularization: Theology, History and Sociology in Conversation.” Pro Ecclesia 15(3):320–337. Leming, Michael R., Raymond G. DeVries, and Brendan F. J. Furnish, eds. 1989. The Sociological Perspective: A Value-Committed Introduction. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Lombaard, Christoffel, Iain T. Benson, and Eckart Otto. 2019. “Faith, Society and the Post-Secular: Private and Public Religion in Law and Theology.” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 75(3):20–31. Lyon, David. 1983a. “The Idea of a Christian Sociology: Some Historical Precedents and Current Concerns.” Sociological Analysis 44(3):227–242. Lyon, David. 1983b. Sociology and the Human Image. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Marsh, Christopher. 2016. “The Two Pluralisms Under the Third Rome.” Society 53(2):123–130. McGrath, Alister. 2001a. A Scientific Theology: Volume 1: Nature. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. McGrath, Alister. 2001b. A Scientific Theology: Volume 2: Reality. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. McLaren, Brian D. 2007. Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson. McLaren, Brian D. 2021. Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned. New York: St. Martin’s Essentials.

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Introduction to the Handbook McLaren, Brian D., Elisa Padilla, and Ashley Bunting Seeber, eds. 2009. The Justice Project. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. Merton, Robert K. 1938. “Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England.” Osiris 4:360–632. Milbank, John. 2006. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Moberg, David O. 2015. “Participant Observations and Reflections Related to the Future of CSS and ACTS.” The Journal for the Sociological Integration of Religion and Society 5(1):55–67. Noll, Mark A. 2022. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Osburn, Robert, and Ksenafo Akulli. 2013. “Does Christianity Aggregate or Distribute Power? A Historical and Analytical Assessment of Christianity as a Power Distribution Mechanism.” Kairos: Evangelical Journal of Theology VII(2):183–192. Parker, Cristian. 2019. “Popular Religions and Multiple Modernities: A Framework for Understanding Current Religious Transformations.” Religions 10(10):565. Perkins, Richard. 1987. Looking Both Ways: Exploring the Interface between Christianity and Sociology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Perry, Samuel L. 2020. “The Bible as a Product of Cultural Power: The Case of Gender Ideology in the English Standard Version.” Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review 81(1):68–92. Perry, Samuel L. 2021. “Whitewashing Evangelical Scripture: The Case of Slavery and Antisemitism in the English Standard Version.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89(2):612–643. Perry, Samuel L., and Joshua B. Grubbs. 2020. “Formal or Functional? Traditional or Inclusive? Bible Translations as Markers of Religious Subcultures.” Sociology of Religion 81(3):319–342. Phillips, Rick. 2020. “The Prospects of Postsecular Religion: A Sociological Perspective.” Berlin Journal of Critical Theory 4(2):53–77. Porpora, Douglas V. 2006. “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36(1):57–75. Porter, Steven L. 2010. “Theology as Queen and Psychology as Handmaid: The Authority of Theology in Integrative Endeavors.” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 29(1):3–14. Possamai, Adam. 2017.“Post-Secularism in Multiple Modernities.” Journal of Sociology 53(4):822–835. Postman, Neil Postman. 1988. “Social Science as Moral Theology.” Pp. 3–19 in Conscientious Objections: Stirring up Trouble about Language, Technology, and Education. New York: Vintage Books. Riley, Alexander. 2019. “A Religion of Activism.” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion & Public Life 292:9–11. Ritzer, George. 2015. The McDonaldization of Society, 8th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Robinson, Marilynne. 2015. The Givenness of Things. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Sacks, Jonathan. 2014. The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning. New York: Knopf Doubleday. Scimecca, Joseph A. 2019. Christianity and Sociological Theory: Reclaiming the Promise. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, Christian. 2007. “Why Christianity Works: An Emotions-Focused Phenomenological Account.” Sociology of Religion 68(2):165–178. Smith, Christian. 2014. The Sacred Project of American Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Christian. 2017. Religion: What it Is, How it Works, and Why it Matters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, James K. A. 2016. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Smith, James K. A. 2018. “The Future is Catholic: The Next Scandal for the Evangelical Mind.” Pp. 141–160 in The State of the Evangelical Mind: Reflections on the Past, Prospects for the Future, edited by Todd C. Ream, Jerry Pattengale, and Christopher J. Devers. Downers Grove: InterVarsity. Spickard, James V. 2016. “Multiple Secularities Beyond the West: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age.” Sociology of Religion 77(1):107–109. Spickard, James V. 2018. “The Sociology of Religion in a Post-Colonial Era: Towards Theoretical Reflexivity.” Religions 10(1):1–13.

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Introduction to the Handbook Sullivan, Andrew. 2006. “My Problem with Christianism.” Time, May 15. Swatos, William H. ed. 1987. Religious Sociology: Interfaces and Boundaries. New York: Greenwood. Taylor, Charles. 1999. A Catholic Modernity: Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture. New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thumma, Scott L. 2021. “A Portrait of the 2020 Faith Communities Today Study.” Theology Today 78(3):212–224. Tromp, Paul, Anna Pless, and Dick Houtman. 2020. “‘Believing Without Belonging’ in Twenty European Countries (1981–2008): De-institutionalization of Christianity or Spiritualization of Religion?” Review of Religious Research 62(4):509–531. Turcotte, Paul-Andre. 1992. “The Sociology of Christianity’s Beginnings.” Social Compass 39(1):179–182. Tweedell, Cynthia Benn, ed. 2003. Sociology: A Christian Approach for Changing the World. Marion, IN: Triangle Publishing. Van der Tol, Marietta, and Philip Gorski. 2022. “Rethinking the Sacred in Religion and Nationalism.” Religion, State & Society 50(5):492–494. Vos, Matthew S. 2022. Strangers and Scapegoats: Extending God’s Welcome to Those on the Margins. Ada, MI: Baker Publishing. Wheeldon, Jeff. 2016. “Theology as Sociology, Sociology as Theology.” Journal of Sociology and Christianity 6(2):6–23. Wink, Walter. 1986. Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces that Determine Human Existence. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Wink, Walter. 1992. Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika, and Marian Burchardt. 2012. “Multiple Secularities: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Secular Modernities.” Comparative Sociology 11:875–909.

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PART 1

The History of Christianity and Sociology

INTRODUCTION TO PART 1 The History of Christianity and Sociology

The metamorphosis and, some would say, rise and fall of Christianity from the first to the twenty-first century CE has profoundly altered Christianity and its host cultures. Yet despite the secularization of the Gregorian calendar from “Before Christ” (BC) and “Anno Domini” (AD) – “in the year of the Lord” – to “Before the Common Era” (BCE) and the Common Era (CE), its dating of world history still turns on the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Furthermore, Christian holy days are frequently enshrined as national holidays, and the etymology of goodbye in the lingua franca of English is “God be with you.” Clearly, both the explicit and implicit presence of Christianity in many cultures remains massive. Hence, sociology’s interest in Christianity remains intense, as it was from the beginning of the social science when Christianity served as early sociology’s European context and primary religious reference point. Part 1 highlights selected social features of the two millennia of Christianity, beginning with sociological factors that formed its first century, then tracking Christianity’s evolution and intersection with classical sociology, and ending with contemporary political expressions of Christianity of interest to sociology. Anthony Blasi leads with a literary examination of the various texts that comprise the New Testament, employing textual criticism, source criticism, and redaction criticism. By examining the texts in the chronological order in which they were written instead of in the order they appear in the Bible, as well as providing social profiles and contexts of the authors, he offers sociological insight into how social location and social dynamics gave shape to the respective texts and, thus, to the early Christian movement. Yulia Prozorova then explicates Christianity as a world-historic phenomenon and locates it within the civilizational analytic perspective of comparative historical sociology with reference to the Axial Age breakthrough, the religio-political nexus as a societal metainstitutional framework, and the rise of modernity. She further elucidates the internal tensions and divisions within the Christian framework that led to the distinct civilizational trajectories of Western Christendom and Byzantine Orthodoxy. Marco Guglielmi provides further distinctions between Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy, as well as descriptions of how Orthodoxy intersects with modernity, refuting the image of Orthodox Christianity as a monolithic religious system composed of passive and backward institutions. More particularly, he provides quantitative and qualitative DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-3

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descriptions of the settlement of Orthodox diasporas in Western countries, and how they ground the Holy Tradition in their conditions as immigrant groups and religious minorities. Joseph Scimecca turns to the Christian origins of sociology, citing the Christian beliefs of the Enlightenment Philosophes and Saint-Simon’s belief in God despite his criticisms of the clergy. He details how it was the misrepresentations and distortions by the Saint-Simonians of Saint-Simon’s model for a new Christian-based society, along with Comte’s professed atheism that provided the context for the triumph of Comte’s vision of sociology as a purely secular discipline that now characterizes contemporary sociology. Evan Kuehn illuminates how the theological concept of transcendence typifies world religions in the classical sociology of religion, though Durkheim presented a transcendence of the collectivity over the individual, whereas Weber presented transcendence as a motivation for social action and a reference point for the legitimation of social organization. Rooted in the work of earlier scholars, and retained in that of contemporary scholars, “intramundane relations of transcendence” are key to understanding religion sociologically. Joseba García Martín and Benjamín Tejerina question theories of secularization by tracing the recent de-privatization strategies the Catholic Church has mobilized to maintain its role as an influential agent in the public space of moral policy debates. They first analyze tensions between religion and politics in the context of the rise of Catholicism as a “public religion,” then identify strategies used by the secularized laity to increase its presence in public space, and finally characterize the identity framework known as the “Culture of Life.” Steven Foertsch and Christopher Pieper address the currently growing, more blatant international phenomenon of Christian nationalism, which is the fusion of authoritarian populism with Christianity in what they term “Christofascism.” After exploring its world history, social contexts, and political theology, they overview case studies of “far-right civilizationism” in the United States of America, Latin America, and Europe to comprehend how, by appealing to religious discourse, fascists appear moral and are legitimated in the eyes of the majority.

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1 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON FIRST CENTURY CHRISTIANITY Anthony J. Blasi

Abstract This chapter summarizes an extensive study which rigorously employed the respective methodologies of literary analysis and social scientific analysis. Literary analysis required the establishment of the original text (textual criticism), then the inclusion of portions of some texts into later ones (source criticism), and finally the development of theses over time (redaction criticism). Information gleaned from source criticism as well as from extra-biblical historical information made a sequence of dates of composition possible. The application of social scientific inductive analyses to the texts and their sequence and dates of composition yielded a developmental process of the early Christian movement, with different sociological interpretive concepts shown to be relevant at different points in that process. The movement emerged as a new religion seeking recognition and creating structure, and eventually as a sect maintaining identity through boundary maintenance and orthodoxy.

Introduction The early movement of Christ-followers included the Jesus Movement and Early Christianity. The former consisted of Jesus of Nazareth and those who followed him during his lifetime, principally in Galilee and Judea. The latter consisted of a geographically broader movement during the course of the following century. Both terms are modern and not found in antiquity. The information we have about both takes the form of literary works in Koine Greek, written and preserved in the Early Christian movement. Consequently, there is scant direct evidence about the Jesus Movement; sociological and social historical works that focus on the Jesus Movement tend to characterize Galilee and Judea before and during the lifetime of Jesus (e.g., Root 2014). Scholars today can undertake solid research more readily on Early Christianity. The ancients generally did not write history in a modern sense, let alone write sociology. Even ancient biographies create impressionistic responses to persons rather than factual narratives. To develop modern perspectives on Early Christianity, one needs to consider DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-4

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the written material from the movement as literary material, not historical material, and as discourse embodied in an ancient language, not translations into modern languages; translations are insufficiently grounded in the original social contexts. The social profiles of the ancient authors and their audiences, therefore, become particularly important. The times and places that are reflected in the various works in Early Christian literature (principally the New Testament) are important data points. Modern authors tend to organize their treatments of the New Testament in the order the ancient works appear in modern Bibles, beginning with Matthew and ending with Revelation. This obscures the developmental aspects of the Early Christian movement. By way of contrast, Anthony Blasi (2017) presents the New Testament works in the order of their composition, as best as can be established. For purposes of establishing the social contexts reflected in the texts, places of reception, if known, are also critical (Blasi 2018).

Era of the Authentic Paulines and Hebrews The earliest work in Christian literature is the first letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, ca. 50 CE. Because it was an actual letter, its intended audience can be identified – “audience” because most people were not literate, and authors expected their works to be read aloud to them. Thessalonika was home to multiple cults from its 315 BCE founding, and the Romans selected some of them as symbols of their social order. Christian legend had it that local influentials resisted the introduction of Paul’s missionizing, that bond had to be posted for Paul’s release from detention, and that Paul had to leave town (Acts 17). Paul evidently addressed his letter to a craft association of male laborers, encouraging them to continue working despite their end-time consciousness, which involved “a symbolic transformation of the temporality of human life into its ultimate state” (Weigert 1988:176). Consequently, the letter had an eschatological section, but it did not encourage a strident sect-like detachment from or opposition to the surrounding society. About 50–53 CE, Paul wrote to the Galatians, followers in the Province of Galatia, now the south-central Turkish coast. There was a controversy in the region among Hellenized Jews over how much of the ethnic practices outlined in the Hebrew scriptures should be observed. The controversy spread among regional Christians as well, and Paul advocated non-observance for gentile Christians. Had the controversy occurred in the days of the Jesus Movement, Jesus, by virtue of his personal charisma, could have settled the matter. In the days of Paul, a second generation convert, the controversy involved the problem of succession of authority. Paul addressed that problem by referring to his personal charisma derived from his conversion experience and addressed the controversy by referring to an organizational consensus achieved, he says, in Jerusalem some years earlier. The issue was critical because ethnic observances from the Hebrew Torah affected commensalism, with the sharing of meals both serving as a vehicle of social solidarity and as a Christian ritual. Paul’s letter to the Galatians and his extensive extant correspondence with the Corinthians (in chronological order: 2 Cor 6:14–7:1; 1 Cor; 2 Cor 10–13; 2 Cor 2:14–6:13, 7:2–4; 2 Cor 1:1–2:13, 7:5-8:24) reveal conflict within the Early Christian movement. Sociologists, following Georg Simmel (2009:227–305), see conflict not as a breakdown of social relationships but, rather, as one aspect of them. Relationships entail both uniting tendencies and respect for mutual autonomy and, hence, distantiation. Information on the Corinthian Christians can also be found in Romans 16:1–23, which was sent from Corinth, as well as in Acts. Internal stratification in the Corinthian church is evident in First Corinthians, with some of the con24

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flict arising from Paul’s efforts to resist the inequality. Paul disapproves of litigation (resorting to political elites to decide cases) and of unequal meals in the assembly, and he declines to become a client of any patron. He also refers, in passing, to some but not many being well off and mentions slaves among the followers. He also resists gender inequality, rejecting out of hand the statement quoted from a letter sent to him, “Let the women be silent in the churches” (1 Cor 14:34). In numerous passages in Second Corinthians, he even seems to glory in stigma. A number of Paul’s letters date from about 55–56 CE. His letter to Philemon seems to accept the institution of slavery, which, along with agricultural estates, were the forms of capital accumulation known in antiquity. However, he also undermines slavery by asking Philemon, publicly, to accept the slave Onesimus as an equal. Paul’s letter to the Philippians rejects any quest for glory and power and accepts female leadership within the congregation. His letter of recommendation for Phoebe also accepts female leadership in the movement (Rom 16:1–23). These stances were countercultural in the context of the Roman Empire. Romans 1–15 is a theological treatise rather than a simple letter, sent during a brief stay in Corinth about 57–58 CE. Paul sent it not only to the dual Jewish and gentile congregations in Rome but also sent a copy to Christians in Ephesus, appending the letter recommending the deacon Phoebe. From a sociology of knowledge approach to Romans 1–15, however, much of the Roman Empire was officially hostile to the quasi-Jewish Christian religious innovation; the Empire itself prepared the way for its growth by transcending genealogical or tribal identities. Compared to the Early Christian movement, Judaism’s retention of ethnic practices limited its appeal. In a short-term response to the dual ethnicity of the Roman congregations, Paul developed separate theologies of salvation for the gentile and the Jewish Christians. The very presence of both led to the problem of one subgroup regarding the status of the other subgroup as somehow disreputably low in status. In a much-discussed passage (Rom 1:26–27), Paul mentions non-natal (usually translated as “unnatural”) sexual activities, in which some gentile converts could have been formerly involved and for which Jewish Christians could have still held them in contempt. Paul refers to such sexual activity as low status (usually translated as “dishonorable”) but does not label it sin. Rather, he lists a number of other behaviors as worthy of condemnation, and then goes on to urge his audience not to judge. After the genuine Pauline letters, but prior to 70 CE, an anonymous author “away from Italy” wrote a treatise for the benefit of one or more congregations in Rome, with some quasi-letter verses added at the end. In modern Bibles, the work is known as the Letter to the Hebrews. Hebrews establishes the identity of Early Christianity as an emergent or new religious movement; dynamics include obtaining recognition as a religion, compatibility with national identities, acceptance as representative of given old traditions, and self-identification by members as being members (Bromley and Melton 2012). The newness of a new religion may be a product of development within an old tradition, syncretism, the insertion of an old tradition into a new geographical location, new forms of organization, or a new population of members (Barker 2004). Simply by being new, such a movement may be vulnerable due to being a product of secondary rather than primary socialization, may involve younger dependent participants, and may elicit external antagonism.

Rome: The Gospel of Mark The Gospel of Mark is the earliest of the synoptic gospels, used by Matthew and Luke as a source for their basic narratives. It uses non-standard Greek, which Matthew and Luke 25

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correct, and lacks early Christian gems such as the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer, which one would hardly cut if the Markan parallels with Matthew and Luke were to be explained by a reverse dependence on those two gospels. Because of references to the destruction of Jerusalem which occurred in 70 CE, commentators in New Testament studies have dated the Gospel of Mark from about that year. For a very weak reason – there were Christfollowers in Antioch and Damascus – they have assumed it was written and published in Syria. However, more recent scholarship, summarized by Brian Incigneri (2003), suggests it more likely dates from 71 CE and was written in and for the Christian congregations in Rome. The author was unfamiliar with the geography of Palestine, alludes twice to the Temple curtain that was paraded through Rome after the destruction of the Temple, uses some Latinisms in the text, and translates common Semitic words. Moreover, early traditions attribute the gospel to Mark, translator for Peter in Rome (1 Peter 5:13; Eusebius, 1998:3, 39, 15). In Rome, Emperor Nero had undertaken an active persecution of Christians. Emperors after Nero left in place statutes making Christianity subject to the death penalty, but they did not set out searching for Christians. In a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation, it was reasonable for Christians to keep their movement secret. As commentators have long noted, the Gospel of Mark has Jesus commanding his followers, the people he cured of various ailments and even demons, to keep his identity secret. Georg Simmel (2009:307–62) saw secrecy as a social form. Individuals or groups that have nothing to do with each other do not keep secrets from each other, but those in some kind of relationship do. The most obvious case is that of competitors, who keep stratagems, plans, and methods secret from each other. Simmel pointed out that even intimate partners and close friends do not reveal everything about themselves, and indeed, they usually do not want to know everything about each other. In group life, secrecy gives those who are “in the know” a certain privileged status. Such a sense of advantage can be particularly important as a survival tactic for a religious movement that is under pressure. To maintain the loyalty necessary to maintain secrecy, individual members treat one another honorably, with leaders made less visible, which has the potential to facilitate a shift from personal charisma to what Max Weber called office charisma (1978:1139–1141). The Gospel of Mark frequently narrates miracles. While narratives such as the calming of the storm on the Sea of Galilee, the multiplication of the loaves, and the transfiguration appear to be literary framing devices, the cures, often in the form of exorcisms, are frequent but not particularly important to Jesus in the Markan narratives. Jesus even tries to get away from the business of curing. Mark tends to link cures to some lesson to be conveyed. They seem to have nothing in common with the quid pro quo pattern of cures in other first century religions. The Markan narratives also lack the “preparation techniques” noticed in modern Pentecostal healings (Stolz 2011). Such techniques can psychosomatically affect only minor biological changes; they significantly affect the mental construals of health and illness at the ambiguous line between them.

The Gospel of Matthew, East of the Jordan in the 80s CE There is consensus that the author “Matthew” used the Gospel of Mark and a sayings collection (“Q,” also used in the Gospel of Luke) as sources. Matthew wrote in Greek, as is evident from the fact that the text has close verbal parallels with the Greek of Mark and Q. Eusebius of Caesarea cites several early Christian writers who reported that the early disci26

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ple Matthew collected Jesus’s sayings in the Hebrew dialect (Aramaic?), but identifying that with the present Gospel of Matthew is unlikely, given the language differences. Moreover, linking Matthew’s collection of sayings to Q would be entirely speculative. One of the traditions Eusebius (1998, 5:10:3) relates is that Bartholomew brought what Matthew had written in Hebrew letters to India. This raises the prospect that the Matthew who wrote the gospel wrote in Greek but used the Hebrew alphabet; transliterating from one alphabet to another is not historically uncommon. Commentators agree, based on numerous passages in the gospel, that Matthew was a Jewish Christian writing for other Jewish Christians, but their speculations about where the intended audience resided vary greatly. However, Matt 19:2 and 4:25 place Judea “beyond the Jordan,” thereby making Matthew’s standpoint in the trans-Jordan region (Slingerland 1979). Eusebius (1998, 3:5:3) reports that some Christians left Jerusalem prior to the Jewish War and settled in Pella, a city in the trans-Jordan region. The region was ruled by Nabataean kings who allied themselves with the Romans. Archaeological evidence reveals a great deal of trade between the Nabataeans and Rome, as well as with China (Tschanz 2013). The trade route might explain how the Gospel of Mark found its way from Rome to the trans-Jordan region to be used as a source by Matthew. The text of Matthew puts Markan material into grammatically better Greek and shows greater appreciation of Jewish law than does Mark. The Pharisees appear as the principal competitors of Jesus. The Matthean leadership appears to have been marginal to the wider Jewish world, but materially secure (Carter 2001:43, 46). Marginality is a social situation in which individuals inhabit two or more socio-cultural worlds, finding themselves to be strangers in everyday life (Park 1928; Simmel 2009:601–05). Religion can thrive in such an environment, finding life ultimately nurturing in one “world” and making alternative claims for oneself in another “world” (Blasi 2002). The Matthean community, as a “school” (Stendahl 1968) or “scribal community” (Wire 1991), may have had a distribution of roles, including gendered ones, as narrated for Jesus and his followers. As noted, the gospels of Matthew and Luke have non-Markan parallels consisting of sayings of Jesus from a source conventionally termed “Q.” Social and historical indicators in this material, apart from changes Matthew or Luke make in it, reflect a different time and place from those of Matthew and Luke. The writing in Q was skilled, but its lack of sophisticated organization suggests the Q community members were “not from the upper reaches of the scribal establishment” (Kloppenborg Verbin 2000:56). The sayings appear to be instructional material, the older portions of which have references to small town life. For example, Kloppenborg Verbin (2000:200) speaks of village notaries and scribes. He goes on to note references to city and critiques of wealth in later Q material, and Torah citations in the latest. While Kloppenborg Verbin suggests Galilee as a likely geographical setting for Q, others note that it was written in Greek rather than Aramaic and, thus, was likely prepared for missionary work to gentiles (Taylor 2004), leaving its geographical locale open (Root 2014).

Luke’s Two-Volume History, ca. 85–90 CE, Greece The author traditionally named “Luke” (the oldest papyrus of the gospel, P75, names him) wrote a two-part history that appears in separated parts in modern Bibles as The Gospel of Luke and The Acts of the Apostles. Their prologues inform us that Luke wrote the gospel first, beginning with the ministry of Jesus (Lk 3:23), then Acts; evidently, he added material to 27

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the beginning of the gospel while working on Acts. He may not have finished Acts, as it ends abruptly. He also says he consulted earlier gospels and found them not in an order and lacking “the sayings by which you were catechized” (Lk 1:4). We know he used The Gospel of Mark as a source, but what other gospel he consulted is unknown. Q material also appears, and that would have been the source of the catechetical sayings. Luke may have known The Gospel of Matthew but did not adopt its non-Q expansions on Mark (Fitzmyer 1981:73– 75). He seems to have had separate sources for his infancy narratives for Jesus and John the Baptist, some parables, much of the passion narrative, and the four Chapter 2 canticles. The gospel and Acts suggest that Luke was not an eye witness to the ministry of Jesus, he did not know Palestinian geography well, he was well educated, and, given the “we” sections of Acts, he sometimes worked with Paul (Fitzmyer 1981:36–37, 46–47, 49). Helmut Koester’s (1990:335) translation of the second century anti-Marcionite prologue to Luke indicates that Luke was a physician of Syrian origin who had become a disciple of the apostles and followed Paul; he remained unmarried and died at age 84 in Boeotia in central Greece. Eusebius (1998:3, 4, 6) agrees that Luke was an educated gentile Christian and adds that he was from Antioch on the Orontes. If Luke’s gospel was published about 85 CE, which is the scholarly consensus, he would have been in his forties when he joined Paul, albeit intermittently, in or near Greece, and accompanied him to Rome. When he returned to Greece, he presumably wrote his history. Acts appears to have made Paul and, hence, the genuine pauline letters, famous. At the time, the Roman Empire comprised a sphere of influence that transcended tribal boundaries and even some nominal political ones. It was called the oecumene (“world”). The oecumene would have been experienced as a distant social circle in a dialectic with a near circle. According to Simmel (2009:621–641), personal individuality increases if oriented toward the larger social circle but decreases if oriented to the smaller social circle. For example, in religious organizations, a closely knit sect tends to allow for less freedom for its members and to marginalize its deviants as heretics, while a large denomination tends to tolerate diverse schools of thought and practice. Luke’s Christian movement shed small social circle aspects in the Hellenistic context in which he wrote, quite in contrast to the Matthean scribal community east of the Jordan. Luke was interested in the parables from the Q material but not questions of the Law (Torah). The contrast was not simply one of ethnicity, as in antiquity, many gentiles joined Jewish communities as God-fearers, and many Jews Hellenized. Luke was interested in doing right by people in general, while Matthew was interested in doing right by them precisely by conforming to the Law as correctly understood. The Lukan and Matthean genealogies differ similarly, with Luke’s beginning with Adam, the first human, and Matthew’s with the patriarch Abraham. Luke’s gospel features themes that are more understandable from the perspective of the large social circle but would be unconventional or non-traditional in the small circle. Inequality in the material and status aspects of life is an uncomfortable topic in the former, especially if hard work, reliability, and astuteness go unrewarded, while in contrast, unchanging life-chances in the countryside inspire fatalism. Similarly, Luke gives women prominence in his narratives, albeit not portraying them as filling public positions. Imperial policy required women not to hold public positions, and as an apologist, Luke avoided any suggestion that Christianity contravene imperial policies (D’Angelo 1990). Luke also favors the inclusion of out-groups, as in the parables of the Good Samaritan, the Great Banquet, and the Prodigal Son as well as the narrative of the conversion of the tax collector Zacchaeus. 28

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The Acts of the Apostles focuses on the missionary career of Paul, beginning in Chapter 13. In the context of the Roman Empire, analogous in some respects to our modern “world system,” rulers and institutions may promote their own short-term interests rather than the common good or the well-being of individual subjects. A sense that something is wrong in such a world can, in part, motivate missionary activity and engender a receptivity to it. The missionary is a stranger, someone who arrives from elsewhere and does not simply continue journeying elsewhere. The near and the far coalesce in the stranger, who may, thereby, have an objective perspective, free from local ties and prejudices. Local influentials may consider the stranger a danger, likely to foment disloyalty (Simmel 2009:601–605). Judging from Acts, elites judged Paul that way. The mere presence of a stranger places everything that is taken for granted by locals into question, with the result that everyday knowledge appears incoherent, opaque, and inconsistent. Meanwhile, the stranger may adopt some perspectives from the new locale and be considered a traitor or even apostate by people in the stranger’s homeland (Schutz 1944; Turcotte 2009). Acts portrays this happening to Paul. Missionary teams often develop their own lore to embody their shared marginal circumstance verbally (Knowlton 1994:220), and Acts appears to have been based on such narrative material. By the time of Luke’s writing, the Jewish War had occurred, and it was not advantageous for post-70s Christianity to be seen as Jewish. Accordingly, the speeches in the pre-pauline sections of Acts exonerate the Judeans for the execution of Jesus, citing their ignorance of his status as Messiah, but “the Jews” are clearly opponents of Paul in the pauline sections. This latter perspective, an artifact of Luke’s redactive activity, reflects the situation of Luke’s post-70s audience wherein the movement no longer identified with Judaism (Slingerland 1986; Matera 1990).

The 90s CE There are a number of Early Christian works that presuppose Paul being a notable historical personage and, hence, can be dated after the publication of Luke’s two-volume history. There is an important insertion into First Corinthians (12:31b–14:1a) on the theme of love. Following the twentieth century sociologist Georges Gurvitch (1958), we may distinguish between surface objects such as cities, highly subjective shared mental states and acts, and other “levels in depth” between those two. First century people were aware of the Empire and organized religions, which were in some tension with one another and were, thus, both insufficient for ordering everyday life. Household roles mixed politics, business, intimate family relationships, and even slave/master relationships – a situation similarly fraught with inconsistencies and, thus, also insufficient for ordering everyday life. Nevertheless, these involved people who would naturally have their spontaneous mutual regard, and this spontaneous level of experience would need to be repressed in formal everyday life situations. Between the demands from the more surface layers of empire, religion, and household and the pull of spontaneous regard would lend importance to the region of ethic – in this case, the ethic of love (agape, also translatable as “compassion”). The pseudo-epigraphic letters to the Colossians and to the Ephesians also date from this period. In antiquity, followers of noted persons wrote after their death and in their name. For Christians, there was also the danger of arrest – a motive for anonymity. For Colossians, even the addressees are pseudonymous, as Colossae had been largely destroyed by earthquake ca. 60–62 CE and was never rebuilt. The occasion for Colossians was a syncretistic cult somewhere near Laodicea and Hieropolis in western present-day Turkey, 29

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and the cult favored anti-family asceticism (see Col 2:18–19). In response, Colossians provides a “household code,” presenting ideal norms not for households as we know them today but for the ancient oikos, an authoritarian, patriarchal consumer (and only possibly also production) unit of family, dependents, and slaves (Weber 1978:381–383). Colossians introduces some reciprocity between the patriarch and his underlings but otherwise accepts the status quo as it was. The letter also de-syncretizes, endeavoring to remove folk-Jewish and mystery cult influences that had crept into the congregations a generation after Paul’s mission. Ephesians may not have even been directed to Ephesus, as early manuscripts lack the reference to the city. It has many parallels with Colossians, and like Colossians, idealizes the oikos in a household code. As a type of intellectual, the authors of the two letters were not traditionalists, as Christianity itself was still an innovation, but rather, conservatives, trying to preserve an idealized status quo (see Mannheim 1971). Idealizing the oikos may be a mark of a shift from governance by itinerant missionaries to governance by local patriarchs (Horrell 2007). Eusebius (1998:2, 23, 23) notes that few writers before him quote the Letter of James. He himself doubted its authenticity as a work of James the Brother, whom Paul mentions in Galatians and Luke mentions in Acts, and who was executed in Jerusalem in 62 CE. The letter mentions nothing about the Jerusalem church and, notably, warns against giving special recognition to people who wore gold rings (James 2:4) – a prerogative of senatorial or equestrian ranked notables of the empire. One can hardly imagine a Roman noble visiting a Jerusalem Christian assembly. Acts made the person James known to Christians in the wider empire, so an author using that pseudonym suggests a date after the publication of Acts. James addresses a collection of local assemblies in which Christians made decisions (2:1–2), prayed (5:13–16), had teachers and elders (3:1, 5:14), and were experiencing persecutions at the hands of “the rich” (2:6, 4:13–5:6). Social inequality among the believers had become the seedbed for internal discrimination. James recognized the rights of the poor for respect as well as for alms, such rights deriving from social solidarity with the group to which they belonged (see Simmel 2009:409–442). The letter itself is making the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty a social problem in the sociological meaning of that term (Blumer 1971). The letter also called for Christian presbyters to pray over and anoint the sick so that they would be raised, and if the sick had sinned, they would be forgiven (5:14). This does not imply that sin caused sickness but, rather, that both illness (the social disruption occasioned by sickness; see McGuire 1988:6) and sin disrupted the immediate community. Revelation was authored by someone named John in southwestern modern Turkey. Calculating from Rev 17:10, he wrote during the reign of Emperor Domitian, 81–95 CE (see Blasi 2017 Vol. 3:15–16). The work consists of two parts. The first is a set of short letters to Christians in seven different cities, with allusions to features known to ancient geographers. The second part takes the form of apocalyptic images that betray hostility toward the empire, a stance characteristic of a sect, that is, a group in high tension with its environment (Johnson 1971). Letters by a self-identified “presbyter” (in compositional order 2 John, 1 John, 3 John) date from about 95 CE, given their shared rhetorical universe with Revelation. The purpose of First John, the principal letter of the three, is to establish fellowship among the addressed churches based on their common faith in Jesus as an incarnate deity. In a context of oppression or persecution, such alliance formation in a conflict with an outside 30

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superior power can be expected. Notably, a corresponding resistance to intra-group divergences is evident, even as the group’s weakness makes syncretism from the environment inevitable. Also in the 90s CE, an anonymous author wrote First Peter from Rome to Christians in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia (all in modern Turkey). Its stance is not quite sect-like insofar as it encouraged detachment from the world but not hostility toward it. It has a household code, presented explicitly to mollify critics who claimed that Christians were undermining the political order by threatening to undermine household patriarchy. The Pastoral Epistles (1 Tim, 2 Tim, Titus) were published together in imitation of the collection of authentic paulines. The attribution to Paul is obviously fictitious through contradicting information known about Paul, Timothy, and Titus from the authentic paulines and Acts. First Timothy (3:6) even disqualifies converts from holding leadership positions in the Christian movement, something that would have been impossible in Paul’s ministry. It also cites the Gospel of Luke as scripture (1 Tim 5:18, Lk 10:10). The Pastorals describe the author’s opponents as insiders who need to be made into outsiders; Pietersen (1997) identifies this process as a “degradation ceremony,” using the term employed by Harold Garfinkel (1956). The letters reflect a concern for orthodoxy and leadership norms.

After the 90s CE A pseudo-epigraphic pauline letter to the Thessalonians (2 Thess) was modeled after First Thessalonians but, nevertheless, has a different vocabulary and contradicts that letter; the addressees of First Thessalonians were troubled because the end times had not yet come, while those of Second Thessalonians believed it had already come. Moreover, 2 Thess 2:2b and 3a depend on 1 Tim 4:1. It generally reflects a populist stance, emphasizing a dissimilarity from elites, especially from idle political hangers-on (2 Thess 3:6a and 11, passages often misinterpreted to refer to idle poor people; see Russell 1988). The Gospel of John, as it is commonly known, went through a number of stages of development, with some texts emanating from someone who knew the Jerusalem of the time of the Jesus Movement, others reflecting later times and different locations, and a final redaction from around 100–110 CE. At least one later stage respected the received earlier textual material enough to publish it without making changes that would have removed inconsistencies and breaks in the narrative. Sociologically, the final version of the gospel reflects a migration out of the locale of its earliest origin and a development over several generations: a refugee or migrant generation, a second assimilationist generation, a third generation re-assertive of its heritage. The community that used the Gospel of John had its own calendar, a fact that results in apparent inconsistencies between its narratives and the passion narratives of the other gospels, and unique calendars generally support the identities of distinctive groups. The gospel also shows evidence of anxiety over its separation from a parent group, probably from a Jewish community. Hence, it can be understood from the perspective of the sociology of schism (Blasi 1996). Some sections may have been dropped from the gospel when the Johannine community merged into the broader Early Christian movement. The text is also marked by different versions of discourse and narrative material, given in parallel, and by interruptions introduced by double Amens. In modern Bibles, one finds an inserted fragment in John (7:53–8:11) about a woman accused of adultery, which is interesting from the perspective of the sociology of law. Judean 31

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organized law was fixed in advance but made relative and tentative because of the Roman domination of Judea (see Gurvitch 1947:178–80). The Letter of Jude may be pseudonymous, as several people named Jude appear elsewhere in the New Testament. It refers to the apostles as belonging to an earlier generation. Jude has close parallels with The Second Letter of Peter, which probably used Jude as a source, making minor corrections to it. Eusebius doubted the authenticity of both letters (1998: 2:23:23 and 3:3:1). Jude is particularly concerned with doctrinal orthodoxy, which implies aspects of Christian thought becoming relatively fixed. Keeping it that way would serve to maintain the boundaries of the Christian community in the course of new generations replacing older ones (Parsons 1951:482; Simmel terms boundary maintenance “self preservation of the group” 2009:443–541). Second Peter refers to First Peter and a body of pauline letters and quotes Matthew 17:5. Second Peter differs from the rest of the New Testament in using a verbose, loose, and exotic style rather than simple Attic Greek. It not only exemplifies but also refers to written communication, something Simmel addresses in his essay on secrecy (2009:343). Second Peter would have the interpretation of scripture and prophecy be communal not individual.

Final Consideration The reader may want to consider the progression from the earliest works, which contended with the problem of recognition and identity, to the latest ones, concerned with boundary maintenance, governance, and orthodoxy. The importance of social location – time and place –is obvious.

References Barker, E. 2004. “What Are We studying? A Sociological Case for Keeping the Nova.” Nova Religio 8:88–102. Blasi, A. 1996. A Sociology of Johannine Christianity. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Blasi, A. 2002. “Marginality as a Societal Position of Religion.” Sociology of Religion 63:267–89. Blasi, A. 2017. Social Science and the Christian Scriptures: Sociological Introductions and New Translation (3 volumes). Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Blasi, A. 2018. A Methodological Guide for Social Scientific Inquiry into Earliest Christianity. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Blumer, H. 1971. “Social Problems as Collective Behavior.” Social Problems 18:298–306. Bromley, D., and J. G. Melton 2012. “Reconceptualizing Types of Religious Organization: Dominant, Sectarian, Alternative, and Emergent Tradition Groups.” Nova Religio 15:4–28. Carter, W. 2001. Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. D’Angelo, M. 1990. “Women in Luke-Acts.” Journal of Biblical Literature 109:441–61. Eusebius of Caesarea. 1998. Ecclesiastical History, translated by K. Lake. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fitzmyer, J. 1981. The Gospel According to Luke I-IX: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Garfinkel, H. 1956. “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies.” American Journal of Sociology 61:420–24. Gurvitch, G. 1947. Sociology of Law. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gurvitch, G. 1958. “Sociologie en profondeur.” Pp. 157–71 in Traité de Sociologie, Tome Premier, edited by G. Gurvitch. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Horrell, D. 2007. “Leadership Patterns and the Development of Ideology in Early Christianity.” Sociology of Religion 58:323–41.

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First Century Christianity Incigneri, B. .2003. The Gospel to the Romans: The Setting and Rhetoric of Mark’s Gospel. Leiden: Brill. Johnson, B. 1971. “Church and Sect Revisited.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 10:124–37. Kloppenborg Verbin, J. 2000. Exavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel. Minneapolis: Fortress. Knowlton, D. .1994. ““Gringo Jeringo:” Anglo-Mormon Missionary Culture in Bolivia.” Pp. 218–36 in Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives, edited by M. Cornwall, et al. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Koester, H. .1990. Ancient Christian Gospels. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International. Mannheim, K. 1971. “Conservative Thought.” Pp. 132–222 in From Karl Mannheim. edited by K. Wolff. New York: Oxford University Press. Matera, F. .1990. “Responsibility for the Death of Jesus According to the Acts of the Apostles.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 39:77–93. McGuire, M. 1988. Ritual Healing in Suburban America. New Brunswik, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Park, R. 1928. “Human Migration and the Marginal Man.“ American Journal of Sociology 33:881–93. Parsons, T. 1951. The Social System. New York: Free Press. Pietersen, L. 1997. “Despicable Deviants: Labelling Theory and the Polemics of the Pastorals.” Sociology of Religion 58:343–52. Root, B. 2014. First Century Galilee: A Fresh Examination of the Sources. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Russell, R. .1988. “The Idle in 2 Thess 3:6-12: An Eschatological or a Social Problem?“ New Testament Studies 38:105–19. Schutz, A. 1944. “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology.” American Journal of Sociology 50:363–76. Simmel, G. 2009[1908]. Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms (2 vols.), edited by A. Blasi, A. Jacobs, and M. Kanjirathinkal. Leiden: Brill. Slingerland, H.D. 1979. “The Transjordanian Origin of St. Matthew’s Gospel.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 2:18–28. Slingerland, H.D. 1986. “‘The Jews’ in the Pauline Portion of Acts.“ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54:305–21. Stendahl, K. 1968. The School of St. Matthew and Its Use of the Old Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress. Stolz, J. 2011. ““All Things Are Possible:” Towards a Sociological Explanation of Pentecostal Miracles and Healings.” Sociology of Religion 72:456–82. Taylor, N. 2004. “Q and Galilee?“ Neotestamentica 38:283–311. Tschanz, D. 2013. The Nabataeans: A Brief History of Pedra and Madain Saleh. Surrey, UK: Medina. Turcotte, P.A. 2009. “Conversion and Mission: Missionary Insertion and the Social Conditions of Christianization.” Pp. 307–28 in Conversion in the Age of Pluralism. edited by G. Giordan. Leiden: Brill. Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (2 volumes), edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weigert, A. 1988. “Christian Eschatological Identities and the Nuclear Context.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 27(2):175–91. Wire, A. 1991. “Gender Roles in a Scribal Community.” Pp. 87–121 in Social History of the Matthean Community: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches. edited by D. Balch. Minneapolis: Fortress.

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2 CIVILIZATIONAL ANALYSIS IN HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY Christianity in World History Yulia Prozorova Abstract This chapter discusses Christianity from a civilizational perspective in comparative historical sociology. It touches upon the classical sociological sources of civilizational scholarship and draws specifically on the relevant studies and theoretical reflections in contemporary civilizational analysis. The chapter considers Christianity in the context of the crucial theoretical problematics and thematic foci of civilizational analysis: the Axial Age breakthrough and its consequences, the civilizational dimension and religio-political nexus as a societal metainstitutional framework, and modernity (or modernities). Such a framework sheds new light on Christianity as a world-historical phenomenon that shapes civilizational complexes and engenders large-scale transformations and socio-cultural innovations of global significance. Christianity is intertwined with the institutionalization of distinct forms of power, state formation, and empire building. Being integral to the Western civilizational complex, Christianity contributed to the rise of modernity and its institutional forms. The divergence between Western and Eastern Christianity with concomitant imaginaries and patterns of relationship between sacral and secular power was conducive to different civilizational trajectories and paths to modernity.

The Religious Problematic in Civilizational Analysis Contemporary civilizational analysis builds on classical theorists’ reflections on religion’s role in society. Its revival in comparative historical sociology was inspired by the theoretical endeavor to overcome heuristic limitations of homogenizing sociological perspectives and linear modernization theory. The new generation of civilizational scholars – Benjamin Nelson and Shmuel Eisenstadt – pursued an interest in socio-cultural creativity in world history, the cultural–religious frameworks shaping diverse civilizational complexes, and their effects on paths to modernity and its multiple trajectories (Arjomand 2010; Arnason 2003; Eisenstadt 2003; Nelson 1981). This chapter explores Christianity as a world–historical 34

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-5

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phenomenon through the lens of focal theoretical and research problematics of civilizational analysis – the Axial Age, the religious–political nexus, and modernity. Max Weber’s pioneering analysis of the religious premises of the Western path to modernity, and his study of the differences between religious traditions of Western Christendom and non-Western civilizations associated with diverse world orientations and social dynamics, play a defining role in the civilizational analytical perspective. Emile Durkheim’s classical studies and insight on religion as “meta-institution,” society’s manifestation of self-creative capacity (“the god and the society are one and the same”) (1995:208), and his long-forgotten essay on civilizations co-authored with Marcel Mauss (Durkheim, Mauss, and Nelson 1971) is another theoretical pillar for contemporary civilizational analysis. Nelson and Eisenstadt associated civilizations with great world religions and shared a common interest in both socio-cultural processes and the capacity of religious worldviews to shape historical mentalities, institutional settings, and civilizational configurations. Nelson’s version of the “civilization-analytical perspective” is a theoretical project opposing “uniformitarianism,” abstract generalizations, and obliteration of diversity as tendencies dominating contemporary intellectual debates and scholarly works (Nelson 1981:241– 243). His studies focused on cultural peculiarities and changes induced by religious traditions, Christianity included. He also pursued Weber’s research agenda on the cultural orientations and Christian background leading to modern Western development. Following Durkheim and Mauss (Durkheim et al. 1971), Nelson’s research program defines civilizations in the plural and as supra-national inter-societal phenomena: “families of societies.” Civilizations or “civilizational complexes” refer to the “paradigmatic cultural patterns in the sphere of the expressive and instrumental productions of societies or societal complexes.” They constitute “the governing cultural heritages” and the “moral milieu” of interacting communities and political societies. In Nelson’s terms, “civilizations come to serve as cultural prerequisites for the relatively enduring organization of different sorts” (Nelson 1973:90). More specifically, Nelson identifies civilizational complexes as “configurations” of elements, which include, among others, “the taken-for-granted structures of consciousness, comprising cultural worldviews, logics, images of experience, self, time, the beginning and the end, the extraterrestrial powers” (Nelson 1973:82). Religion is a central conceptual and symbolic complex in these civilizational configurations, which engenders and relates to other socio-cultural structures. Nelson’s socio-historical studies of canon law, theologies, and structures of consciousness tend to uncover the underlying cultural patterns of institutional forms and long-term civilizational complexes. Nelson’s typology of the three structures of consciousness – sacro–magical, faith, and rationalized – aims to grasp “historical phenomenologies,” the historical formation of the mind, mentalities, and frameworks of thought as well as the combination of cognitive and conceptual changes manifested in the (trans)formation of individual expressions, experience, and institutional structures. The different types can coexist in diverse historical mixes and configurations (Nelson 1973). All three types of structures of consciousness are associated with religious ideas and orientations. In a sacro–magical structure of consciousness, there is a fusion of cosmic and social order; collective representations dominate the individual and affirm the absolute authority of magical-prescriptive structures. In a faith structure of consciousness, characteristic of Christianity, there is a kind of logos or world soul to which individual deeds and thoughts must conform. Faith structures emerge within different civilizational contexts, and several structures can exist within one religious framework. Early 35

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Christianity emerged under the influence of encounters between Judaism, Hellenism, and Rome that gave rise to Greek, Roman, and Russian variations of Christianity with different trajectories. During the “axial shift” to a rationalized structure of consciousness, the content of faith in Western Christendom was rationalized in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The new logic and the new dialectic brought forth a new theology, initially articulated by Abelard in the method “by which the contents of faith are to be differentiated and sifted so as to produce a logically provable structure of rationales which undergird belief in all spheres of opinion and act” (Nelson 1973:94). The structure of rationales developed around the notion of conscience and related institutions of moral casuistry and systematic theology first appeared in Christian theological contexts, then spread to other areas such as science and law. For Eisenstadt, another prominent theorist of contemporary civilizational perspective, one of the key themes is the relationship between culture and social structure. This includes the effects of cultural traditions and religious–civilizational frameworks on the patterns of change of political systems, the constitution of major institutional arenas (Eisenstadt 1980, 1981), and the civilization premises of empires, great revolutions, and modernity. Eisenstadt’s crucial contribution to civilizational analysis is his renowned exploration of the Axial Age breakthrough. An intimate relationship between cultural–religious orientations and socio-political organization, “civilizational dimensions of politics,” appeared integral to Axial Age civilizations. Axial innovations and the new “cultural ontology” gave rise to new frameworks of sovereignty, entailing the decline of sacred kingship and the emergence of conceptions of a higher authority (God and Divine Law) and accountability (Eisenstadt 1993). Regarding religion, the comparative civilizational perspective considers its interpretive and institutional aspects as frameworks for articulating worldviews and the (trans)formation of social order. Eisenstadt highlights an analytical duality of religion as both a distinct social institution and a set of cultural orientations shaping institutional forms and civilizational frameworks (Eisenstadt 1993). In the latter capacity, religion functions as a metainstitution, a viewpoint further elaborated by Johann Arnason (2014b). Based on his comparative civilizational studies, Eisenstadt introduced the concept of the “civilizational dimension” of human societies, regarded as a combination of interpretative and institutional orders, cultural–religious visions of the world with “the definition, construction, and regulation of the major arenas of social life” (Eisenstadt 2000). Following Webert, Eisenstadt argued that “at least in historical civilizations, religion provided some components of the broader civilizational premises and frameworks, and this partly determined how religious activities and organizations became related to political processes” (Eisenstadt 1993:13). Arnason agreed that religion “plays a key role in the development and codification of cultural perspectives on the world, but it has also – for much of human history – been decisively involved in the institutionalization of other spheres, in particular, the politics” (Arnason 2010:70). Therefore, he attributed the metainstitutional capacity to the “religio-political nexus,” which can be subsumed under the concept of a civilizational dimension. “The political dimension, in the sense of an overall distribution of power translating into social rules, is the primary domain of integration, and during most of human history, it was intertwined with the religious sphere” (Arnason 2014b:17–18). Arnason’s studies and critical reflection on the Weberian corpus of ideas, in particular his typology of domination and historical patterns of inter-relations of sacral and political 36

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power (hierocracy in the forms of the priestly legitimated ruler as an incarnation of God, theocracy, and caesaropapism) (Weber 1978), call for a closer look at historical forms of the religio-political nexus and those which remained under-theorized or marginalized in Weber’s works, namely sacral rulership and theocracy (Arnason 2017). The introduction of the hermeneutical problematic and the “imaginary significations” as the “structuring semantic complexes that shape the cultural profile of the respective societies” in civilizational analysis (Arnason 2007:95) suggests a research agenda that is more focused on the role of the religious imaginaries and meanings in the constitution of socio-political orders and civilizational configurations. The metadimension is intrinsic to Christianity. Its exegetic critical-explanatory tradition continuously generated new meanings and theological discourses. Interpretations of Christianity’s core imaginary significations laid the ground for rival theologies, heterodoxies, various religious orientations in different sects, and the Great Schism of 1054 CE. The internal tensions and divisions within the Christian framework were conducive to the distinct civilizational trajectories of Western Christendom and Byzantine Orthodoxy.

Christianity and the Axial Age The problem of axiality, or historical turning points of global significance, is crucial for civilizational analysis, though it is understood and studied in connection to different periods, chronological frameworks, emergent phenomena, and consequences. For the Nelsonian tradition, it is the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe when religious reflexivity, the ideas and concepts that originated in the Christian theological discourse within Latin Christendom, gave rise to intellectual developments formative of the domains of science and law that appeared conducive to Western modernity. For the Eisenstadtian line of inquiry, inspired by Karl Jaspers’s treatise (Jaspers 2014), the Axial Age refers to a period of cultural creativity dated several centuries around the middle of the last millennium BCE that induced large-scale transformations across Eurasia. Here we look more closely at the ongoing debate about the relationship between the Axial Age and Christianity as an important theme in contemporary civilizational analysis. The Axial Age is regarded as a period of an unprecedented cultural breakthrough in the realm of cosmological ideas and ontological visions distinguished by “the formation of culturally entrenched structuring principles for macro-institutions” (Wittrock 2005:64). Among the most crucial innovations of the Axial Age are increasing reflexivity, the emergence of historical consciousness, awareness of human “agentiality,” elaboration of more reflective cosmologies and broader interpretative activities (Wittrock 2005:66–67), and, more specifically, albeit not universal for all axial civilizations, “the emergence, conceptualization, and institutionalization of a basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders” (Eisenstadt 1982:294). The axial conception of tension opposed “the ‘homologous’ perceptions of the relation between these two orders, when the symbolic structure of the higher world reflected that of the mundane one” (Eisenstadt 1982:296). This cultural–religious innovation is accompanied by the search for salvation, expanding reflexivity and problematization of given reality and its organization that requires a distinct type of intellectual elite who strived to (re)construct this-worldly order according to the new transcendental vision. The relationship between the emergence of the great world religions and the original epoch of the Axial Age is crucial for the Axial Age hypothesis but is still a matter of debate. 37

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Eisenstadt associated early Christianity with the original Axial Age as the reformulation of the premises of Judaism in the context of contestation of interpretations, the problematization of the institutionalized orthodox conception, and heterodox challenges (Eisenstadt 1982). He later (1986) introduced the notion of a “secondary breakthrough” to explain Christianity as a chronologically distant effect of the early Hebrew transformations synthesized with the Greek axial shift. Both Christianity and Islam “are historically intelligible only as developments of Israel’s axial breakthrough” (Bellah 2005:72). The underlying idea was that Christianity had developed within the framework of the first Axial Age and as a transformation of the original Jewish religious pattern with the transcendental–mundane dichotomy. It retained a close affinity to the significant innovations of the Axial Age despite occurring chronologically ahead of it. In a more contextualized approach to the Axial Age, which assumes multiple paths of axiality, Christianity is a distant development along the “transcendental-interpretative” axial path (Wittrock 2005:73–74). The concept of a “secondary breakthrough” initially appeared as “an attempt to clarify the relationship between late antiquity and its axial ancestors” (Arnason, Wittrock, and Eisenstadt 2005:287). However, the rediscovery of late antiquity required the reconsideration of its unprecedented elaborations of the axial legacies with due respect to their originality. The “secondary” framework received criticism for its subordinate implication and “implicit hierarchy” (Stroumsa 2005:296). Therefore, Eisenstadt suggested that the emergence of two monotheistic world religions – Christianity and Islam – can be interpreted as a new axial turn after the Axial Age, thus, subsuming these developments in a general category of axiality. This typological approach claims that axial patterns can emerge in different historical and geographical contexts, bearing common typological criteria of “axiality” – a new ontological vision and institutionalization of the fundamental disjunction between the transcendental and mundane orders (Arnason 2014a). Contrary to this abstract model, other approaches claim the importance of contextualization, “bringing history back in” to “historicize” the Axial Age and other notably innovative periods, such as late antiquity with the expansion of Christianity (Arnason 2012, 2014a). As a world religion closely linked to the imperial order, Christianity did not evolve until the fourth to sixth century CE, and its subsequent diffusion, which is even more remote from the original Axial Age, interwove its religious practices with other non-axial traditions (Wittrock 2005:69). Nevertheless, emerging on the ground of the Jewish axial legacy and inheriting the vision of tension between the mundane and transcendental orders, Christianity retained a connection with Axial Age problematics and the projections of the cultural–religious orientations into politics entailed by the Axial shift.

Christianity and the “Religio-political Nexus” The contemporary civilizational-analytical perspective views the religious–political connection as a metainstitution of the human condition and the core of the civilizational dimension of societies (Arnason 2014b). Considered from this point of view, Christianity has played a constitutive role in societal and political dynamics from late antiquity to modernity. Unlike the Israelite monotheistic tradition, Christianity expressed a more substantial potential for universalization. A distinct feature of the Christian conception of salvation was a combination of initial ascetic practice with other-worldly orientation along with emergent this-worldly aspiration to change the world. The this-worldly perspective was evident in the vision of Christ as the earthly embodiment of God and the conception of God 38

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as the Creator of the universe (Eisenstadt 1986). Christianity’s status as a dominant religion of the Roman Empire re-inforced its this-worldly perspective. Furthermore, Eisenstadt argues, the visions of many, if not all, Christian heterodoxies and sects comprised a firm this-worldly orientation to the restructuring and control of the political and cognitive arenas, with a predisposition to engage in social and political protest movements (Eisenstadt 1999:23–24). However, Christianity retained affinity with its Israelite sources. It assimilated the old royal epithet of the king as the Son of God and proclaimed the reign of Christ the King (Bellah 2011:267). Furthermore, it developed as a successor of the “radical and unequivocal” Judaic re-formulation of the religio-political nexus – the monotheistic distinction between the political and the religious realm. There was a “semantic relocation” or the transference of the sovereignty to the exclusive God, the sole divine creator and legislator (Arnason 2014a:195; Assmann 2005, 2009). As the ruler was de-sacralized, God was perceived as an ultimate power to whom the secular ruler was accountable. However, as Arnason points out, the monotheistic tradition inaugurated in Ancient Israel and subsequently developed into rival world religions turned out to be eminently adaptable to new forms of sacralized power. The divine creator-cum-legislator could, in multiple ways, invest earthly power-holders with religious sanctity and authority. (Arnason 2014a:195–96) Christianity politicized the monotheistic turn; “it was the mutual embrace of Christianity and a reformed Roman empire that first enabled a large-scale interaction between monotheism and sacral rulership” (Arnason 2014b:33). The political ascendancy of Christianity began with Constantine’s conversion and the introduction of a single dynastic rule that “forged the link between Christianity and power” (Berend 2007:9). Christianity’s “constant ambivalence toward political power” (Stroumsa 2005:305) never impeded Christian tradition and ecclesiastic actors from participating in the secular matters of the state. The organized Christian church monopolized religious life and its relations to the political powers and regulated the doctrines by controlling cognitive criteria and boundaries of discourse. The latter tendency was rooted in the monotheistic tradition, with its “strong orientations to the cognitive elaboration of the relations between God, man, and the world” (Eisenstadt 1999:24) and was even more pronounced in Christianity because of its reception of Greek philosophy. The range of interpretations of the relations between the secular and sacral realms articulated in the milieu of Christian thinkers and theologians left room for various symbolic-institutional maneuvers, from sacralization of political power and close integration with the church to their distinction and autonomy. The engagement of Christianity with the secular realm gave rise to diverse patterns of union between political power and religion, exemplified by theocracy, sacral rulership, and caesaropapism (in the Byzantine and Russian versions). Christianity evolved as a world religion historically associated with imperial political vision and order; the monotheistic universalism of Christianity was conducive to expanding Christendom’s frontiers. Christianity entered a “symbiotic relationship with imperial power” in late antiquity, which made it a “defining part of imperial rule” (Arnason et al. 2005:289–291). Promulgation of Christian doctrine was crucial for the demarcation of civilizational zones (e.g., Latin Christendom or the Byzantine Commonwealth) (Obolensky 1971), for39

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mation of states and empires, and colonization. Christianization of pagan societies was usually a political incentive of the local ruling elite that linked Christianity with princely power. Although local conditions determined the reception of the new religion, Christianity usually coalesced with political power into the centralization/consolidation of polities, establishing control over territories, state formation, and the rise of the monarchy. At the symbolic–ideological levels, Christianity brought legitimacy, emphasizing kingship. Its rhetoric and biblical references provided a model of power for kings, making kingdoms “the archetype of political unit” (Berend 2007:15). Christianity also introduced a cult focused on the ruler’s authority (Shepard 2007:383), and secular rulership could be defined within the JudeoChristian theocratic conception analogously to the ancient Hebrew kings of the biblical tradition (Hanak 2013). Christianity is also associated with distinct symbolic–semantic structures and concomitant interpretative schemes. Political interpretations and implications of Christian theology –political theology – played a crucial role in articulating the church’s political aspirations and religious conceptions legitimizing secular political power. As such, it contributed to the development of the medieval political institutions of kingship, monarchies, and absolutist states in which the reciprocal adaptations of terminology, symbols, representations, and practices between the church and secular authorities took place. The application of theological concepts and religious doctrines to secular institutions induced their divinization. The European monarchies evolved as “churches by transference,” the apparatus of the Roman Church suggested a “prototype of an absolute and rational monarchy on a mystical basis,” and the secular state tended to become “a quasi-Church or a mystical corporation on a rational basis” (Kantorowicz 1957:193–197). Christian politico-theological conceptions provided theological legitimation for historically different forms of power and political authority. They also contributed to juristic notions and legal frameworks. Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity are associated with separate civilizational trajectories and the emblematic divergence of their religious–political patterns. Historically, “the sacralization of political power in general and empire in particular, was a defining feature and a source of complications” (Arnason 2014b:35) for both versions of Christianity, though their resulting patterns varied greatly. Weber’s (1978) typological distinction between ecclesiastic and secular political domination implies different scenarios of their relationship – dualism/independence of hierocracy from political domination versus monism/identification of church and state under a political head (caesaropapism) or hierocratic rule (theocracy). An independent autonomous hierocracy (papacy) that challenged secular power and limited political domination with the concomitant cultural structures evolved only in Western Christendom. By contrast, the monistic scenario of the subordination or fusion of religious and political power is historically predominant and more widespread, occurring in advanced theocracies and those configurations in which political domination makes religion only a part of public power (Murvar 1967). Compared to the autonomous church as a societal and highly rationalized, legalistic, and differentiated structure of Western Christendom in which religious and political domains acquired independence (regardless of their turbulent relations) (Nelson 1981, Nielsen 1989:495–96), Eastern Christianity’s trajectory is caesaropapian, the subservient position of the church and “symphonia” (de facto asymmetric) between the church and the state in the Byzantine Christian Empire and Orthodox Russia. With established autocracy and caesaropapism, the Russian Church, for instance, became “a branch of political administration” supervised by the state (Weber 1978:1162). In Russia, caesaropapism and state bureaucracy created a “unified 40

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culture” (Weber 1978:1193) lacking autonomous spiritual and institutional powers, being unable to resist the political authority of the solid patrimonial state (Buss 2003:57–58). Eastern Orthodoxy did not oppose the monistic pattern of the unity of all power realms but, rather, legitimized the absolute secular power with its supernatural rationalization (Murvar 1971:507–508).

Christianity and Modernity The themes of religious–civilizational pre-conditions for the breakthrough to modernity and its variations are crucial for civilizational analysis, which inherits the Weberian perspective on the religious premises of different civilizational trajectories and modernity. Some studies in the field have advanced Weber’s thesis on the rise of the West, the uniqueness of the occidental Sonderweg, and the universal significance of Western developments, first and foremost being the rationalism of Western civilization that engendered the institutional architecture of Western modernity (Eisenstadt 1989; Weber 2005). Nelsonian civilizational analysis examines the religious, particularly the Christian theological premises of modern science and Western legal culture, and, somewhat in passing, the political forms conducive to the development of Western modernity. Nelson’s concept of “intercivilizational encounters” is a crucial analytical tool for uncovering the effects of contacts and the reception of external cultural legacies. In the medieval period, such encounters led to an intellectual revolution within the Christian religious framework – the transition from faith to a rationalized type of consciousness. The retrieval of past ideas and the encounter of Western Christianity with Islam, the reception of classical legacy, and the Greek sources through the medium of Arab and Hebrew texts all gave rise to the new cosmic vision, the image of a world known and modified by number (Nielsen 2001:417). As Nelson and his intellectual successors show, the breakthrough to natural theology took place only in Christianity, and the passage to universalistic structures came with the new logic and new science representing “the distinctive patternings of Western civilization, the accelerated thrust toward modernization, rationalization, and universalization” (Huff 2000, 2017; Nelson 1973:98–99). Christian theology claims that the world is a rational order which God created according to number, weight, and measure and that all people can arrive at right reason. The idea of laws of nature had Judeo-Christian groundings (Huff 2017). The effort to systematize a Christian worldview was conducive to the theoretical rationales of Christian theology. The codification of new structures created a universalistic rational theology which constituted a prime science, fundamentals for further scientific argumentation, criticism, and innovations. The later scientific revolution and Protestant Reformation were linked to the quest for subjective certitude and objective certainty resulting from these cognitive and institutional changes (Nelson 1981, 2001). Nelson unveiled the origins of universalism in the nexus between Christian theology and law – that is, in the transposition of religious commitment into a legal principle that the rule applies to all, regardless of one’s denomination (Huff 2017). The reception of rational theology in law contributed to the legal revolution of the High Middle Ages, manifesting in the development of new legal notions, legislative rules, principles, and practices. Religious references, images, and interpretations were at the core of Western legal culture. For example, the restraining of activities of the Prince and Pope referred to the image of Adam of the Bible, who had to respond to God’s summons to judgment. So, likewise, “neither Pope nor 41

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Prince could dispense with this part of the judicial process because no one can ignore a precept of divine law” (Huff 2017:111–119). Another significant effect of this legal dynamic was the Papal revolution, the declaration of the independence of the papal authority of the Christian church from secular control, which limited the prerogatives of secular power, which created the idea of separate and autonomous legal jurisdictions between the religious and secular spheres (Huff 2017). These legal adjustments had far-reaching consequences for the development of a state ruled by law and Western modernity. The connection between theology and law was mainly induced by their involvement in consolidating the Catholic Church “as a civilizational nucleus and as a pioneer of state formation” (Arnason 2003:155). As Toby Huff concluded, “Europe as a civilizational entity solidified around a fusion of Greek philosophy, Christian thought, and Roman law” (2013:84). Modernity, first as a Western phenomenon and condition, emerged from historically rationalized structures of consciousness, and here “the role of religious ideas and images is far more decisive than might be imaged” (Nielsen 2001:417). Carl Schmitt’s conception of political theology suggests a Christian theological genesis of modern political concepts and their juristic representations (Schmitt 2005). From this standpoint, the ideas of human rights, utopia, and the communist ideal are secularized interpretations of theological notions of the unity of humanity, paradise, and chiliastic eschatology. Modernity brings about an “atheistic theocracy” (Geréby 2008:11–12). In analyzing different paths to modernity, Weberian studies inspired another essential subtopic of the different societal dynamics and modernization processes associated with Western and Eastern Christianity. In contrast to Western Christianity, Orthodox Christianity is devoid of the concept of “predestination” and the Western idea of a law-based relationship between God and humans (Buss 1989a, 2003). Unlike Western Christianity, especially its Protestant branch characterized by the “methodical organization of conduct” and the motivation for the rational and purposeful re-organization of the political and economic domains, the Eastern Christian counterpart is distinguished by its contemplative, mystical attitude and an “absolute minimization of all outer or inner activities” (Weber 1978:545), as no inner-worldly success or achievements are meaningful to salvation. The Russian Orthodox spirit contains magical–traditional, ritual, and mystical aspects which are predisposed to conduct distinct from the asceticism associated with pro-capitalist economic ethics (Buss 1989b). The mysticism and contemplative orientation of an inner-worldly religion of salvation are conducive to indifference toward the world and accepting a given social reality (Weber 1978:550). The theme of expiation of sins and spiritual rebirth through suffering in the imitation of Christ was central in Russian Christianity, which adopted a highly collectivistic and radically kenotic version of Christianity within the Byzantine model of intimate church and state relationship (Nielsen 1989, 2001). In Russia, the Orthodox church evolved as an institution lacking independent bureaucratic organization or ideology and theological and ethical rational systems (Murvar 1968). Limited access and unsystematic reception of the Greco-Roman rationalistic legacy, early Christian theology, and the absence of rational theology made further rationalization problematic. They paved a path divergent from the juridical and bureaucratic orientation of the Roman Church. Moreover, while Western sectarianism had a decisive impact on the social, economic, and political rationalization of modernization, and while Protestant sects acted as agents of modernization, the Russian sectarian movements did not cause such societal effects. Instead, they reinforced ritualistic

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traditional orientations and social structures, and “failed to sustain ‘liberal’ political ideas, rationalized and universalistic orientations” (Nielsen 1989:493–494). Eisenstadt (2003) suggests theorizing modernity as a distinct civilization. Developed in one of the Great Axial Civilizations – the Christian-European – its cultural–institutional pattern centered on the imaginary of radical autonomy crystallized first in Western Europe and then expanded worldwide as a referential model. In his study of multiple modernities, he argues that the Jacobin component of modernity’s cultural and political program is at the core of the confrontation between the pluralistic and totalistic ideologies which engendered alternative versions of modernity. Both modernity and modern Jacobinism have the same religious roots. Jacobinism originated from the anti-Augustinian turn toward bringing together the City of God and the City of Man, and the strong Gnostic orientations seeking to bring the “Kingdom of God” to earth. Different medieval and early modern European Christian heterodox sects promulgated these orientations. The radical Reformation and Calvinism, which were able to turn a this-worldly orientation into political activities of distinct communities, represented the sectarian transformations in question. Moreover, they also constituted a background for the development of the Great Revolutions of modernity when “the central political arena became imbued with very strongly utopian, eschatological, and millenarian orientations which later became transformed in a more secular way in the Enlightenment and French Revolution” (Eisenstadt 1999:24–25). The Jacobin orientation of society’s radical reconstruction through the totality of political action was intrinsic to the totalitarian versions of alternative modernities. Some politico-theological conceptions recognized affinities between Christianity and communism or national socialism, and provided religious justification for the classless/communal or racial/antisemitic orientations of the regimes – for example, the Russian church’s prorevolutionary “renovationist” movement (Lunacharskii 1926), and the German Catholic Reichstheologie (Böckenförde and Schmandt 1961; Dietrich 1987, 1988), respectively. The Christian foundations of alternative totalitarian modernities and Christianity’s contribution to diverse post-communist transformations and trajectories of modernity still require deeper case-oriented and comparative analysis from a civilizational perspective.

Conclusion Studies in civilizational analysis cast a critical light on Christianity in world history. Christian re-interpretation of Jewish monotheism and re-consideration of the Axial Age problematics highlight diverse appropriations and elaborations of the axial legacies in world religions as major frameworks for institutional patterns and political projects that represent diverse ways of participating in history. Moreover, Christianity’s creative reflexivity and reception in the settings of inter-civilizational encounters and engagement with Indigenous traditions of Christianized societies gave rise to distinct civilizational complexes and socio-cultural innovations of global significance. Finally, Christianity is intertwined with the institutionalization of distinct forms of power, state formation, and empire building; it contributed to the rise of modernity and its alternative versions. Nonetheless, despite such current understandings, more comparative studies of the civilizational effects of Christianity in Eurasia and other world regions are needed to expand our comprehension of Christianity as a world–historical phenomenon.

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Civilizational Analysis in Sociology Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1986. “Introduction: The Secondary Breakthroughs in Ancient Israelite Civilization – The Second Commonwealth and Christianity.” The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations 227–40. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1989. “Max Weber on Western Christianity and the Weberian Approach to Civilizational Dynamics.” Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 14(2):203–23. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1993. “Religion and the Civilizational Dimensions of Politics.” The Political Dimensions of Religion 13–41. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1999. Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2000. “The Сivilizational Dimension in Sociological Analysis.” Thesis Eleven 62(1):1–21. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2003. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. 1 (2003), Vol. 1: Brill. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2005. “The Religious Origins of Modern Radical Movements.” Pp. 161–92 in Religion and Politics: Cultural Perspectives, edited by Bernhard Giesen and Daniel Šuber. Leiden: Brill. Geréby, Gyorgy. 2008. “Political Theology Versus Theological Politics: Erik Peterson and Carl Schmitt.” New German Critique 35(3 (105)):7–33. Hanak, Walter K. 2013. The Nature and the Image of Princely Power in Kievan Rus’, 980–1054: A Study of Sources. Leiden: Brill. Huff, Toby E. 2000. “Science and Metaphysics in the Three Religions of the Book.” Intellectual Discourse 8(2):173–98. Huff, Toby E. 2013. “Europe as a Civilization: The Revolution of the Middle Ages & the Rise of the Universities.” Comparative Civilizations Review 69(69):8. Huff, Toby E. 2017. The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West: Cambridge University Press. Jaspers, Karl. 2014. The Origin and Goal of History (Routledge Revivals). New York: Routledge. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lunacharskii, Anatolii. 1926. Khristiansto Ili Kommunizm: Disput S Mitropolitom A. Vvedenskim. Leningrad: Gos. Izd-vo. Murvar, Vatro. 1967. “Max Weber’s Concept of Hierocracy: A Study in the Typology of Church-State Relationships.” Sociology of Religion 28(2):69–84. Murvar, Vatro. 1968. “Russian Religious Structures: A Study in Persistent Church Subservience.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 1–22. Murvar, Vatro. 1971. “Patrimonial-Feudal Dichotomy and Political Structure in Pre-Revolutionary Russia: One Aspect of the Dialogue between the Ghost of Marx and Weber.” The Sociological Quarterly 12(4):500–24. Nelson, Benjamin. 1973. “Civilizational Complexes and Intercivilizational Encounters.” Sociological Analysis 34(2):79–105. Nelson, Benjamin. 1981. On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science, and Civilizations: Selected Writings. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield Pub Incorporated. Nielsen, Donald A. 1989. “Sects, Churches and Economic Transformations in Russia and Western Europe.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 2(4):493–522. Nielsen, Donald A. 2001. “Rationalization, Transformations of Consciousness and Intercivilizational Encounters: Reflections on Benjamin Nelson’s Sociology of Civilizations.” International Sociology 16(3):406–20. Obolensky, Dimitri. 1971. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. New York: Praeger Publishers. Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shepard, Jonathan. 2007. “Rus.” Pp. 369–416 in Christianization and the Rise of the Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’c. 900-1200, edited by Nora Berend. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Yulia Prozorova Stroumsa, Guy G. 2005. “Cultural Memory in Early Christianity: Clement of Alexandria and the History of Religions.” Pp. 295–317 in Axial Civilizations and World History, edited by S. N. Eisenstadt, J. P. Arnason, and B. Wittrock. Leiden: Brill. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, Max. 2005. “The “Rationalism” of Western Civilization.” Pp. 53–67 in Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity, edited by Stephen Kalberg: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Wittrock, Björn. 2005. “The Meaning of the Axial Age.” Pp. 51–85 in Axial Civilizations and World History, edited by S. N. Eisenstadt, J. P. Arnason, and B. Wittrock. Leiden: Brill.

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3 ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN DIASPORAS IN THE WEST Grounding the Tradition Marco Guglielmi Abstract This chapter sheds light on some current transformations of Orthodox Christianity and the settlement of Orthodox Christian diasporas in Western countries. The first and second sections outline a perspective for a sociological comprehension of Eastern Orthodoxy. They trace its key features by grasping the main societal trends that have historically developed around its theological teachings on the Holy Tradition. The third and fourth sections examine the Orthodox Christian diasporas in North America and in Western, Central, and Northern Europe. Following a reading of the main sociological studies on the subject, Orthodox churches abroad appear to develop some socio-cultural and religious encounters with the receiving environment and to engage with certain contemporary challenges. Due to their conditions as immigrant groups and religious minorities, Orthodox diasporas are generally called to ground the Tradition abroad by discerning the latter from their cultural customs and traditional habits diffused in the homeland. In short, this chapter refutes the vague image of Orthodox Christianity as a monolithic religious system and shows Orthodox diasporas as permanent renovations at multiple levels.

Introduction This chapter sheds light on some current transformations of Orthodox Christianity and the settlement of Orthodox Christian diasporas in Western countries. From a sociological perspective, Eastern Orthodoxy appears to be a conservative religion that is, nevertheless, internally plural and in permanent renovation at multiple levels. In particular, sociological analysis of the Orthodox diasporas highlights some dynamic and changing aspects of this Christian tradition. The first and second sections outline a sociological comprehension of Orthodox Christianity. They trace its key features by grasping the main societal trends that have devel-

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-6

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oped historically around its theological teachings on the Holy Tradition. More specifically, the first section examines the religious vision which is at the heart of Orthodoxy, while the second examines its broad influences on Orthodox church relations with the contemporary world. The third section focuses on the Orthodox Christian diasporas from a sociological perspective, rather than adopting the more common canonical perspective on the subject. It describes the two main panoramas of Orthodox diasporas in North America and in Western, Central, and Northern Europe. Through a reading of the most important studies on the topic and some sociological theories concerning religion and migration, the fourth section indicates the primary tasks experienced by Orthodox churches abroad and the major issues tackled within their settlement. Beyond the defensive identity shaped by these churches in diaspora, they appear to develop characteristic socio-cultural and religious encounters with the receiving environment and to engage with certain contemporary challenges. This chapter discusses the main hypothesis developed during fieldwork on Orthodox churches in Italy (Guglielmi 2022), which focused especially on the case of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Broadly speaking, Orthodox Christian diasporas in the West handle their conditions as religious minorities and immigrant groups by adopting creative solutions, fresh practices, and more flexible liturgical routines which appear to re-shape some features of Orthodoxy’s customary patterns. Against this fragmented but widespread process within the diasporic condition, Orthodox churches generally seem to reflect consolidated societal aspects of their religion. Usually for compelling practical reasons, they are often called to ground the Tradition abroad by discerning the latter from their traditional habits, cultural references, and national customs diffused in the homeland.

Understanding Orthodox Christianity through the Tradition Orthodox Christianity is the second-largest branch of Christianity, with more than 250 million adherents. It operates as a communion of 14 autocephalous churches, each governed by its hierarchy, and by some autonomous metropolises and archdioceses under the jurisdiction of these independent churches. This Christian tradition does not have a central ecclesiastic authority, unlike the power assigned to the bishop of Rome (the Pope) in Catholicism. However, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (EP) is recognized as primus inter pares, or “first among equals” by the Orthodox churches. The Eastern Orthodox Church was in communion with the Roman Catholic Church until the East-West Schism in 1054, which disputed the authority of the bishop of Rome. The term “Eastern” has been adopted to differentiate this branch of the church from the Western branch during and after the Schism. Historically, the presence of the Orthodox faith was rooted in the Eastern part of Christendom, that is, in countries located in Southeast and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus region, and the whole Russian area. The term “Orthodox” derives from the Greek words orthos, which means “right,” and doxa, which means “belief.” Thus, the word Orthodox means “correct belief” or “right thinking.” In fact, Orthodoxy claims to practice the original Christian faith as transmitted by the true tradition established by Jesus Christ. In this regard, the double meaning of the Greek word doxa, which also means “glory” or “glorification,” reveals the belief of Orthodoxy that it practices the original forms of Christian worship and underlines its attention to the liturgical and sacramental dimension of the church’s life. A sociological view of Eastern Orthodoxy focuses on the societal trends that have developed historically around its theological teachings on the Tradition. As noted, Orthodox 48

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churches stress their fidelity to the apostolic tradition and the ecclesial patterns of Early Christianity, referring to the Scriptures, the Ecumenical Councils, the ancient canons, and the writings of Church Fathers. Generally, they refer to this body of norms, rules, and forms as the Holy Tradition. The latter may be considered the crucial feature of Eastern Orthodoxy with respect to Catholic and Protestant churches. In this regard, the theologian Father (Fr). John Anthony McGuckin writes: One of the most commonly used phrases in the theological vocabulary of the Orthodox is “The Holy Tradition.” In former times this notion had some resonance with Western Catholics, but perhaps a little less in the present era of extensive theological and cultural changes affecting Roman Catholicism. For Protestants, the term usually brought to mind many of the reasons for which they had originally challenged Latin Catholicism in the Reformation era, accusing it in several instances with corrupting the biblical tradition of Christianity in favor of its own “customs and traditions.” (2008:90–91) As McGuckin observed, the conception of Holy Tradition concerns Orthodoxy’s distinctiveness within the Christian milieu, which shapes the essence of its basic theological vision. On the other hand, as McGuckin also noted, “it may be the case that some of the less educated Orthodox equate the tradition with everything that happens in church as they currently experience it (for better or worse, good practice or bad)” (2008:90). It, thus, becomes essential to establish Tradition’s theological definition. According to McGuckin, “Orthodoxy understands the Holy Tradition to be the essence of the life-saving Gospel of Christ brought to the world through the church by the power of the Holy Spirit of God. The tradition is, theologically speaking, how the Spirit is experienced within the Church of Christ as the charism of Truth” (2008:90). Earlier, among the many Orthodox conceptions formulated about the Tradition, the well-known Russian theologian Fr. Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944) offered this nuanced perspective: Tradition is not a sort of archaeology, which by its shadows connects the present with the past, not a law, it is the fact that the life of the Church remains always identical with itself. Tradition receives a “normative” value precisely because of this identity. And as the same spirit dwells in each man living the life of the Church, he is not limited to touching the surface of Tradition, but, in so far as he is filled with the spirit of the church, he enters into it. (1935:26) The work of sociologists may resemble the vision of what both McGuckin and Bulgakov term the “less educated Orthodox” who frame the church’s tradition by focusing on its symbols, rituals, and customs, merely “touching the surface of Tradition.” Dealing with this pertinent issue is the more inclusive notion of “Living Tradition” that was developed in the 1930s by a group of Russian theologian émigrés in France as the title of a collection of articles (YMCA 1937).1 Forty years later, Fr. John Meyendorff (1978) adopted the same title for his notable book which surveyed the Orthodox understanding of Tradition by relating it to modern society and contemporary challenges. He argued that Christian solutions to society’s issues can never be absolute or perfect. Rather, Christians should use the 49

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mysterious and transcendent communion lived within the church as their starting point and criterion (1978:201). However, he noted that “historically Orthodox Christians frequently looked for substitutes for this initial and basic criterion. The Byzantine Empire provided one; nationalism later presented another” (1978:201–202). In short, this last view appears to invite sociologists to focus on the above “substitutes” in order to explore the aspects and dynamics developed by Orthodox churches in their societal “living” of the Tradition. Sociologists even appear required to detect the impacts of the “normative value” of the tradition’s identity that Bulgakov described, and through which “the life of the Church remains always identical with itself” (to a certain extent) in important features of a parish. According to Max Weber’s theory, the powerful traditional character of Orthodoxy has been shaped by a “unique religious universe” centered on the pathways of monasticism and asceticism (Kalberg 2012). This religious universe has been enhanced by the predominant liturgical and sacramental dimension maintained by Orthodoxy throughout the centuries as well as by its elaboration of a “cosmic” Christian vision. Also, according to Weber (1973), a specific mysticism linked to the typical beliefs of the East seems to persist within Orthodoxy, a mysticism which shows itself as knowledge of the meanings of the world through a relationship with God.

Framing a Sociological Perspective on Eastern Orthodoxy To analyze the trends experienced by Orthodoxy around the sociological core of the Tradition, it is suitable to start from a general historical perspective. Throughout their histories, the territories with an Orthodox majority did not experience the ensemble of sociocultural, economic, and scientific factors that arose in the wake of the Renaissance in the fifteenth century and the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Mainly for geographical and political reasons, there were a few historical encounters between Eastern churches and the main model of modernity developed in Western Europe (Makrides 2012a, 2012b).2 In this circumstance, the crucial feature of Orthodoxy (i.e., its fidelity to the Tradition) appeared to play a central role in shaping a social traditionalism within Orthodox churches. By offering multiple forms of conservative reference and self-protection, it seemed to influence Orthodoxy’s interactions with societal domains, as well as its stances on contemporary challenges. [For Orthodox churches,] the purpose of this continuous quoting [of past sources] was to justify traditionalist policies and orientations and to condemn various attempted changes or innovations. Characteristically enough, we are not talking here about religious and theological contexts alone. The same holds true for secular contexts as well, which were equally influenced by this kind of Orthodox traditionalism. The question is whether there is an intrinsic connection between the Orthodox and social traditionalism or if these are simply parallel and coincidental phenomena. The Orthodox usually try to find pertinent answers or solutions with reference to a normative and binding past, which is somehow regarded as a panacea beyond time and space. It appears, however, that there was indeed a strong interplay between Orthodox and social traditionalism in certain historical periods, although always in relation to the overall conditions of the time and numerous other factors. (Makrides 2012b:21) 50

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As underlined by this quotation, the bonds between Orthodoxy and social traditionalism are not obvious, nor are their historical paths and intersections. However, the societal dimension of Orthodoxy’s traditionalism may be primarily related to its elaboration of critical and/or conflicting teachings with respect to the broad project of Western modernity. This general stance emphasizes a defensive symbolic character of the Holy Tradition as well as suspicion of socio-cultural and religious encounters with other domains (Agadjanian 2003). Thus, the category of the West has functioned as a marker of difference from what is considered to be the essence of Orthodoxy and, ironically, has become a constitutive aspect of the Eastern Orthodox imagination (Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou 2013). Recently, this controversial attitude has become more evident in the tensions that arise in the engagement of Orthodox churches with some contemporary challenges, such as gender sensitive issues, LGBTQIA+ movements, scientific advances, and human rights. From a historical point of view, other differences of Eastern Orthodoxy from Catholicism and Protestantism in addressing certain complex processes should be considered, as they have favored progressive “demarcations” of their positions. For example, one should consider the historical ways in which Orthodox churches have faced the modern formation of the nation state. In fact, Orthodox churches have sought to monopolize the cultural and religious identity of their country. This overlapping of national and religious identities has generated minor paths of religious nationalism (Leustean 2014), increasing the contentious facets within the widespread Orthodox conservatism. Furthermore, the above nationalistic facets have been enhanced by the lack of civil and social capital, as well as the economic difficulties, experienced by countries with an Orthodox majority under communist regimes (Djankov and Nikolova 2018). As became more evident in the post-communist period, the conservative stances of Orthodox churches were affected by the harsh legacies of the previous political era. As Elizabeth Prodromou (2004) stated, the memories of the communist regime are still alive within Orthodox churches, causing an Orthodox deficit in the fresh resources necessary to deal with some contemporary challenges. While the other two Christian traditions – Catholicism and Protestantism – adopted religious reforms and innovations with respect to changes occurring in modern society during the second half of the last century, the Orthodox churches seemingly remained anchored to the points of reference of an “imaginary idyllic past” (Ramet 2006:150). On the other hand, it is important to emphasize the plurality of modernization processes experienced by countries with an Orthodox majority, as well as their dissimilar cultural absorption of latter stages of globalization. For example, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the new international period since the 1990s have enabled new encounters of Orthodox churches with other socio-cultural, religious, and political domains. This trend is most apparent for the Orthodox majority countries both internal to the European Union (EU) (such as Romania, Greece, and Bulgaria) and external to it as neighbor or candidate countries (such as Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, and Macedonia). Particularly, the processes of European integration have been a testing ground for the Orthodox churches in EU countries. These churches have shaped the first Orthodox discourses on some contemporary challenges as responses to certain EU reforms concerning church–state relations and human rights (Guglielmi 2021; Leustean 2018; Stoeckl 2014a). In this respect, some Orthodox churches are appearing to deal flexibly with some contemporary issues. This more accommodating approach appears to change its features and intensity according to the particular church and its socio-cultural context. Among the clearest examples is the recent decision by the Ecumenical Patriarchate (EP), criticized among 51

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Orthodox churches, to allow its clerics to marry a second time in certain circumstances (Maragòs 2018). This religious reform has been followed by other adaptations negotiated by the EP regarding some current challenges in a global world. They may concern, for instance, a more inclusive approach to administration of the Holy Eucharist to the faithful, the systematic formulation of ecological and social teachings, and the development of a dominant inter-religious and ecumenical agenda.

The Orthodox Christian Diasporas in Western Countries The subject of the Orthodox diasporas has long been debated by scholars as well as being at the center of ecclesial conflicts among Orthodox churches. Generally, the discussions are marked by a canonical perspective focused on the normative or legal condition of the Orthodox diasporas in non-traditionally Orthodox territories (Hämmerli 2010). Differently, the sociological perspective concentrates on the societal reality of the Orthodox diasporas, paying attention to their settlement in the receiving country as well as their transnational connections with the homeland. The two main panoramas of the Orthodox diasporas in the West are in North America and in Western, Central, and Northern Europe (Roudometof 2015a). From a historical perspective, Orthodox Christians have actively spread the influence of their churches beyond their traditional territories. During the first three centuries, Orthodox missionaries evangelized lands to the East, generally through the establishment of a monastic community. Over the centuries, this model of evangelization became the pattern for Russian Orthodox missionaries who established a network of missions across Siberia and along the entire Pacific Rim. In North America, the eight Orthodox monks who arrived in Alaska in 1794 formed part of the centuries-old missionary heritage of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). After more than 200 years, the estimated number of Orthodox Christians in the United States of America in 2020 totaled 675,765 in 2,014 parishes (Krindatch 2021). In Canada, where Orthodox immigration began in 1920, the Orthodox population exceeded 400,000 by 2001, with a Greek, Ukrainian, and Serbian majority (Wigglesworth 2010). Counting both Eastern and Oriental3 Orthodox churches together, Johnson and Grim (2014) projected that there were approximately 1,000,000 Orthodox faithful in Canada in 2015. The Orthodox diasporas in the USA and Canada are largely composed of immigrants and linked to the churches in their motherland, such as those in Russia, Greece, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Syria, and Albania. Among these, the most well-established and culturally merged appear to be those of the Greek Orthodox Archdioceses of both America and Canada as well as of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America. Some Orthodox diasporas in North America have foundations related not only to migration but also to political issues, such as the case of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) united with the Moscow Patriarchate since 2007. At the time of the newly constituted Soviet regime, the Patriarch Tikhon (Bellavin) (1866–1925) authorized Russian bishops in the diaspora to create independent organizations if it became impossible to maintain normal relations with the mother church. In November 1920, he approved the development of the above Russian church which has its headquarters in New York. The peculiar establishment of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) was also a Metropolia of the Russian Orthodox Church in the USA until 1970. In that year, after disputes related to political issues, it was granted a tomos of autocephaly (currently not recognized by the EP). Unlike the other Orthodox diasporas, it did not receive large influxes of immigrants 52

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after the 1960s, and currently its members are mostly second- and third-generation immigrant citizens and converts. Indeed, this is the only Orthodox church in North America that uses solely English as a liturgical language. More specifically, the OCA is the most important case in the world of an Orthodox diaspora that has become an Indigenized church or Indigenous religion. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Western, Central, and Northern Europe, it is more difficult to estimate the number of followers of Orthodox diasporas. The first group of immigrants started to arrive in these European areas at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and their number has grown exponentially during the European integration process. Currently, Orthodox churches abroad are composed mainly of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet countries, especially Romania, Moldavia, Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. They have established themselves in all EU countries, occasionally with historical and/or cultural dynamics influencing their domestic migratory flows. For instance, the settlement of the Greek community in the United Kingdom is deeply rooted historically and so, too, is that of Cypriot immigrants, while the number of Romanian immigrants is very high in Spain. Johnson and Grim (2014) also projected approximately 1,400,000 adherents of Eastern Orthodoxy in Germany in 2015. Italy seems to have the highest Orthodox presence in Western Europe – close to 1,600,000 faithful – due to the settlement of the largest Romanian diaspora in the world (Giordan and Guglielmi 2018; Guglielmi 2020). Finally, Orthodox communities are historically rooted in France especially because of the presence of the Russian diaspora following the Bolshevik revolution. They have grown significantly over the past 25 years due to transnational migration, with about 750,000 faithful in 2015 (Johnson and Grim 2014). There are also small Orthodox diasporas, again due to more recent migration flows, in Switzerland, Austria (186,000 faithful projected in 2015), Belgium (64,000 faithful projected in 2015), and Denmark (13,000 faithful projected in 2015), and a small Orthodox group exists in Norway (Johnson and Grim 2014). Regarding Northern Europe, the Finnish Orthodox Church, which embodies the features of both an Indigenous religion and a diaspora religion, is notable (Martikainen 2013). On the one hand, this church is legally recognized as a national church by the Finnish state, along with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. On the other hand, it has its roots in the medieval Novgorodian missionary work undertaken in the Karelia area from the twelfth century onward, and it was part of the ROC until 1923. Finally, another particular case is that of the Archdiocese of the Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe, which has its headquarters in Paris. This church stems from a rift among the ROCOR parishes in Western Europe that occurred in 1931 due to conflicts related to political issues and was received as an exarchate by the EP. After the EP’s decision to dissolve this exarchate in 2018, the Archdiocese was received by the Russian Orthodox Church, while a minority of its parishes joined diasporas of the EP, the Romanian Orthodox Church, and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

Grounding the Tradition within Orthodox Diasporas According to some research (Giordan and Zrinščak 2020; Roudometof et al. 2005; Sagle 2011), relevant transformations and engagements have marked Orthodox diasporas of the older North American panorama from socio-cultural, religious, and political points of view.4 By no mere chance, a greater canonical independence of these Orthodox churches abroad can also be recognized compared with those settled in Western, Central, and Northern 53

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Europe. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, several studies showed that initial situations of Orthodox diasporas in Europe solely engaged in the assistance of their immigrants have been superseded (Giordan and Guglielmi 2018; Giordan and Zrinščak 2020; Guglielmi 2022; Hämmerli and Mayer 2014; Ihlamur-Öner 2009; Rimestad 2020; Roudometof 2015b). In the past two decades, Orthodox Christian diasporas in the above European areas have been marked by more significant organizational developments and engagements with societal contexts. Following the research paths emerging from these studies, Orthodox diasporas in the West appear absorbed (with differing intensities, forms, and degrees of relevance) with many tasks generally related to churches abroad (Ebaugh and Chafetz 1999). These include commitment to reproduction of national and ethnic identities, development of social networks for immigrants, and arrangement of basic welfare for compatriots. Moreover, they seem focused on many customary issues of immigrant religions (Kivisto 2014), from shaping stances toward the host society and its natives, such as the self-ghettoization–social inclusion spectrum, to management of multi-lingualism in both their social and liturgical activities. Orthodox diasporas in both continents also maintain a leading role in the construction of transnational religious connections – flows of people, goods, knowledge, and other resources across national borders (Wuthnow and Offutt 2008). In that respect, the global creation of institutional forms of transnationalism among Orthodox churches abroad and religious and social communities in the country of origin is observable (Giordan and Zrinščak 2020; Roudometof et al. 2005). Also considered in these studies are the efforts of Orthodox diasporas in facing certain contemporary challenges which became more prominent and pressing because of the social dispersion of the faithful abroad and their immigrant condition. These challenges included maintaining a liturgical and sacramental emphasis in increasing secularized contexts, developing an ecclesial organization through scarce economic resources and notable laity involvement, incorporating fresh community practices, carrying out youth ministry for the new Orthodox generations growing in plural societal environments, and positioning themselves as a religious minority within local inter-religious relations. In the context of these challenges, the Orthodox diasporas in North America seem to practice a more powerful engagement with contemporary issues. This is especially evident within Orthodox diasporas that are composed mostly of second- or third-generation immigrants and native converts, such as the OCA and the local archdioceses of both the Greek Orthodox diaspora and of the Church of Antioch. However, Orthodox churches in the West generally appear to re-shape some features of Orthodoxy’s customary patterns, particularly dealing with the multi-faceted historic influence of their social traditionalism. Against this backdrop, the sociological theory on the reframing of immigrant religions elaborated by Fenggang Yang and Helen R. Ebaugh (2001) may further elucidate the establishment of Orthodox diasporas in Western countries. It assumes some crucial transformations in the settlement of immigrant religions in the USA and beyond, especially arguing a symbolic and practical return by the latter toward the roots of their religious heritage. In other words, Yang and Ebaugh claim that the experiences and adjustments which religious groups abroad tackle are “accompanied by a simultaneous process – returning to the theological foundations of the religion” (2001:278). The organizational adaptations of Orthodox diasporas require theological justifications, while the encounter with a different culture and majority religion prompts immigrants to reflect on their beliefs and practices. Hence, the new condition as a religious minority challenges immigrants to provide theo54

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logical foundations for their distinct religion and to justify the transformations developed abroad with respect to the parish’s life in the motherland. Considering the manifold research paths highlighted by the studies mentioned above, the diaspora condition appears to prompt Orthodox churches to embrace a general process of return toward the foundations of the Orthodox tradition. More specifically, in their settlement, Orthodox diasporas are called to reflect about the societal features of the Holy Tradition which they have experienced and learned mainly in the homeland. Often due to concrete reasons related to immigrant situations, they are urged to recognize cultural practices and national customs within their grounding of the Tradition abroad. They must discern this latter from the traditional habits which may assume different nuances in the diaspora, even becoming superfluous or inharmonious within the contexts of transnational Orthodox migration. In this sense, they could be called to “re-discover” the meanings of ancient religious symbols and rituals, which are currently performed in a different societal context. This common but fragmented process within these diasporas grows beyond their apparent monolithic reproduction of a widespread Orthodox conservatism. In that regard, the volume edited by Maria Hämmerli and Jean-Francois Mayer (2014) on Orthodox Christian diasporas in Western Europe identifies some religious innovations inside them. Likewise, further research by Marco Guglielmi (2022) also recognizes a re-shaping of more traditional stances of Orthodox churches in Italy. However, in the above studies, the Orthodox leaders in the diaspora perceive these transformations not as a break with the past, nor as a hybridization with local majority Catholicism or Protestantism, but as a reinterpretation of the tradition. Furthermore, the diaspora condition appears to create new opportunities to enhance transnational alliances among different Orthodox churches. The configuration of Orthodox diasporas in a given country generally compels all the churches to interact with each other, generating exchanges among Orthodox institutions, populations, and factions to an unprecedented extent (Stoeckl 2014b). This broad trend appears to be founded on the spectrums of both reflexivity and contamination among churches and their ecclesial traditions, and it may re-frame some contentious facets that have historically affected the association of national and religious identity within Orthodoxy, as well as address the vague entanglement between cultural habits and Tradition still socially diffused into Orthodox Christian environments. In this context, some Orthodox diasporas are developing a process to transcend their ethnic and national boundaries, thus addressing a crucial immigrant church issue (Kivisto 2014). In that respect, certain Orthodox communities in North America are embracing a process of “pristinization” (Breton 2012:113), which separates religion from culture by searching for a more inclusive national and ethnic belonging for diverse typologies of faithful (such as converts and second- and third-generation immigrants). Overall, factors related to Max Weber’s (1973) sociological thought come into play in this multi-faceted scenario: the immigrant condition of Orthodox diasporas embody a realm in which social fermentation can be observed in a period of powerful creativity. According to the German sociologist, the great transformations in European history occurred in specific moments of strong social charisma which often translated into cultural and religious transformations. In the two geographical panoramas examined here, social fermentation has given shape to potential ecclesial renovations which are embedded in the journey of Orthodox diasporas toward actually “living” the Holy Tradition in the context of transnational migration in order to benefit from its “protection” abroad. 55

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Conclusions The first and second sections of this chapter developed a sociological perspective of Orthodox Christianity and addressed the societal trends historically shaped around its theological teachings on the Holy Tradition. They aimed to grasp the “living” social influences engendered by the Tradition, as the latter is the crucial specificity of Orthodoxy within the entire Christian milieu. Despite the conservative backdrop, this chapter has refuted the vague image diffused among some scholars about Orthodox Christianity as a monolithic religious system composed by passive or backward institutions. Rather, sociological studies shed new light on Orthodoxy’s frictions with the contemporary world, showing they are dynamic in nature and not lacking in practical compromises. The third and fourth sections outlined the main transformations of Orthodox Christian diasporas in the West. Especially in North America, some Orthodox diasporas more deeply encounter different socio-cultural and religious environments and powerfully engage certain contemporary challenges. Through a reading of the leading studies on all Orthodox diasporas, a broad but fragmented process of return toward the roots of the Orthodox heritage can be observed. Notable in this regard is a reciprocal reshaping between the Orthodox diasporas and the main tasks and issues that typically concern the settlement and life of religious minorities and churches abroad. In fact, this re-consideration of societal aspects of the Tradition and of the intricate legacy of Orthodoxy’s social traditionalism is desired by some Orthodox diasporas, while not envisaged by others. In conclusion, there is an identifiable general process followed by Orthodox diasporas of grounding the Tradition abroad, which involves widespread reflections about cultural customs and traditional habits usually associated with it in the homeland. Indeed, Orthodox diasporas do not function as passive agents with respect to societal changes, as their “Living Tradition” nimbly moves through the trajectories generated by transnational migration. Paradoxically, their fidelity to Early Christianity requires them to discern their own identity boundaries in order to embody the Holy Tradition in the immigrant context and vis-à-vis other religious groups.

Notes 1 Fr. Bulgakov was also a Russian emigrant in Paris. 2 The sociological debate on the topic of religion and modernity is characterized by manifold positions (Pollack and Rosta 2018). In recent decades, several sociologists have maintained that some social theories deemed to be universal are adequate only for analysis of Western socio-religious contexts. In fact, until the end of the last century, many sociologists adopted the historical and societal experiences of Protestantism and Catholicism in the West as their sole points of reference, thus neglecting those of Eastern Christianity (Hann 2011). This chapter does not enter directly into this debate but rather adopts an extended and inclusive notion of modernity, referring to it as the main model of modernity developed in Western Europe or as the broad Western modernity project. 3 Oriental Orthodoxy is the second largest tradition of Eastern Christianity, which operates as a communion of six autocephalous churches. 4 Many reports on Orthodox churches in the USA are available from the personal website of Alexei Krindatch, who served as the research coordinator of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the USA: https://orthodoxreality​.org.

References Agadjanian, Alexander. 2003. “Breakthrough to Modernity, Apologia for Traditionalism: The Russian Orthodox View of Society and Culture in Comparative Perspective.” Religion, State and Society 31(4):327–346.

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Orthodox Christian Diasporas in the West Breton, Raymond. 2012. Different Gods: Integrating Non-Christian Minorities into a Primarily Christian Society. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bulgakov, Sergius. 1935. The Orthodox Church. London: Centenary Press; reprinted by New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988. Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. 2013. Orthodox Constructions of the West. New York: Fordham University Press. Djankov, Simeon, and Elena Nikolova. 2018. “Communism as the Unhappy Coming.” Policy Research Working Paper, No. 8399, World Bank Group. Ebaugh, Helen R., and Janet S. Chafetz. 1999. “Agents of Cultural Reproduction and Structural Change.” Social Forces 78(2):585–613. Giordan, Giuseppe, and Marco Guglielmi. 2018. “Be Fruitful and Multiply… Fast! The Spread of Orthodox Churches in Italy.” Pp. 53–69 in Congregations in Europe, edited by Christophe Monnot and Jörg Stolz. New York: Springer. Giordan, Giuseppe, and Siniša Zrinščak, eds. 2020. Global Eastern Orthodoxy: Politics, Religion, and Human Rights. Cham: Springer. Guglielmi, Marco. 2020. “Orthodox Christianity in a Western Catholic Country: The Glocalization of Orthodox Diasporas in Italy.” Pp. 219–240 in Global Eastern Orthodoxy: Politics, Religion and Human Rights, edited by Giuseppe Giordan and Siniša Zrinščak. Cham: Springer. Guglielmi, Marco. 2021. “The Romanian Orthodox Church, the European Union and the Contention on Human Rights.” Religions 12(1):1–15. Guglielmi, Marco. 2022. The Romanian Orthodox Diaspora in Italy: Eastern Orthodoxy in a Western European Country. Cham: Palgrave. Hämmerli, Maria. 2010. “Orthodox Diaspora? A Sociological and Theological Problematization of a Stock Phrase.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 10(2–3):97–115. Hämmerli, Maria, and Jean-François Mayer, eds. 2014. Orthodox Identities in Western Europe: Migration, Settlement and Innovation. Farnham: Ashgate. Hann, Chris. 2011. “Eastern Christianity and Western Social Theory.” Erfurter Vorträge zur Kulturgeschichte des Orthodoxen Christentums, 10:5–32. Ihlamur-Öner, Suna G. 2009. The Romanian Orthodox Churches in Italy: The Construction of Romanian-Italian Transnational Orthodox Space. PhD Thesis, University of Trento, Italy. Johnson, Todd M., and Brian J. Grim, eds. 2014. “Religious Traditions.” In World Religion Database: International Religious Demographic Statistics and Sources. Leiden: Brill. http://www​.wor​ldre​ligi​ onda​tabase​.org​/wrd​_default​.asp. Kalberg, Stephen. 2012. “Misticismo, Ascetismo e Azione nella Sociologia della Religione di Max Weber.” Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 2:163–184. Kivisto, Peter. 2014. Religion and Immigration: Migrant Faiths in North America and Western Europe. Cambridge: Polity. Krindatch, Alexei. 2021. “US Religious Census 2020.” In Orthodox Reality. https://orthodoxreality​ .org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2021​/03​/202​0Cen​susG​ener​alReport1​.pdf. Leustean, Lucian N., ed. 2014. Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe. New York: Fordham University Press. Leustean, Lucian N. 2018. “The Politics of Orthodox Churches in the European Union.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 18(2–3):146–157. Makrides, Vasilios N. 2012a. “Orthodox Christianity, Modernity and Postmodernity: Overview, Analysis and Assessment.” Religion, State and Society 40(3–4):248–285. Makrides, Vasilios N. 2012b. “Orthodox Christianity, Change, Innovation: Contradictions in Terms?” Pp. 19–50 in Innovation in the Orthodox Christian Tradition? The Question of Change in Greek Orthodox Thought and Practice, edited by Trine S. Willert and Lina Molokotos-Liederman. Abingdon: Routledge. Maragós, Ioannis. 2018. “Ortodossia: Il Secondo Matrimonio di Preti e Diaconi.” SettimanaNews. http://www​ . settimananews​ . it​ / ecumenismo​ - dialogo​ / ortodossia​ - secondo​ - matrimonio​ - preti​ diaconi. Martikainen, Tuomas. 2013. Religion, Migration, Settlement: Reflections on Post-1990 Immigration to Finland. Leiden: Brill. McGuckin, John A. 2008. The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Marco Guglielmi Meyendorff, John. 1978. The Living Tradition: Orthodox Witness in the Contemporary World. New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Pollack, Detlef, and Gergely Rosta. 2018. Religion and Modernity: An International Comparison. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prodromou, Elizabeth. 2004. “The Ambivalent Orthodox.” Journal of Democracy 15(2):62–75. Ramet, Sabrina P. 2006. “The Way We Were - And Should be Again? European Orthodox Churches and the ‘Idyllic Past’.” Pp. 148–175 in Religion in an Expanding Europe, edited by Timothy A. Byrnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rimestad, Sebastian. 2020. Orthodox Christian Identity in Western Europe: Contesting Religious Authority. Abingdon: Routledge. Roudometof, Victor. 2015a. “Orthodox Christianity as a Transnational Religion: Theoretical, Historical and Comparative Considerations.” Religion, State and Society 43(3):211–227. Roudometof, Victor, ed. 2015b. “Special Section: Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe.” Religion, State and Society 43(3):209–2010. Roudometof, Victor, Alexander Agadjanian, and Jerry Pankhurst, eds. 2005. Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age: Tradition Faces in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: AltaMira Press. Sagle, Amy. 2011. The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace: American Conversions to Orthodox Christianity. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Stoeckl, Kristina. 2014a. The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights. Abingdon: Routledge. Stoeckl, Kristina. 2014b. “Orthodox Churches and Migration.” Pp. 721–736 in Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Lucian N. Leustean. Abingdon: Routledge. Weber, Max. 1973. “Max Weber on Church, Sect, and Mysticism.” Sociological Analysis 34(2):140–149. Wigglesworth, Kevin. 2010. “Statistics of Orthodox Christianity in Canada.” The Canadian Journal of Orthodox Christianity 5(1):28–48. Wuthnow, Robert, and Stephen Offutt. 2008. “Transnational Religious Connections.” Sociology of Religion 69(2):209–232. Yang, Fenggang, and Helen R. Ebaugh. 2001. “Transformations in New Immigrant Religions and Their Global Implications.” American Sociological Review 66(2):269–288. YMCA (ed.). 1937. Predanie Zhivoe: Pravoslavie v Sovremennosti. Paris: YMCA Press.

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4 SAINT-SIMON, SAINT-SIMONISM, AND THE TRIUMPH OF COMTE’S VISION OF SOCIOLOGY Joseph A. Scimecca Abstract Much of the disregard for the importance of Saint-Simon in the history of sociology is traced to the rejection of the Saint-Simonians’ (a group of Saint-Simon’s disciples) misrepresentation of what they considered to be Saint-Simon’s model for a new Christian-based society spelled out in Saint-Simon’s last published work The New Christianity (1825). The argument presented in this chapter refutes the generally held view that Saint-Simon was an atheist. Instead, Saint-Simon is taken at his word in The New Christianity, and it is proposed that a combination of SaintSimon’s belief in God and his belief that Christianity was of divine origin, along with the distortions of the Saint-Simonians as opposed to Comte’s professed atheism, provided the context for the triumph of Comte’s vision of sociology as a purely secular and materialistic discipline that now defines contemporary s­ ociology.

Introduction This chapter takes exception to the almost universal characterization in introductory sociology textbooks of Auguste Comte as “the father of sociology” and, instead, presents the argument that Claude-Henri Saint-Simon has as much, perhaps even more, claim to the title, than Comte. Indeed, even Emile Durkheim, who is generally recognized for institutionalizing and legitimizing sociology as a discipline worthy of study in the academy, wrote that he considered Saint-Simon “the founder of Positivism and of sociology” (Manuel 1963:3). What has been grievously overlooked is the significance of Saint-Simon’s contributions to what would become social science and sociology. In no particular ranking of importance, Saint-Simon (1964) called for positivism, a science of social order to understand social organization; emphasized that historical change is at the heart of society; called for the unity of the physical and social sciences; held that human knowledge passed through three stages of development – theological, metaphysical, and scientific; proposed a rudimentary typology of social classes; called for a meritocracy; called for social theories to be based on evidence; developed ideas of industrialism, socialism, and a “Religion of Humanity.” DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-7

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These are some of the major ideas that Comte, without attribution, “borrowed” from SaintSimon. “Borrowed” is placed in quotation marks here to emphasize the well-known fact that Comte was reluctant, to say the least, to credit anyone else for his grand theory of a positivist “science of man.” This alternative interpretation of the neglect of Saint-Simon as a founder of sociology is based on his last work, The New Christianity (1825), which was published a few months before his death. In the dialogue that comprises the work, one of the two participants (the Innovator), who represents Saint-Simon, states that he believes in God and that Christianity has a divine origin. The contention presented here is in stark contrast to the generally held view that Saint-Simon was an atheist (Kennedy 1994:76). Instead, Saint-Simon is taken at his word, and it is proposed that a combination of Saint-Simon’s belief in God and his belief Christianity was of divine origin, as opposed to Comte’s professed atheism, provided the context for the triumph of Comte’s vision of sociology as a purely secular and materialistic discipline. To understand how this occurred, attention must be drawn to a growing secularism among the intelligentsia of the early nineteenth century, Comte’s “borrowed” concept of a “Religion of Humanity,” and the negative reception of the Saint-Simonians (a group of Saint-Simon’s disciples) who attempted to put into practice what they considered to be a model for Saint-Simon’s “new Christianity.” These factors, it is argued, are the primary reasons for Saint-Simon’s lack of recognition in the history of sociology.

The New Christianity and Secularization Saint-Simon’s The New Christianity is a dialogue that takes place in a world the philosopher and poet Johan Goethe describes as characterized by “the conflict between belief and unbelief, the deepest, indeed only theme in the history of the world” (quoted in Cassirer 1951/2009:136). This worldview conflict about whether God created and sustained the universe was the world into which Comte was born, and he rejected theistic claims when he embraced atheism as a teenager. Comte then came to maturity during a time the world was becoming more and more secularized. A continuous and often contentious debate was being played out in European society between two major alternative worldviews: belief and unbelief. It was a debate that began with the origins of the secularization of the Western world, a movement that philosopher Charles Taylor locates as beginning around 1500, and which he describes as “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently is not the easiest to embrace” (2007:3). Whereas Saint-Simon accepted the worldview of belief, Comte embraced the worldview of unbelief. It is important to understand this conflict between the two because Comte’s worldview signifies the beginnings of a very real schism in the early history of what would become sociology. It represents a break from a group of French, English, and Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, known collectively as the Philosophes, who (with the noted exception of David Hume) envisioned what constituted a religiously based “science of man,” the precursor of what would become social science and sociology (Becker 1971; Seidman1983). It was the triumph of Comte’s vision of sociology as a positivistic, materialistic science that continues to describe sociology to this day. Even though this chapter is in the Handbook of Sociology and Christianity, it remains a truism that contemporary sociology is predominantly a secular discipline with little, if any, regard for Christianity 60

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other than as one tradition of interest in the sociology of religion. In fact, as the renowned sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow states, sociology is “one of the most anti-religious of all the disciplines” (quoted in Swatos, Jr. and Kivisto 1991:347). What follows is speculation on how this character of sociology came about by focusing on a neglected period in the history of sociology, the time right after Saint-Simon’s death in 1825. It was during the second quarter of the nineteenth century that the Saint-Simonians attempted to live out what they believed to be Saint-Simon’s version of a new Christianity, as well as a time when Auguste Comte fashioned his positivistic and materialistic vision of sociology. Although, as previously stated, it is well known that much of Comte’s overall thought was “borrowed” from Saint-Simon, what is not as well-known is how Comte’s conception of a “Religion of Humanity” is a distorted version of Saint-Simon’s The New Christianity. This distortion resulted in Saint-Simon’s version of Christianity as interpreted by the Saint-Simonians being dismissed and mocked by the intelligentsia of the time, as was Comte’s “Religion of Humanity.” This ridicule removed the chances for any positive reception of Saint-Simon’s new version of Christianity, something that may very well have dampened the criticisms of Christianity in vogue at the time. It also raises the possibility that the call for a moral philosophy based on a Christian humanism that characterized the precursors of sociology, the Philosophes, who called for a social science grounded in a combination of empiricism and a Christian-based moral philosophy, may have led to a different kind of “science of man” being accepted (Scimecca 2019.) When Saint-Simon’s belief in God and the divine origins of Christianity was introduced and distorted in the tenets of the Saint-Simonians’ interpretation of the “new Christianity,” it led to Saint-Simon becoming coupled in ridicule with Comte’s later “Religion of Humanity.” However, a caveat is needed here because what follows seems to be playing the “what if” game, something that fiction writers are fond of doing but sociologists normally are not. The justification for this line of reasoning is that even if something cannot be “proven,” a “cogent argument” – a rational contention that warrants further consideration – can, nevertheless, be offered. This is a variation of what Charles Lemert (1999:242) describes as the “could be of religion in social theory.” The variation introduced here is that if the SaintSimonians had not almost completely distorted Saint-Simon’s vision of Christianity, it may very well have survived the secular challenge to Christianity. Three factors support this contention: 1) Christianity was at the heart of the moral foundation of sociology as formulated by the Philosophes during the Enlightenment; 2) the Saint-Simonians’ distortion of SaintSimon’s version of a “new Christianity” was ridiculed and rejected; and 3) Comte’s substitution of a “Religion of Humanity” for Catholicism was conflated with the Saint-Simonians’ model of Saint-Simon’s “new Christianity” and, therefore, was also ridiculed and rejected.

The Enlightenment and the Origins of Sociology The origins of sociology can be traced to two intellectual ideas that characterized the Enlightenment: moral philosophy and empiricism (all valid knowledge comes from experience), traditions which most modern sociologists now see as separate but which were intertwined and inter-dependent during the Enlightenment (Becker 1971; Seidman 1983). It was the intention of the Philosophes to formulate a social science that fused science and morals, a social science with a moral imperative that sought to liberate the human spirit and ensure the fullest development of the person. The nascent social science that emerged out of the Enlightenment was an evaluative and moral approach to understanding human behavior 61

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with roots in Christian humanism and did not hesitate to offer value judgments about the need for social order and the conditions under which people lived. It is important to understand that although the Enlightenment Philosophes called for the application of scientific principles to the study of human behavior (Rossides, 1998), they were first and foremost moral philosophers. For the Philosophes, science and morality were to be fused, not separated; the “is” and the “ought” were to be merged into a moral science, a science used for the betterment of humankind. What also must be considered is that Christian humanism has at its base a moral imperative to uphold the inherent dignity of all humans. In contradiction to the view that the Enlightenment was anti-religious, religious belief was an integral part of the Philosophes’ moral philosophy (Barnett 2003; Byrne 1997; Pocock 1999; Sorkin 2008). As David Sorkin writes, The Enlightenment was not only compatible with religious belief but conducive to it. The Enlightenment made possible new iterations of faith. With the Enlightenment’s advent, religion lost neither its place nor its authority in European society and culture. If we trace modern culture to the Enlightenment, its foundations were decidedly religious. (2008:3) For the most part, although some of the Philosophes have been characterized as critical of religious belief, their criticism was primarily anti-clerical. In the words of S.J. Barnett, they “still retained a belief in God, even if they were hostile to the Church” (2003:3). With the previously noted exception of David Hume, the more well-known and influential Philosophes believed if not in the Christian God, at least in a deistic version. By way of specific examples to challenge the anti-religious characterization of the Enlightenment, John Locke was a believing Christian who wrote The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695/1824). Adam Ferguson answered his countryman Hume by “seeing Christianity as providing the mechanisms for positive outcomes of conflict and for establishing one’s identity and social bonds for society as part of a ‘Providential Functionalism’” (Scimecca 2019:40–41). As for the major French Philosophes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, all provided foundations for sociology from the context of religious beliefs. Montesquieu is reported to have asked to be given the last rites of the Catholic Church and to have said, “I always respected religion; the ethics of the Evangelicals is excellent, and the most beautiful gift God could have made to man” (Richter 1977:16). And although Rousseau has been characterized as anti-Christian, this is somewhat of a misconception. Like other French intellectuals, he was primarily opposed to the power of the Catholic Church in France and the clergy who wielded this power. His main theological criticism of Christian theology was his rejection of the concept of original sin not theistic beliefs. As a deist, Rousseau believed human beings were born good – “noble savages” – but were corrupted by an immoral society. He believed in a benevolent God and advocated a natural religion as the foundation of society, stating: “I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me” (Rousseau 1762/1979:277). For Rousseau, the corrupt society of France could only be restored by going back to Christian-based foundations of religion. As for Voltaire, he too, has been misinterpreted concerning his views on religion. He accepted the argument of Newton that the universe was created and held together by God (Scimecca 2019:46). For Voltaire, human beings were governed by natural laws, and his notion of the person 62

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was similar to the views of St. Thomas Aquinas and John Locke who believed that it was God-given reason that enabled the individual to discern these natural laws. Given this belief in God, Voltaire’s famous quote that “If God would not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” (quoted in Parton 1884:554) can be interpreted as a hypothetical statement. Otherwise, how could the order of the universe be explained? This view of the importance of the social value of religion in society was almost universally accepted as the eighteenth century ended. However, what was questioned by some as the nineteenth century began was belief in God. Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonians were among those who did not question that God created the universe, and this affected the beginnings of sociology.

Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonians The desire of the Saint-Simonists to preserve Saint-Simon’s legacy had the opposite effect of what they intended when they tried to put their misguided interpretation of Saint-Simon’s vision of a new type of Christianity into practice. The New Christianity (1825) is written in the form of a dialogue between an “Innovator” (a new Christian) and a “Conservative.” The aim of the work revolves around the Innovator’s attempt to convert the Conservative to Saint-Simon’s “new Christianity.” What would become the manifesto of the Saint-Simonians begins by stating the Innovator’s belief in the existence of God and how Christianity has been inspired by divine revelation, and ends with the conversion of the Conservative to this new form of Christianity. The New Christianity claims that the essence of Christianity lies in its moral content. It is based on the New Testament and can be summed up in a single commandment: that all men [sic] should behave toward one another as brothers. This was what the original Apostles had taught and which had been lost over the centuries (Saint-Simon 1825/1834). The papacy and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the dominant religion in France and all of Europe, no longer followed this precept. According to the Innovator, the clergy were heretics who needed to be called out for their hypocrisy and be totally reorganized. It was also no longer sufficient to preach “brotherly love,” because, due to the progress of science and the discovery of new worlds, it was incumbent upon the Church to recast Christianity into a morality that looked to the amelioration of the plight of the poorest and most numerous classes in society as humanity’s goal on earth. What Saint-Simon called for in The New Christianity was a new form of the Christian humanism of Francesco Petrarch and Desiderius Erasmus. It is what has come to be known as the “Double Love Command,” the ethic of love given to humanity by Jesus, when He was asked “which commandment in the law is the greatest?” (Qinping 2007:681). Jesus’s response is based on the first two of the Ten Commandments: 1) “You shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength;” and 2) “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:29–31). What Saint-Simon offered was a transcendental foundation to the moral imperative of Christianity that could not be altered due to changing power or influence arrangements in a particular culture or nation. In essence, Saint-Simon was advocating a society based on the teachings of Jesus. According to Saint-Simon, to accomplish this renewal, the problem of the clergy had to be solved. Comte wanted to literally replace priests with sociologists because he believed that the clergy were teaching a theology based on the illusion of transcendence. Saint-Simon, because he believed Christianity to be of divine origin, instead called for priests to be as well63

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versed in science as they were in theology. In his view, Christianity and science were not at odds. Saint-Simon wanted to educate and transform the clergy, not replace them with sociologists as Comte advocated. The clergy had failed to keep abreast of scientific knowledge and, therefore, had forfeited their right to function as society’s intellectual elite. “They had become a … stronghold of superstition and false ideas, which they were defending against the new scientists merely out of a desire to maintain themselves in power” (Manual 1962:141). It was this thirst for power that hindered the clergy’s ability to preach the Christian morality of brotherly love and that impeded them from being a positive spiritual force in society. This put Saint-Simon in sharp contrast to Comte and numerous other intellectuals of the age who believed that Christianity was on the brink of disappearing. For Saint-Simon, it was, instead, the failure of the clergy to preach the Christian morality of brotherly love that hindered them as leaders in the society. A few days before his death, Saint-Simon wrote: Our last work will be the last to be understood. It is generally believed that men are not susceptible of becoming passionate in a religious direction, but this is a grave error. The Catholic system was in contradiction with the systems of the sciences and modern industry, and therefore its fall was inevitable. It took place and this fall is the signal for a new belief which is going to fill with enthusiasm the void which criticism has left in the souls of men, for it is a belief which will draw its strength from everything that belongs to the ancient belief … The whole doctrine is there. (quoted in Manuel l962:147–148) Saint-Simon may have believed that the whole doctrine was there in The New Christianity, but the Saint-Simonians did not, and they added numerous ideas and distortions to The New Christianity as they attempted to put a new vision of Christianity into practice.

The Distortion of Saint-Simon’s Christianity by the Saint-Simonians The leader of the Saint-Simonists, Prosper Enfantin, in his interpretation of The New Christianity, argued that religion was much more important than philosophy and science for achieving social unity. Because they held that human beings were basically religious, the Saint-Simonians believed Comte, who advocated a science devoid of religion, had completely misunderstood and distorted Saint-Simon’s overall, albeit unorthodox, version of Christianity. However, though certain of the Saint-Simonians’ new ideas were ahead of their time, they were not well received. For example, Enfantin championed radical ideas for the time about sexuality and marriage. He envisioned God as androgynous and, therefore, women were to be seen as the equal of men. (The Saint-Simonians were, thus, among the first to argue for the rights of women, something unacceptable in France at the time.) These ideas, because they were considered as those of a cult that advocated egotistical and messianic ideas, were what eventually led to the downfall of the Saint-Simonians. For another example, Enfantin referred to himself with the title of “Father,” declaring he was the chosen one of God, and began to look for a female Messiah who would be the mother of a new female savior to come. While this is not that much different than Comte’s later “Religion of Humanity,” with Comte himself as a secular pope, the Saint-Simonians’ radical views on the role of women and their embracing of easy divorces and “free love,” led them to run afoul of the French elite. Enfantin was brought to trial for endangering public morality, 64

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found guilty in 1832 for violating the penal code for outrages against public morality, and sentenced to one year in jail. Enfantin and the Saint-Simonians could never overcome the infamy of this among the intelligentsia and the public in France at the time. An important consequence of this was that the “Double-Love Command” was lost among the excesses of the Saint-Simonians. In short, the argument here is that Enfantin’s and the Saint-Simonians’ distorted interpretation of The New Christianity was a prime factor in the rejection of Saint-Simon’s total system of an empirical and Christian-based moral philosophy. This is somewhat in agreement with the well-known analysis of historian Frank Manuel that, While the Saint-Simonians’ ideology of love and humanity as a cure for the mal du siecle evoked a widespread emotional response, the purely religious doctrine of the cult was a dismal failure: it was a manufactured religion whose raw materials were easily recognized (1962:163) Manuel may be correct about the “manufactured religion” of the Saint-Simonians, but it can also be argued that it was the altering of the basic tenets of Saint-Simon’s biblically based Christianity that led to the perceived excesses of the Saint-Simonians, which in turn made it easier for the intelligentsia to reject Saint-Simon’s views. Ironically, Comte’s “Religion of Humanity” was subject to a fate similar to that of the Saint-Simonians.

Comte and the “Religion of Humanity” Comte’s second major work, System of Positive Polity (1854), is concerned with the application of moral philosophy to the problem of order in society. The System of Positive Polity represents a shift in Comte’s thought from The Positive Philosophy (1853), in which he saw religion as only providing a necessary function, one that would eventually be fulfilled by positivist scientists and engineers in the positivist stage. However, even the best plans are subject to change. In 1844, Comte met and fell madly in love with Clotilde de Vaux, the sister of one of his few disciples and the widow of a Parisian bureaucrat. Even though Comte called de Vaux his “spiritual wife,” she in no way reciprocated his love for her. A few months after they met, Madame de Vaux died of tuberculosis, leaving Comte with only memories of her. This experience of unrequited love led Comte to experience a complete transformation from an objective man of science to one who focused on the role of emotions. He now called for the establishment of a “Religion of Humanity,” a secular religion based on the principle of universal love. As Comte wrote: “Love, then is our principle; Order our basis; and Progress our end” (1854/1976:257). In the System of Positive Polity, Comte added emotional and religious tenets to the three stages of history through which knowledge passes: 1) the theological or fictitious, 2) the metaphysical or abstract, and 3) the scientific or positive. Comte also added altruism, which was to be the guiding principle of establishing a new society, and which he now saw as innate in humans in the positive stage. In this stage, human beings would evolve to the point that egoism could be replaced by social altruism. It is no coincidence that Comte’s religion of humanity is modeled on Catholicism. Catholicism was the state religion of France, and it characterized ordered existence before 65

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the French Revolution. And perhaps more importantly, Catholicism itself represented order – an order that had been around for 1800 years. Comte’s new religion, though it had no deity, was modeled after the Catholicism of his youth that he had rejected while a student at Lycee. In Comte’s new religion of love, sociologists were to be the priests, and Comte, himself, was to be the Pope. Whereas The Positive Philosophy outlined Comte’s vision of the role and scope of positivism, the System of Positive Polity concentrated on the moral and religious basis of his philosophical system. In the latter, he advocated a sociology that focused on the moral values of a new secular religion, one that would provide unity and order. During the time Comte fashioned his vision of sociology, the materialistic worldview was increasing. It was a world in which the security and certainty of Christianity, which for many centuries had reinforced and preserved social order, was being more openly questioned. For Comte, science would now provide the means to discover the basis of social order that previously had been taken for granted under the worldview of Christianity. To shed light on how Comte’s materialistic worldview shaped his version of what sociology should be, a closer look at his engagement in a dialogue with Christianity is necessary. To put it simply, for Comte, positivism was the new religion to replace Christianity in Europe. It would provide not only a new way to understand the world but also to ensure social cohesion. As Henri De Lubac states, “The law of the three stages may well be simply the appearance in an intellectual disguise of a deeper spiritual choice – the decision to do without God” (1995:169). But this meant that God would have to be replaced, and to do so, Comte substituted the “Religion of Humanity.” Positivism was eventually to become the true religion that provided Catholicism’s previous function as the basis of social order. Comte adumbrated Durkheim (1912), who would later hold that rituals were important to bind a secular society, and offered his own secular rituals. In Comte’s “Religion of Humanity,” there were rituals for baptism, marriage, and funerals and even a calendar for secular saints. Secular love was the key. For Comte, it was love, a purely secular form of love, that held everything together. In sum, it is important not simply to dismiss Comte’s “Religion of Humanity” as the irrationality of a lovesick man because the essential dilemma that confronted Comte, which is still with us today, must be considered. In his attempt at a science of society, Comte was faced with the dilemma of finding something to replace the Christianity in which he did not believe but which he did believe had helped to maintain order in France. His answer was the “Religion of Humanity,” a Catholicism without a deity. Needless to say, this was not well received by the intellectuals and general public of the time. As John Stuart Mill posited: “few people with religion would want one without God, and few people without God want a religion” (quoted in Kennedy 1994:79). Comte eventually died of cancer on September 5, 1857, a disappointed and bitter man, whose religious system based on the principle of love was universally ridiculed, as was the Saint-Simonians’ cult-like version of Christianity. What survived, though, was Comte’s contribution to sociology as a science of society, one devoid of a viable moral philosophy.

Summary and Conclusion Comte’s choice of the worldview of unbelief and its rejection of moral philosophy is essential to understanding the triumph of his vision of sociology. He embraced a growing secularism and sought to substitute a positivistic sociology for the worldview of Christianity. And 66

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though later in life, he offered a secular substitute for a moral philosophy with his “Religion of Humanity” (a secular Catholicism devoid of belief in God), it was ridiculed and dismissed. Comte’s “Religion of Humanity” was never conceived of as anything other than an add-on, a pragmatic illusion. Saint-Simon, on the other hand, never rejected Christianity and its transcendental belief but did modify its expression at the time with what he called a “new Christianity.” However, Saint-Simon’s disciples, in their distortion of his acceptance of the worldview of belief, and through their attempts to implement the “new Christianity,” pushed it to the point that it was also subject to ridicule and eventual dismissal, just like Comte’s “Religion of Humanity.” After Comte, a close to complete rejection of Christianity emerged among those who most influenced the beginning of sociology, specifically by Karl Marx (1994) who rejected all religious belief as illusional but functional, an ideology whose primary purpose was to support the ruling class. Whether Saint-Simon’s vision of the “new Christianity” could have made a difference in what sociology has become today is, of course, a matter of speculation. But what is not a matter of speculation is that the misinterpretations of Saint-Simon’s “new Christianity” by the Saint-Simonians, along with Comte’s attempt to offer a positivist-oriented society based on a secularized Catholicism, hindered any real chance of accepting the “the New Christianity,” which as Saint-Simon stated, was based on a belief in God and the divine origins of Christianity. Christianity as a viable basis for the moral philosophy the Philosophes envisioned as one of the twin tenets, along with empiricism, for the “science of man,” was discarded. After Marx came Durkheim, who postulated religion solely in functional terms and ultimately equated the worship of society as a replacement for the worship of God. This understanding has become the consensus that characterizes contemporary sociology, which Benton Johnson summarized as “religion is a good thing but that religious ideas are false” (1977:375). In conclusion, by the start of the nineteenth century, the theistic, Christian worldview that had defined the Western world had begun to lose its place of unchallenged dominance in intellectual discourse. Materialism and secularism became a viable option for a sizable number of prominent philosophers and scientists of the time. In the contentious debate between belief and unbelief, with substantial inadvertent help from the Saint-Simonians, the unbelief of Comte triumphed over the belief of Saint-Simon and defines sociology today. What we now have is social science that sees Christianity and all religious beliefs as illusions whose only purpose is functional – to help preserve the social order. In short, because Comte’s atheism led him to dismiss Christianity, his early attempts to define sociology played a large role in formulating sociology as an “anti-religious” secular sociology and helped social science label him the “the Father of Sociology” to the neglect of Saint-Simon.

References Barnett, S.J. 2003. The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Becker, Ernest. 1971. The Lost Science of Man. New York: Braziller. Byrne, James.1997. Religion and the Enlightenment: From Descartes to Kant. Lexington, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1951/2009. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Joseph A. Scimecca Comte, Auguste. 1853/1896. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Vol. I-II. Translated by Harriet Martineau. Reprint. London: George Bell & Sons. Comte, Auguste. 1854/1976. System of Positive Polity. Translated by Henry Dix Hutton. New York: Franklin. De Lubac, Henri. 1995. The Drama of Atheist Humanism. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1912/1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by J.W. Swain. New York: The Free Press. Johnson, Benton. 1977. “Sociological Theory and Religious Truth.” Sociological Analysis 38(4):368–388. Kennedy, Emmet. 1994. “The French Revolution and the Genesis of the Religion of Man.” Pp. 61–88 in Modernity and Religion, edited by Ralph McInerny. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Lemert, Charles. 1999. “The Might Have Been and Could Be of Religion in Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 17(3):240–264. Locke, John. 1695/1824. The Works of John Locke, Vol. 6: The Reasonableness of Christianity. London: Rivington. Manuel, Frank. 1962. The Prophets of Paris. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Manuel, Frank. 1963. The New World of Saint-Simon. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Marx, Karl. 1994. Marx’s Early Political Writings, edited by Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Parton, J. 1884. Life of Voltaire, vol. II. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Pocock, J.G.A. 1999. Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenment of Edmund Gibbon, 1737–1774. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Qinping, Liu. 2007. “On a Paradox of Christian Love.” The Journal of Religious Ethics 3(4):681–694. Rossides, Daniel W. 1998. Social Theory Its Origins, History, and Contemporary Relevance. Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, Inc. Richter, Melvin. 1977. The Political Theory of Montesquieu. London: Cambridge University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1762/1987. On the Social Contract. Translated by D.A. Cress. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri. 1825/1834. The New Christianity. London: B.D Cousins and P. Wilson. Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri. 1964. Social Organization: The Science of Man and Other Writings. Translated and edited by F. Markham. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Scimecca, Joseph A. 2019. Christianity and Sociological Theory: Reclaiming the Promise. London: Routledge Press. Seidman, Steven. 1983. Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sorkin, David. 2008. The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Swatos, William H. Jr. and Peter Kivisto. 1991. “Max Weber as “Christian Sociologist.”“ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30(4):347–362.

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5 DEFINITIONS OF RELIGION IN CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY Transcendence in Durkheim and Weber Evan F. Kuehn Abstract This chapter examines the work of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber on religion as two primary representatives of classical sociology. It demonstrates how certain theological concepts, notably that of transcendence, remain important for social scientific study of religion and how Durkheim and Weber’s engagements with transcendence influence the sociological understanding of religion to the present day. Durkheim presents a transcendence of the collectivity over the individual as the key to his sociological definition of religion. Meanwhile, Weber presents transcendence as a motivation for social action and a reference point for the legitimation of social organization with which religion is involved. These theories are rooted in earlier work from Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Ernst Troeltsch, and others and have been taken up more recently, especially by Peter Berger and Hans Joas. Durkheim and Weber identify what Karl Heim calls “intramundane relations of transcendence” as a key for understanding religion ­sociologically.

Introduction Social scientific studies of religion, and especially the sort of classical texts considered in this chapter, are often criticized for being crypto-Protestant or for their dependency on a theological genealogy of their ground concepts and inner logic. Brent Nongbri’s Before Religion puts the matter in a helpfully blunt manner: Because of the pervasive use of the word ‘religion’ in the cultures of the modern Western world (the ‘we’ here), we already intuitively know what ‘religion’ is before we even try to define it: religion is anything that sufficiently resembles modern Protestant Christianity. (2013:18)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-8

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Centering belief or cognitive assent, personal disposition, and monotheistic standards of divinity (including divine transcendence) are primary examples of the theological assumptions that have colored sociological conceptions of religion. While the rise of the discipline of sociology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century represented a move away from theological explanation and a new attention to non-Abrahamic faiths, the categorical schema with which classical sociology worked remained ordered largely by Christian metaphysical, moral, and epistemological assumptions. This critique is fair in certain respects, but it is also ironic in its own dependency on Christian theology. “Crypto-Protestantism,” after all, is itself an early modern theological category, and theological genealogies fall comfortably within the purview of political theology. Therefore, methodological critiques of the classics of sociology as harboring an implicit, borrowed, or imported theology present instructive examples in their own right of the tenacity of the proximity between sociology and Christianity. It may be that the presence of seemingly theological forms in sociological theory simply demonstrates that, while the scientific study of religion does more than just translate religious discourse for secular audiences, it is still doing much the same sort of work that theologians do to describe and explain religious life.1 It is difficult to deny that certain theological considerations, mostly but not exclusively Christian, influenced the way that classical sociologists understood religion in general. However, focus on such Christocentric and Eurocentric themes might be an example of reflective judgment (in the Kantian sense) on the part of social theorists such as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, rather than of any sort of encroachment of pseudo-theological methodology within the social sciences. That is, in examining Christian forms and concepts, generalizable rules have been proposed from particular local instances. This chapter argues that one important value of classical sociologies of religion is demonstrated in how these theories rendered certain explicitly theological concepts as pertinent to a sociological understanding of religion in general and offered interpretations of what was already of Christian theological interest in terms of generalizable social forces. The key concept for classical sociology to be investigated here is transcendence. Transcendence was only occasionally invoked by Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, the two “classics” considered most thoroughly in this chapter. The transcendent has appeared elsewhere in social thought under the concepts of “self-transcendence” and “immanent transcendence,” for instance in the work of Georg Simmel (1959) and Alfred Schutz (1962; 1973). Transcendence also remains relevant in the work of Hans Joas and Jürgen Habermas. It is present, if mostly implicit, in the earlier theories of Durkheim and Weber as well. Durkheim presents a transcendence of the collectivity over the individual as the key to his sociological definition of religion. Meanwhile, Weber presents transcendence as a motivation for social action and a reference point for the legitimation of social organization with which religion is involved. This classic sociological core becomes relevant to various other theories of theodicy (Weber 1969:518–29; Berger 1969a:53–80), meaning (Berger 1969a; Luhmann 2013), and ideal formation (Joas 2008, 2013, 2021). The flexibility of the concept of transcendence is likely an important reason for its continued viability within sociology. As an introduction to the works of classical sociology, an engagement with transcendence seems counterintuitive. It does not directly address some of the main themes inherited via textbooks from Durkheim, Weber, and others, such as the secularization thesis, the sociology of capitalism, and the church/sect/mysticism typology of Ernst Troeltsch. 70

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However, the choice to examine transcendence in early sociology of religion is not simply a choice of one interesting topic over equal others. Rather, transcendence functions as a fundamental concept of the sociology of religion and, as such, can act as a hermeneutical key for understanding what is lasting or adaptable in the work of Durkheim and Weber. Understanding classical sociology through transcendence recognizes the close connections between Christian theology and sociology and the ways that sociologists of religion continue to engage directly with the concerns of theologians without violating the principles of objectivity and methodological atheism that were of particular concern to the early professionalization period of sociology. Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber are the canonical triumvirate of classical sociologists. Powerful arguments have been made to expand this canon while recognizing the limitations of its embeddedness in European coloniality and the particular dilemmas facing the “metropole” in the early twentieth century (Fillingim and Rucks-Ahidiana 2021; Connell 2007). That this chapter does not expand the canon in considering transcendence requires some justification. The focus here is on transcendence because attention to it uncovers rather than obscures the contextual particularities of classical sociologists, both as Europeans and as theorists within a Christian and post-Christian milieu. The extent to which the concept of transcendence can be set in conversation with other contexts remains a question, one that is dependent upon whether both the polarity of individual and society and the problem of meaningfulness amidst suffering are genuinely transcultural. It is likely, though, that transcendence of the individual and rejection of the world, such as found in Durkheim and Weber, can be fruitfully tied to rejection of European coloniality, the transcendence of traditional notions of individual identity as constituting a “natural” order, and the rejection of the universalizing and abstracting of whiteness in modern thought. That is, transcendence as a sociological concept can operate in relation to various social pressures and need not be only a story about European Christianity, or Abrahamic monotheisms.

Emile Durkheim Two definitions of religion Durkheim provided frame consideration of his work as it transforms the concept of transcendence. The first is in his 1899 essay on the definition of religious phenomena in L’Année sociologique: “Phenomena held to be religious consist in obligatory beliefs, connected with clearly defined practices which are related to given objects of those beliefs” (1975:93). The second is in his 1912 Elementary Forms of Religious Life: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. (1995:11) Although the mature definition in the Elementary Forms differs in certain respects from his earlier one, there is substantial continuity between the two. In both cases, beliefs and practice/rituals are related both to the social and the sacred. In the earlier definition, sociality is simply implied in a concept of the obligatory, and the sacred is established elsewhere in distinguishing religious obligation from moral obligation. Both, however, are present in nuce. What do these definitions have to do with transcendence, which is not mentioned in either? At first glance, Durkheim does not seem to be concerned with transcendence in religion as 71

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traditionally conceived. The components of a definition of the religious are beliefs, rites, and communities, not gods, revelations, or the sacred understood as supernatural. Instead, transcendence in religion can be tracked in the shift from the individual to the collective. For Durkheim, “Religion functions to give symbolic expression to the moral rules and ideals that specify the relationships on which social order rests” (Tole 1993). This is true in all forms of religion, whether in ancient and undifferentiated societies, or modern and differentiated societies. In his 1899 essay, Durkheim writes, “Religion becomes something natural and explicable to human intelligence, while at the same time retaining in relation to the reason of the individual, its characteristic transcendence” (1975:94). As early as his Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim describes the transcendence of divinity as paralleling the common conscience of society (1960:288). This is a theme that continues and becomes strengthened in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, in which divinity and society not only parallel one another but are also actually understood as one and the same. Here, god and the community are equated in the symbolism of the totem, because god and community are both understood as the ground of universal (that is, trans-subjective) obligation. Durkheim appears, for many of his readers, to have fallen quite neatly into a problematically anti-religious box here, where he “retained an expurgated notion of religious transcendence while summarily disposing of supernatural deities, so that religion devolved, according to his famous dictum, into society worshiping itself” (Garrett 1974:172). However, such charges of reductionism ought to be made with caution. Religion is naturalized as a matter of explanation for Durkheim, but this does not do away with its fundamentally transcendent character. In fact, the sociologization of understanding of religion is precisely what preserves the nature of its transcendence. Religion goes beyond that which can be rationalized at an immediate and individual level, and its horizon always stands beyond the life-world of the individual in the larger social structure. Charles Taylor has suggestively described this sociologization as presenting goods which are “consubstantial with the transcendent” (2007:546). The transcendence of the social does not conflate with the divine, but it is also not a distinct genus of transcendence.

Roots in Feuerbach Although Feuerbach is often only identified as a precursor to the sociology of religion via his more general Left Hegelian influence on Karl Marx, it is helpful to think about Durkheim’s move here in terms of Feuerbach’s own, especially because Feuerbach was doing explicitly theological work in his Essence of Christianity and in other writings. Feuerbach argues that “that which in religion is the predicate we must make the subject” (Feuerbach 1957:60) and explicitly ties this to moral ideals in the same way that Durkheim did. Durkheim’s understanding of religion as a form of self-consciousness and a projection of human ideals is the theoretical ground for any assignment of religion’s essence to collective moral obligations. While Feuerbach began the transposition of religious transcendence into the human sphere, Marx rightly pointed out the limited extent to which Feuerbach understood religion as social. In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx concludes with the famous call of Thesis Eleven not simply to interpret, but to change the world. However, this praxis is predicated upon an originally sociological insight. Thesis Six reads: “Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations” (Marx 2002:183). 72

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His next thesis goes on to say that “Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society” (Marx 2002:184). It would be incorrect to say that Feuerbach is wholly unaware of the social nature of human self-consciousness. His appeal to the human species is an appeal to the collective, and at certain points, he speaks explicitly of social forms. For instance, in discussing religious claims to the sacred nature of morality, right, and institutions, Feuerbach argues that these are based on the fact that “the legal relations as such are sacred” (1843:406). In Durkheim, however, this appeal to self-consciousness is established inter-subjectively and is transcendent of the subject in the social collective. In every case, whether that of Feuerbach, Marx, or Durkheim, the idea of religion as projection has suggested a flattening of transcendence into immanence. Here Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s dialectical theory of externalization, objectification, and internalization can assist in understanding how religious projection, in fact, remains connected to religious transcendence. As Berger writes, Within the framework of science, transcendence must appear as immanence. The gods, which appear in the religious consciousness as possessing an ontological status transcending consciousness, are not available to the scientist in this alleged status – they are only available qua contents of human consciousness, thus as immanent by necessity. If one likes the language of Feuerbach and Marx, then, it is quite proper to say that, in the framework of science, religious meanings must appear as human projections. (1974:126) Put differently, religious transcendence is manifest in social life as a process of externalization and objectivation (Berger and Luckmann 1967:60–61). Projection and objectivation cannot dismiss religious transcendence any more than transcendence disavows the social nature of its experience. Such an insight is not originally sociological but theological. Friedrich Schleiermacher, in his classic early nineteenth century systematic theology The Christian Faith, describes how the study of religious communities relates to their theological constitution: No starting point of a distinctively formed way of existing and, still more, of a community, especially of a religious community, is ever to be explained based on the condition of the circle in which it arose and progressed, in that it would then be no starting point but would be simply the product of some intellectual surrounding. Now, although the actual existence of the starting point surpasses the nature of that surrounding, nothing gets in the way of our assuming, nevertheless, that the emergence of such a life would be the effect of the force for development that indwells our nature as a species. (2016:93–94) In other words, attention to the constitution of communities at the level of social function rather than spiritual process is allowed by the very fact that they are constituted, even if uniquely and as a product of spiritual processes, within the social context. The individual and society is not the only Durkheimian polarity in which transcendence can be detected. Religious life bridges the sacred and the profane as well as belief and 73

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practice, and both of these pairs could be understood as object- and action-oriented phenomena of immanent transcendence. But the shift to understanding religion as grounded in the collective is the most basic sense in which Durkheim both establishes a social science of religion and seeks to explain the nature of transcendence that characterizes religion.

Max Weber In Durkheim, religious transcendence is located in the inter-subjectivity of the social sphere as supra-mundane. The community is explicitly identified with God and as the source of the sacred. In Weber, a similar shift takes place through the process of rationalization and universalization. Regional gods are replaced in primacy by universal gods (1969:417). But universalization was not itself the source of transcendence in the same way that collective conscience was in Durkheim. Rather, rationalization and the rise of salvation religions identified the meaning obtained in religious life as extra-mundane, which, in turn, organized social action according to different relations to the world. These relations can be discerned in at least two primary places in Weber’s writings. The first and more widely discussed is a fourfold matrix of world relations divided between ascetic and mystical religion. The second is found in Weber’s discussion of theodicy and the threefold typology of religious responses to it. The world relations of mysticism and ascesis will be discussed first because they are relatively unique to Weberian sociology of religion, and the problem of theodicy will be discussed second because of how it relates to certain themes in Durkheim and is also engaged by later sociologies of religion.

Types of World Rejection Weber’s “Intermediate Considerations” (Zwischenbetrachtung) was published as a section of his Economic Ethics of the World Religions, between his treatment of Confucianism and Taoism, and Hinduism and Buddhism (Weber 1946:323–59; Weber 2004:81–100; Ertman 2017; Whimster 2002). The text resumed Weber’s interest in religion after a hiatus following his Protestant Ethic, largely instigated by Ernst Troeltsch’s classic Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (Ghosh 2014:182–204), and addressed religious rejections of the world, first presenting a general theory of this tendency and then examining different spheres of social life where it occurs. Here Weber offers a fuller explanation of what is meant by “asceticism,” a term already extensively employed in The Protestant Ethic, as well as “mysticism.” Both asceticism and mysticism describe ways that the religious individual relates to the divine. Asceticism involves the religious person as a tool and mysticism involves the religious person as a vessel. The social action of the ascetic is, therefore, the pursuit of a supra-mundane will (of God), while for the mystic, it is of an “otherworldly religious state” (Adair-Toteff 2016:13–28, 61–77). While Weber distinguishes between asceticism and mysticism as two religious types, he also states clearly that their differences are tempered by many factors, and in fact, their common orientation of world abnegation highlights some of their shared themes (Breuer 2001). Ultimately, both involve a quest for salvation. What “salvation” entails may look quite different in different religions, from a justification before an absolute god, to a mystical self-deification (Weber 1969:526–41; Riesebrodt 2010). However, certain tensions with the world present themselves regardless, and these world relations constitute a transcendence of mundane life which defines the world religions. 74

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Tension with the world arises from the formation of sacred values tied to the promise of salvation that form into an absolute religious ethic. Religious values emanating from a prophet form a separate community, over against previous kinship relations, and develop into new relations of “loving brotherhood.” These communities effectively short-circuit worldly relations by establishing direct access to god and reproduce neighbor relations in what Weber calls “an objectless acosmism of love” (Weber 1946:328–30). In part because of the absolute nature of the religious end, and relatedly because of the separateness (and sacredness) of the ethical communities formed in response to the charisma of the prophet, a growing sense of the inadequacy of worldly solutions leads to a rejection of the world by religions (Joas 2021:227).

Theodicy The second track for which Weber develops ideal types relating to religious transcendence is in his discussion of responses to theodicy, or the problem of how to reconcile evil in the world with a transcendent divine source of goodness and meaning (1969:519). This discussion makes up the end of the Zwischenbetrachtung and builds on its account of tensions with the world and the ultimate world rejection that results. Three main types of solutions to theodicy present themselves in the history of religions: predestination, dualism, and the transmigration of souls. Of these three options, Weber understood transmigration to be the “most radical solution of the problem of theodicy,” which collapses the transcendence that maintains theodicy’s problem of meaning in religious systems of predestination or dualism (1969:526–527). While predestination presents a sharp distinction between the divine and the created, and dualism between a world of good and a world of evil, transmigration naturalizes what Weber calls its mechanism of retribution and dispenses with the need for cosmic or theological explanations over against the world. Theodicy, like transcendence, may not appear to exist comfortably within the wheelhouse of sociology. It was, however, a significant and perhaps more explicit theme for classical sociologists than even transcendence was. In Weber, the interest may have come from his colleague Ernst Troeltsch (Troeltsch 1913; Adair-Toteff 2015). Peter Berger also powerfully introduced theodicy to his sociological theory in The Sacred Canopy, drawing from Weber but also contributing a Durkheimean insight: theodicy can be understood not only as a reconciliation of the divine with worldly evil but also as a response to anomic situations (1969a). It operates at the level of what Berger calls “world-maintenance.” Theodicy negotiates conflicting instances of transcendence. The nomos of the social world embeds the individual within a wider, meaningful cosmos that presents a stable form of transcendence. Anomic phenomena challenge this stability, and theodicies legitimate the presence of such suffering within a meaningful world in order to preserve as more basic the self-transcendence of social life. It is important to note that theodicy does not necessarily resolve the tension between ideals and world or reduce religious transcendence to immanence. In many cases, the tension is actually heightened by reference to a transcendent hereafter that renders the present world meaningless or at least decidedly penultimate. In the preceding, it has been argued that Durkheim and Weber both exhibit a recognition of transcendence as deeply embedded in sociological understandings of religion. Their use of the concept of transcendence is not the same, but they offer two possible ways of 75

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understanding religion in terms of transcendence. Finally, through the problem of theodicy, or maintenance of a coherent sense of reality in the face of suffering, we see that Durkheim and Weber can be brought together in the service of a unified theory, as has been done in the work of Peter Berger. Another point on which these two classic theorists can be compared and synthesized is on the question of magic. Durkheim and Weber famously came to different conclusions about whether magic ought to be considered a form of religiosity. Considering their disagreement will be helpful for understanding the centrality of transcendence for the classical sociological project. What unfulfilled necessary condition led Durkheim to assert that magic could not be a religion? Its lack of a society was ultimately the disqualifying fact: “there is no church of magic.” And what, in the case of Weber, was the necessary condition that magic did fulfill, and which made the magician at least a precursor to the religious prophet? Magic involved charisma and power obtained through world abnegation and directed toward ascesis. How magic fit within their respective definitions of transcendence determined how Durkheim and Weber classified it. For Durkheim, magic did not achieve the transcendence of the collective, while for Weber, it did achieve the relevant transcendence that would be fully developed in salvation religion. The fact that transcendence became the criterion upon which some phenomenon was determined either to be or not to be religion is an indication of its centrality for classical sociology.

Sociology and Transcendence Forms of transcendence arise from theological rationalizations of social life, but they do not end there. Sociology itself is a part of the process of this transformation of transcendence that Weber, especially, identifies. The stance of methodological atheism in sociological understanding is, basically, an identification of the theological conditions of religious life as transcendent from secular reasons. The sociologist then relates to these conditions on the same plane as the inner worldly ascetic does; in their own way, they seek transcendent ends through worldly callings. Social science, however, is an ascesis of the wissenschaftliche Beruf (scientific vocation) whose inner worldly nature is tied to the accumulation of understanding. Turning reflectively on sociological practice allows us to ask an important methodological question: should we understand transcendence in classical sociology as contributing primarily to a functionalist or a substantive theory of religion? Notably, no clear answer is apparent. The engagement with transcendence displays attributes of both approaches, and in Durkheim (whose understanding of religion is, on the whole, functionalist), the use of transcendence is more substantive (society as transcending the individual = god), while in Weber (whose understanding is more substantive), the use of transcendence is more functionalist (transcendence of the end of salvation establishes world relations of various sorts). This is good news for those who worry that one approach or the other may lead to a “quasi-scientific” dismissal of transcendence by sociologists (Berger 1974:128–9). Because transcendence is closely tied both to what distinguishes religion as a distinct social phenomenon and to how it functions within society, both approaches to explanation should benefit from attention to the role of transcendence. At the very least, the balance of this investigation points to an interesting isomorphism between theological transcendence and different formulations of transcendence within clas76

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sical social theory. At times, there might even be clear connections between earlier theology and classical theory. But it is worth asking, as Hans Joas did in his recent The Power of the Sacred, what the implications are for employing concepts of transcendence without their prior cosmological assumptions (2021:143). Does it really matter what vestiges of transcendence can be pieced together from the classics if they cannot, and do not intend to, fulfill the theoretical tasks that an originally religious transcendence was meant to address? In Weber’s own words from The Protestant Ethic, we risk taking “a path through certain dogmatic considerations that must seem as tedious to the nontheological reader as they must seem hasty and superficial to the theological scholar” (Weber 2002:69). In closing, then, we will turn from evaluating what is sociologically interesting about the theological concept of transcendence to what might be theologically interesting about the sociological concept of transcendence. Using the terminology of Karl Heim, what Durkheim and Weber identify in their studies of religions are largely “intramundane relations of transcendence,” which ought to be distinguished from the very distinct sort of transcendence characteristic of both the Christian God, and an impersonal absolute of metaphysical speculation (1936).2 Intramundane concepts of the beyond form the necessary basis for extramundane (what might be called “theological”) transcendence. Heim identifies three such intra-mundane concepts – the boundaries between objective worlds of different persons, the boundary between self and object, and the boundary between self and other persons – but surely there are other ways of construing intra-mundane transcendence that can establish a social ontology (for instance, Schutz 1973). Indeed, some candidate construals in Durkheim and Weber have been identified above. In all cases, Charles Taylor’s statement in A Secular Age holds: “The immanent order can thus slough off the transcendent. But it doesn’t necessarily do so” (2007:543). Intra-mundane, or immanent transcendence, suggests, presents, or manifests a sort of transcendence that is interesting to Christian theologians. David Martin has taken up a similar strategy by identifying transcendence and unity (what Durkheim might term solidarity) as aspects of human activity through which we can “circumscribe how we talk about God” (1979:2). Engaging with transcendence in this way is a different project than Peter Berger’s attempts to identify “signals of transcendence” in modern life (1969b). The intention here is not to say that classical theory can bring us back to a traditional sort of theological transcendence but, rather, that it is important because of how it identifies a logic of transcendence within human sociality itself, which manifests itself in religious life. Durkheim and Weber remain classics of the sociology of religion because their theoretical approaches opened new vistas for engaging with religion. Explanatory bases for relating religious faith to capitalism, modernity, and social solidarity set the tone for twentieth century sociology, and although the specific conclusions of these classics have since been replaced by new problems and better solutions, a surprising number of grounding assumptions remain in play that were originally introduced over a century ago. Among these is the centrality of the concept of transcendence for understanding how religion develops at a social level. This chapter has demonstrated that while transcendence as an absolutizing concept identifying a super-nature over against nature may be absent, this is not because of a sociological reductionism that leaves transcendence behind. In fact, while various two-tiered cosmologies associated with older theological versions of transcendence have been shown to be problematic, intra-mundane transcendence of the sort identified by Durkheim and Weber remains theologically important to say nothing of its clear sociological significance. 77

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Notes 1 Such an assertion can be made in ways that privilege theology over social theory (see, for instance, Milbank 2006), but this is not the intention here. Exchange and replacement between the disciplines of theology and sociology ought to be understood as mutually generative rather than as a competitive relationship. A long tradition of interaction between theology and sociology exists in the sociological work of Robin Gill, David Martin, Peter Berger, and others, to say nothing of those working from the side of theology toward sociology. 2 Heim’s work, published in the 1930s and at least partially in response to the ideologies of Nazi political religion asserted by writers like Alfred Rosenberg and Ernst Bergmann, is especially applicable to this consideration of classical sociology because it emerged from the same milieu and addressed many of the same questions of secularism, communalism, and projection that had been inherited from Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and others.

References Adair-Toteff, Christopher. 2015. Fundamental Concepts in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Adair-Toteff, Christopher. 2016. Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor Doubleday. Berger, Peter. 1969a. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. Berger, Peter. 1969b. A Rumor of Angels. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. Berger, Peter. 1974. “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive versus Functional Definitions of Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 13(2):125–33. Breuer, Stefan. 2001. “Weltablehnung.” Pp. 227–240 in Max Weber’s Religionssystematik, edited by Hans G. Kippenberg and Martin Riesebrodt. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1960. The Division of Labor in Society. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1975. Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies. Translated by Jacqueline Redding and W.S.F. Pickering. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E. Fields. New York: The Free Press. Ertman, Thomas. 2017. “Max Weber’s The Economic Ethic of the World Religions: A Neglected Social Science Classic?” in Max Weber’s Economic Ethic of the World Religions: An Analysis, edited by Thomas Ertman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1843. Das Wesen des Christentums. Leipzig: Otto Wigand. Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1957. The Essence of Christianity. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Fillingim, Angela, and Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana. 2021. “Theory on the other Side of the Veil: Reckoning with Legacies of Anti‐Blackness and Teaching in Social Theory.” The American Sociologist 52:276– 303. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s12108​-021​-09487-z Garrett, William. 1974. “Troublesome Transcendence: The Supernatural in the Scientific Study of Religion.” Sociology of Religion 35(3):167–80. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/3710647 Ghosh, Peter. 2014. Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heim, Karl. 1936. God Transcendent: Foundation for a Christian Metaphysic. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Joas, Hans. 2008. Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of Self-Transcendence. New York: Routledge. Joas, Hans. 2013. The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Joas, Hans. 2021. The Power of the Sacred: An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Religion in Durkheim and Weber Luhmann, Niklas. 2013. A Systems Theory of Religion. Translated by David A. Brenner. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Martin, David. 1979. The Breaking of the Image: A Sociology of Christian Theory and Practice. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Marx, Karl. 2002. Marx on Religion, edited by John Raines. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Milbank, John. 2006. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Nongbri, Brent. 2013. Before Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press. Riesebrodt, Martin. 2010. The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2016. The Christian Faith. Translated by Terrence N. Tice et al. Vol. 1. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Schutz, Alfred. 1962. “Symbol Reality and Society.” Pp. 287–356, in Collected Papers I edited by M. Natanson. Dordrecht: Springer. Schutz, Alfred. 1973. The Structures of the Life-World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1959. The Sociology of Religion. Translated by Curt Rosenthal. New York: Philosophical Library. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tole, Lise Ann. 1993. “Durkheim on Religion and Moral Community in Modernity.” Sociological Inquiry 63(1):1–29. Troeltsch, Ernst. 1913. “Theodizee II. Systematisch.” Pp. 1186–92 in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart Bd.5. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Weber, Max. 1969. Economy and Society. Translated by Ephraim Frischoff, et al. Vol. 2. New York: Bedminster Press. Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, Max. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings. New York: Penguin. Weber, Max. 2004. The Essential Weber: A Reader. Translated by Same Whimster. New York: Routledge. Whimster, Sam. 2002. “Translator’s Note on Weber’s ‘Introduction to the Economic Ethics of the World Religions.’” Max Weber Studies 3(1):74–98.

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6 THE RISE OF PUBLIC RELIGION IN COUNTRIES OF CATHOLIC TRADITION Joseba García Martín1 and Benjamín Tejerina Abstract Secularization has been considered an important process explaining the transformation of religion. In recent decades, however, this theory has proven to be aprioristic and incomplete. This chapter traces the most recent de-privatization strategies that the Catholic Church has mobilized to maintain its role as an influential agent in the public space of moral policy debates. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first analyzes tensions between religion and politics in the context of the rise of Catholicism as a “public religion” and its participation in different controversies. The second section identifies strategies used by the secularized laity to increase its presence in public space. And the third section characterizes the identity framework known as the “culture of life,” in which believers are educated in the face of the advance of secularization. Overall, the chapter examines and compares the scenarios, strategies, and collective identity frameworks that Catholicism has refurbished in order to continue to be a relevant political actor in contemporary society.

Introduction In recent decades, religion has taken on a significant and unexpectedly central role both in the public sphere and in political life, contradicting predictions made previously about its future. Observing global changes seen among different religions since the end of the 1970s (Kepel 1993; Casanova 1994), current reality seems to be defying predictions of long-term demise. Despite multiple studies carried out in the West that confirm the decline of various institutional religions (Molteni and Biolcanti 2018), these indicators do not give a complete understanding of contemporary religious transformations, particularly in majority Christian regions, where higher levels of secularization, both societal and individual, were expected. 80

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One of the most relevant characteristics of this worldwide resurgence of religion is the negotiation between public and private morality (Casanova 2008; Burchardt, WohlrabSahr, and Midell 2016). This can be seen transversally in the rise of a specific brand of “Christian nationalism” in the United States (Castells 1997; Whitehead and Perry 2020), the growth of far-right groups in Europe who create and promote policies from a Christian perspective (Casanova 2021), and the spread of evangelical and Catholic influence in Latin American politics (Orique, Fitzpatrick-Behrens, and Garrard 2020). These active processes question the “invisibility” (Luckmann 1967) of religions in the public sphere and their exemption from global norms (Davie 2006). A close look at the role of religion in the West reveals a complex, ambivalent, volatile, and sometimes even contradictory reality that “classical theorizations of religious change failed to capture” (Griera, Martínez-Ariño, and Clot-Garrell 2021:2). In the case of traditionally Catholic countries (Lefebvre and Pérez-Agote 2018), these tensions are growing in light of the transformations that religion is undergoing in order to exert a public influence through Christian-inspired secular organizations (CISO) of neoconservative persuasion that utilize “strategic secularisms” (Vaggione 2005) and that are being carried out through civil society in order to reclaim greater visibility and conservatism in the development of so-called “moral politics” (Euchner 2019). Several studies have noted this movement of de-privatization both in Europe (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017) and in Latin America (Bárcenas Barajas and Delgado-Molina 2021). The re-armament driven by these groups on a global level is primarily concerned with placing limitations on human behavior, emerging family models, and legislation concerning sexual and reproductive freedom. The above-mentioned CISOs have not emerged spontaneously but, rather, are the consequence of a strategy (Casanova 1997; Díaz 2016) underpinned by two complementary movements. On the one hand, represented by an ecclesiastic/political entity collectively empowered by the Second Vatican Council (Vatican 2009), is the secular world, which has come to occupy a central role in the struggle to take back public space. On the other is the emergence of the so-called “new evangelization” (John Paul II 1979), which propels contemporary struggles to redefine public and private spheres and influence public policy (Díaz-Salazar 2007). This double strategy, demonstrated in various documents produced by the Vatican since the 1980s or earlier (John Paul II 1993; Benedict XVI 2009), emerged as a geopolitical strategy whereby Catholicism (re-)positioned itself in societies that were experiencing a growing pluralization (Graziano 2012). Most of the research done on the current state of religion either analyses specific legislative conflicts with a focus on discourse and rhetoric – mobilizations against same-sex marriage (Béraud and Portier 2015), abortion (Munson 2018), gender politics and equality (Cornejo-Valle and Pichardo 2020), or euthanasia (Voyé and Dobbelaere 2015) – or adopting a comparative approach, identifies similarities and differences between different strategies throughout the world (Bramadat et al. 2021). This chapter will attempt first to understand specific internal transformations set in motion by the Catholic Church to create a framework for de-privatization and increased public influence. Second, it will describe the reasoning underlying the discourse around collective identity and the concept of “culture of life” (John Paul II 1991, 1995), a functional framework for positioning moral politics in opposition to pluralism and liberalization both culturally and politically (Vaggione 2012). The hypothesis here maintains that the restructuring and shift toward de-privatization promoted by the Catholic Church via the politically mobilized laity and civil 81

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society has three objectives: 1) to counteract the increasing loss of influence experienced by the Catholic Church on a societal and individual level since the end of the 1980s, particularly in areas related to “intimacy” (Dobbelaere and Pérez-Agote 2015); 2) to influence both public opinion and political agendas in order to champion different Catholic-inspired secular groups around the world; and 3) to forge a collective identity based on the tenets of Catholicism which establish a clear difference between correct (Vaggione 2020) and erroneous (Garbagnoli 2014) societal functioning and individual attitudes. Groups, individuals, and discourses that make up the neoconservative Catholic landscape (Díaz-Salazar 2007) have mobilized against moral politics to stifle or even reverse them.

Religious De-privatization as a Global Phenomenon: Ties between Religion and Politics in the Context of “Public Religions” Historically, the social sciences have studied the public presence, political role, and influence of religions through the lens of general secularization theory (Martin 1978; Dobbelaere 2002). This theory is based on three ideas: 1) the structural differentiation and emancipation of secular spheres from religious norms and institutions in the modern period; 2) the systematic decline of institutional religious practice; and 3) the loss of plausibility structures in religions within an ever more “disenchanted” (Weber 2004) world, leading gradually to their privatization and eventual disappearance. Classical and contemporary sociology have embraced certain principles based on an essentialist, linear, and homogeneous vision of modernity (Casanova 2001). Nevertheless, today, the liberal notion of public space is being questioned, making it necessary to re-think the basis of these predictions. In light of the idea of “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt 2000), the concept of “multiple secularities” emerged (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012), which offers a new narrative about the complex relationship between modernity and religion. Related to secularization as a “multi-dimensional” phenomenon (Dobbelaere 2002), other authors refer to the process of losing relevance that religion has undergone in contemporary societies as something reversible (Berger 1999). Empirical data from different parts of the world question whether secularization is inevitable (Bramadat et al. 2021) because religion and modernity are necessarily incompatible (Berger, Davie, and Fokas 2008; Beaumont 2019). Parallel to this, new interpretations speak of the “resurgence” (Joas and Wiegandt 2009) or “return” (Beckford 2010) of religions in the West. José Casanova’s (1994) thesis regarding the de-privatization of religion maintains that the re-politicization of monotheistic religions casts doubt on the decline experienced by religious institutions and suggests that religion may actually play a prominent role in the public sphere. This shift toward public space informs the proposed concept of “public religions.” This perspective does not limit the impact of religion to the private sphere but, rather, considers religion to be a multi-faceted institution increasingly understood as a product of culture transcending institutional spaces and now gradually assuming a position of greater public and political visibility. Thus, the framework of public religions attempts to explain how revitalization and the assumption of its publicly relevant roles has come about among those religious traditions believed to be destined to invisibility. From this new space, it questions the relationship between public and private morality.

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Three ideas characterize the process of de-privatizing religion:



1. The introduction of religion into public space, not so much in its institutional interests, but rather in its vision of modern collective liberties and rights, helping to strengthen the pillars of civil society in democracy. 2. The insertion of religious institutions into the public sphere in order to participate in the consideration and deliberation of ethical and moral factors. 3. The assertion of religion and its defense of traditional lifestyles from administrative or legal intervention, presenting arguments on governmental guidelines and logic to enrich public debate.

This framework helps to reinforce new ties between religion and politics. Obviously, some religious figures exert influence and demonstrate in public to defend their neoconservative moral agenda. However, in the case of secular Catholic groups with a public presence, their relationship to the institutional church is more indirect and elusive, fostering new kinds of ties between the institution and ecclesiastic groups (Turco 2016). Nevertheless, mobilization in public space happens from the perspective of the “master frame” (Snow and Benford 1992) put forth by Christian humanism (Cornejo-Valle and Ramme 2022). Although the concept of public religions does not address the intersection of public space, politics, and religions comprehensively, it does help to understand the updating of the Catholic Church as it navigates its recent loss of relevance (Vaggione 2020). Approaching the topic this way reveals the strategic change characterizing the emergence of contemporary neoconservative social, cultural, and political movements that, marked by a symbolic adherence to Christianity (Poulat 2003), seek to promote Christian values in highly secularized societies. In this way, how the Catholic Church tries to mitigate the undesired consequences of modernization and counteract secularization on an individual level (Hervieu-Léger 2000) becomes evident. These ideas match the spirit of the new Catholic agenda of de-privatization set in motion by the Second Vatican Council as demonstrated below. Using this strategy, the institution has created a new framework for political action to regain influence, at least in the West. Their intention is to emerge as a new, relevant political actor that defends the interests of the church in public by consolidating a field of discourse which counters the promulgation of certain rights and freedoms regarding moral policies.

Restructuring the Political Field and De-privatizing Catholicism on a Global Level Through Vatican II (1962–1965), the Catholic Church established the basic principles for spreading their message throughout civil society in an attempt to stop legislative developments that did not align with Catholic ideals regarding “moral politics.” This strategy marked a rupture with the previous era (Gil-Gimeno 2017), as the church transitioned from an institution primarily concerned with maintaining and expanding its power in the West (Graziano 2012) to one concerned with maintaining a certain public image able to influence people’s practices, representations, and attitudes in an increasingly pluralistic environment (Casanova 1997). This strategic movement constituted a crucial turning point in the para-institutional actions of the church in civil society, whereby secularized Catholic citizens could practice an “ethic of responsibility” (Weber 2004) that exemplified ecclesiastic positions in public space.

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This strategy of modernizing the church represented a change in the “institutional programme” (Dubet 2002) that sought to promote new approaches among believers and, subsequently, to extend this logic to the rest of the population via social and political movements and actions (Zald and McCarthy 1987). This new reasoning was aimed at reclaiming the relevance and role of the Catholic worldview among the general public without re-unifying different spheres2. Thus, both to oppose secularization and to re-conquer public space, the program is based on two strategies that are only possible through the modernizing efforts of Vatican II.

Catholic De-privatization, Agency, and Public Space: The Emergence of the Laity as a Political Actor The repositioning of laity within the Catholic ecclesiastic structure is central to understanding its de-privatization and defining new ways of manifesting and defending the Catholic worldview. These agents operate within a sphere based on their personal and spiritual development in order to ordain or guide the world according to laws that predate and transcend humanity. For the laity, the world becomes the “place in which they receive their call from God” (John Paul II 1988:n.15). This strategy empowers such secular people, allowing the church not only to recover its diminished influence but also to focus on “conquering the world” (Graziano 2012:31) using the figure of the “believer citizen” (Gamper 2010). This individual functions in the world according to the coordinates that modern Western societies set, though filtered through the lens of religious rationale. The position of the layperson following the Catholic agenda of de-privatization is illustrated in Figure 6.1. In this new scenario, secular individuals act as political agents in civil society to spark a “transformation in power relations … by mobilizing certain sectors of society” (Tejerina 2010:20). This new repositioning enables the religious institution to reconfigure and control the changing and secularizing religious climate, “yielding to ways of organizing these communities in smaller groups, groups that are more deeply connected to different areas

Figure 6.1.  Political reorganization of the laity in the process of religious de-privatization

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of civil society … and that can take on a more active role in coordinating the community” (Díaz 2016:138).

Re-adjusting Disputed Parameters: Public Space and “Moral Politics” A fundamental characteristic of public religions is how they shape common space, redefine the boundaries between public and private, and influence issues of morality. This process took shape in the Catholic Church at the end of the 1970s and signifies the re-conquest of institutionalized public space via the modernization of the Catholic Church (Casanova 1997). Intervention into the realm of morality occurs via a renewed “neoconservative” discourse (Díaz-Salazar 2007) called “new evangelization” (John Paul II 1979), which ends up being the contemporary narrative of the church’s opposition to the global liberalization of “moral politics.” This discourse complements the utilization of secular individuals as political agents in areas related to morality policies, supporting their actions both in daily life and in public space in the spirit of restoring the privileged position that Catholicism once held. The discourse of “new evangelization” operates in two complementary ways. On one hand, it functions as a “counter-discourse” (Díaz 2016) to the pluralization of lifestyles. On the other, it presents itself as the ultimate basis of morality and culture in contemporary societies, a kind of guide for ordering society and individual action based on the Catholic Catechism. Aligning the discourse and actions of individuals with the Christian moral order is said to be the only effective means of stopping the advance of “materialist relativism” (Ratzinger 2005:n/a). Such an alignment will bring about moral re-armament on issues that the institution considers essential to its survival and will identify movements that oppose “moral politics.” Notably, the global Catholic agenda of de-privatization is not limited to the production of documents in the Vatican; these documents are only the first step in creating a clearly designed “instruction manual” which highlights the objectives of the movement (Garbagnoli 2014) and supports the de-privatization of secular life. Faced with cultural transformations that are considered contrary to the cultural framework of Catholicism, deprivatization presents itself as a “mission space” (Díaz 2016:152) created by conscientious and mobilized lay people in the public sphere.

De-privatization, Collective Identity, and Public Space: The Emergence of the “Culture of Life” Since the 1980s, the Catholic Church has experimented with visible de-privatization in countries where the church has traditionally had significant historical influence. This can be seen to varying degrees in countries such as Argentina (Vaggione 2020), Colombia, France (Béraud and Portier 2015), Italy (Garbagnoli 2017), Mexico (Molina 2022), Peru (Mujica 2007), Poland (Cornejo-Valle and Ramme 2022), and Spain (Cornejo-Valle and Pichardo 2020). The goal has been to erode, block, or overturn secularizing legislation related to sexual and reproductive freedom or non-traditional family structures. This restructuring has been the strategy used to overcome the failure of actions taken by more traditional Catholic ecclesiastic groups. The process of de-privatization is carried out by mobilizing numerous secular groups associated with Catholicism, referred to here as CISOs. The issue addressed in this section has to do with the collective identity and community feeling that these groups provide. The maintenance of these groups rests on the perception they have of the vitality of their own 85

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culture (Cohen 2001). This makes collective identity a central aspect of their analysis, as it replaces complex processes of identification that appeal to emotional ties which unite personal identity with a higher-order unit (Elias 1991). From there, joint practices are carried out to construct the idea of a common “us:” the community. This dynamic can only exist for as long as it is sustained by members who make it functional (Melucci 1996) and involves three key elements (Tejerina 2009:105):



1. The collective identity understood as something dynamic that is subject to permanent processes of creation and reproduction. 2. The elements that define an individual’s belonging to the collective identity (“us”) – a sense of belonging that emerges by sharing actions and community points of reference. 3. Shared attributes that members of the community use as markers of identification, thereby establishing the line separating “us” and “them.”

Framing the Collective Identity and the “Us”: The Culture of Life Frame analysis (Goffman 1974) refers to the meanings associated with objects or experiences mediated by culture. Frames serve three functions: they focus attention on what is “inside” and “outside” the frame, they articulate and unite different elements of interpretation, and they transform perception and understanding of reality (Snow and Benford 1992). To spread the church’s discourse beyond the community of believers, a rhetoric clearly inspired by Catholic belief has emerged through the use of “strategic secularism” (Vaggione 2005), which attempts to unite the population against the process of secularization. This concept is conveyed as the “culture of life” and represents a global milestone in understanding both the process of Catholic de-privatization and the characteristics that define the political enemy to be opposed. Although this discourse makes regular use of scientific knowledge to support itself in public space – a clear break from previous Catholic strategy – the main goal continues to be to adapt “society to the gospel” (López 2013:25). This synthesis approaches the discursive and identity-based framework of different Catholic groups from the perspective of the “culture of life.” The “us” within these groups maintains contact with a “social frame of memory” (Halbwachs 1994) that is based on the discursive and behavioral model proposed by Christian humanism. This cultural dynamic is not only built on Catholic doctrine regarding intimacy (sexual, familial, and matrimonial morality) but also refers to a way of interpreting and being present in the world (Hiebert 2021). Having turned the protection of human life into an “absolute moral imperative” (Fassin 2010:193), the expression “culture of life” was adopted in 1991 to refer specifically to the family institution as a “sanctuary of life” (John Paul II 1991:n.39), that is, as a privileged space both for reproducing the evangelical mission as well as for the promotion of certain discourses on the topic of sexual and familial morality. The second time this functional framework was referenced publicly was in the circular Evangelium vitæ (John Paul II 1995). From that point on, the culture of life was definitively established as an identity-based rhetoric attempting to create a community that defends the “sacred value of human life from its very beginning until its end” (John Paul II 1995:n.2) because “it is the property and gift of God the Creator and Father” (John Paul II 1995:n.40). After this second appearance, and together with political action carried out in public space by the laity, the battle was established on two fronts: first, it fought against the human capacity for self-determination strengthened by the pro-choice movement (mani86

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fested in controversial debates about medically assisted human contraception, procreation, and euthanasia), and second, it mobilized to seek out strategies to respond to new-found sexual and reproductive rights. This call to defend Christianity occurred within the “master frame” (Snow and Benford 1992) constructed by the institution as part of the program of “new evangelization” that “not only defends a particular cultural worldview of sexuality and family which is seen as threatened, but that also seeks to have this symbolic order protected by law” (Vaggione 2012:62).

Mobilization against Moral Politics: The “Other” Collective identities represent “socially produced, socially objectified realities that … are turned into elements of personal identity” (Pérez-Agote 2016:5). Furthermore, the correspondence between individual and group identity defines the boundaries “between self and other” (Calhoun 2003:9), helping to reinforce “the warmth of our relationships with others, such as neighbors, or members of the same community, or fellow citizens or followers of the same religion” (Sen 2006:22). These mechanisms yield processes of identification with others to then be able to build elements of union among individuals who self-identify within the same cultural parameters. Given this narrative, those individuals who constructed their identity according to an ill-defined “post-1968 cultural Marxism” (Contreras and Poole 2011:35) and who, having failed in their proposals for progressive political transformation, shifted their ideological struggle toward culture and morality were identified as the enemy of the Catholic Church – a representation of the “other.” These individuals would be representatives of a cultural mindset known as the “culture of death” (De Marco and Wiker 2004). In this way, those who operate according to the “culture of life” consider themselves to be representatives of an order that pre-dates human development (Vaggione 2012), while those who do not are considered to be the voices of a disorderly order and a product of free will who have been led astray from the path of tradition. Taking this approach, Catholicism believes that if the “culture of life” is the “light” (John Paul II 1995:n.28), then the “culture of death” emerges “as a cultural model of darkness” (Fforde 2013:339).

Common Attributes and the Boundary between “Us” and “Them” These notions of identity are not only internalized by social movements embedded within the Catholic master frame but are also embraced by individuals and political organizations that participate in these debates without clearly belonging to the institution. This is one of the most noteworthy attributes of the new framework of belonging that the Catholic Church has constructed to deal with secularism and to create a strong, unified bloc. This is fundamentally due to the effort made to voice discourses on the basis of “public reasons” (Rawls 1995), alluding to Christian influence in Europe or Latin America via scientific legitimation (Vaggione 2005; Cornejo-Valle and Pichardo 2020). The use of science has become pivotal to the organization of public protests, for “in a complex society, reasoning replaces conviction in processes of deliberation where beliefs must be translated into argumentative language and logic” (Díaz-Salazar 2007:50). Employing the concept of “ventriloquist knowledge” (Thuillier 1983), science can be seen to standardize an ideological orientation and fuel discourse that uses socially legitimized perspectives to support the proposals of Christian humanism as it relates to morality policies. 87

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In a study of the anti-abortion movement in the United States, Ziad Munson pointed out that, aside from the backlash against moral politics and the broadening of a mobilized support base in public spaces, the true victory of the movement lies in its ability to evoke new forms of subjectivation that re-define the identity of the mobilized, revealing that “the range of previously held beliefs that the activist brings to the process of mobilization” (2008:195) is relevant when creating a framework of belonging. This reinforces the idea that the underlying motivations and expectations among these social movement participants are more complex and diverse than they may seem at first. This can be substantiated by simply observing the lines of argument expressed by emerging radical, right-wing populist movements in Europe – VOX in Spain, FIDESZ in Hungary, Law and Justice in Poland, Lega Nord in Italy, or Rassemblement National in France, to mention the most significant – who explicitly or implicitly utilize their own definitions of the “culture of life” to characterize the enemy, though their ties to the Catholic Church remain unclear.

Conclusions Looking at institutionalized religious practices, traditionally Catholic countries exhibit a divided pattern of behavior. While the secularization of individuals has advanced in many sectors of the population so, too, has religious and spiritual pluralism both within and outside of Christianity. Although these processes of change are important at the individual level, public discourse has been littered with debates in which religious symbols and rhetoric are used to champion religious hegemony over secular “moral politics.” These processes are facilitating the mobilization of Catholic-inspired secular groups who promote religious de-privatization. To do so, they redefine the liberal concept of public space, making it possible for religion and its messages to take on an important role in public life. This idea of “public religion” is oriented toward 1) having greater presence and social visibility by redefining individual and collective freedoms and rights and 2) contributing ethical vision and moral principles to public debate by defending traditional lifestyles and disputing government legislation. The key players in this change are emerging Catholic-inspired Christian groups, sociocultural and political movements that seek to promote Christian beliefs in an increasingly secularized world. These emerging groups of organized believers aspire to mobilize other sectors of society and strengthen religious rationality in modern society, thereby empowering the Catholic program. Concurrently, public space is seen as a place of confrontation, of “new evangelization” and opposition to the liberalization of moral politics. With their narrative rooted in Christian culture and morals conceived to be the ultimate basis of contemporary society, the discourse of the mobilized laity opposes the pluralization of lifestyles. Confronted with materialist relativism, the public sphere is seen both as a new “missionary space” and a space for mobilization. By focusing on secular laws related to sexual and reproductive freedoms and non-traditional family units, a collective identity tied to the “culture of life” takes shape, capable of providing and showcasing the ideals and common attributes that distinguish them as they attempt to adapt private behaviors and practices to Christian humanism and the teachings of the Gospel. Their identity is focused on discourse around sexual, familial, and matrimonial morality, aiming to defend the sanctity of life from beginning to end and standing in opposition to modern, pro-choice discourse and new sexual and reproductive rights cut off from religious customs and traditions. 88

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What is new about this “culture of life” discourse is that it is based on public support and is upheld, in part, by scientific legitimization. In complex and pluralistic societies in which logic dominates, it is telling to observe the change that this “culture of life” discourse has undergone, given that the ideas it proposes have now come to be supported more by processes of deliberation that are gradually replacing principles of conviction. The rise of these mobilizations has, in recent decades, sparked continued electoral success for various organizations and political parties. These entities have incorporated many of the lines of argument behind the “culture of life” into their own projects, which respond to dissatisfaction with modernity and the advancement of globalization by seeking to recover traditional values. On this point, it is necessary to delve deeper into the combined origins of this discomfort with modernization, the desire to defend damaged national identities, and the need to implement a public moral code based on traditionally Christian values. Significantly, these movements are not exclusive to the traditionally Catholic countries analyzed here but have also reached countries characterized by other religious cultures.

Notes 1 This author thanks the University of the Basque Country and the Ministry of Universities and the European Union-Next Generation EU for the Margarita Salas post-doctoral contract from which he benefited during the year 2022. He also thanks the Basque government for granting his current post-doctoral contract. 2 This framework is particularly relevant to Catholic groups marked by a more secular-leaning spirituality (such as Opus Dei, The Neocatechumenal Way, Legionaries of Christ, etc.), whose members account for some of the Christian-inspired secular organizations active in public space. This twofold political and religious allegiance can be seen across the globe in places such as Spain with the Foro Español de la Familia (Spanish Family Forum) and CitizenGo-HazteOír.org (CornejoValle and Pichardo 2020), and France with the Manif Pour Tous (Demo for All), to highlight just three of the most active Catholic organizations in Europe (Béraud and Portier 2015).

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7 A SOCIAL HISTORY OF CHRISTOFASCISM Steven Foertsch and Christopher M. Pieper

Abstract Recent literature on Christian nationalism by sociologists of religion in the United States identifies a perceived novel phenomenon: the fusion of authoritarian governmental forms with Christianity. However, the socio-historical origin of this international trend has been left relatively unexplored. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to create a single international account that lends itself to future comparative theoretical frameworks and analyses through the term “Christofascism.”

Introduction Sociologists of religion have recently identified what appears to be a novel phenomenon: the fusion of seemingly incompatible political and religious identities, particularly, the fusion of authoritarian governmental forms with Christianity. Groups attempting this amalgam have gained power through democratic processes across the Western world (Donald Trump in the United States (US), Viktor Orban in Hungary, Andrzej Duda in Poland, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, etc.). The deep roots of this social movement have been left relatively unexplored by this flurry of inquiry, which has understandably tended to focus on modern incarnations rather than the generation of the idea itself. This is likely due to threat avoidance of overgeneralization present in academic discourse – it is wiser and less controversial, perhaps, to focus only on Christian nationalists in the US. However, the reality remains: there is a generalizable global and historical trend worthy of introduction into the academic discourse surrounding the sociology of Christianity. Some of this has already been explored, though piecemeal, by various theologians, political economists, journalists, political scientists, and others. The goal here is to assemble these pieces into a single parsimonious account that lends itself to future theoretical frameworks and analyses of what has been termed “Christofascism.” The byzantine work here of tracing the social history and lineage of Christofascism begins with the questionable inheritance of European Middle Age political theology and ends with modern Christian nationalist literature, including Dorothee Sölle’s (1982) version DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-10

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of “Christofascism.” Once grounded in context, the final section marshals these contributions to advance greater awareness and applicability of the concept moving forward.

The Social and Cultural Roots of Fascism Authoritarian populism arises from the mass disenfranchisement (Hiebert 2020) inherent in the capitalist mode of production. American sociologists have recently been scrambling to understand the populist impulse within American politics with the advent of Donald Trump. However, a theoretical framework inherited from mostly Latin American studies, in which populism has been more active and prevalent in political movements, already exists to make sense of this tendency. Scholars such as Ernesto Laclau (2005), Chantal Mouffe (1999), Marco Revelli (2017), Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1994), and Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter (1986) have cataloged populist movements from their initial mass leanings into late authoritarian/fascistic incarnations. Their conclusions are clear: populism naturally morphs into fascism when unchecked. In today’s globalized world, these populist movements have developed into international nationalistic incarnations across the world. Blake Stewart (2020) recently discussed transnational nationalism through the lens of far-right civilizationism, which is helpful for the analysis here. Whether and how these authoritarian tendencies are legitimated becomes the primary concern of leaders, which is where religion comes into play. By appealing to religious discourse, fascists wear the cloak of morality and are legitimated in the eyes of the majority, as individual commitment is generated through tension with society (Stark and Finke 2000). Institutional religion then has a choice: work with the conservative elite to protect original privileges or lose salience in an increasingly pluralizing world. Most churches choose the former rather than the latter (Gill 1998). This is not to say that religion itself is inherently fascistic, but it does imply that organized religion is likely to cooperate with traditional and hierarchical organization (Durkheim 1915). Furthermore, religious beliefs are more likely to be salient in places with high existential insecurity. Like Pippa Norris and Ronal Inglehart (2011), Joseph Baker and Buster Smith (2015) have described at length the effect of existential insecurity on religious belief. “[C] ultural contexts with high levels of death, suffering, and uncertainty are typically characterized by higher average levels of religious belief and practice” (Baker and Smith 2015:103). Edwin Eschler (2020) has recently also demonstrated that in Latin America, those who experience existential threats are more likely to experience religious miracles. Countries with higher Gini coefficients (and, thus, the wealth inequality, shame, ostracization, etc. of the majority) are more likely to fall into traditional boundaries of belief such as institutional religion. This is the reason that Western proto-fascist leaders, such as Vladimir Putin in Russia or Donald Trump in America, have attempted to co-opt Christian legitimacy in an effort to win over a larger constituency. To understand this cultural process fully requires examining how the social history, cultural lineage, and context of Christianity allows it to be used by these fascists in specific Western international cases.

Christian Legitimacy and Political Theology Any belief system is filled with the opportunity to construct floating signifiers (Laclau 2005), regardless of whether they conform to the ideological bedrock of the system. As Ernesto Laclau suggested, 94

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the same democratic demands receive the structural pressure of rival hegemonic projects. This generates an autonomy of the popular signifiers different from the one we have considered so far. It is no longer that the particularism of the demand becomes self-sufficient and independent of any equivalential articulation, but that its meaning is indeterminate between alternative equivalential frontiers. I shall call signifiers whose meaning is “suspended” in that way “floating signifiers.” (Laclau 2005:131) Christianity is, of course, not exempt from this process. Initially a movement focused on empowering the poor, Christianity has now been symbolically co-opted by ruling class after ruling class throughout history, making its key symbols “float.” Analyzing the political theological underpinnings of Western society facilitates an understanding of why floating signifiers are so readily drawn from Christianity to support Western fascistic incarnations. The ultimate goal of Christofascism is to incorporate the religious into the political (Schmitt 2007). Christian idealism is, therefore, appropriated for this discursive legitimation, and institutional Christianity is no stranger to co-option by non-democratic rule for the purpose of legitimacy. A lineage to the beginnings of Western Christendom could easily be traced, but the literature surrounding this period is dubious and hotly debated by historians. A less contested marker is the unseating of the papacy as the hegemonic power of Christian legitimacy through the process of the Protestant Reformation in the Early Modern era. The papacy long served as the legitimizer of the divine right to rule. Originally a democratizing effort to liberate Christian idealism from the internationalists, Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin sought to establish community churches that determined the truth of Christ and the Gospels from the ground up (Mueller 1954). This significantly weakened central control of religious narrative, and individual state churches began to legitimate their respective national states in the face of the internationalist papacy. The first major example of this would naturally be the Anglican Church and King Henry VIII. The decline of the absolutist monarch followed during the Enlightenment, the French Revolution in 1789, and the collapse of the Ancien Régime. No longer were traditional forms of legitimacy suitable to prevent hegemony from breaking down. Rulers had to turn to a new legitimizer: popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty, or rule on behalf of an “empowered” people, became the ideotype. In practice, this amounted to, at best, little more than representative parliamentarianism, which favored elite special interests to fill the gap left by the now absent absolute sovereign. Even so, legalistic frameworks inherited by the Roman Empire, revised by the papacy, and preserved under the Napoleonic Code, instilled Christian political theology into democratic incarnations of governance. The people were “empowered” only through institutions that had survived the test of time, and these institutions carried Christian morality on into the modern era, in which fascistic leaders would later attempt to co-opt them. Some may, following this line of argument, conclude that Christianity is uniquely pre-disposed to producing fascistic tendencies and co-option; however, Sölle’s (1982) concept of obedience can assist in dispelling this myth. Obedience is the key to every organized faith, including Christianity; one must accept the moral authority and power of the belief system to become a member and practitioner. Sölle argues that this type of rigid and unquestioning belief system is not only misleading but also contrary to the teaching of Christ. Christ did not conform to the institutional expectations 95

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of the Pharisees of the time who were legitimizing the unjust rule of Herod, and it follows that Christians today would presumably continue this tradition of resistance and independence of thought. To deny the influence of dominating political and religious movements, Sölle argues, is to pursue true and purer Christianity.

Recent Incarnations and Literature Those who seek to establish a sort of Christofascism, or a co-option of fascistic politics with a Christian symbology and narrative, must lean on this obedience belief structure. There are plenty of potential case studies that can be marshaled to better understand this modern assemblage. The two most obvious cases of fascism in the twentieth century come from Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany, though focusing on these two cases ignores the wealth of knowledge on case studies from Latin America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. Suffice it to say that, in both the cases of Mussolini and Hitler, the Christian state church was used to legitimize their movements. It can also be argued that, in the case of Spain, Francisco Franco actively led a Christofascist political movement, though some have disagreed with the fascist label. After World War II, however, more active forms emerged in various areas across the globe which call for closer examination.

The United States The US has a long-documented history of potential Christofascist movements, which are covered at length by a variety of scholars (see Diamond 1995; Kruse 2015). Largely emerging from appraisals of the dominionist movement (a political movement of the Christian Right to implement biblical law as social policy), theologians began to proclaim or reject the dominionist innovation in the 1970s. R.J. Rushdoony (1973) is a large figure in this proclamation push, which was later critiqued by multiple observers, particularly sociologists and journalists. Chris Hedges (2008) is a journalist who has viewed this movement well through a critical lens: Debate with the radical Christian Right is useless … It is a movement based on emotion and cares nothing for rational thought and discussion … Naive attempts to reach out to the movement, to assure them that we, too, are Christian or we, too, care about moral values, are doomed. This movement is bent on our destruction. The attempts by many liberals to make peace would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. These dominionists hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution, a world they blame for the debacle of their lives. They have one goal: its destruction. (Hedges 2008:202) The extremist dominionism movement has naturally begotten a Christian nationalist ideology which has become increasingly more prominent over the years. Michael Emerson and Christian Smith helped begin the exposition of the racialized nature of evangelical Protestantism (and, thus, the Christian Right movement) with their work Divided by Faith (2001). They demonstrated that America’s evangelical movement is uniquely structured along the systems of racial inequality present in the post-modern US. This means that white evangelicals do not intermingle with Black evangelicals, even though they supposedly share a belief system. More relevantly, the white evangelical ethic 96

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of individualism poses a unique challenge to racially integrating the evangelical movement, an issue that fuels the in/out group distinctions of Christofascism to this day. Philip Gorski (2017) aptly traced the post-modern Christian nationalism movement by identifying the lineage and involvement of Christianity within American democracy and argued for a reclamation of the civil religious tradition from religious nationalists. Gorski makes a compelling case for the right of religion to exist within the American public sphere, though perhaps he is a bit optimistic on the probability of its voluntary release from the hands of extremists who have had a taste of political power. Similarly, Michele Margolis (2018) demonstrated that political identity is often more salient than religious identity, though the two are now inter-related. Using life-course theory, she makes a compelling argument surrounding the state of post-modern American polarization, showing that those who identify politically as conservatives are more likely to identify as Christian, regardless of their behavior surrounding worship. This is a dangerous synthesis of politics and religion and threatens the perceived separation between church and state. Directly following, and related, is the seminal work by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry defining the study of Christian nationalism in America, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (2020). In this revealing work, the authors enliven the discourse surrounding Christian nationalism with statistical data within the context of Donald Trump’s administration. By doing this, they expose the social framework surrounding our most controversial social issues of late and how the conservative right is growing dangerously close to authoritarian movements. This unique contribution to the literature surrounding the intersection of politics and religion in the United States has spawned countless empirical articles solidifying its role as a significant and observant coinage. While all these authors (and others) have done an excellent job describing the American proto-fascist movement, a broader theoretical lens is needed to make sense of these trends in other countries as well. Thus, what follows are examples of literature and cases that help analysts and ordinary citizens understand Christian nationalisms/proto-fascisms internationally so that this well-developed American framework can be expanded to explain similar incarnations globally. This lens, argued here, is Christofascism.

Latin America Modern Latin American cases, while generally under-represented in the discussion of Christian nationalism within the sociology of religion, are just as susceptible, and perhaps more, to the co-option of Christian legitimacy by fascist leaders, caudillos, and military juntas. This is likely the result of the prevalence of the Catholic Church in state functions, which was deliberately built into the Spanish model of colonization and native segregation. This role of the Catholic Church (Penyak and Petry 2019) has clearly changed over the years and now varies country to country, especially where Protestant groups, such as Pentecostals, are growing in number. Falangist groups, which are the cultural inheritors of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, can be generally labeled as Christofascist, though political scientists may disagree. Falangism, in this case, is defined as a fascistic totalitarian movement with strong emphases on nationalism, authoritarian control, charismatic authority, order, anti-communism, illiberality, and Catholic identity (Bowen 1996:4). Leaders, symbols, and ideologies borrowed from Roman Catholicism have been used to legitimize countless fascistic regimes, a good 97

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example being Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina. A detailed treatment of these many influences is presented by Anthony Gill in Rendering Unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America (1998). Gill aptly describes the rock-and-hard-place scenario many Latin American Catholic bishops found themselves in when confronted with authoritarian rule: either cooperate and legitimize the fascistic movement to protect the integrity and continued existence of the church or oppose it and risk losing centuries of traditional privileges granted under Spanish colonial rule (the patronato). Gill also questions the salience of the liberation theology movement which challenged the propensity of the Catholic Church to mix with fascistic/elite politics. Likewise, many cases of Christofascist movements originating outside the Catholic tradition also exist in Latin America, the two most notable being those led by José Efraín RiosMontt in Guatemala and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Both leaders have used their evangelical Protestant identities to re-inforce and legitimate their pushes for non-democratic procedure, and several scholars have written on them (see Egoshi 2018 for Montt; Zanotta Machado 2020, Barreto and Chaves 2021 for Bolsonaro). Latin America remains a good case study for Christofascism and its many incarnations.

Europe After World War II, many popular movements on the right have actively sought to co-opt aspects of the Christian narrative and use it for non-democratic idealism. The biggest and most obvious modern cases can be found within what is currently known as the Visegrád Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). Both President Viktor Orban of Hungary and President Andrzej Duda of Poland have pushed a Christian-first narrative in their anti-immigration policy, which they see as the only way to protect the European character of Europe. Compounding this, they have attacked the free press and the independent judiciary. This movement is well described by Didier Fassin’s term ambivalent hospitality (2012), in which refugees are admitted but only under challenging cultural conditions, and Craig Calhoun’s description of the rejection in Cosmopolitan Europe (2009). Outside of the European Union, Slavic states have also taken on the trappings of Christofascism. A key role in this push is Vladimir Putin, who actively legitimizes his authority through appeals to Russian Orthodoxy. This has been derived through various anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation, additions of God and Russian Orthodoxy to the Russian Constitution, and the weaponization of Orthodoxy to justify (some would say motivate) the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia is not a stranger to Christian legitimation of authoritarian rule (see Ware 1993 for a good summary), and so, after its resurgent period post-USSR, it is only natural that this relationship should continue.

Criticism and Conclusion The regional case studies which have been introduced briefly here indicate a strong likelihood that the American phenomenon dubbed “Christian nationalism” is only the local species of a global genus. Thus, a broader, more inclusive, and less regionally unique theory is needed to explain this international phenomenon, which has been dubbed “far-right civilizationism” by Stewart (2020). The literature has been hitherto dominated by national cases that are not related to globalization, and while the respective cases are very important, the oversight of creating a generalized concept needs to be addressed. The perspective of Christofascism is partial remediation of this omission. 98

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Granted, it is understandable to critique this proposition and its supporting literature as flawed by over-generalization, given the foundational concept of fascism. Some may view the umbrella term “Christofascism” to be too extreme. However, without radical labels, the true nature of the phenomenon will continue to languish in euphemisms. Worse yet, tangible harms to human persons may not be prevented or abated. Whether this form of authoritarian rule, which denies popular participation in government, or totalitarian rule, which denies popular participation in government and extensively regulates the lives of all citizens, is actually instituted does not diminish the potential of current movements to become fascist. Current research on Christian nationalism fails to acknowledge this movement to be as dangerous as it is – that is, as a step toward fascism or proto-fascism. While it is clear from history and experience that Christianity itself is not inherently fascistic, it takes conscious effort to ensure that Christianity is not co-opted for fascistic purposes. That is the role of this chapter, and that is the role of intellectuals in a free society pursuing an open dialogue (Hiebert 2018). In 2021, a number of proudly self-described Christian nationalists stormed the US Capitol building. More recently, they have sought to ban the teaching of historically accurate descriptions of the American Civil War, the Reconstruction era, the lynching period, and the Civil Rights Movement. In the EU, shared immigration policy is tearing the political and economic union apart. One third of the Polish country has voted to convert their districts into “LGBT-free zones” (Hiebert 2020). In Russia, LGBTQIA+ people continue to experience harassment and detainment under the “gay propaganda law.” Fascism in all its forms, no matter how cleverly shrouded in a thin veneer of religion, must be identified and resisted. Should these warnings not be heeded, the privilege of this chapter – intellectuals writing in a free society – may be lost.

References Baker, Joseph, and Buster Smith. 2015. American Secularism: Cultural Contours of Nonreligious Belief Systems. New York: NYU Press. Barreto, Raimundo, and João Chaves. 2021. “Christian Nationalism is Thriving in Bolsonaro’s Brazil.” The Christian Century. https://www​.christiancentury​.org​/article​/critical​-essay​/christian​-nationalism​-thriving​-bolsonaro​-s​-brazil Bowen, Wayne. 1996. “Spaniards and Nazi Germany: Visions of a New Order.” PhD Dissertation, History Department. Northwestern University. Calhoun, Craig. 2009. “Cosmopolitan Europe and European Studies.” Pp. 637–645 in The SAGE Handbook of European Studies, edited by Chris Rumford. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Diamond, Sara. 1995. Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. New York: The Guilford Press. Durkheim, Émile. 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin Macmillan. Egoshi, Miho. 2018. “Evangelical Dictatorship Driving the Guatemalan Civil War: Reconsidering Ríos Montt, the ‘Savior of La Nueva Guatemala”. Thesis, Interdisciplinary Program. CUNY. Emerson, Michael, and Christian Smith. 2001. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Eschler, Edwin. 2020. “In the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Insecurity and Miraculous Experience.” Review of Religious Research 62:439–464. Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gill, Anthony. 1998. Rendering Unto Caesar. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Steven Foertsch and Christopher M. Pieper Gorski, Philip. 2017. American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hedges, Chris. 2008. American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. New York: Free Press. Hiebert, Dennis. 2018. “A Call for Civility in Public Dialogue.” Journal of Sociology and Christianity 8(2):1–5. Hiebert, Kyle. 2020. “The Authoritarian Populism and Social Pathologies Pulling Democracies Apart.” Journal of Sociology and Christianity 10(2):25–49. Kruse, Kevin. 2015. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic Books. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Linz, Juan, and Alfred C. Stepan. 1994. The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. Linz, Juan. 2009. “Further Reflections on Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes.” In Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. Boulder, CO: Rienner. Margolis, Michele. 2018. From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 1999. “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?” Social Research 66(3):745–758. Mueller, William. 1954. Church and State in Luther and Calvin. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. 2011. Sacred and Secular. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. O’Donnell, Guillermo, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead. 1986. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Penyak, L.M., and W.J. Petry. 2019. “Roman Catholicism in Latin America.” In Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions. New York: Springer. Revelli, Marco. 2017. The New Populism: Democracy Stares into the Abyss. London: Verso. Rushdoony, R. J., and Gary North. 1973. The Institutes of Biblical Law. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co. Schmitt, Carl. 2007. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sölle, Dorothee. 1982. Beyond Mere Obedience. New York: The Pilgrim Press. Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. 2000. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stewart, Blake. 2020. “The Rise of Far Right Civilizationism.” Critical Sociology 46(7–8):1207–1220. Ware, Timothy. 1993. The Orthodox Church. New York: Penguin Books. Whitehead, Andrew, and Samuel Perry. 2020. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Zanotta Machado, Lia. 2020. “Do tempo dos direitos ao tempo das intolerâncias. A movimentação neoconservadora e o impacto do governo Bolsonaro: Desafios para a Antropologia Brasileira”. Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology Vol. 17. https://www​.scielo​.br​/j​/vb​/a​/Hg7​whn7​MnSj​Kx9y​ ykr7GDxm/​?lang​=en#

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PART 2

Contemporary Sociological Theory and Christianity

INTRODUCTION TO PART 2 Contemporary Sociological Theory and Christianity

A theory is a set of interrelated propositions specifying relations between variables. Major theoretical perspectives in contemporary sociology vary from the scientistic to the interpretive to the critical, from the macroscopic to the mesoscopic to the microscopic, from the objective to the subjective, and most illuminate at least some aspect(s) of Christianity effectively. None, alone, are conclusive. Conversely, different expressions of Christianity vary in their acceptance of the truthfulness and usefulness of different sociological theoretical perspectives of different aspects of Christianity. Alone, all are inconclusive. Moreover, various metatheoretical philosophical perspectives shape sociological theories and Christianity themselves, providing new ways of seeing and understanding social phenomena based on alternative worldviews. Each philosophical perspective adds another frame or angle of insight, whether the entity being scrutinized is sociology or Christianity. Science and religion are both methods of knowing, though starkly different in the process and purpose of knowing; science provides empirical evidence of reality, whereas religion provides meaning, belonging, and ethics. Part 2 begins with the historically abiding dichotomy of individualism versus collectivism in human social life and then considers various contemporary theoretical, though not necessarily or exclusively, sociological perspectives of human social life, before formulating a theistic theory that explains the progress of human social life. Tsung-I Hwang observes that most analyses of individualism and collectivism have fallen into generalization or even reductionism and that integration of different definitions and types of individualism and collectivism are needed to provide more specific descriptions of each type and subtype. He then details how concerns about the problem of loss of self, caused by both individualism and collectivism, has led some philosophers and theologians to argue for a synthesis, exemplified by Jurgen Moltmann’s social trinitarian anthropology. Jeffrey Robert Thomas explores how ideas of space contribute new perspectives on the relationship between Christianity and modernism, secularity, and other religions. After arguing that the leading work of Kim Knott, and her reliance on Henri Lefebvre, lacks a means to discuss Christianity in its actual and complex relationship within the Global North, he articulates how the work of Michel de Certeau does allow for a critique of normative and institutional ideas of Christianity and highlights the visibility of Christianity as a practice of everyday life. DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-12

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Henry Kwok introduces the “post-critical” philosophical perspective and addresses its implications for Christian sociologists in this time of “post-truth,” noting that “post-critical” is not a rejection of critical theory but rather a challenge to the emancipatory logic it inherited from the Enlightenment. As illustration, he employs Jacques Rancière’s post-critical criticisms of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of education, before highlighting some postcritical elements of Christianity that already existed prior to the birth of sociology. Brad Vermurlen begins with a non-exhaustive introduction to critical realism, including its most central and distinctive philosophical proposals, before reflecting on its relationship to both sociology and Christianity. He outlines what critical realism has to do with Christianity by specifying its multiple points of contact with consensual Christian thought relating to ontology, epistemology, and normativity, revealing why Christian sociologists find critical realism an intuitive and compelling set of philosophical commitments with which to undergird their work. Henry Kwok reflects on ongoing colonialism and imperialism under the new hegemonic order of global capitalism and addresses three tasks required for decolonizing both sociology and Christianity. He calls for a revisitation of the colonial roots of sociology and a reconnection of the metropole and periphery in its narrative of modernity, a de-colonization of the secularization thesis by reassessing the role of Christianity and multiple theologies flourishing in the Global South, and a re-imagination of the Kingdom of God via envisioning a radical gospel. Clinton Stockwell presents four models of globalization in the post-World War II era: imperialism, neoliberalism, international development, and globalization from below. Given the complex nature of globalization in the contemporary world, he seeks to provide an ethical framework for an alternative view based on the efforts of the United Nations and grassroots organizations to envision a process whereby the flourishing of both humans and the earth might be achieved and sustainability realized. Tong Zhang outlines a theist social science paradigm which assumes an omnibenevolent God and posits that the motives of people, or the worldviews they adopt, fundamentally determine their society’s organization and evolution. He theorizes that the more hedonic or Nietzscheist a society is, the less progressed it will be and that the more ascetic a society is, the more progressed it will be and offers as evidence the Great Divergence between the West and China, the sudden eruption of the two World Wars, and the religious distribution of Nobel laureates.

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8 INDIVIDUALISM, COLLECTIVISM, AND CHRISTIANITY Tsung-I Hwang

Abstract Most discussions and debates about individualism and collectivism have fallen into generalization or even reductionism and lack consensus about the scope of individualistic and collectivistic explanations, the definition and usage of their many key terms, the reasons shaping varieties of individualism or collectivism, and categorizations of individualism and collectivism. Having concerns about both individualism and collectivism, especially the problem of a loss of self that might be caused by both, some philosophers and theologians present and argue for a synthesis of them. Among them, through his development of social trinitarian doctrine, Jurgen Moltmann argues that social trinitarian anthropology is a synthesis between individualism and collectivism. The integration of different definitions and types of individualism and collectivism is needed to provide a more specific definition for each type and subtype and a spectrum for further related studies. Furthermore, whether Christian theological anthropology is a synthesis between individualism and collectivism is also a significant question requiring further studies. After it is confirmed theoretically, the development of a practicing model to solve the problem of a loss of self, caused either by individualism or collectivism, is also a compelling direction for further studies.

Introduction Individualism and collectivism have been explored and examined more comprehensively and thoroughly than any other subject in contemporary cross-cultural psychology. This topic has dominated many fields, from the study of personality, developmental, and social psychology to sociology, anthropology, philosophy, economics, business management, and political science (Triandis 1995). Scholars have used the individualism versus collectivism construct to understand, analyze, explain, and predict cultural differences and similarities across multifarious human behavior in political philosophy for 300 years (Triandis 1995) and in social science for about a century (Triandis 2001). DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-13

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During the twentieth century, the viewpoints of scholars increasingly diverged over individualism and collectivism or “holism,” another term denoting collectivism in a positive way (Buss 2000:1f.; Zahle and Collin 2014); they increasingly discussed topics including democracy, education, government, industries, and trade (Hayek 1944; Infantino 1998). Problems on both sides of these debates have been examined and criticized (Zahle and Collin 2014). For example, the possibilities of “the many [being] absorbed into the embrace of the one” (Gunton 2003:86) and the existing social structure being sabotaged by the radical trend of individualism are deemed worrisome (Bellah 1980, cited in Tu 1985). The attributes of collectivism in general, or Ru/Confucian-based collectivism in its hierarchical social structure in particular, are presumed to be better adapted to “the age of mass industrialization” than to “Western individualism” by many scholars (MacFarquhar 1980:71), such as Herman Kahn (1979) and Fan Ruiping (2010) in China’s case, Park Sangchul (2016) in Korea’s case, Michio Morishima (1984) in Japan’s case, and Darryl Crawford (2000) in overseas Chinese cases. Nevertheless, some other scholars do not see enough evidence to support this presumption (Dǒng, Xiǎochuān 1999) and some empirical studies disclose the opposite, namely, a greater degree of individualism leading directly or indirectly to greater economic production but also to greater income inequality (Ahuja, van der Schaar, and Zame 2016; Kyriacou 2016). Some scholars argue that collectivism is not an alternative solution to individualism because the collectivist repressive imposition causes other issues (Bellah 1970), such as a problematic Ru-based collectivist understanding of selfhood (Bellah 1980, cited in Tu 1985) that leads to repressive economic control and totalitarianism (Hayek 1944). The literature about individualism and collectivism is so wide-ranging and vast that it is only practical to highlight some pivotal topics and issues for advancing future research. Notably, the terms individualist and individualistic as adjectives are given different nuanced definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary (2016). Individualist refers to the stronger meaning of individualism: “relating to being independent and self-reliant,” or “relating to or denoting a social theory favoring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control.” In contrast, individualistic denotes the general and neutral meaning of individualism: “more interested in individual people than in society as a whole.” The definition of the adjective collectivist in the Oxford English Dictionary is “relating to the practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it.” However, the adjective collectivistic is placed under the word collectivist and not given any additional definition. Based on the nuanced different definitions between individualist and individualistic, this chapter will use collectivist differently than the term collectivistic for highlighting “the collectivist-oriented society, relationships, or selfhood that are harmful to the development of personality” (Hwang 2018:10). Collectivistic refers to a general and neutral meaning of collectivism.

The Attributes of Collectivism and Individualism There is no consensus on the definitions of collectivism and individualism and the scope of collectivistic (or holistic) and individualistic explanations (Zahle and Collin 2014). However, a comparative summary of the attributes of collectivism and individualism is suitable here. Table 8.1 presents the contrast described by Harry Triandis.

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Individualism, Collectivism, Christianity Table 8.1 The attributes of collectivism and individualism (quoted from Triandis et al. 1985:397–98; Triandis, McCusker, and Hui, C. Harry 1990:1006, 1020) Collectivism

Individualism

In-group Regulation of Social Behavior More Dissociative and Super-ordinate Behavior toward Out-group Much Emphasis on Hierarchy Inter-dependence Subordination of Personal Goals to Goals of In-group In-group Harmony and Intimacy Is Important and Strong In-group/Out-group distinctions In-group Is Seen as Homogeneous Socialization for Obedience and Duty; Sacrifice for In-group; Focus on Common Elements with In-group Shame Control Sense of Common Welfare and Fate with In-group In-group Is Center of Psychological Field In-group Is Extension of the Self

Individual Regulation of Social Behavior Less Dissociative and Super-ordinate Behavior toward Out-group Less Emphasis on Hierarchy Self-sufficiency In-group and Personal Goals Are Unrelated Confrontation Within In-group May Be Good: Loneliness In-group Is Seen as Heterogeneous Socialization for Self-reliance and Independence; Good Skills in Entering New Groups Guilt Control Personal Goals and Fate Person Is Center of Psychological Field Self Is Distinct from In-group

Are Western Countries Individualistic and Eastern Asian Countries Collectivistic? Scholars have tended to argue that 1) individualism prevails more in Western countries, whereas collectivism/holism dominates more in Eastern Asian countries, especially in terms of certain local cultural patterns (Hofstede 2001; Tu 1985), and 2) Christianity has promoted individualism in the West (Heath 2019). However, both impressions run the risk of generalization or even reductionism. Therefore, it is important to clarify these arguments before deepening and advancing discussions about the relationship of individualism to Western culture or Christianity. Many scholars are prone to generalizing collectivism as Eastern and individualism as Western without specifying which kind of collectivism and individualism they are referencing (Hwang 2018). Their behavioral forms in the East and West are not uniform, and the factors shaping any type of collectivism or individualism are not the same (Hwang 2018). Furthermore, psychological scholars find diverse categories of collectivism and individualism. Those unfamiliar with this work tend to fall easily into generalizations.

The Types of Collectivism and Individualism Harry Hui and Harry Triandis (1986) provide two main types of collectivism: a certain subset of people or the entire universe of human beings, with the former later named “horizontal collectivism” and the latter “vertical collectivism” (Chen, Meindl, and Hunt 1997:48). The former stresses “equality,” while the latter accepts “inequality” (Hofstede 2001:114).

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Some collectivism in East Asia falls between the horizontal and vertical, though it leans more toward the latter (Yum 1988), and is identified as the Ru-based familistic collectivism (la Barre 1946). It is “only among those bound by social networks,” namely kinship or family in Chinese contexts (Wong 2001:5), instead of “any abstract concern for a general collective body” (Yum 1988:375). Fei Xiaotong (1992) criticizes the selfhood shaped in this kind of Ru-based, familistic, collectivist context as another type of “egocentrism,” because “the priority is placed on the family, then the self, and only subsequently the society or the nation” in this context (Hwang 2018:393). Notably, Islamic collectivism appears to be a similar family-based kind of collectivism (Vandello 2016), but are these two identical? According to Hofstede (2001), Islamic collectivism is more egalitarian because of Islamic theocratic ideology (Triandis 1994). This reveals that different cultures produce similar but not identical collectivism, as the value of collectivism and individualism is the consequence of culture (Hofstede 2001). Therefore, further cross-cultural, especially ethnographic, and psychological investigation is necessary. There are also different categorizations of individualism. In terms of the development of human society, individualism is classified into proto-individualism versus neoindividualism. In the former, “the individual is closely related to very few others”; in the latter, one can do “one’s own thing and get away with it,” almost without being influenced by the in-groups to which one belongs (Triandis et al. 1988:324, emphasis original (eo)). In contrast, Edward Sampson (1988) categorizes individualism into two different types: self-contained individualism versus ensembled individualism. Their characteristics are shown in Table 8.2. Notably, Marx (1845) originally used the term ensemble to reject individualism in his formulation of socialism. Therefore, Sampson’s categorization of individualism manifests that individualism and collectivism are not necessarily two mutually exclusive extremes at the opposite ends of a continuum, although they can be two independent categories (Oyserman 1993). Moreover, there are collectivism-oriented persons in an individualistic culture as well as individualism-oriented persons in a collectivistic culture (Triandis et al. 1988). Furthermore, basic individualistic and collectivistic orientations are not static cultural attributes of given societies but orientations which adapt to environmental and socioeconomic change. For example, Ronald Inglehart and Daphna Oyserman point out that “economic development facilitates a shift toward some of the cultural syndromes associated with individualism and away from some … associated with collectivism, resulting in increased emphasis on individual freedom-focused values and reduced focus on traditional hierarchies” (2004:74). Such a shift was evident in certain ways in China after 1919 (Zeng and Greenfield 2015). In analyzing and discussing the development of individualism in the realm of religious studies, there are additional different typologies. To distinguish modern Western individual-

Table 8.2  Two types of individualism classified by Edward E. Sampson (1988:16)

Self-Other Boundary Control Conception of Persons

Self-Contained Individualism

Ensembled Individualism

Firm Personal Excluding

Fluid Field Including

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ism from the prior forms of individualism, individualism is differentiated into in-worldly individualism and out-worldly individualism. In in-worldly individualism, “individuals were not only members of an organic whole but also entities with a final cause of their own” (Buss 2000:12). In out-worldly individualism, “society is seen not as a whole but as composed of autonomous individuals who conclude a contract among themselves” (Buss 2000:4). Furthermore, to characterize and explain the two meanings of individualism in modern Western ideology, it can be classified into 1) quantitative or formal individualism and qualitative individualism in which “all individuals are fundamentally identical and equal” or 2) qualitative individualism which “stresses the uniqueness, the incomparability and irreplaceability of each human creature … not individualism of singleness but individualism of uniqueness” (Buss 2000:18). Individualism and collectivism are often viewed as the opposite. However, in reality, the extreme of either may lead to totalitarianism (Hayek 1944:60). Indeed, “there might accordingly exist a spectrum of different levels of social behavior ranging from extreme individualism through different levels of mixed individualism and collectivism to totalitarianism” (Hwang 2018:390-91). Therefore, it is important to integrate types of collectivism and individualism, especially through more ethnographic studies and empirical evidence, with the goal of advancing and deepening related studies in this realm.

Over-generalization of Collectivism as Eastern and Individualism as Western Generalizing collectivism as Eastern and individualism as Western is based only on rough impressions about the cultural characteristics and distribution of collectivism and individualism. Sometimes scholars draw on empirical studies from cross-cultural psychology. When the cultural distance of their context is large, they sometimes use ethnographic studies to show that more than one type of each view exists and that there is not as clear a dualism as others have perceived. For example, Igbafen (2014) finds Africans more collectivistic than individualistic. The term “Africans” might also be too generalized because there are more than 50 countries, 2,000 languages, and 3,000 ethnic groups in Africa. But are Africans Eastern or Western? In addition to many African countries, many Latin American countries are also more collectivistic than individualistic. Are they Eastern or Western? Moreover, many so-called Western countries in Europe are obviously collectivistic: Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgarian Turks, Slovakia, and Turkey (Hofstede n.d.; Triandis 1995). In some cases, ethnic groups are seen as collectivist or individualist, even if the larger nation is not perceived as such. Adam Cohen and colleagues urge caution in “characterizing large, heterogeneous groups of people (like the United States) as either individualistic or collectivistic” (2016:1236). They argue that “any cultural system (be it a country or a religion) contains both individualistic and collectivistic features” (2016:1237) and doubt the fairness “to call entire cultural systems (e.g., Ruism/Confucianism [or Islam]) collectivistic or individualistic” (Musah 2011). It has been verified that the collectivistic or individualistic levels are different in different regions in the same collectivistic or individualistic areas and countries. Some are different in different subdivisions in the assumed same collectivistic or individualistic cultures and religions. This phenomenon happens because they are shaped by different subcultural factors under the same common culture and religion. For example, the United States is more individualistic than Canada, and Northern Italy is less collectivistic than Southern Italy. And “Catholicism is more collectivist[ic] than most Protestant denominations” (Triandis 1995:168–169). 109

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It is necessary to avoid ambiguity and conflation caused by over-generalization and reductionism in addressing the related issues of collectivism and individualism. Based on further aforementioned integration of the definition and types of collectivism and individualism, more specific types of them must be adopted for clarification and distinction, such as Ru-based familistic collectivism versus Islamic familistic collectivism.

Is Christianity Individualistic? Andreas Buss summarizes three main assumed influences on the rise of individualism: the Reformation, the coming of modern secularized society, and “developments in the first millennium B.C.E. in India, China and along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean in Israel and Greece, during … the Axial Age” (2000:1). He argues that individualism had existed in traditional holistic societies in some Axial Age civilizations, such as Indian and Hellenistic cultures. But, different from modern individualism, this individualism is called an “outworldly” individualism of “religious renouncers outside and beyond the holistic society.” From it, “a transformation towards in-worldly individualism [modern individualism] gradually started to take place from the eighth century as the Church developed a new conception of its relationship to the state or the ‘world’” (Buss 2000:2). As mentioned previously, Christianity is often viewed as the main factor that spawned Western individualism – that is, in-worldly individualism. According to this viewpoint, Western individualism began with Augustine of Hippo (354–430), expanded via the Enlightenment thinkers, and reached its apex with Kant (1724-1804) (Grenz 2001). Literature related to this topic is enormous, including works by Colin Morris (1972), Charles Taylor (1989), Lorenzo Infantino (1998), Andreas Buss (2000), Jerrold Seigel (2005), and Maureen Heath (2019). It is only possible to briefly summarize this dominant understanding. Western individualism first emerged obviously in Augustine’s works, Confessions and On the Trinity (Kaiser 2001). Confessions, one of the first autobiographies, was written with a “complex interplay of external change and internal self-reflection.” Through exploring “the inner-self,” Augustine finds his “personal subjectivity” (Heath 2019:47). In his On the Trinity, Augustine shapes “an individualistic concept of humanity” based on the early fathers’ understanding of inter-personal analogies between individual persons and trinitarian persons. Because of the doctrine of imago Dei, namely “the human soul bearing the image of God within itself like a mirror” (Moltmann 1998:32), the inter-personal “distinction of the divine hypostases” becomes the inter-personal model of individual persons (Kaiser 2001:89–95). Through searching for God within one’s soul, Augustine inaugurated a “concept of the self as the stable, abiding reality that constitutes the individual human being” (Grenz 2001:67). Heath maintains that Augustine’s turning inward to find the answer for “Who am I?” due to his belief in Christianity was “an essential step in the evolutionary path of individualism” (2019:43). Since the Enlightenment, the concept of self, augmented by thinkers such as Descartes and Locke, has shifted to a focus on mastery, namely “the world-mastering rational self.” By the power of reason, it attempts to take charge of the world which “it inhabits in both its outer and its inner dimensions, so as to constitute itself and determine its identity” (Grenz 2001:67, 76). But the shift from the Enlightenment self to the modern self, namely “radical individualism,” cannot be made without “the final intellectual foundation” that Kant provides. He elevates the “active mind” from the “passive mind” in Locke’s empiricism as “the definitive agent both in the knowing process and in the life of duty, [and so] completed 110

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the turn towards the knowing subject” (Grenz 2001:74, 76). In sum, the “autonomous individual self,” namely the “universal self” is elevated by Kant’s philosophy (Grenz 2001:77). Not only does it come to know the universal, but it also harnesses it. Some scholars, such as Taylor (1989), find that the empirical science that rose and spread in the Enlightenment depends on a Reformed theology that includes “the stewardship mandate” (Grenz 2001:78). Louis Dupre (1976) further details the major contribution of the Reformation tradition, emphasizing Calvin over Luther, and identifying the importance of the idea of the “worldmastering” self. Growing from the Enlightenment in this understanding, the “self-mastering self” attempts “not only to manipulate nature but also to gain control over the self” (Grenz 2001:78). Colin Gunton highlights, without any explanation, that both modern individualism and modern collectivism, as “mirror images of one another,” are “the main products of the Enlightenment” (2003:87–88). Both lead to “the loss of the person” because relation with other persons is problematic in both. That is, “the one [disappears] into the many or the many into the one.” Other scholars, such as Alasdair MacIntyre (1983) and Hwang Tsung-I (2018), support the insight that individualist people might still suffer from a loss of self just not one caused by repressive social imposition in collectivist cultural contexts. To avoid the problems, or to escape the criticisms, of individualism and collectivism, some models for a communitarian synthesis are presented or argued by philosophers and theologians (Gunton 1999). For example, the concept of “community” emerges in contrast to society (Moltmann 2000). A society is an impersonal and external unity of different groups of “isolated individuals,” but a community is “a unity of persons with persons” (Gunton 2003:88). Communitarianism emphasizes the importance of community, not as collectivism but as an antithesis to individualism and liberalism and as a synthesis of individualism and collectivism (Christians 2006; Triandis 1995). Some scholars, such as de Bary (1998) and Tucker (2019), defend Ruist/Confucianist accounts of community as communitarianism. The concept of open community presented by Jurgen Moltmann based on his concepts of “open Trinity” (1981:94–96) and “open friendship” (1977:119–21), as well as the concept of “fiduciary community” presented by Weiming Tu (1976:52–99), are both similar to communitarianism. Kurt Richardson (2012) also identifies Moltmann’s social Trinity as communitarian Trinity. There are some commonalities between Tu’s fiduciary community and Moltmann’s open community and the concepts of communitarianism. But communitarianism is not a cultural consequence, nor a cultural dimension, but more of a political philosophy which is beyond the scope of this chapter. All the above efforts by scholars are for the purpose of keeping the strengths of both collectivism and individualism while avoiding their weaknesses. But will problems related to a loss of self be solved by any humanistic synthesis of collectivism and individualism? Some scholars argue that either a loss of self or a repressed form of self can be caused by both individualism and collectivism in the absence of communion with God and His people (Grenz 2001; Gunton 2003; Bellinger 2010). Japanese psychiatrist Takeo Doi suggests that the problem of the repressed form of self in collectivist Japanese society should be dealt with by “the question of the absence of God” (1981:132–41). Chinese sociologist and social psychologist Zhai Xuewei (2010) argues that the essential reason for the prevalent problem of negatively masking in Ru-influenced collectivist Chinese societies is the lack of the transcendent personal God in traditional and post-traditional Ruism. In a critique of Western individualism, Carver Yu (1987) sums up three main issues Western individualists experience: ontological uprootedness, fragmentation of personal identity, and failure of human relation. Heath 111

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highlights that “hyper-individualism has accelerated” (2019:261) as secularism has increased after the Enlightenment in the West. For example, “Kant inverted the concepts of morality and religion by stating that morality is not based on knowledge of God and God’s law; in fact, we actually produce the concept of God by reasoning through moral principles” (Heath 2019:245). Based on Taylor (1989) and Seigel (2005), Heath concludes that the Christian worldview was premised on the belief that the world, and the self, is structured so as to fulfil intelligible moral ends. The modern self is devoted to its own “radical remaking” and finding its dignity and independence in the absence of any reliance on a cosmic order or source of values outside itself. Modern science contributes to this, as it finds no teleological meaning in the universe, leading to a rootlessness that has turned the individual focus upon itself. (2019:261–62) In other words, Western individualism loses the strength of the Christian worldview, individual belief, and faith, even if it was developed under Christian culture after the Enlightenment. As William Barrett points out, this faith marks “a revolutionary break with the philosophic consciousness of the [secularized] world” (1987:123). The main problem of individualism is holding too much space between each other. Contrarily, the main problem of collectivism is giving too little space (Gunton 1999). The definition and norm for responsibility and autonomy valued in individualism cannot be based on any human individual or collectivity, but only on the transcendent Creator God (Macmurray 1971). The absolute responsibility and autonomy of the person can only be defined “in the relationships between the three persons of the triune God,” namely “trinitarian relatedness” in Gunton’s term (2003:88–89, 99), and “only be granted through the relationships between human beings and the triune God” (Hwang 2018:468). Similar terms for the concept of trinitarian relatedness were adopted during and after the revival of interest in the trinitarian doctrine in the late twentieth century, such as the “trinitarian self” (Bellinger 2010), “trinitarian personhood” (Volf 1998), “ecclesial personhood” (Volf 1998), and the “relational or social self” (Grenz 2001). It is evident that modern Western individualism, namely in-worldly individualism, originated and was influenced and shaped by Christianity, especially Protestantism, in its later stages. Heath asserts that the Christian religion, with its focus on the inner person with an individual conscience and individual judgment, and its doctrine that all humans were equal in the sight of God, was a crucial factor in the rise and spread of these memes of individualism. (2019:243) But what kind or type of individualism is fostered by Christianity? Based on his studies on different ethnic groups, Joel Robbins (2012) concludes that Christianity cultivates various kinds or levels of individualism. For example, evidence shows that Catholic Christian societies are characterized by moderate individualism or even collectivism, whereas Orthodox Christian societies are correlated positively with collectivism (Kyriacou 2020). Therefore, religion is not the only factor to shape an individualistic culture. However, some Christian theologians, including Moltmann (1998) and Gunton (2003), recognize the influence of Christianity on the initiation and development of modern Western 112

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individualism but disagree on whether Christian theology is individualist (Gunton 2003; Moltmann 1981). Moltmann (1981:199) argues that the development of the doctrine of the Trinity in the Western European Church is a distorted version without enough stress on perichōrēsis. It is this very distorted trinitarian doctrine that leads to “the development of individualism, and especially possessive individualism,” namely, that “everyone is a self-possessing, self-disposing center of action which sets itself apart from other persons” (Grenz 2001:11). Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas (1995) argues that individualism was inconceivable within the theological development of the trinitarian doctrine before the fifth century because of the unbreakable unity of the three divine Persons.

Is Christianity a Synthesis of Individualism and Collectivism? It is in this context that Moltmann (1977, 1981, 1985) argues for Christianity as a synthesis of individualism and collectivism through the interpretation of his social trinitarian theological anthropology. His version prevents not only the merely autonomous selfhood cultivated in individualism but also the merely soluble selfhood produced in collectivism. His interpretative account of selfhood can be summarized as follows: one’s self is made secure by 1) the embedded imago Dei as the source of the self by creation, meaning that both the self and the community of selves come from creation in the form of the imago Trinitatis; 2) the imago Christi as the reconciled and redeemed self appearing at the beginning of the new creation is made possible and sustainable by messianic grace applied as a form of continuous creation; 3) the gloria Dei as will be realized in the promised future self revealed in the consummation of the new creation by means of gracious moral cultivation expressed in continuous creation. (Hwang 2018:288) Moltmann’s concept of social trinitarian theology inherits the Eastern Orthodox heritage (Hwang 2021). Some other contemporary theologians also pay attention to this doctrine but vary considerably in their interpretations, including Catherine LaCugna (1985), Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. (1988), and Ronald Sider (2012). However, Moltmann is among the few of them who, through the doctrine of the imago Dei and based on social trinitarian theology, develops a comprehensive social trinitarian theological anthropology. Moltmann’s social trinitarian theological anthropology is “not only an open friendship that relies on neither collectivism nor individualism, but also locates the imago Christi as the source of the self” (Hwang 2018:288). “A relational selfhood embedded within a dynamic diversity in unity as well as a unity in diversity” is the most important feature of this Christian theological paradigm. In this account, one’s self-value and relationships with others, God, and other persons, are not earned by one’s performance but created, granted, and restored, after the Fall by the creator and savior God. Put differently, the triune God is “the ground and paradigm of true social life and liberation” as well as the source of the self and salvation (Thompson 1994:3). Therefore, Thomas Thompson (1996) argues that “equality and diversity are made possible to be kept in unity in Moltmann’s open fellowship within any cultural context” (Hwang, 2021:322). Notably, Lydia Hogewoning’s (2012) empirical study in the field of social work reveals how Moltmann’s and Volf’s social trinitarian theological anthropology can be “applied significantly to enhance core ‘anti-oppressive social work’ principles of critical consciousness and empowerment” (Hwang, 2021:322). 113

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Therefore, Moltmann’s special synthesis of the good elements of both collectivism and individualism might fulfill the universal hope for avoiding their problems. Social trinitarian theological anthropology is also adopted by some psychologists in their social psychologies and psychotherapies (Boccia 2011).

Direction of Future Studies Integration of different definitions and types of individualism and collectivism will be needed to provide more specific definitions for each type and subtype of individualism and collectivism. Such work merits further cross-cultural, especially ethnographic and psychological investigation to overcome the problem of over-generalization. Moreover, more consideration and research is needed on whether Christian theological anthropology is based on the doctrine of the imago Dei and the social Trinity or is a synthesis between individualism and collectivism. The hope is that it might be confirmed theoretically and lead to a model of practice that is empirically oriented. The application of this model to solve the problem of a loss of self, caused by either individualism or collectivism, is also a compelling direction for further studies.

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9 THE SPATIAL TURN IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION Jeffrey Robert Thomas

Abstract This chapter explores the potential of a spatial approach to Christianity. There is a growing discourse around a spatial turn in social and cultural theory now being applied to religion. Ideas of space contribute to numerous discussions, including identity, multi-culturalism, globalization, commodification and consumption, the nature of modernism, and the relationship between Christianity and secularity. Spatial approaches offer new perspectives on the relationship between Christianity and other religions, as well as non-religion, and the physical, social, and cultural arenas in which it is situated. Here, the work of Kim Knott stands out for her identification of important trends in spatial theory and for her novel attempt at constructing a spatial methodology to examine religion. Nevertheless, after introducing Knott’s method and her reliance on Henri Lefebvre, it is argued that her model lacks a means to discuss Christianity in its actual and complex relationship within the Global North. However, the spatial approach in the work of Michel de Certeau does allow for a critique of normative and institutional ideas of Christianity and highlights the visibility of Christianity as a practice of everyday life.

Introduction Walking is an ordinary practice. Depending on context, a walk can represent health, romance, shame, punishment, protest, and even the sacred. The Via Dolorosa is a marked and traveled walk in the old city of Jerusalem representing the path Jesus may have taken on the way to his crucifixion. For some Christians it is a sacred space, a place of pilgrimage, where devotees can literally walk in the footsteps of Jesus. The aisle as the processional/ recessional route of a wedding ceremony may be similarly seen as sacred due to its ceremonial symbolism but also in its imaging of the end of Christian history and the churches’ final ascension to Jesus the groom. These examples of walking draw directly on geographical and theological frames to make a walk something more than motion. Still, there are other less visible ways that a walk can be an embodiment of Christian belief. For Messianic Jews, a 118

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-14

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Sabbath-day journey can take the common sidewalk as the site of an act of faithfulness. A prayer-filled morning walk to a job taken as an act of dutiful responsibility may be an act of submission. Each of these are undertaken without any observable Christian visibility. Further, a walk of political protest and civil disobedience, arguably non-Christian practices, can be taken by some as embodying belief. In each example, there are physical, mental, and social elements that open them up to spatial analysis. Grace Davie observed that the discipline of sociology is about pattern … [it is] concerned both with identifying and with explaining the nonrandom ways that individuals, communities, and societies order their lives … the sociology of religion aims to discover the patterns of individual and social living associated with religion in all its diverse forms. (2006:171) Historically, this has led sociology to follow the secularization thesis of reducing religion to social functionality, conceiving religion as a response to specific social conditions. In this view, religion is an effect, and what sociology seeks to understand are the causes of the effect. Yet changes to the nature of democracy and new ideas such as globalization, post-materialism, and post-modernism complicate this thesis, leading some thinkers toward “post-secularization” as a category for identifying and explaining society as well as religion (Ward 2009). Instead of asking which set of human expressions should be defined as religious, we are questioning the category of religion itself (Knott 2005). Part of this shift is a recognition that, while we seem to have a strong sense of what is meant by religion, it is not defined definitively. Coinciding with this new visibility of religion is an appreciation that any analysis needs to address the meaning of religion in its various expressions (Flood 2012), considering, for example, the myriad implications for religion of changed notions of mainstream and subaltern, identity, value, and embodiment (Davie 2006, 2007). Some suggest that religion as a normative term is ineffective (McCutcheon 1997; Martin 2022), while others conceptualize religion by using terms such as “the sacred,” “spirituality,” and “mysticism,” or even “memory,” “body,” and “territory” (Ornella, Knauss, and Höpflinger 2015). Graham Ward and Michael Hoelzl (2008) helpfully summarize that, in any case, effectively treating religion and its visibility must consider the complexity of religious phenomena, the seeing of those phenomena, where they are seen, who is making them seen, and how they are evaluated. Spatial theory provides a conceptual method for locating religion within and in relation to society, recognizing religion in practices of everyday life embedded in, framed by, and manifesting traditional narrative. Gavin Flood notes that “religions provide meaning in the face of a meaningless world … [it] gives us a sense of identity, a path to walk, and a place in the world from where to act” (2012:15). It is a way people imagine, structure, and live their lives (Raudvere 2015). Two questions are posed in this chapter: 1) what exactly is a spatial theory? and 2) what categories does it offer for analysis of Christianity? For space is not a backdrop or context of religion, including Christianity. Rather, space is the shape of Christianity in its social context. Space is an artifact of Christian meaning. Much of the work on space is secular in its orientation, meaning the assumptions and terms tend to reduce religion to sociality and culture using the terms as categories defining religion. Michel de Certeau takes an alternate approach, arguing that religious practices, representations, and discourses frame the modern social imagination. Signally, de Certeau 119

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([1986] 2010) explores the origin of Christian mysticism to show how dominant language and social products are often appropriated by minority groups to produce spaces (“hidden” cultures) that often reform dominant social places. An increasingly visible example of such spaces are social enterprises, business that aim to accomplish a social aim defined by their Christian belief, such as providing employment and community for ex-prisoners or addicts, even as they make a profit. Following de Certeau, the intent here is to show how spatial notions help to make the presence and practice of Christianity more visible. Doing so requires an overview of the history, current state, important themes, and potential future direction of a spatial approach to Christianity.

Spatiality as a Critical Resource Kim Knott observes that “ideas about space underpin discussions of urbanization, globalization, identity, diaspora, commodification and consumption, and the nature of modernism and postmodernism – all of which are important in debating contemporary religion” (2005:1-2). One approach defines space as phenomenological (Heidegger 1993; Merleau-Ponty 1962; Tuan 1977; Casey 1996, 1997). The contrasting view takes space as material and situational (Harvey 1993; Massey 1994; Shields 1991, 1999; Soja 1989, 1996; Tobler 2000). The difference could be illustrated by considering a home. What makes a building a home? Is it its design and materials or the life that takes place within it? Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift observe that “space is everywhere in modern thought” and that “it is used with such abandon that its meanings run into each other before they have been properly interrogated” (2000:1). In fact, Simon Susen (2014) suggests the multiple and varied ways space is used in social and cultural theory impedes its use as a general spatial framework. The concept of space is only peripheral in founding sociological thought (Susen 2014; Lechner 1991). However, in a now well-known essay on space and politics, Doreen Massey (1993) shows that properties of space can be central to social analysis. The socio-cultural roots of spatial theory can be traced using two categories: situational and substantial (Knott 2010; Kong 2001). Situational conceptions of space focus on materiality and are particular associations between real and imagined social associations of individuals and locations. This social constructivism is common to geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars. Jonathan Smith’s Map Is Not Territory (1978) and To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (1987) are examples of this within religious studies. Here, space is explored empirically, measuring locations and behaviors, patterns of practice, and the interactions of formal and informal social organizations such as churches. The situational view of space emphasizes that social structures function as the practical foundation for individual social existence. The substantial perspective focuses on how space is a referent of individual and/or social being, which then contributes to other phenomena. An early example is found in Martin Heidegger’s (1993) essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” He argues that it is interaction between the world and our being as embodied rationality that shapes us and then the content of the world. Crang and Thrift write that Heidegger sees that “boundaries are not the limits of the self but rather they create that sense of self” (2000:9). The substantial conception of space privileges spatiality as coterminous with being. This can be imagined by how churches understand “worship spaces,” asking the question: is the place of worship substantial sacred or is it the act that makes it so? 120

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While religion has not been a central object in most critical spatial thought, there are two areas in which that is not the case: sacred space and sacred pilgrimage. Extensive studies examine sacred landscape, pilgrimage routes, places of worship, missionary practice, global religious development, and even cyber-religious networks (Knott 2008). There is also growing interest in seeing religion in its social, political, and cultural context, making specific note of spatiality, and a growing use of spatial terminology in diaspora scholarship.

Theoretical and Methodological Considerations Knott (2005) attempts a general spatial method by drawing on both situational and substantial approaches to produce tools and tropes for studying religion. Her method takes space as an epistemic field of force-power relations, with religion (Christianity) and nonreligion (secularism) competing over society. This limitation has its problems. For instance, in doing this, Knott privileges the situation over the substantial, leading to a misinterpretation of the transcendent and sacred of religious space. At the same time, she presumes an inherent conflict between the religious and the secular, such that she takes her object as an epistemological field of struggle. The assumption of conflict is an outcome of modern secularization and leads Knott to make some problematic interpretations of the relationship between religious and ostensibly non-religious locations. Nevertheless, Knott’s method identifies several issues for spatial studies. She notes both material and metaphorical uses of spatial terms such as the body, the social nature of space, the relations between space and time and space and power, among other terms. Knott uses each of these to define the dimensions, properties, and dynamics of space and to discuss the location of religion therein. Lefebvre writes that [H]umans as social beings are said to produce their own life, their own consciousness, their own world. There is nothing in history or in society which does not have to be achieved and produced. ‘Nature’ itself … has been modified and therefore in a sense produced. Human beings have produced juridical, political, religious, artistic, and philosophical forms. Thus, production in the broad sense of the term embraces a multiplicity of works and a great diversity of forms. (1991:68) Spatiality is one means of categorizing the productions and experiences of Christianity, along with their connection to belief, identity, agency, and affection. Spatiality highlights Christianity as a practice of everyday life, embedding and embodying its meaning in the physical, mental, and social arenas in which it is located. Substantial takes on spatiality draw attention to how Christian knowledge is made possible through such embodiment. This is not knowledge of a general sort but a particular knowledge of things and sites as events or, theologically, “participation in Christ” and “testimony to the reality of the kingdom as a new social and political realm.” (Ward 2009:282–283). Christians act on and in imagined sites, bringing out of and into them a world of meaning. In contrast, the situational approach considers Christianity through its social configurations of identity and membership, structures, productions, and power. A spatial theory will locate the nature and presence of Christianity in its relationship to the mental, physical, and social arenas in which it is situated. This locating will con121

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sider geographical places, material objects, built environments, and social institutions even as it focuses on how narrative, meaning, and metaphor imbue in those locations, sites, and spaces. As Knott summarizes, spatiality “sees religions and their practical, discursive, and material entailments as co-constructed by religious actors in engagement with their traditions, social relations, and historical, geographical, and political contexts, and as amenable to spatial interrogation” (2010:35). Think again of the Via Dolorosa or the Sabbath-day journey. Three critical ideas are needed to clarify the relationship between situational and substantial approaches to space: the object of the spatial approach, the terminology, and the relation of space to time. What is the object toward which the spatial analysis is directed? And does it sufficiently account for Christianity and its phenomena? One key for spatial study is the question of the relation between what can correctly be termed Christian and what cannot, and the challenge is how to characterize that relation. Is it wholly oppositional or something else? Situating the study of Christianity within such a question of difference forces a reflective critique of the sociology of religion. Questions about who is defining the study, the differences, and the relations; about what is measured and used to determine the difference; and about how Christianity is to be measured force a check on sociological study that tends to constrain and obscure Christianity through its reification and objectification of what are essentially lived and often messy existences in its effort to identify patterns of belief and behavior. Even as Knott writes, that “’space,’ ‘place,’ and ‘location’ are concepts that have helped people to think about their social, cultural, and physical experience, their relationships to other people, things, and the cosmos” (2005:1), how is space to be codified? How can the totality of the social space of Christianity be measured, when, to be true to its self-interpretation, it is both material and immaterial? How can the intersection between what Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) calls geometrical and anthropological spaces, where homogeneous and isotropic spatiality meets space as existential or even existence as spatial, be defined? How can spatiality order our understanding of Christianity if there are as many Christian spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences and, as some of these are understood, as mediums of transcendence? Fully, any notion of space must accept the relation of space and time as central. As mentioned, religious knowledge is knowledge of things and spaces as events, which implies a stable meaning over time. Space is a “human interactional order … informed by one simple principle, that it is neither time nor space that is central to the study of human interactional orders, but time-space” (Thrift 1996:1). The dynamic of timespace multiplies the complexity of the analysis, leading to a multitude of further considerations. Consequently, a spatial approach to the study of Christianity must accept trajectories of things and sites and the meaning brought into and out of them. Any trajectory includes the past-present and anticipation of the present-future, accounting for genealogies, experiences, and anticipations not fully accountable or determinable by static images of social constructions. De Certeau (1984) notes that it is on these trajectories that classic sociological analysis, which is philosophical and descriptive, tends toward ignorance. For example, baptism is, in a sense, a Christian practice that envelops the past-present-future of time-space, enfolding the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ with the symbolic affirmation of the baptized and the eschatological hope of Christianity in a particular event ordered by church tradition and made meaningful by the appropriation of this order by those specifically involved. 122

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Theory for a Spatial Methodology Knott’s spatial methodology draws heavily on Henri Lefebvre and provides a strong beginning for using space as an approach to studying Christianity. An alternative, arguably stronger approach is that of de Certeau. Both conceive of space in the terms previously identified. However, when it comes to the properties of religious space(s) and their visibility, nature, and relation to power, the methods differ significantly. The qualifications of space(s) as substantial and situational, with the corresponding emphasis on meaning and materiality, raise questions about how space(s) are constituted and to be measured. Each of Knott/Lefebvre and de Certeau accept that base materialities of society – the production, reproduction, and consumption of the immediate essentials of life and organized society – are in a constant affective relationship with its super-structural elements – its values, relations, and norms. The base and super-structure are dialectically related in that, as the latter shapes and then maintains the former, the former embeds and, therefore, concretizes the latter. In their theories, spaces, both physical and symbolic, need be understood as such a dialectical construct (Knott 2005; de Certeau 1984). Knott’s take on the constitution of space echoes Merleau-Ponty, in which perception and experience precede the differentiation of physical space but express “the same essential structure of our being as a being situated in relationship to a milieu” (1962:324ff). While we can isolate materiality from perception and distinguish the base from the experience of space, it would be a mistake to dissociate the two. To define this constitution, Knott applies Lefebvre’s spatial triad, the formulation of which Andrew Merrifield (2000) suggests accounts for Lefebvre’s near cult status in contemporary discussions of space. The triad consists of three categories: representation of space, spaces of representation, and spatial practice. Representations of space focus on how space is conceived as the precursor to experience. “[I]t comprises those dominant, theoretical, often technical representations of lived space” (Lefebvre 1991:38) such as those made by designers, planners, or architects. Representations of space are conceptual or ideological in the way that Charles Taylor (2007) defines a social imaginary. Not purely intellectual, it is “broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when the think about social reality … [it is] the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings” (Taylor 2007:171–72) even as this is often expressed in theoretical, political, or judicial terms and is carried in images, stories, legends. This is contrasted with spaces of representation as the “space as lived through its associated images and symbols” (Lefebvre 1991:39), in which lived space is given meaning through its perception informed by imagination and cultural constructs. The lived space is the arena of struggle toward individual and communal realization. For understanding the lived space, the body and its foundation to space has become a dominant theme. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow summarize Foucault here, suggesting he saw the body as “the place where the most minute and local social practices are linked up with the large-scale organization of power” (1983:xxvi) and its organization of society. Consistent with this is Thomas Csordas’s idea of “somatic modes of attention” (2002:244–245), bringing the body forward as an object of attention, for example, in religious practices such as charismatic healing. This idea is taken forward in the recent book Commun(icat)ing Bodies, in which bodies are taken as mediating and representing experience, boundaries, and reflexivity in religion (Ornella, Knauss, and Höpflinger 2015). Ancient abbeys provide a context

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for allowing us to differentiate Lefebvre’s first two categories. The former category is akin to the plan and design of the monastic complex with its intention to facilitate Christian activities, work, and housing for members, whereas the latter is the imagined meaning of the common life encapsulated in an accepted rule, like that of St. Ignatius. Completing the triad is spatial practice, the functional component of spatiality denoting the way space is used. Spatial practice, according to Lefebvre and Knott, is the use of space, systematic and individual. The spatial practices are the intersection of the base and superstructure with their translation through the force-power. These practices, however, have no inherent meaning, according to Knott. Instead, as the translating dynamic, any meaning emerges from their function in embedding or reproducing meaning or superstructure. Per Knott, the analysis of spatial practices offers a nuanced interpretation of what Pierre Bourdieu (1989) calls the two seemingly incompatible points of view on social theory. This nuance eschews both the objectivist structural theory of Durkheim focused on social spaces as systems in which all parts of society interact to form culture and any theory understanding each social structure as a particular instantiation of power, creating its own cultural space within or apart from the larger social order. Instead, it is not structures or systems which are the basic units of social analysis, but dynamic lived spaces as the outcome of spatial practices. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “one must therefore reject as an abstraction any analysis of … space which takes account only of figures and points, since these can neither be conceived nor be without horizons” (1962:324ff) and take as concrete bodily everyday practices. Lefebvre asserted that “the whole of (social) space proceeds from the body” (1991:405). Foucault concurred that the body is “the place where the most minute and local social practices are linked up with the large-scale organizations of power” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:xxvi). It is on the dynamic of space and practice that de Certeau’s spatial theory prevails. In each of Knott and Lefebvre, lived spatiality is the practiced use of space along the lines of the base-superstructure dynamic. Even as de Certeau accepts this dynamic at the macro-level of the production and reproduction of social orders, he identifies a difference at the level of everyday practice. The distinction can be clarified through looking at how Knott/Lefebvre and de Certeau differ in the use of the terms “space” and “place.” For Knott/ Lefebvre, the subject of spatial study are social spaces as constitutive of society. [S]ocial space “incorporates” social actions, the actions of subjects both individual and collective … from the point of view of knowing (connaissance), social space works (along with its concept) as a tool for the analysis of society. (Lefebvre 1991:26) Space is a distinct form of the production and reproduction of the whole of society in discrete locations. Space is a product wholly situated within and constituent of a society’s local and general systems. This, as de Certeau argues, implies that what are often thought of as revolutionary and subversive practices are undercurrents of the self-same social space. Per Knott/Lefebvre, all social space and practice, while dynamic and ideological plural, are a closed social field of force-power determinations. There is no notion of actual difference in social orders, their practices or products. Religion is essentially similar to secularism; the only difference between the kind of places they engender being the local instance of the social space, the inter-penetration of physical and subjective forces within “formative political-economic processes” (Merrifield 1993:522). 124

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Space and place are only different scales of the same. Knott and Lefebvre use space and place to differentiate between scales of lived space within the same field, as expressions of the same field. In this, any belief, action, or event can be reduced to a single imaginary; social space “brings … all together and then … substitutes itself for each factor separately by enveloping it” (Lefebvre 1991:410). Space, then, is a dynamic composition of dimensions, properties, and aspects, which is an enclosure of force-power relations within which place(s) are embodiments (Knott 2005:129). The theory and method lead to the view that Christianity is disciplined by the same social space, representations, and practices as all that is not Christian, and as a result, a local analysis of Christian practice must be read as constituted by the singular political–social construction. De Certeau’s conceptualization of space avoids this reduction of Christianity and all religion, as he defines space and place as indices of different orders, or trajectories of meaning, resulting in practices that differ in essence even if they do not differ in expression. De Certeau’s theory allows for a multiplicity of social orders to exist within the same social dynamic. Each space (espace) and place (lieu) is its own location. Lieu is the dominant order defined by its products and reifying an interpretation of culture, whereas espace results from the tactical re-appropriation of that order, creating locations of alternate, and often hidden, meaning. As seen with Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day in Quebec, Canada, the lieu is represented by Christian symbols and language but through a diffusion of their use both Christian and secular espace are created (Zubrzycki 2016). To differentiate these organizing principles, de Certeau pairs them with the appositional terms strategy and tactics. Lieu and espace identify locations of meaning where strategy and tactics are the types of practices that make these locations. The significance of the pairing emerges not only from what they signify but also from the relationship that exists between them. Strategy is a function of, emerging from, and reinforcing lieu, as, according to de Certeau, the efforts of individuals or systems within the social setting to organize un propre (the clean) – that is, “a place where the ambiguities of the world have been exorcised” to make it available “for a partial but regulatable” set of practices (1984:134). Strategies are actions taken from a position of local or general power, a denotative power. Lieu is akin to that social space of Knott and Lefebvre in which instances and locations are differentiated by scale. Lieu and strategy are seen to identify the same social dynamic as Lefebvre’s triad. The key insight of de Certeau’s theory is the addition of tactics and espace as indices of a lived spatiality of a different kind. Even as strategies produce the order lieu, tactics produce espace, yet the relationship between the latter pairing is different from that of the former. Unlike the relations of strategies to power and un propre, tactics are practices without a proper locus and without ordering power. These tactical practices exist within, using the resources and social products of lieu without the visibility nor order of strategies. The created espace are hidden to the dominant order as well as to the spatial vision of Knott/Lefebvre. De Certeau’s famous image of the relation of lieu/strategy to espace/tactic is the difference between seeing the planned vision of Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center and observing the embodied use of Manhattan’s streets by its residents or those passing through (1984:91). However, and more importantly, the following example shows the essential difference of espace from lieu: Submissive, and even consenting to their subjection, the Indians nevertheless often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting 125

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or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept. They were other within the very colonization that outwardly assimilated them; their use of the dominant social order deflected its power, which they lacked the means to challenge. (de Certeau 1984:xiii) The contrast of foreign ends with the dominant order implies what is later made explicit. Lieu and espace are indices of a group’s stories or myth, what Alisdair MacIntyre (1988) refers to as rationality or tradition. This distinguishes tactics and espace from revolutionary or countercultural practices. The latter are practices intended to subvert and to recall a forgotten or marginalized element of the social space. The former are practices that take the dominant culture and transform it through adding an external narrative. By allowing real difference, de Certeau’s model allows a way to make visible the complexity of plural religious belief and practice in and through societies that are themselves complex and messy. In all this, it provides a language to make visible Christianity in society both where it is dominant and open but also where it is hidden and muted.

Christian Spaces Accepting this analysis, some conclusions about how we are to understand the space(s) of Christianity are in order. Recognizing that space is multi-dimensional, being physical, mental, and social, it must be said that spaces are not independent of culture. Space does not eliminate the other materials or resources that play a part in the sociopolitical arena, be they raw materials or the most finished of products, be they business or “cultural.” Rather, it brings them all together and then in a sense substitutes itself for each factor separately by enveloping it. (Lefebvre 1991:410–11) Spaces are produced both within and distinct from societal dynamics, but in all cases, they are co-constituted with these dynamics. Consequently, even as the political has come to envelop the quotidian aspects of modern life (our sense of self and our purchasing habits are as political as anything) and Christian espace cannot help but relate to the political, they are not wholly equitable. Further, even as it must be accepted that some Christian spaces will be present as representations of the present dominant order, we should also acknowledge and look for those espace that put forth distinctly other expressions of Christianity. One way to identify these espace is to look for references foreign to the dominant system and then explore how these practices intend to embody that Christian story. The theoretical nature of this chapter did not allow opportunity to conduct a full spatial analysis of Christianity, but referring to examples will enhance understanding. Knott conducts an in-depth spatial analysis in The Location of Religion (2005), defining religion via its relationship to non-religion using the “Left-Hand” as a case study. Knott explores textual and linguistic sources to trace how left and right-handedness came to represent the profane/impure and the sacred/pure. She considers how hands, and their gestural systems, embody traditional ways of reasoning and practice. The right/left asymmetry analysis leads to a discussion of the development of hierarchical and value-laden dualism, positing the left as inferior and evil but also potentially powerful as a space of resistance or liberation. 126

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Right and left are used repeatedly to represent moral positions. She notes that, in Western dualism, forging “right” as superior, higher, and truer is expressed in such practices as placing the right-hand on the Bible at swearing-in ceremonies and referring to a key supporter as a “right-hand man,” each in some sense resonant with the idea of Jesus as sitting at the “right hand” of the Father. The correlation is that making the “right” powerful led to “left” becoming a symbol of resistance to authority and domination and, thus, having potential for symbolizing emancipation and liberation (2005:155–163). Another example of an operational farm in the United Kingdom’s Midlands is not denotatively spatial, and it lacks the specificity of Knott’s case data, but its context does broadly resonate with de Certeau’s lieu and espace. From one perspective, the farm accepts and consumes the authorizing language of the social lieu in its business practices. The farm follows environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles with a clear focus on profitability, conservation, and community involvement. By any open measure, the farm is any number of small-scale agricultural businesses and, as such, is a symbol of an economic institution rightly associated with the Global North and secularism. A close inspection shows that a different tradition (a combination of first-century Christian ecclesiology and ethics and Middle Age European Christian mysticism) is informing the shape and practices of the farm. That tradition is revealed in the colloquial way the business is referred to as an abbey, referencing medieval abbeys that were complexes of buildings and land set apart for Christian activities, work, and housing. Furthermore, the farm owner and principal worker is an Anglican priest who tactically uses the farm and its operations for, among other things, supporting intentional “common-life” communities, leading spiritual retreats, conducting theological education, and taking visitors on guided prayer walks.

Conclusion Sociology is concerned with identifying and explaining the ways that individuals, communities, and societies order their lives. In application to Christianity, this needs to include an awareness of its practice in a variety of scales, from bodies and things to streets and properties, from cities and nations to global flows and transnational connections. This awareness begins with attention to everyday practices and to the locations and movements of religion, seeking to make visible religious phenomena as meaning making embedded in space and time. Theories such as that of Knott/Lefebvre and de Certeau which generalize social and cultural thinking on space can provide a generalized means and methodology for dealing with these complex multiple conditions together.

References Bourdieu, Pierre. 1989. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 7(2):14–25. Casey, Edward S. 1996. “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena.” Pp. 13–52 in Senses of Place, edited by S. Feld and K.H. Basso. Sante Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Casey, Edward S. 1997. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Certeau, Michel de. [1986] 2010. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Crang, Mike, and Nigel Thrift. 2000. Thinking Space. London and New York: Routledge. Csordas, Thomas. 2002. Body/Meaning/Healing. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

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Jeffrey Robert Thomas Davie, Grace. 2006. “Sociology of Religion.” Pp. 171–192 in The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, edited by Robert A. Segal. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Davie, Grace. 2007. Sociology of Religion. London, UK: Sage Publications. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Flood, Gavin. 2012. The Importance of Religion: Meaning and Action in Our Strange World. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Harvey, David. 1993. “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity.” Pp. 3–29 in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, edited by J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson, and L. Tickner. London and New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1993. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Pp. 343–363 in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, edited by D.F. Krell. London and New York: Routledge. Knott, Kim. 2005. The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. Durham: Acumen. Knott, Kim. 2008. “Spatial Theory and the Study of Religion.” Religion Compass 2(8):1102–1116 Knott, Kim. 2010. “Religion, Space, and Place: The Spatial Turn in Research on Religion.” Religion and Society: Advances in Research 1:29–43. Kong, Lily. 2001. “Mapping “New” Geographies of Religion: Politics and Poetics in Modernity.” Progress in Human Geography 25(2):211–233. Lechner, Frank J. 1991. “Simmel on Social Space.” Theory, Culture & Society 8(3):195–201. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Martin, Craig. 2022. Discourse and Ideology: A Critique of the Study of Culture. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic. Massey, Doreen. 1993. “Politics and Space/Time.” Pp. 141–161 in Place and Politics of Identity, edited by M. Keith and S. Pile. London: Routledge. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Cambridge: Polity. MacIntyre, Alisdair. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. McCutcheon, Russell T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London and New York: Routledge. Merrifield, Andrew. 1993. “Place and Space: A Lefebvrian Reconciliation.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18(4):516–531. Merrifield, Andrew. 2000. “Henri Lefebvre: A Socialist in Space.” Pp. 167–182 in Thinking Space, edited by Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift. London and New York: Routledge. Ornella, Alexander D., Stefanie Knauss, and Anna-Katherina Höplinger. 2015. Commun(icat) ing Bodies: Body as a Medium in Religious Symbol Systems. Verlagsgesellshaft, Germany: Nomos/Bloomsbury. Raudvere, Catherine. 2015. Islam: An Introduction. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Shields, Rob. 1991. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London and New York: Routledge. Shields, Rob. 1999. Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1978. Map is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London and New York: Verso. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Susen, Simon. 2014. “The Place of Space in Social and Cultural Theory.” Pp. 333–357 in Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory, edited by Anthony Elliot. London and New York: Routledge. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Thrift, Nigel. 1996. Spatial Formation. London: Sage. Tobler, Judith. 2000. ““Home Is Where the Heart Is?” Gendered Sacred Space in South Africa.” Journal for the Study of Religion 13(1/2):69–98 Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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The Spatial Turn in the Study of Religion Ward, Graham. 2009. The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens. London: SMC Press. Ward, Graham, and Michael Hoelzl. 2008. The New Visibility of Religion. London: Continuum. Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2016. Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism in Quebec. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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10 POST-CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY Henry Kwok

Abstract “Why has critique run out of steam?” asked French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour (2004:225). Latour’s question is vital for critical sociologists, who increasingly find their intellectual resources running out of steam, especially in this time of “post-truth.” This chapter introduces the “post-critical” philosophical perspective and addresses its implications for Christian sociologists. It is organized into three sections. The first clarifies what is meant by post-critical. Post-critical philosophy is not a rejection of critical theory but, rather, a challenge to the emancipatory logic it inherited from the Enlightenment. To illustrate this point, the second section turns to Jacques Rancière’s post-critical criticisms of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of education, especially its tautology obscured in the concept of “misrecognition.” The final section highlights some post-critical elements of Christianity that already existed prior to the birth of sociology. The post-critical perspective is neither prescriptive nor apologetic but imagines the practice of being critical differently – a minor key charting a line of flight from majoritarian thinking.

Introduction “Why has critique run out of steam?” asked French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour (2004:225). Latour’s question is vital for critical sociologists, who increasingly find their intellectual resources running out of steam, especially in this time of “post-truth” (Fuller 2018). In this secular age, Christian intellectuals are always dragged into a quandary, needing to confront critiques on multiple fronts. Criticisms from “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett seem to put Christian intellectuals on the defensive, triggering reactionary apologetics from philosophers and theologians such as William Lane Craig, Alister McGrath, and John Lennox, who offer explanations and stir up debates ad infinitum. Participation of Christians in politics, especially those associated with the far-right, such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in Australia, embarrasses Christian scholars who, in fact, find the critical views of the liberal left more agreeable than 130

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their fellow believers. As populism sweeps through the world, critical theory is under attack as well – the rise of Canadian Jordan Peterson being one example. As Latour says, intellectuals are “at war,” with “fresh ruins” added to “fields of ruins,” “deconstruction to destruction,” and more “iconoclasm to iconoclasm” (2004:224). The prophetic voice of Christian sociologists cannot escape the frenzy of critique from all sides in this never-ending culture war (Hunter 1991). Are we all, in reality, infected by this rampant “fatigue of critique” (Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski 2017)? This chapter explores the “post-critical” philosophical perspective and addresses its implications not only for Christian sociologists but also all intellectuals and their practices in the broader academic landscape. It is organized into three sections. The first clarifies what is meant by post-critical. Post-critical philosophy is not a rejection of critical theory but, rather, a challenge to the emancipatory logic it inherited from the Enlightenment. It calls for critical sociologists to turn this anti-fetishistic gaze on their own assumptions about knowledge and knowing. To illustrate this point, the second section turns to Jacques Rancière’s post-critical assessment of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of education, especially its tautology obscured in the concept of “misrecognition.” What, then, is meant by being post-critical in practice? Inspired by Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy (Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski 2017), the final section proposes an inchoate proposal for post-critical Christian sociology. The noble task of being critical is not to debunk but, rather, to gather, protect, and care, cultivating our “response-ability” to the community and the world in which we are immanent (Latour 2004; Haraway 2016; Stengers 2019). The post-critical perspective is neither prescriptive nor apologetic but imagines the practice of being critical differently – a minor key charting a line of flight from majoritarian thinking.

Toward Being Post-Critical What is meant by being post-critical? The prefix “post” may carry a connotation that it is just another label recycling old thoughts for the sake of being faddish in our performative culture today. The post-critical perspective by no means suggests a new philosophical or cultural movement like “post-modernism,” “post-structuralism,” or “post-colonialism.” It is not a systematic school of thought formed by a closely knit group of scholars with common interests. The adjective post-critical is often attributed to the Hungarian-British philosopher of science Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), coined after his 1951–1952 Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958). Polanyi’s ideas have been taken up in the fields of economics, education, sociology, and even theology. His philosophical perspectives cross over with post-structuralist thinkers closely associated with actor-network theory (ANT) and science and technology studies (STS), such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Isabelle Stengers. This chapter is not limited to Polanyi’s ideas but deploys the label post-critical as a shorthand to juxtapose these diverse views and tease out the common threads running through their works. The post-critical perspective postulates the passionate, active participation of the knower in the process of knowing and the absence of strict criteria in formulating knowledge (Manno 1980:205). In Personal Knowledge, Polanyi took aim at objectivism, which is the idea that “objects in ‘the real world’ had merely to be discovered and described to correspond with knowledge constructed by scientific experiment” (Ainley 2009:254). The post-critical position rejects the subjective–objective epistemological dichotomy and 131

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the reductionistic view of being which has dominated Western thought since Descartes. It advocates a “fiduciary” approach to all knowledge, in which knowers recognize that we believe more than we can prove and “know more than we can tell” (Polanyi 1966:4). “Tacit knowledge,” which is the unspecifiable, unspeakable, tacit residue underlying all knowing, is as important as explicit knowledge valorized in positivistic sciences. Instead of holding on to the mechanistic perception of human beings, the post-critical perspective attempts to bring the knower back into the endeavor of scientific inquiry. The knower can never be disconnected from his/her surroundings, and reality can only unfold within “conviviality,” that is, the social arrangements for pursuing scientific truth, such as cultivation of the research environment, deliberate sharing of experience, and participation in joint activities (Polanyi 1958:223). This point is comparable to feminist perspectives on “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988:575) and the “ecology of practices” (Stengers 2005:183). The knower does not sit outside the universe as if occupying a transcendental position from above but is “immanent” to it (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). The post-critical perspective, therefore, sensitizes knowers to attend to their immediate surroundings, as referenced later in this chapter. Just as post-structuralism never suggests the end of structure, being post-critical is not the same as being anti-critical or an outright dismissal of the knowledge claims made by critical intellectuals. It is worth quoting Polanyi’s point on being critical at length here: All kinds of articulate affirmations can be made more or less critically – and indeed quite uncritically. Where there is criticism, what is being criticized is, every time, the assertion of an articulate form. It is our personal acceptance of an articulate form that is judged to have been critical or uncritical, and this judgment expresses our appraisal of the tests to which we have subjected the articulate form or articulate operation before accepting it. It is the mind granting this acceptance which is said to have been acting critically or uncritically. The process of logical inference is the strictest form of human thought, and it can be subjected to severe criticism by going over it stepwise any number of times. Factual assertions and denotations can also be examined critically, although their testing cannot be formalized to the same extent. (1958:278) It is widely believed that Polanyi was targeting the neo-Marxian schools of thought at that time, such as the famous Frankfurt school of critical theory led by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse (Thorpe 2001). From the post-critical point of view, since the Enlightenment, the epistemological foundation of all academic disciplines and intellectual movement, whether it be neo-Marxism in France in the 1960s or the recent wave of “new atheism,” is all premised upon a similar logic: the goal of “public understanding of science” or any knowledge should be “emancipation.” Modern pedagogy must be “powerful intervention” from the outside in order to set someone free, be they the naïve religious believers in the eyes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, or critical theorists like Horkheimer who believe that a critical theory should seek “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (1982:244). Dutch philosopher of education Gert Biesta questions the colonial logic concealed in critical thought. It introduces a fundamental dependency and inequality between the emancipator and the emancipated. The critical urge to emancipate knowers from ignorance also assumes a fundamental distrust and suspicion of the experiences of the emancipated (Biesta 2013:77–78). It is 132

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important to emphasize that the post-critical perspective does not reject the content of a particular claim made in critical social theory, but it targets its hidden colonial logic and its effects on reality. In Latour’s view, the logic of inequality assumed between the critic and “naïve believers” allows the fetishization of critique to exist in the first place and creates a dead end of circular argument. He is very specific about the role of the critic in the “contemporary critical scene,” which is “to show that what the naïve believers are doing with objects is simply a projection of their wishes onto a material entity that does nothing at all by itself” (Latour 2004:237). The intellectual is the only one “who alone remains aware and attentive, who never sleeps, turns those false objects into fetishes that are supposed to be nothing but mere empty white screens on which is projected the power of society, domination, whatever” (Latour 2004:238). The knower is always the “poor bloke” and “ordinary fetishists” whose behavior is “explained” because they are not free and are not conscious of the forces or “false consciousness” acted upon them (Latour 2004:238). Here, critique is the most ambiguous “pharmakon” (Latour 2004:239), and the critic is always right because he/she possesses “the strong drug of Truth” and the “power to denounce and judge, to deconstruct and criticize” (Stengers 2005:188). When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. (Latour 2004:239) The post-critical view is trying to expose the fetishistic tendencies masked in the process of critique and logic of most theories in the critical tradition. It is the unconscious amnesia of the sociologist’s own blind spot in knowing that creates intellectual cul-de-sacs and which leads nowhere close to emancipation. While the critic pretends to an enlightened knowledge which allows him/her to demystify the fetishistic belief of naïve others, the fatal mistake is that the critic fails to turn this anti-fetishistic gaze upon his/her own belief – that is, his/ her own fetish of demystification, which renders the critical intellectual “the most naïve of all” (Foster 2012:5). The problem does not lie in the consciousness of the naïve others, such as the Christian believers that Dawkins and Hitchens criticize, which the critic attempts to liberate through enlightened knowledge, but the inability of the critical intellectual to sense the contradictions and to subject their own desire for emancipating others to sociological critique (Boltanski 2011). Latour points out this unconscious arrogance of the critic almost in a farcical tone. The critic is 1) an anti-fetishist for everything he or she doesn’t believe in (religion, popular culture, art, politics, and so forth), 2) an unrepentant positivist for all the sciences he or she believes in (sociology, economics, genetics, evolutionary psychology, semiotics, and even conspiracy theory), and 3) a perfectly healthy “sturdy realist” for what he/she cherishes, including criticism (Latour 2004:241). Indeed, the endeavor of being a critic, in Latour’s eyes, is forever trapped in a vicious circle. 133

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For an extended example and elaboration, this post-critical perspective on the critical can be seen in the field of the sociology of education. In what follows, the comments of Jacques Rancière on the work of Pierre Bourdieu are invoked to explain why the influence of the critical is so pervasive and how the post-critical dialogue with it can be a fruitful intellectual exercise.

Rancière’s Post-Critical Views on Bourdieu Not stated explicitly in his widely acclaimed The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), it is widely believed that French philosopher Jacques Rancière had Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology in mind as his main target (Bingham, Rancière, and Biesta 2010). Rancière summarized Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction as follows: The school is failing at its assigned mission of reducing inequalities, and this is because it ignores the functioning of inequality. It pretends to reduce inequality by distributing knowledge equally, and to all. But it is precisely this appearance of equality that is the driving force behind educational inequality. It remains to the students and their “individual talents” to make a difference. But these very talents are nothing but the cultural privileges of the children of well-to-do families. The children of the privileged classes do not want to know this, the children of the dominated classes cannot know this, and the latter give up due to an acute awareness of their lack of talents. The school fails to enact equality because its egalitarian appearance hides the fact that inherited cultural capital has in fact been given the new face of individual difference. (2010:10) Bourdieu’s thesis assumes that the sociologist is placed “in the position of eternal denouncer of a system granted the ability to hide itself forever from its agents” (Ross 1991:xii), a similar point raised by Latour as discussed previously. The translator of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Kristin Ross, argues that this logic will create “the Bourdieu effect,” which is premised upon a tautological statement – working-class children are “excluded because they don’t know why they are excluded; and they don’t know why they are excluded because they are excluded” (1991:xi). It is not difficult to see why Bourdieu’s work is cherished by the critical left for pointing out the problems of schooling and reform under neoliberalism. Rancière is not concerned if Bourdieu’s diagnosis of problems in French education systems is right or wrong. What he attempts to highlight is that, underneath Bourdieu’s sociological premise, is the unintended consequences his argument creates; endorsing and legitimizing the neoliberal reform programs that promise to eradicate inequality, in fact, entrench or exacerbate the existing problem of inequality. Rancière (2010:10) points out that this “refusal to know” embedded in Bourdieu’s theory can be interpreted in two opposite ways. On the one hand, it can be understood as teachers’ ignorance of the conditions or pedagogies of transforming inequality into equality. The teacher misunderstands the conditions of pedagogical practice because he/she lacks knowledge, which can be learned from the sociologist and enlightened reformer. Inequality is remediable and can be eradicated through some supplemental knowledge explaining the rules of the game and rationalizing teacher training. On the other hand, this “refusal to know” may also be interpreted as a successful internalization of the logic of this unequal system. The teacher is positioned as an agent in the process of reproducing cultural capital, 134

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which infinitely reproduces the conditions and functioning of the social machine. In this light, every reform program is destined to be futile. Rancière points out that this tautological statement in Bourdieu’s sociology paradoxically gives oxygen to the state for proposing all forms of neoliberal reform which, in fact, cannot compensate for the society. In fact, in most jurisdictions, the agenda of education reform also embraces the critical perspective ethos that educational inequality should be ameliorated, and that the policymakers know best how to camouflage the neoliberal agenda under the “equality” rhetoric. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act enacted in the United States is an example, which is also couched in the language of “equality” but, in effect, pushes forward the neoliberal attributes of accountability, competition, and privatization, which, as Henry Giroux has pointed out, lead to “all children left behind” (2005). In France, Rancière notes that the socialist reformers drew up reform plans that have been, more or less, informed by Bourdieu’s sociology, aspiring to reduce educational inequalities by adopting progressive pedagogical approaches such as de-emphasizing the “high culture” elements in curriculum, making education “less cerebral” but more “life-embracing,” and adapting pedagogy to the children from disadvantaged backgrounds (2010:11). Rancière argues that such “dumbed down” approaches actually “limit the knowledge transmitted” to the poor. Thus, the reform initiatives which promise to mitigate inequality do not, by default, deliver egalitarian consequences. What then is wrong with the Bourdieusian informed agenda of reform? Both traditional pedagogies and progressive pedagogies, argues Rancière, take “equality” as an end – that is, they take reduction of “inequality” as its sociological presupposition. Both perspectives wrongly attribute to the school “the fantasmatic power of realizing social equality” or “reducing ‘social fragmentation’” (Rancière 2010:11). In his view, the moment one is setting out to reform school and society for achieving the goal of reducing inequality is the moment a crisis in the making will emerge. Rancière terms this issue as the “pedagogicization of society”: One need only learn how to be equal men in an unequal society. This is what being emancipated means. … The task to which the republican hearts and minds are devoted is to make an equal society out of unequal men, to reduce inequality indefinitely. But whoever takes this position has only one way of carrying it through to the end, and that is the integral pedagogicization of society—the general infantilization of the individuals that make it up … the coextension of the explicatory institution with society. (1991:133) In other words, the other side of the mirror to the “equality” or “critical” discourse that promises “emancipation” is “general infantilization of the individuals” who are still trapped in the assumption that the intellectuals and knowers are positioned in unequal power relations. Notice that Rancière is not against pedagogy itself, but he questions how the critical pedagogical agenda obscures a hidden logic of colonialism, which is supported by two unexplored axioms: first, one must start from inequality in order to reduce it, and second, to reduce inequality is to conform to it by making of it an object of knowledge (2010:4). The intellectual is unconsciously regarded as a more capable, enlightened master who needs to constantly explicate knowledge and ideas to the “ignorant” uneducated knowers on the receiving end. The result of this is what he calls “enforced stultification,” in which the critical scholar is assumed to explain something to the knowers, as if showing that they cannot 135

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understand the material by themselves and, therefore, the pedagogical action of the critical intellectual, reinforces the division of a world into “knowing minds” and “ignorant ones,” “ripe minds” and “immature ones,” “the capable” versus “the incapable,” “the intelligent” versus “the stupid” (Rancière 1991:6). Rancière’s post-critical proposal is different. The point of departure, he asserts, should be the presupposition of equality of intelligence, not inequality, in the sense that equality is not assumed to be given or claimed, but “practiced” and “verified” (1991:137). What does it mean to verify this equality of intelligence? Unfortunately, neither Rancière nor the post-critical approach specify what this pedagogical principle means in practice. Rancière never suggests transplanting the pedagogical methods from The Ignorant Schoolmaster to the modern-day school context (Biesta 2015). Nevertheless, what Rancière’s postcritical approach is trying to accomplish is to redefine the most-used terms that pass sociologists unnoticed, including “emancipation” and “equality,” to experiment with these new meanings in practice, and thus, to observe what kinds of difference emerge on the horizons. In Rancière’s view, emancipation is not restricted to the critical theorists’ definition of someone being liberated from ignorance to freedom and enlightenment. Rather, emancipation is about the “verification of the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being” (Biesta 2013:87). It is not a revolutionary program or intervention brought by outsiders to the naïve other but, rather, something that people do for themselves and under the presupposition of “equality of intelligence” (Rancière 1991:38). Rancière does not naively believe that people possess equal intelligence, but he takes this presupposition as a point of departure. This perspective may be interpreted as the following question: what kinds of pedagogical and political possibilities are emerging if the speaking beings assume this presupposition and strive to validate it in their practices? (Rancière 1995:51) While the critical view posits “inequality” as the starting point, the post-critical perspective reverses this order and embeds an empirical dimension, without foreclosing the results that such experimental actions might bring. But such practices require much discernment, as well as the sociologist’s own involvement in the world not elevating him/herself out of context. As already mentioned, sociologists and theologians are already part of the broader environment, already immersed in the middle. In the process of discovery, the material world is not just an object for the knowers to study, but it also carries certain kinds of power, “the power of sensible events, a power which requires allowing oneself to be touched, of making sense in common as a means of experimenting with an ‘ontology of ourselves’” (Stengers 2019:4). To borrow the words of Spinoza, Isabelle Stengers argues that we do not know what a practice of discovery is able to become but can only acknowledge “the way we define, or address, a practice” that constitutes part of the surroundings in which the knower is situated (2005:187). Therefore, instead of taking a transcendental position which assumes that intellectuals are all-knowing and can occupy a position that will never be defeated, the post-critical view is humbler, taking an “immanent” view and assuming that both knowers and their environment cannot be detached. What is to be done, if both Christians and sociologists are to rescue their own terrain from the intellectual dead end of the “critical” spirit? In what follows, a possible postcritical response is contemplated, which is not so much a set of formulaic principles or another new call for action but a direction that already exists – more than critique, more than speaking of and for Christians. 136

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Becoming Post-Critical Christian Sociologists What is the post-critical response? Latour’s thoughts in his “Critique” article may offer some clues for Christian sociologists. On the noble task of the critic, he argues, [t]he critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishim and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution … to indicate the direction of critique, not away, but toward the gathering, the Thing. (2004:246) The post-critical perspective that Latour describes does not entail a novel hermeneutical frame for reconciling Christian faith with sociological practices, but it simply re-orients the gaze of Christian sociologists and sensitizes them to the very post-critical nature that can already be found in the discourse of Christianity. More specifically, the implications of Latour’s call for Christian sociologists with post-critical aspirations must be emphasized. Christian pedagogical practices are not to debunk but, rather, to gather, protect, and care with caution, through cultivating their “response-ability” to the community and the wider world of which they are part (Haraway 2016:34). What Donna Haraway calls “response-ability” is nothing new to Christians. Responseability refers to one’s ethical sensitivity and the ability to respond accordingly (Weldemariam 2019:397). It is about “cultivating collective knowing and doing,” “making-with,” and as responses of “becoming-with” and “rendering each other capable” (Haraway 2016:34; 58). Being critical, in this light, is about how to respond “within and as part of the world” (Barad 2007:37). This view can be interpreted through the theological lens as expressed in the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father in heaven, may your name be revered as holy. May your kingdom come. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:9-10 NRSV). As many biblical scholars and theologians argue recently, the meaning of “kingdom of God” is not the same as “heaven,” but it highlights the fact that Christians are already within and a part of this fallen world (Bauckham 2011; Gooder 2011). Just as Latour exposes the artificial bifurcation of the nature/culture distinctions in modern thought, British theologian Richard Bauckham argues, in his green exegesis of Genesis 1, that cultural aspects of human life are, in fact, a part of the created order commonly known as “the nature” (Bauckham 1986:229–230). The post-critical perspective is simply an effort to bring the detached knower back into that order. The post-critical perspective is not limited to those Christian sociologists who are interested in science and technology studies but is also useful to think about pedagogical practices in teaching controversial topics such as race, gender, and sexuality. As previously noted, to be post-critical is not to be anti-critical. In other words, the post-critical sociologist still sides with those groups in our society who, as Jacques Rancière puts it, are “the part of those who have no part” (Rancière 2004:305). In fact, throughout history, the influence of Christianity on social change has been not so much brought by debunking revolutionaries or through scientists ridiculing religious believers but the social movements which always start from the ground up at the granular, molecular level. Contrary to mainstream 137

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evangelicalism in North America, Christians of the early church were not solely made up of middle-class professionals and ruling elites with political power and capital. The existence of “church” as a body politic was a gesture promising the creation of “equality” in the Rancièrian sense. “[T]here is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, enslaved and free, but Christ is all and in all!” (Colossians 3:11 NRSV). This message from Paul the Apostle to the church in Colossae is radical by today’s standards. It did not start with the emancipatory logic of liberating others from ignorance to enlightenment. Rather, the radicality of Christianity comes from the premise that human beings are all fallen beings in this created order. In this regard, we are all “equal” because we are all evil “sinners,” in the Augustinian sense of “the privation of good.” In other words, the meaning of “evil” is not limited to the narrow definitions of whether a Christian violates certain ecclesiastical regulations, but it encompasses broader issues, including social injustice, inequality, the ravages brought by neoliberalism, environmental degradation, and so forth. However, the theological discourse of Christianity also holds the promise of a different “equality,” an “equality” that is guaranteed under the doctrine of salvation. “Only a God saves us,” not the apostles or Christians, as German philosopher Martin Heidegger said in his final musings in 1966. Meanwhile, this “equality” cannot be taken for granted, but one has to “work on your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12 NRSV). The vision of radical equality opened up by Christian discourse on redemption is starkly different from the simplistic, privatizing interpretation of “believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31 NRSV), from illness and misfortunate, against which a lot of Christian believers are insured. Whether referencing Martin Luther King, Jr. or W.E.B. Du Bois, one thing is common: they were highly sensitive to the unjust world they inhabited. They did not just debunk, but they cultivated collective knowing and doing, even though at that time, they were just a voice on the margins. The relevant question for today is can we still live up to this challenge left by Christians in the early days? After all, the early church was no different from our social conditions today. It was afflicted with all sorts of social pathologies, violence, and social injustice. The post-critical direction that some Christian sociologists are taking is inevitably “minor,” escaping from the mainstream. Pursuing this “line of flight” does not just denounce but “reveals, makes perceptible” the special power of certain provocative circumstances today as seen in numerous challenges: refugee crises, climate emergency, racial injustices, and so forth (Stengers 2008:38). Furthermore, the post-critical view is a minor view not because it is only spoken by a few scholars. Following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1994), it is minor because it is constructed within a major language, be it the dominant language of sociology or that of major Christian denominations. It is not aiming for the limelight of the center stage but is always precarious, exuding the feeling of betrayal and even heresy.

Conclusion In this chapter, the post-critical philosophical perspective on knowledge and its relationship to sociology has been introduced. The post-critical position puts emphasis on the connection between the knower, the process of knowing, and the environment in which he/she is immanent. It rejects the simplistic objective–subjective epistemological dualism, which still characterizes contemporary sociological research. It is different from conservatism. It does not dismiss criticism but starts with it. As Latour notes, it is a “new route” which tries 138

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to associate the critical “with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thoughts” (2004:247). It never rejects the critical perspective and the agenda of emancipation, but attempts to push them to the limits, in the process of intellectual inquiry. Also, Jacques Rancière’s post-critical assessment of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of education has been demonstrated. One real strength of Christian theology lies in its potential power for a post-critical sociological reflection on contemporary crisis of environmental degradation and climate change, which has not been adequately addressed in the anthropocentric version of critical theory. Sociology need not be positioned against Christianity. In fact, both discourses are inter-dependent upon each other, and the post-critical perspective simply means the return of sociological imagination back to Christianity.

References Ainley, Patrick. 2009. “The Knowledge Is out There.”. British Journal of Sociology of Education 30(2):251–58. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/01425690802700362. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bauckham, Richard. 1986. “First Steps to a Theology of Nature.” Evangelical Quarterly 58:229–44. Bauckham, Richard. 2011. Living with Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Biesta, Gert. 2013. The Beautiful Risk of Education. London: Routledge. Biesta, Gert. 2015. “What Is Education For? On Good Education, Teacher Judgement, and Educational Professionalism.” European Journal of Education 50(1):75–87. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/ejed​ .12109. Bingham, Charles, Jacques Rancière, and Gert Biesta. 2010. Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation. London: Continuum. Boltanski, Luc. 2011. On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation. Malden, MA: Polity. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? London: Verso. Foster, Hal. 2012. “Post-Critical.” October 139:3–8. Fuller, Steve. 2018. Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game. London: Anthem Press. Giroux, Henry A. 2005. Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Gooder, Paula. 2011. Heaven. London: SPCK. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3):575–99. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/3178066. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hodgson, Naomi, Joris Vlieghe, and Piotr Zamojski. 2017. Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy. Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books. Horkheimer, Max. 1982. Critical Theory Selected Essays. New York: Continuum. Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books. Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry - Special Issue on the Future of Critique 30(2):25–248. Manno, Bruno V. 1980. “Michael Polanyi and Erik Erikson: Towards a Post-Critical Perspective on Human Identity.” Religious Education 75(2):205–14. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/0034408800750209. Polanyi, Michael. 1958. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge. Polanyi, Michael. 1966. The Tacit Dimension. London: Routledge. Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1995. On the Shores of Politics. London: Verso. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103(2):297–310. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. “On Ignorant Schoolmasters.” Pp. 1–24 in Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation. London: Continuum. Ross, Kristin. 1991. “Translator’s Introduction.” Pp. vii–xxiii in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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11 SOCIOLOGY, CHRISTIANITY, AND CRITICAL REALISM Brad Vermurlen

Abstract Over recent decades, sociologists have taken interest in critical realism (CR) as an approach to sociological theorizing and research. This chapter explores the intersections of sociology, CR, and Christianity. It begins with a non-exhaustive introduction to CR, including some of the major associations, networks, journals, and sociologists commending it, followed by some of its most central and distinctive philosophical proposals. The chapter then moves on to reflect on CR’s relationship to Christianity so far as it is pertinent to sociology and sociologists. In particular, this chapter outlines what CR has to do with Christianity by specifying multiple points of contact between CR and consensual Christian thought relating to ontology, epistemology, and normativity. The goal is not to offer anything like a Christian defense of CR. Rather, the goal of this chapter is to demonstrate some of the resonances between CR and Christian thought or, in other words, to show why a sociologist steeped in Christian thought would likely find CR an intuitive and compelling set of philosophical commitments with which to undergird their work. It, thereby, also provides some broad context for understanding ongoing debates about CR in sociology.

Introduction Critical realism (CR) is a hot topic in sociology. Over recent decades, sociologists have taken interest in and argued about the prospects of a critical realist approach to sociological theorizing and research. Proponents say CR offers the most promising philosophy of social science to undergird and guide high-quality work (e.g., Porpora 2015; Rutzou 2016; Smith 2010). Meanwhile, skeptics criticize CR on many fronts, among them that it brings along too much unknowable ontological baggage, that it allows researchers to pronounce whatever they’d like as “real,” and that its supposedly low payoff-to-reading-time ratio makes it unworthy of much attention (e.g., Gross 2017; Healy 2013; Martin 2015). A less com-

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-16

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monly voiced critique of CR is that it is the “secret handshake” of traditionalist Christians in sociology, although by no means are all its proponents Christian. The present chapter explores the intersections of sociology, CR, and Christianity. The Christianity in mind in this context is its “mere” or “consensual” form, which encompasses Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and many strands of Protestantism (Oden 1992). The chapter begins with a short and non-exhaustive introduction to CR, including some of the major associations, networks, journals, and sociologists commending it, followed by a selection of some of its most central and distinctive philosophical proposals. Newcomers who pay attention long enough to CR among sociologists might notice that some of its leading proponents are Christians, and that the Christian intellectual and moral tradition might have something to do with CR. After the basics of CR vis-à-vis sociology are introduced, the chapter moves on to reflecting on CR’s relationship to Christianity so far as it is pertinent to sociology and sociologists. In particular, this chapter briefly outlines what CR has to do with Christianity by specifying multiple points of contact between CR and consensual Christian thought relating to ontology, epistemology, and normativity. The goal is not to offer anything like a Christian defense of CR. Rather, the goal of this chapter is to demonstrate some of the resonances between CR and Christian thought or, in other words, to show why a sociologist steeped in Christian thought would likely find CR an intuitive and compelling set of philosophical commitments with which to undergird their work. It, thereby, also provides some broad context for understanding ongoing debates about CR in sociology.

Critical Realism, Very Briefly1 CR, in the form in which it has gained traction among sociologists, was developed by English philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) beginning in the 1970s with his first two books, A Realist Theory of Science ([1975] 2008) and The Possibility of Naturalism ([1979] 2015). CR is a philosophy of science typically presented as a realist alternative to positivist-empiricist science, strictly interpretivist social science, strong versions of social constructionism, and post-modernism (Gorski 2013a; Steinmetz 2005). It is sometimes forgotten that CR is likewise a major alternative to pragmatist social science, which focuses on concrete, lived experience and finding solutions to practical problems while eschewing abstract ontological theorizing (Gross et al. 2022; Kivinen and Piiroinen 2004; Wehrwein 2019). CR is also an alternative to the common practice of ignoring philosophical issues in sociology and, thereby, simply adopting some approach by default (see Smith 2015:22–23). Today, there are a handful of major channels advancing CR. One is the Centre for Critical Realism (CCR),2 which was established by Roy Bhaskar in 1996. The CCR helped form the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR), which was founded in 1997 and has existed as a separate professional society since 1998. For more than 20 years, IACR’s annual conferences have served as a major gathering point for scholars interested in CR worldwide. Another hub is the Critical Realism Network,3 which until recently, was housed in the sociology department at Yale University and funded by the Templeton Foundation but now has come under the CCR. There is also the Centre for Social Ontology (CSO) hosted by Grenoble Ecole de Management.4 IACR runs the Journal of Critical Realism, and another journal friendly to CR is the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Over the years, CR has evolved into a broad and diverse community of researchers, including people from nations across the world in several disciplines. Names that soci142

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ologists, in particular, would be interested in knowing include Margaret Archer (1995), Claire Decoteau (2017), Dave Elder-Vass (2010, 2012), Phil Gorski (2013a, 2013b), Daniel Little (2016), Doug Porpora (2015), Andrew Sayer (2000), Christian Smith (2010, 2015), George Steinmetz (2005), and Frédéric Vandenberghe (2014, 2018), among many others. Scholars adjacent to sociology include Timothy Rutzou (2016) and Margarita Mooney (2016). What does CR propose? At the core of CR are its three pillars: ontological realism, epistemic perspectivalism, and judgmental rationality (Archer et al 2016; Smith 2015:13). Ontological realism is the philosophical position that significant portions of reality exist and operate independently of human awareness of or beliefs about them. Not every aspect of reality is humanly and socially constructed or dependent on human perception.5 Second, epistemic perspectivalism6 acknowledges that human knowledge about reality, including social scientific knowledge, is always socially and historically situated, fallible, and viewed through an interpretive lens. No person or community possesses an absolute God’s-eye view. Third, judgmental rationality holds that, even in the face of conflicting theories and knowledge-claims, genuine progress can be made toward improving knowledge by adjudicating which beliefs, theories, claims, and accounts about the world are better than others (Isaksen 2016). That is, not all is relative or hopelessly intractable when it comes to competing beliefs and explanations of the world. CR insists these three core commitments be held in unity.7 Built on these three pillars is a highly specified system of positions concerning various aspects of reality and science, including social science. A fundamental move CR makes is its prioritization of ontology (matters concerning being and existence) before epistemology (matters concerning ways and limitations of knowing). Setting out by pondering or pre-supposing what and how one can know about anything leads to a dead-end; instead, it is more productive first to have an idea about what we can reasonably believe about the character of reality (Smith 2010:93). Indeed, Bhaskar understood his project as “the vindication of ontology” (2016:11–13). The crucial insight of CR’s ontology is a distinction between three levels: the empirical, the actual, and the real (Sayer 2000:11–12). The empirical is what is experienced and observed. The actual, in contrast, is what happens in the world, regardless of whether those events are observed. And the real, which includes but is not exhausted by the empirical and the actual, is everything that exists, including the capacities, mechanisms, and structures that, when actualized, produce events (Sayer 2000:11–12; Smith 2010:93). Moreover, reality, according to CR, is stratified into multiple levels. Some levels are small-scale, like the atomic and molecular levels. Some are large-scale, including phenomena at the level of entire solar systems or galaxies, for example. Between those are levels more readily recognizable as constitutive of human lives, including the level of persons and the level of social structures and institutions. Reality is not “flat,” but multi-layered, ordered, and complex (Sayer 2000:12–13; Smith 2015:32–34). Different levels of reality are connected via ontological emergence, the process in which two or more entities at a lower level combine or interact to give rise to a new, higher order entity that possesses new capacities or properties that cannot be reduced to the lower level parts from which it emerged. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts (Hodgson 2000; Sawyer 2005). Crucial in this schema as well is a distinct view of causation, according to which causes are understood as real powers and mechanisms, often not directly observable, that operate (or not) as tendencies in open systems to make things happen in the world (Groff and Greco 2013; Smith 2015:49–51). 143

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Because of its commitment to an integrative view of reality and human life, CR also cautiously welcomes a normative and moral dimension to social science. Objectivity and value-neutrality are not the same, says CR (Porpora 2015:14–15, 210). In contrast to perspectives (such as Max Weber’s) that insist upon strict value-neutrality in social science, CR acknowledges that facts and values, though different, often touch upon and implicate each other. Facts are value-laden, and values are fact-laden (Archer et al 2016; Gorski 2013b). Anyone engaging CR will encounter talk of “moral realism” and “ethical naturalism,” which are outlooks that understand ethics and values not as subjective and ethereal but as unavoidably connected to the real world of human affairs. Some recent CR-guided sociological accounts draw from premodern modes of thinking, namely the Aristotelian tradition, to articulate a teleological model of human nature, moral goodness, and human flourishing (Smith 2010, 2015).

What’s Christianity Got to Do with It? Any philosophical resonances between CR and Christianity are indirect. Bhaskar was not a Christian and did not understand himself to be putting forth a metatheory for social science that was informed by Christianity. But neither is the relationship entirely coincidental. Sociologists who reject both CR and Christianity would most likely say that any resonances between the two can be attributed solely to a shared orientation – one that feels strange to modern and post-modern thinkers alike – toward ontological claims about reality, causation, morality, unobservable phenomena, and so on. On the other hand, the tiny minority of sociologists who find both CR and Christianity convincing would likely argue that the two systems overlap because they both speak truth about the reality in which we live. Either way, there is no special relationship between CR and any substantive areas of research, including the academic study of religion or Christianity. As critical realists are fond of reminding people, CR is not itself a theory or theoretical approach to human social life (on par with, say, symbolic interactionism or Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory). It is a philosophy of science. And as such, CR concerns fundamental questions about reality, causation, human agency, structure, what entities exist, what they are like, and how social scientists can know about them. There is, in other words, no singular “critical realist theory of religion,” only theories that better align with or make claims counter to the deeper philosophical stances that CR adopts. It should be noted that a line of thinking exists known as “theological critical realism,” which concerns applying a (non-naïve) realist epistemology to theological method and the relationship between religion and the physical sciences. This other CR developed independently of Bhaskar’s, who was unaware of it early on (Bhaskar 2016:10–11), but the two philosophies share sensibilities about ontology and epistemology. Christian scholars – mostly Catholics and Anglicans – associated with theological CR include Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984), Ian Barbour (1923–2013), Arthur Peacocke (1924–2006), Ben Meyer (1927– 1995), John Polkinghorne (1930–2021), and Alister McGrath (1953–present), among others. Interested readers can consult their many works (Meyer 1994; Polkinghorne 2005). More recently, some have called for more interaction between theological CR and Bhaskar’s CR (Wright 2013; Walker 2017). However, as the focus of this chapter is on sociology, theological CR can only serve for present purposes as a fascinating side conversation. Still, the development and existence of theological CR hints at the many resonances between CR and Christian thought. In fact, as Dennis Hiebert has written, “the fit is so 144

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perfect that, were it not for its origins and growing acceptance in secular philosophy and social science, critical realism would appear made for contemporary Christian scholarship” (2020:xx). What, then, can be said to be the interface between Christianity and CR as far as it is pertinent to sociology and sociologists? Given that the intersection of Christianity and sociology is already subtle, the intersections of the three will be subtle as well (Smith 2017).

Ontology On a basic level, CR, like Christianity, is a systematized body of thought that makes claims about the nature of reality and aims to ground its adherents in reality. They both take reality seriously. That might not sound too impressive (one might wonder, “there are people who don’t aim to be rooted in reality?”), but in sociology, an unflinching commitment to objective reality cannot always be taken for granted, unfortunately. While they may be a minority, there are approaches to sociological research and theorizing that prioritize thoroughgoing social constructionism, radical human self-invention and fluidity, and activist moral and political projects which do not allow reality to push back. Critical realists want to know about reality, even (or especially) if and when reality is other than how they would prefer it to be. That, in itself, is a Christian sensibility that makes CR a partner in intellectual pursuits. Beyond that basic commitment, the similarities between CR and Christianity on the question of reality become much more philosophical and specific. Bhaskar recognized overlap between CR and Thomism (Bhaskar 2016:11), which is the philosophical legacy derived from the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Catholic philosopher, theologian, and towering intellectual figure of the medieval period. Aquinas is best known for his attempt to show the compatibility of faith and reason and especially his synthesis of Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian theology. That synthesizing project encompassed multiple aspects including epistemology, moral philosophy, and God. But as far as ontology goes, Aquinas was a realist, as defined above, and set forth a grand elaboration of the nature and structure of reality (Gilson [1939] 2012).8 Aquinas held that entities have essences or natures, by virtue of which they are what they are, and not something else (Ellis 2002, Oderberg 2007). His ontology – what is called Thomistic metaphysics – emphasized “that the world is made up of substances, that these substances have essences and causal powers, and that they are composites of substantial form and prime matter” (Feser 2017a). To put it succinctly, CR is neo-Aristotelian, and the traditional Christian view of the nature and structure of reality, via the long legacy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, is likewise neo-Aristotelian. That is why when a Christian comes to learn the ontological claims of CR, a likely response is that those positions match, or at least pose no problem for, what he or she already believes. Of course, not every Christian is conversant with Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, but for many educated Christians, the barebones ontological impulses will be there. Christians historically believe in a “full” ontology, a world teeming with unobservable entities, powers, and processes. So, for example, the CR account of causation as often unobserved powers and mechanisms that make events happen in the world, typically in non-deterministic and conjunctural ways, immediately fits with a Christian’s view of what causation is and how it works in the world. It is little stretch from there to add to one’s “sociology toolkit” the CR conceptions that are perhaps less familiar, including a stratified 145

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reality, emergence, and the distinction between the real, the actual, and the empirical – in short, CR’s whole ontological/metaphysical package. Thus, one of the main features of CR that makes many contemporary sociologists resistant to and skeptical of it – its supposed “ontological baggage” – is precisely the feature that for traditional Christians tends to make CR seem acceptable and, indeed, commonsensical. CR provides social scientists with an alternative to views of reality that are common in sociology but which Christians cannot and do not embrace. One comprehensive view is materialism or physicalism, the presupposition that physical things constitute all there is, all that exists, and that seemingly non-physical phenomena (such as human consciousness or mental states) can and must be explained in terms of physical processes (Koons and Bealer 2010; Nagel 2012). Christians are not materialists or physicalists. Historically, they have believed in non-corporeal beings such as angels and demons, for example. But so far as it frames their sociological work, rejecting materialism/physicalism opens the ontological landscape for social scientists to affirm and refer to the non-reducible reality of non-physical entities, standards, and processes important to human social life. Relevant examples include causal mechanisms and powers, essences and natures, love and justice, social structures and relations, and beliefs and desires. If such phenomena are to be kept in the picture, CR helps. If CR offers an alternative to ontologies that are too narrow and restrictive, like materialism and physicalism, it is equally resistant to pictures of the world that are too lenient or unstructured. These are theories about reality that presuppose a sort of “silly putty” ontology, according to which reality itself (if such a thing is even imagined) is the contingent product of human inventions, mental categories, and desires and, therefore, can be pressed and molded into practically any shape. Such a view is guided by strong versions of social constructionism, post-modernism, and post-structuralism. Sociologists whose work centers on subjective experience and/or identity politics are especially prone to adopting this idea. This kind of fluid, strong constructionist ontology is akin to what Smith (2010:119–206) called “metaphysical meltdown.” Christian thought has historically had no room for radical constructionist ontologies, including those sometimes found in sociology, which again makes CR a welcome philosophical alternative for the Christian.

Epistemology Like Christianity, CR believes in the existence of and is oriented toward getting at truth. Many sociologists, critical realists or not, accept the notion of truth. But many do not. Skittishness about truth for sociologists primarily represents the continuing influence of interpretivist, post-modernist, and strong social constructionist ways of thinking (Porpora 2015:16–20). Even if it is rarely encountered in written scholarship, skepticism about and rejection of the notion of truth is a stance sociologists will encounter in other channels of the discipline, such as conferences and grad seminars. Yet truth is a recurring theme in CR literature (Groff 2000; Porpora 2015:16–20, 65–95; Smith 2010:207–219). According to CR, it is possible to know the truth, including the truth about social phenomena, even while acknowledging that human knowing is often tricky and subject to revision. It is not epistemic criteria, such as certainty or consensus, that make a statement or belief true. Rather, a statement is true when the reality to which the statement refers is as the statement says it is (Alston 1996; Smith 2010:208–209). Foregoing further nuance and detail concerning differing approaches to truth as a concept, suffice it to note here that the CR emphasis on

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getting at the truth about reality is another crucial commonality it shares with Christian thought. A commitment to truth naturally raises the question of how social scientists can know what is true about human social life and what is not. With its foregrounding of ontological considerations, CR scholarship has been comparatively less focused on specifics about how to arrive at truth. CR affords a range of approaches to epistemology. Some recent articulations of CR epistemology are indistinguishable from familiar leftist-progressive approaches, emphasizing feminist standpoint theory and post-colonial theory (Albert et al. 2020).9 Others, in contrast, basically ignore epistemic positionality. Smith (2010, 2015), for example, draws from Aristotelian and Catholic intellectual resources to develop general social theory that aspires to universal applicability and emphasizes rational coherence and practical adequacy (even while, as a critical realist, maintaining that there always might be need for revision).10 All critical realists agree that knowledge claims are socially and historically situated, fallible, conceptually mediated, theory-laden, and so on. That is one of their core pillars. Beyond that, the question of epistemology in CR remains unsettled, effectively welcoming an “epistemological pluralism” much like it supports “methodological pluralism.” What this means for intersections with Christianity is simply this: the meeting place of sociology and CR is also a nexus at which religiously informed knowledge and understanding on a range of topics – say, human embodiment or motivations, for example – could enter sociological work. Indeed, it already has (Archer et al. 2004; Smith 2010, 2015). This does not mean appealing to divine or other supernatural forces in sociological theories and explanations. It is more complex and subtle than that (Smith 2017). Over and above the many resonances between CR and Christian thought, the very openness of CR on strategies of epistemology more fundamentally opens the field of sociological scholarship to intellectual resources, habits, and insights from the Christian tradition, however subtly or convincingly, or not, those are used. Two basic rules of epistemology for CR are to avoid committing what it calls the “epistemic fallacy” and the “ontic fallacy.” The epistemic fallacy occurs when questions about what the objective world is like (i.e., ontology) are conflated with or reduced to questions of what we can or cannot know about the world. Conversely, the ontic fallacy happens when our knowledge or beliefs are projected onto the world, in effect over-confidently conflating our beliefs about the world with the world itself (Bhaskar 2016:11). Christians, contrapost-modernists and others, will be among the first to acknowledge that one’s beliefs about the world, including even beliefs about ourselves, do not determine reality. Another important shift CR commends for social scientific knowing and reasoning is to attend not only to common modes of inference – namely, deduction and induction – but also to employ two potentially lesser known ways of inferring: retroduction and abduction. Retroduction is the thought operation that asks what must be the case, even if it cannot be observed, for the phenomenon we do observe to be the way it is. And abduction is the creative process by which an observed phenomenon is re-interpreted within a broader conceptual framework or structure (see Bhaskar 2016; Danermark et al. 2002:79–106; Smith 2010:97).11 Retroduction and abduction are modes of inference that underpin most Christian defenses of the existence of God and the truth of the Christian religion. This is the case for all the major branches of apologetics, whether classical, evidential, or pre-suppositional (Feser 2017b; Keller 2008; Ortlund 2021). This means that sociologists who are conversant in Christian apologetics will probably find the two modes of inference emphasized by CR familiar intellectual moves not particularly foreign to their standard cognitive equipment.

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Normativity In addition to ontology and epistemology, there are resonances between CR and Christianity regarding normativity, that dimension of human life concerning oughts and ought nots, obligations, values, rights, morality/ethics, critique, and ends/purposes (Wedgwood 2007). Sociology is a deeply normative discipline with an underlying moral imperative, oftentimes even activist in character toward leftist-progressive goals (Smith 2014).12 Consequentially, animosity toward stances traditionally held by Christians sometimes comes along with that progressive bent, especially on issues of sexuality, gender, marriage, and reproduction. But are there actual right answers on moral, normative, and political questions? Is it not all relative and socially constructed anyway? CR in sociology provides the grounding for cautious engagement with normative and moral questions, and because of its commitments to reality, truth, and rational adjudication, it tempers the worst impulses of ideologically driven sociology. The typical CR approach to normativity in sociology begins with the rejection of the divorce, developed and popularized only in the twentieth century, between fact and value, between what is and what ought to be. It is not that is and ought become simply equated to one another but, rather, in the common CR view, descriptive and normative claims, while different kinds of statements, overlap and are implicated in each other. Facts imply and depend upon normative judgments, while normative judgments have a factual component. Facts and values co-mingle in several different ways, from the questions sociologists choose to ask, to “thick ethical concepts,” to the language and categories scholars use, to the under-determination of explanations from data, among others (Gorski 2013b; Smith 2010:384–399). For most critical realists, a dichotomy between the descriptive (is) and the normative (ought) is recognized as both unnecessary and untenable. To many modern people, re-connecting is and ought feels like an ill-advised step, but it is a very common step in classical Christian ethics. Once the gulf between is and ought is bridged, that intellectual move opens up sociological work to engage cautiously in normative, moral, and political concerns (Archer et al. 2016). Again, this does not mean that sociology, therefore, should embrace a role as activist scholarship, which is already common in many segments of the discipline. Rather, the same pillars that are applicable to sociological descriptions and explanations of social life – ontological realism, epistemic perspectivalism and fallibilism, and judgmental rationality –likewise can be applied to the normative dimension of human life and societies. Normativity is, to some extent, subject to empirical correction. Sociology, in this sense, then, can be viewed as an empirically grounded practical philosophy and moral science (Vandenberghe 2018). CR offers sociologists (and others) a framework within which to see the moral and normative dimension of human personal and social life as something other than merely arbitrary, subjective, historically contingent, and entirely socially constructed. Indeed, CR provides a framework within which to understand such things as objective and real. Critical realists tend to embrace moral realism, which asserts that moral claims express propositions, and that some of those propositions are true (Enoch 2011).13 As morally realist, CR has affinities with classical Christian approaches to metaethics, such as that of Oliver O’Donovan: “The order of things that God has made is there. It is objective, and mankind has a place within it. Christian ethics, therefore, has an objective reference because it is concerned with man’s life in accordance with this order” ([1986]1994:17). In fact, some Christian ethicists have recently started exploring how Bhaskarian CR can contribute to their work (Cloutier 2021; Finn 2020).

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Under the umbrella of moral realism, CR sociologists tend to favor ethical naturalism, which derives normative and moral ideals from the actual world of lived human lives (Archer et al. 2016; Gorski 2013b) and specifically that version of ethical naturalism which emphasizes human virtues and flourishing.14 With this, CR in sociology can again be seen as a retrieval of the Aristotelian-Thomistic worldview, this time as it pertains to how to live well. Christian Smith has developed this account most prominently in sociology (Smith 2010, 2015), and Bhaskar wrote of Smith’s account approvingly (Bhaskar 2016:68). Smith’s program centers on the nature, capacities, agency, and limitations of humans as persons and how the moral good for humans is discernable from what humans are and what they require to flourish. One need not accept Christianity to adopt a neo-Aristotelian, virtues-based account of morality, politics, and normativity, but it is compatible with and largely inspired by Christian moral philosophy. There are even strong resemblances to natural law.15 There is, of course, no guarantee that sociology (or social science broadly) will, in the long run, come to adopt and champion normative positions aligned with Christian thought like it now accepts and advances certain other moral and normative positions. Given the current normative state and path dependence of sociology as a discipline, the prospect that sociology would eventually – in 50 or 100 years – come around to support views that align with Christian ethics seems unlikely. Nonetheless, as with questions of ontology and epistemology, anyone interested in the intersections of sociology and Christianity will find in CR a solid philosophical ground from which to understand ethics, normativity, and values in science. And with that philosophical understanding, one also finds a ground from which to generate sociological work that can contribute to genuine human goods and flourishing societies.

Notes 1 This chapter cannot give an extensive introduction to CR, which has been done competently elsewhere (Archer et al. 1998; Bhaskar 2016; Collier 1994). In addition, there are multiple short introductions to CR, some of the most helpful including the opening section of Sayer’s Realism and Social Science (2000), pages 90 to 98 in Smith’s What Is a Person? (2010), the multi-author answer to the question “What Is Critical Realism” in the American Sociological Association theory section’s newsletter (Archer et al. 2016), and Gorski’s review essay (2013a). 2 https://cen​tref​orcr​itic​alrealism​.com/ 3 https://cri​tica​lrea​lism​network​.org/ 4 https://socialontology​.org/ 5 Porpora states the position especially well: “Ontological realism is the acceptance of a single, ontologically objective reality, common to us all and independent of human thought” (2015:67). 6 Also called epistemic relativism. 7 Some refer to these three as CR’s “Holy Trinity” (Hartwig 2007). 8 See also the helpful lecture “Aquinas and Realism” by John Haldane delivered at the Lumen Christi Institute, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=8MnS6A7mzwE. 9 As Albert et al. assert, “The whole point of standpoint theories is to relate epistemic positions to social positions, to find out which positions have been excluded, to explain that exclusion in terms of causal mechanisms …, to reintroduce excluded voices, to open up a more inclusive science” (2020:363). In sociology, Christian standpoint theory and its attendant analyses of exclusion are especially underdeveloped (but see Archer et al. 2004). 10 In response to the potential critique that his argument is “so Western,” Smith rejoins: “Certainly, the geographic location of the origin of the ideas that undergird the book are mostly Western, but that is ultimately irrelevant to the argument. All ideas come from somewhere. The geographic and cultural genesis of ideas says nothing about their truth value” (2015:284).

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Brad Vermurlen 11 The concept of abduction originates with Charles S. Peirce and features prominently in pragmatist approaches to research and theorizing (see Ritz 2020). 12 There are also sociologists with traditional or even rightist worldviews, though a small minority. 13 Moral realism is a position in metaethics which stands in contrast to various forms of moral antirealism, including moral subjectivism, moral nihilism, and non-cognitivism. 14 As opposed to other versions of ethical naturalism, such as utilitarianism. 15 Smith writes that his critical realist account of human nature and flourishing “would not unfairly be understood as a secular analogue to other natural law accounts that may be religiously oriented” (2015:25).

References Albert, Katelin, Jonah Stuart Brundage, Paige Sweet, and Frédéric Vandenberghe. 2020. “Towards a Critical Realist Epistemology?” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 50(3):357–372. Alston, William P. 1996. A Realist Conception of Truth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Archer, Margaret S. 1995. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. New York: Cambridge University Press. Archer, Margaret, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, and Alan Norrie, eds. 1998. Critical Realism: Essential Readings. New York: Routledge. Archer, Margaret S., Andrew Collier, and Douglas V. Porpora. 2004. Transcendence: Critical Realism and God. New York: Routledge. Archer, Margaret, et al. 2016. “What Is Critical Realism?” Perspectives: A Newsletter of the ASA Theory Section, http://www​.asatheory​.org​/current​-newsletter​-online​/what​-is​-critical​-realism. Bhaskar, Roy. [1975] 2008. A Realist Theory of Science. New York: Routledge. Bhaskar, Roy. [1979] 2015. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, 4th ed. New York: Routledge. Bhaskar, Roy. 2016. Enlightened Common Sense: The Philosophy of Critical Realism. New York: Routledge. Cloutier, David. 2021. “Sociological Self-Knowledge, Critical Realism, and Christian Ethics.” Studies in Christian Ethics 34(2):158–170. Collier, Andrew. 1994. Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy. New York: Verso. Danermark, Berth, Mats Ekström, Liselotte Jakobsen, and Jan Ch. Karlsson. 2002. Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences. New York: Routledge. Decoteau, Claire Laurier. 2017. “The AART of Ethnography: A Critical Realist Explanatory Research Model.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 47(1):58–82. Elder-Vass, Dave. 2010. The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure, and Agency. New York: Cambridge University Press. Elder-Vass, Dave. 2012. The Reality of Social Construction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ellis, Brian. 2002. The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press. Enoch, David. 2011. Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism. New York: Oxford University Press. Feser, Edward. 2017a. “Taking Aquinas Seriously,” First Things, https://www​.firstthings​.com​/web​ -exclusives​/2017​/06​/taking​-aquinas​-seriously. Feser, Edward. 2017b. Five Proofs of the Existence of God. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Finn, Daniel K., ed. 2020. Moral Agency within Social Structures and Culture: A Primer on Critical Realism for Christian Ethics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Gilson, Étienne. [1939] 2012. Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge. Translated by Mark A. Wauck. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Gorski, Philip. 2013a. “What is Critical Realism? And Why Should You Care?” Contemporary Sociology 42(5):658–670. Gorski, Philip. 2013b. “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction: Ethical Naturalism and the Social Sciences.” Society: Social Science and Modernity 50(6):543–553.

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Sociology, Christianity, Critical Realism Groff, Ruth. 2000. “The Truth of the Matter: Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism and the Concept of Alethic Truth.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30(3):407–435. Groff, Ruth, and John Greco, eds. 2013. Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism. New York: Routledge. Gross, Neil. 2017. “Review of: Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach by Douglas V. Porpora; The Relational Subject by Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret S. Archer.” American Journal of Sociology 123(1):297–301. Gross, Neil, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship, ed. 2022. The New Pragmatist Sociology: Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press. Hartwig, Mervyn. 2007. “Holy Trinity.” Pp. 238–242 in Dictionary of Critical Realism, edited by Mervyn Hartwig. New York: Routledge. Healy, Kieran. 2013. “A Word on Critical Realism (with comments from Christian Smith, Philip Gorski, and George Steinmetz, among others).” Org Theory Blog, http://orgtheory​.wordpress​.com​ /2013​/09​/04​/a​-word​-on​-critical​-realism/. Hiebert, Dennis. 2020. Rationality, Humility, and Spirituality in Christian Life. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Hodgson, Geoffrey M. 2000. “The Concept of Emergence in Social Science: Its History and Importance.” Emergence 2(4):65–77. Isaksen, K. Robert. 2016. “Reclaiming Rational Theory Choice as Central: A Critique of Methodological Applications of Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism 15(3):245–262. Keller, Timothy. 2008. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York: Dutton. Kivinen, Osmo, and Tero Piiroinen. 2004.“The Relevance of Ontological Commitments in Social Sciences: Realist and Pragmatist Viewpoints.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34(3):231–248. Koons, Robert C., and George Bealer, eds. 2010. The Waning of Materialism. New York: Oxford University Press. Little, Daniel. 2016. New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Martin, John Levi. 2015. Thinking Through Theory. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Meyer, Ben F. 1994. Reality and Illusion in New Testament Scholarship: A Primer in Critical Realist Hermeneutics. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Mooney, Margarita A. 2016. “Human Agency and Mental Illness.” Journal of Critical Realism 15(4):376–390. Nagel, Thomas. 2012. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. New York: Oxford University Press. Oden, Thomas C. 1992. Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Oderberg, David S. 2007. Real Essentialism. New York: Routledge. O’Donovan, Oliver. [1986] 1994. Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics, 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing. Ortlund, Gavin. 2021. Why God Makes Sense in a World that Doesn’t: The Beauty of Christian Theism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Polkinghorne, John. 2005. Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Porpora, Douglas. 2015. Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ritz, Bridget. 2020. “Comparing Abduction and Retroduction in Peircean Pragmatism and Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism 19(5):456–465. Rutzou, Timothy. 2016. “Re-Imagining Social Science.” Journal of Critical Realism 15(4):327–341. Sawyer, R. Keith. 2005. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sayer, Andrew. 2000. Realism and Social Science. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Smith, Christian. 2010. What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, Christian. 2014. The Sacred Project of American Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

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12 DE-COLONIZATION, SOCIOLOGY, AND CHRISTIANITY Henry Kwok

Abstract What is the meaning of “de-colonization” for sociology and Christianity today? Is it another buzzword that plays into identity politics and culture wars through a wholesale rejection of the Global North? This chapter reflects on the implications of de-colonization for theologians and Christian sociologists. The meaning of decolonization is not restricted to political transition as witnessed in the retreat of the British Empire in the twentieth century. It refers more broadly to the ongoing processes and consequences of colonialism and imperialism under the new hegemonic order of global capitalism. Three specific tasks constitute the de-colonization project for sociology and Christianity. The first is to revisit the colonial roots of sociology as an academic discipline, reconnecting the metropole and periphery in its narrative of modernity, which recent scholarship has mandated. The second task is to de-colonize the secularization thesis by reassessing the role of Christianity and multiple theologies flourishing in the Global South. The final task is to call for envisioning a radical gospel. What is the messianic hope for the “wretched of the earth” (Fanon 1967)? If Christianity is the promise of good news for the postcolonial world, how can the Kingdom of God be re-imagined?

Introduction “The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon, and indeed something greater than Solomon is here!” (Matthew 12:42, NRSV)

Outside the church, Christianity has received bad press. Its reputation is less than positive, given the fact that it was once a partner in crime in colonialism. In Australia, the Catholic Church was once part of the cultural assimilation policy of the colonial state leading to the “stolen generations” of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Similarly, DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-17

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in Canada, various Christian denominations were in collusion with the federal government to run the scandalous residential school system in the name of “civilization,” which was, in essence, a form of cultural genocide. In South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church initially supported the apartheid regime, although it later changed its stance and made great reconciliation efforts. In sociology and cultural studies, there has been an increased emphasis on de-colonization, and not just as a metaphor (Tuck and Yang 2021). It is not merely a strategic move of shifting research focus from the West to the rest. More importantly, it is a reflexive exercise prompting sociologists and theologians to return to the colonial roots of knowledge production and the modern world (see Bhambra 2016; Chen 2010; Connell 2007, 2018; Go 2013; Takayama et al. 2016; Tuhiwai Smith 2021). This chapter offers an analysis of de-colonization and addresses its implications for both theologians and sociologists. What does it mean to de-colonize sociology and Christianity today? Is it another buzzword that plays into identity politics and culture wars through a wholesale rejection of the Global North? Due to the contested meanings of “de-colonization,” it is necessary to specify its working definition here. This chapter follows the definition given by Taiwanese scholar, Kuan-Hsing Chen in Asia as Method. To de-colonize is: to deconstruct, decenter, and disarticulate the colonial cultural imaginary, and to reconstruct and rearticulate new imaginations and discover a more democratic future direction. In imagining a new line of flight, one possibility is to leave behind the obsession with colonial bondage and seriously practice a critical syncretism – that is, to multiply and shift the existing sites and objects of identification. (Chen 2010:112) The meaning of “de-colonization” is not confined to the narrow definitions of localization and building independent sovereign nation-states. As Edward Said put it, despite national liberation after de-colonization in many former colonies, the old colonial structures remain and are replicated in new national terms (Said 1986:74). De-colonization, as an intellectual practice, is the attempt of the previously colonized (including former settler colonies such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, occupation colonies such as Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Singapore, and Taiwan, and semi-colonized countries such as China, Thailand, and many former states of the Soviet Union) to “reflectively work out a historical relation with the former colonizer, culturally, politically, and economically” (Chen 2010:3). It involves reconciling the “inevitable violence” of colonial conflict inherited from the past with everyday politics and ongoing struggles via the discourse of reason, persuasion, and even poetry (Said 1986:90–91). The process of interrogating colonial mentality is painful, but de-colonization also offers an opportunity for renewing our sociological and theological imagination (Mignolo 2010; wa Thiong’o 1987). Strictly speaking, the world became post-colonial with the disintegration of the British Empire post-World War II. But not many countries survived colonialism and imperialism unscathed. It is simply naïve to believe we have passed into a “powerless and conflict-free time zone”; we are still living the “after-effects” of colonialism (Hall 1996:254). With the collapse of Pax Britannica and the Soviet Union marking the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992), the new global order witnesses not only new imperialism and neoliberalism buttressed by the United States (see Harvey 2003, 2007) but also the new Cold War between the United States and Russia, the rise of China as a superpower, and the growing influence 154

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of metanational corporations and their tentacles reaching beyond the confines of nationstates. Colonialism has metastasized into globalization (Stiglitz 2002). Whether it be the former colonizer or the colonized, the new borderless empire under global capitalism reigns sovereign (Hardt and Negri 2004). This chapter proposes three de-colonization tasks for theologians and sociologists to undertake together today. The first is to redress the problem of the unequal division of labor in the production of knowledge. The Global North and the West remain the primary site of theory production, whereas the Global South and the Rest share the labor of data collection, analysis, and theory application. To de-colonize sociology is to reconnect the gap between the metropole and periphery in its narrative of modernity, as recent post-colonial sociology and southern theory have highlighted (see Bhambra 2014a; Connell 2007; Go 2013). The second task is to de-colonize the secularization thesis proposed by the classic founders of sociology – Durkheim, Marx, and Weber. While the political influence of Christianity in the Global North has declined and its reputation has been tarnished by various recent scandals, it has been given a new lease on life in the post-colonial world. The final task is to revisit the gospel and re-vision it radically. What is the messianic hope for the “wretched of the earth” (Fanon 1967)? If Christianity remains the promise of good news for the post-colonial world, the Kingdom of God must be re-imagined.

The Southern Roots of Knowledge One task of de-colonization is to revisit and bridge the gap between the West and the Rest, the Global North and the Global South, the metropole and the periphery, in the process of knowledge production. The study of Christianity and theology from the sociological perspective is no exception. In Southern Theory (2007), Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell, quoting Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji, describes a problematic colonial pattern in modern social sciences of theorizing occurring in the metropole, but data-gathering and application often happening in the former colonies. Sociological and theological ideas, whether those of Pierre Bourdieu, Niklas Luhmann, Karl Barth, or Rudolf Bultmann, continue to be exported. Universities and seminaries in the metropole rarely dialogue with ideas produced by and in the colonized world. More often than not, many academics in the Global South feel they are still in some “outpost” on an imaginary “frontier” for knowledge advancement dependent on the Global North (Ward 2017:564). Yet theory and knowledge do emerge from the social experience of the periphery, in different genres, styles, and journals, as exemplified in the flourishing of Indigenous knowledge (Connell 2007:104). In his ambitious proposal for a post-colonial sociology, American sociologist Julian Go (2016:187) highlights the problem of “analytic bifurcations” in most social sciences in North America today. Most social theories in the Global North systematically ignore social reality in the Global South when, in reality, the metropole-periphery is closely connected to each other. For example, the development of capitalism in England cannot be divorced from the British Empire, especially in relation to the trade of commodities such as tea, spice, sugar, and cotton from India and Jamaica back to the textile mills in Lancashire, England. What post-colonial thought offers, in sum, is a recognition that our social theories, our concepts, our frameworks might also have been shaped by imperial domination and its correlates. And the invitation of post-colonial thought follows: to try to imagine alternative post-colonial knowledges, to push our modalities of knowing further 155

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and cultivate critical understandings that transcend or circumvent the conventions of the imperial episteme; this not in a vain effort to overcome guilt, but, quite simply, in an effort to create new and better social knowledge. (Go 2016:188) To de-colonize knowledge, whether sociological or theological, is to correct “the distortions and exclusions produced by empire and global inequality and reshap[e] the discipline in a democratic direction on a world scale” (Connell 2018:402). When it comes to the study of Christianity, the project of de-colonizing both sociology and theology requires rethinking the composition of curriculum, conceptual questions, and the conditions of knowledge distribution. Connell (2007) emphasizes that the term “southern” does not suggest a sharply and rigidly bounded geographical location of societies below the equator. Instead, the word “southern” designates “relations – authority, exclusion and inclusion, hegemony, partnership, sponsorship, appropriation – between intellectuals and institutions in the metropole and those in the world periphery” (2007:viii). In other words, some history in the Global North, such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil disobedience movement and even the more recent Black Lives Matter movement, is also encompassed in the sociological perspective of southern theory, as they are deeply entwined in the extremely painful and traumatic memory of slave trade, cultural genocide, and colonialism. In fact, even the French Revolution and European Enlightenment were tied to the Global South. Prior to the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution was staged by the self-liberated slaves led by Toussaint Louverture against French colonial rule. Some historians even argue that it was the Haitian Revolution that inspired the French Revolution and had a profound influence on the abolition of slave trade in the United States (Bongie 2008). It is this inter-connectedness between Europe and the Global South which prods British sociologist Gurminder Bhambra (2014a) to develop “connected sociologies.” Sociologies should be plural because the history of modernization in the Global North can never be divorced from its Other, that is, the Global South. The academic discipline of sociology was born at the apex of Western imperialism (Bhambra 2014b). Whether it was Durkheim writing about Aboriginal Australians from the second-hand historical sources of British explorers, or Weber’s sociological study of Confucianism in China, classical sociologists, under Enlightenment logic, mapped the world and its problems from a detached point of observation. In the words of Argentine philosopher Walter Mignolo, the birth of sociological knowledge already begs the question of racism and epistemology in the sense that “the first world has knowledge, the third world has culture” because Euro-centered epistemology concealed its own “geo-historical and bio-graphical locations” and, therefore, succeeded in creating the idea of “universal knowledge” (Mignolo 2010:160). Because of the hidden assumption of the sociologist as a knowing subject who can create “universal” knowledge, there has been a systematic ignorance of the world-historical processes of “dispossession, appropriation, genocide, and enslavement” which, nevertheless, were central to the development of modernity in the West (Bhambra 2016:962). The call for de-colonizing sociological knowledge is not to reject the valid claims made in classical sociology. What Bhambra calls for is a “global sociology” if the field aspires to take seriously the histories of inter-connection that have engendered the process of modernization: Global sociology acknowledges the masquerade of European histories as world-historical upon which sociology has largely been constructed and seeks to reconstruct 156

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sociology on the basis of more adequate historical understandings. It is more than a history of (long-standing) globalization, however. It points to a sociology that starts from the perspective of the world by locating itself within the processes that facilitated the emergence of that world. By starting from a location in the world, necessarily means starting from a history that enabled that location to be part of the world; identifying and explicating the connections that enable understandings always to be more expansive than the identities or events they are seeking to explain. (Bhambra 2014a:172–173) It is not difficult to justify Bhambra’s argument for a more “global sociology” here. In most sociology textbooks, the standard histories of the Renaissance, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution have only a narrow focus upon the emergence of modernity which is based on Europe, but such historiography consistently ignores the development of Europe and its connections to the colonial world (Bhambra 2014a:15). To de-colonize sociology, therefore, implies the re-construction and pluralization of the social, which should include the experiences and histories of other cultures and societies outside the mainstream European framework. A sociological study of Christianity and its theology can illuminate the fruitfulness of the Southern perspective to reconstruct and pluralize sociological knowledge as Bhambra (2007) advocated. While Christian theology is often assumed to be the oldest academic discipline in the Global North, its roots in the Global South are often ignored – St. Augustine of Hippo came from North Africa. With Egypt as its backdrop, the Book of Exodus is actually a narrative of “pivotal moments” describing how enslaved people in exile resisted exploitation and oppression (see Brueggemann 2021). Christianity later originated in Asia, as Jesus of Nazareth was Middle Eastern. The gospel narrative was then constructed against the backdrop of the Roman Empire, as St. Paul of Tarsus, a Hellenized Jew whose privilege as a Roman citizen enabled him to embark upon missionary journeys across the empire from Jerusalem to Spain (Dunn 2011), already mirrored features of globalization today. The Roman Empire was an ancient form of imperialism, different but still parallel to the unequal social and political order of global capitalism today, full of inequality, injustices, slavery, economic and social exclusion, social hierarchy, and violence symbolized by the death of Jesus on a cross. Similarly, the ephemeral ancient form of “democracy” in Greek city-states was far from inclusive and just. Meanwhile, the early church may be interpreted as an inclusive space for “a part of those who have no part, a part or party of the poor” (Rancière 1999:11). St. Paul’s epistles to the early churches in Asia envision this radical inclusivity of the Christian body politic: “In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, enslaved and free, but Christ is all and in all!” (Colossians 3:11, NRSV). This vision of inclusivity and diversity has been embraced by non-Euro-American theologians closely affiliated with the Global South, such as the Asian feminist theology of Puilan Kwok (2000) and the queer theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid (2004). Indeed, multiple theologies exist in the Global South. While Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope (1993) has gained popularity among evangelical Christians and inspired works such as Miroslav Volf’s (1996) theology of reconciliation and Richard Bauckham’s (2011) green theology, the radical liberation theology of Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez and Leonardo Boff from Brazil went beyond the realm of Christianity. Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy was partly inspired by his reading of not only Marxism but also liberation theology (McLaren 157

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and Jandrić 2018), and some of its tenets have been absorbed in instructional methods in formal secular educational contexts. If the origin and role of Christianity are examined in light of southern theory and postcolonial sociology, we can safely conclude that the South and the North are closely intertwined. Despite the heinous crimes committed by Christians of the North in the past, a different Christianity endures, a de-colonial Christianity forged out of marginality. It is the Christianity of Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote his doctoral thesis on Paul Tillich’s theology. Desmond Tutu’s Black theology was pivotal to South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggles. In South Korea, minjung theology, which is a form of post-colonial theology and literally means “the people’s theology,” began in the 1950s and 1960s after the Korean War. Despite strong criticisms from evangelical Christians, minjung theology was well known for its role in the struggle for social justice, democratization, and resistance to the military dictatorship of Park Chung-hee (Kim and Kim 2014). Christianity in the Global South is not just a rigid, conservative creed such as the Westminster Confession of Faith, still embraced in some denominations today. It was shaped by the external environment and, thus, constituted part of the broader social and political changes in human history. To be sure, “[t]he queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon, and indeed something greater than Solomon is here!” (Matthew 12:42, NRSV). While Christianity in the West has inflicted enormous pain and trauma for many due to its complicity with colonialism, the presence and experience of Christianity in the Rest may modify some theological views from the West and, thereby, enrich the theological imagination.

De-colonizing Secularization As mentioned previously, while the influence of Christianity is declining in the Global North due to secularization, the growth of Christianity in the Global South somewhat counters the trend, whether by Christian population growth or by the diversity and renewal of theology. The secularization thesis popularized in sociology of the Global North can be de-colonized by examining two aspects: first, the secularization thesis itself, and second, Christianity in the Global South. British theologian John Milbank of the Radical Orthodoxy school of theology provocatively claimed that “[o]nce, there was no ‘secular’” (Milbank 2006:9) and argued that the secular had to be “imagined” as a domain, both in theory and in practice. Classical sociology, according to Milbank, is simply an example of an institution promoting secularization despite the remnants of Christianity not having departed the Global North due to the rise of science and reason. To him, theology is a “metadiscourse” encompassing secular knowledge such as sociology (2006:1). What does he mean by that? What is the implication of this radical claim for de-colonization and the role of Christianity in the Global South? It is important to highlight what Milbank and other theologians of the Radical Orthodoxy school mean by “the secular.” British theologian Simon Oliver (2009:4) posits four ways to understand the meaning of secularization. First, “the secular” refers to a “post-Christian” era in which regular church attendance is declining inexorably in the Global North, including the United States. Second, it refers to an era in which politics and religion are constitutionally separated. While there are some European countries, such as England, which still regard Christianity as their state religion, in most liberal democracies, Christianity no longer enjoys the privileged status of being an official religion that is governed by separate 158

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ecclesiastical laws. Nevertheless, there are some residues of Christianity remaining in the public sphere, such as oath-taking in court, pledge of allegiance in ceremony, celebration of public holidays, and so forth. The secular era means that religious belief and practice are confined to a private domain. It is assumed that people have the right to practice their religious faith so long as they do not infringe upon other people’s rights. The most obvious example today is the argument made by LGBTQIA+ activists who claim that religious groups have no rights to impose their ideas on others because the world today is assumed to be in secular order. However, religious believers also latch onto this rights-based discourse, claiming that the political left epitomized by LGBTQIA+ activism is now infringing upon religious freedom and people’s rights to practice their private faith. The third meaning of “the secular” is closer to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s reflection, which is that the secular age indicates the epochal shift from a situation or cosmological order in which belief in God and the authority of the church went largely unchallenged to a situation in which belief in God is just one option among many others (Taylor 2018). The notion of God is no longer the undisputable governing principle of human life in the secular world today but, rather, has become only another “worldview” (Oliver 2009:4). As Oliver put it vividly, in the United States, despite the large Christian population, “religion becomes a consumer product amongst many others with countless ‘retailers’ peddling their version of God in a free market” (2009:4). Another interpretation of “the secular” is the rise of science. In Oliver’s (2009) view, the shift from natural philosophy to science is largely attributed to the rise of experiments. While the new universities in the Middle Ages introduced Aristotle’s philosophy, it is important to note that Aristotle only advocated the observation of nature in order to describe its workings. He did not invent experimental science. In Oliver’s view, Aristotle’s natural philosophy was “refracted through Christian theology,” that is, natural philosophy “heavily influenced the way people thought about their relations with each other and their place in creation” (2009:5). It was not until the rise of experimental science with Galileo that it became possible to predict and manipulate natural processes, and therefore, the old world of natural philosophy, Christian practice, the holy scripture, and theology was stripped away, gradually paving the way for secularization. From the perspective of Radical Orthodoxy, secularization is far from a neutral result because of the retreat of religion and theology just as the secular was actively constructed, imagined, or instituted as a positive ideology (Oliver 2009:6). The classical sociology propounded by Durkheim, Marx, and Weber is an example of this institutionalized confinement of theology to the margins of human society, equivalent to “modernity” and “the Enlightenment” (Oliver 2009:6). It is most obvious in Durkheim’s sociology. In Durkheim’s time, sociology was not established as a formal discipline in French universities, but its genesis was somewhat affiliated with education. It was the creation of a secular education system in France separate from the Catholic Church, which prompted Durkheim to write about the evolution of the educational system in France and about which Durkheim lectured extensively in The Evolution of Educational Thought (see Durkheim 1977; Jones 1999). His renowned work, Moral Education, may also be interpreted as Durkheim’s attempt to create a secularized educational system that could distill the values from religious beliefs and prove workable for a society transitioning from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity. Yet, as Milbank and Oliver have pointed out, despite the efforts of sociologists to resist the influence of religion on society, the secular is not simply the rolling back of religious, 159

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Judeo-Christian theological consensus that will reveal a neutral, agnostic territory in which everyone has become equal players. The secular is simply the replacement of a certain view of God and the world with a different view and vocabulary that still makes theological claims (Oliver 2009:6). Universal values and ideologies inherited from the Enlightenment in the contemporary secular order, such as democracy, human rights, justice, human dignity, equality, compassion, and so forth, all carry dimensions of Christian theological discourse. In the contemporary world, it is impossible to think without concepts such as these, which all bear the burden of European thought, history, and political modernity (Chakrabarty 2008:4). To de-colonize the secularization thesis also suggests going back to the Christian genesis of these European Enlightenment concepts, not throwing them away from our habitual ways of thinking, doing, and seeing. In fact, the refutation of the secular is nothing new to some sociologists, theologians, and philosophers, including Peter Berger (1999), Graham Ward (2014), and Peter Sloterdjik (2013), who all assert, in one way or another, that the secularization thesis is long oversold. Why do theologians such as John Milbank and Simon Oliver claim that secularism is a form of “Christian heresy” and “an ideological distortion of theology” (Oliver 2009:6)? To answer this question, it is important to trace the onto-theological genesis of most social and political theories and their cognate assumptions which evolve into the contemporary contour of sociological knowledge. In Milbank’s theological interpretation of the worldview in the Middle Ages, following St. Augustine of Hippo, much violence and conflict was understood as intrusions into the created order in which peace is ontologically basic. In other words, in the created order, it was peace before the chaos. However, in much modern political thought and social theory, such as the famous “state of nature” hypothesized by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, violence and conflict are seen as basic characteristics of society and nature, and therefore, human beings tame the world by appealing to force and power. Meanwhile, St. Augustine’s theology narrates a different onto-theological perspective. The good–evil dualism is rejected. Good is not the opposite of evil, but evil is understood, theologically, as “privation of good.” In other words, metaphysically speaking, prior to evil, there must be the good; evil is entirely parasitic on the good (Oliver 2009:11–12). Despite the decline of Christianity, the secular world also hinges upon this theological vocabulary in our cultural unconscious. If the theological perspective of Radical Orthodoxy on secularization is considered, the task of de-colonizing Christianity will be given new meanings. First, de-colonization is not about dismissing Christianity as a religion of the Global North. Instead, it expresses reconciliation, and the purpose is to reassert the original good bestowed upon the created order. The history of colonialism is obviously the evil – that is, the privation of good in the Augustinian sense. To de-colonize Christianity carries the painful obligation to confront the traumatic past, itself a gesture of repentance. It also expresses the longing for restoring the good in the created order. This perspective is similar to Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Orwell’s description in Burmese Days that, while under colonialism, nobody could escape unscathed and claim innocence. A socially just world in a de-colonized frame of mind is possible. In addition to becoming skeptical about the knowledge and modernity of the Global North, de-colonization should also espouse a theological dimension – that is, aspire to reclaim the onto-theological goodness. Because of this inherent radicality embedded in Christianity, Christianity is even arguably appealing to fundamentalist and evangelical churches in Africa and Asia, to which we now turn. 160

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A De-colonial Gospel for the “Wretched of the Earth” A vast body of literature calls for more sociological sensibilities in relation to social justice, democracy, human rights, and others in order to imagine a more progressive and relevant Christianity in and for the post-colonial world (Brueggemann 2021; Kwan 2014; Kwok 2005; Segovia and Moore 2006). The attempt here is to contemplate the points on decolonization raised by British theologian Graham Ward. Ward (2017:578) argues that Christian theology faces three challenges in the process of de-colonization. The argument here is that preaching a radical gospel for the “wretched of the earth” in the post-colonial world today should address them systematically. The first step is to work through the traumatic past, especially regarding the historical role of Christianity in colonization. This challenge is inevitably bound up with revisiting colonial “habits of mind, sensibility, and ways of feeling, experiencing and valuing” (Ward 2017:576). Painful questions will arise, and Christians in the post-colonial world need to confront them. Who was oppressed in the past? Who are the newly oppressed? Who are the newly marginalized? Without asking these questions, it is not possible to go forward by way of affirmation, what Nancy Fraser (1995) calls a radical politics of recognition affirming “the diversity of peoples and their experiences of being here” – whether it be Australia, Canada, or South Africa – “with their own histories, politics, economies, solidarities and values” (Ward 2017:578). Ward warns against the “aggressive and opportunistic grabbing of people’s hearts and minds” still present in the missionary zeal of evangelistic Christians. After all, as brutal colonial history has amply shown, the impact of Christianity is always a considerable “mixed bag” – education provided by Christian schools also came with indoctrination, racism, denial of Indigenous cultures, and oppression. The second challenge of de-colonization, argues Ward, lies in the conservative understanding of “tradition” in Christian theology. Following Eric Hobsbawm (1983) and Rowan Williams (1989), Ward argues that Christian tradition is not about “seeking to conserve or preserve in amber,” but “to hand on” (2017:579). Ward emphasizes that there are multiple forms of de-colonization that are already present in Christian traditions, and Christian “tradition” should be orientated toward the future not the past (2017:579). When it comes to traditions as past examples, Ward highlights two aspects. First, traditions are in the past, not the present. Apart from the Creeds, traditions as practiced in Christianity are not written as universal blueprints for what is the case but are “located answers to located questions in located situations” (Ward 2017:573). Second, people handle their interpretations of those past examples as traditions, not the examples as theologians or churches understood them then. It is important to make a distinction between “borrowing and learning from” traditions and “being dependent upon” them (Ward 2017:573). For example, Ward emphasizes that his theology can learn from but cannot rehearse the theology offered by Jürgen Moltmann. Similarly, it is worth asking whether the Westminster Confession of Faith, which was adopted in the 1643 English Parliament and is still embraced by Reformed Presbyterians, is really the “located answers to located questions in located situations” here and now in the third decade of the twenty-first century. To what extent should rigid adherence to this confession of faith be further de-colonized in practice? These uncomfortable and provocative questions are raised not to dismiss the validity of such standard doctrines, but it is worth asking how such distillation of Christian faith may supply adequate reasoning and words of comfort, while outside the church wall, violence is very real. How should the church respond? What does de-colonization mean to the

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faith, practice, and message proclaimed from the pulpit every Sunday morning? There are no standard answers to such questions. In fact, whether it is about the academic sociology taught in the classroom or the practical theology preached in the sanctuary, the third challenge of de-colonization applies equally. The challenge today for the professional and teaching theologian like myself in the academy lies in the fact that universities aspire to be internationally important in the dissemination of universal knowledge. In addition, academics absorb that ambition so that even the aspiration of academic Christian theologians is to have their name in AAR floodlights. I do not believe – I cannot believe – those academics have sold out; but we are certainly owned. What we can do is facilitate; nurturing and educating congregations of lay theologians. (Ward 2017:580) Here, both Christian theologians and sociologists face similar challenges, especially those located in universities in which the culture of performativity and the neoliberal trend is colonizing every aspect of academic lives. To get the message of de-colonial hope beyond the ivory tower is a mammoth obstacle. Meanwhile, lay audiences, who are still barred from knowledge by the invisible paywall no different from Luther’s medieval times, are yearning for “good news” – not the arcane discourse of consumerism but, rather, social justice, hope, and redemption – in short, the Kingdom of God.

Conclusion Christianity is more than a privatized, regulatory faith which ensures our sense of security in liquid modernity through the distribution of all sorts of symbolic boundaries. Through the de-colonial lens, this chapter imagines the unthinkable possibilities inherent in the messages of both sociology and Christianity, freeing our minds, faith, and reason from colonizing bias and structures. More specifically, this chapter limits the discussion of de-colonizing sociology and Christianity three ways. First, it introduces the de-colonial turn of sociology which has been highlighted recently in the work of Connell et. al. Second, it revisits the secularization thesis put forward by classical sociologists such as Weber and Durkheim and argues why it is more appropriate to argue for the return of Christianity, especially in the post-colonial world. Third, it offers brief thoughts on what de-colonization means in academic practice for both Christian sociologists and theologians. To de-colonize Christianity through sociological theory such as Connell’s southern theory is not even about reconciling Christian faith with modernity and re-enacting Thomas Aquinas’s well cited idea of “faith seeking understanding” – a thesis recognized by Karl Barth. It is simply an affirmation which recognizes the experiences of Christianity in the Global South and its social and political struggles and, as such, is more than a privatized faith and cerebral knowledge ensconced in universities.

References Althaus-Reid, Marcella. 2004. The Queer God. New York: Routledge. Bauckham, Richard. 2011. Living with Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.

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De-colonization, Sociology, Christianity Berger, Peter, ed. 1999. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2007. “Sociology and Postcolonialism: Another “Missing“ Revolution?” Sociology 41(5):871–84. Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2014a. Connected Sociologies. London: Bloomsbury. Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2014b. “Contesting Imperial Epistemologies: Introduction.” Journal of Historical Sociology 27(3):293–301. doi: 10.1111/johs.12059. Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2016. “Postcolonial Reflections on Sociology.” Sociology 50(5):960–66. doi: 10.1177/0038038516647683. Bongie, Chris. 2008. Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Brueggemann, Walter. 2021. Delivered Out of Empire. Louisville, KY: Presbyterian Publishing. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2008. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern Theory. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Connell, Raewyn. 2018. “Decolonizing Sociology.” Contemporary Sociology 47(4):399–407. doi: 10.1177/0094306118779811. Dunn, James D. G. 2011. Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Durkheim, Émile. 1977. The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and Development of Secondary Education in France. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fraser, Nancy. 1995. “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a “Post-Socialist“ Age.” New Left Review (I/212):68–93. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Go, Julian. 2013. “For a Postcolonial Sociology.” Theory & Society 42(1):25–55. doi: 10.1007/ s11186-012-9184-6. Go, Julian. 2016. Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “When Was “the Post-Colonial?“ Thinking at the Limit.” Pp. 242–60 in The PostColonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons. London: Routledge. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J., and Terence O. Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Robert Alun. 1999. The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kim, Sebastian C. H., and Kirsteen Kim. 2014. A History of Korean Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kwan, Simon Shui-Man. 2014. Postcolonial Resistance and Asian Theology. Abingdon: Routledge. Kwok, Pui-lan. 2000. Introducing Asian Feminist Theology. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Kwok, Pui-lan. 2005. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. McLaren, Peter, and Petar Jandrić. 2018. “Paulo Freire and Liberation Theology: The Christian Consciousness of Critical Pedagogy.” Vierteljahrsschrift Für Wissenschaftliche Pädagogik 94(2):246–64. doi: 10.30965/25890581-09402006. Mignolo, Walter D. 2010. “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom.” Theory, Culture & Society 26(7/8):159–181. doi: 10.1177/0263276409349275. Milbank, John. 2006. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Moltmann, Jürgen. 1993. Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Oliver, Simon. 2009. “Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: From Participation to Late Modernity.” Pp. 3–27 in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, edited by J. Milbank and S. Oliver. London: Routledge.

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13 THE ETHICS OF GLOBALIZATION Clinton E. Stockwell

Abstract Globalization is the strongest economic and cultural force in the world today. This chapter traces the origins of contemporary globalization to the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 and argues that there are four models of globalization in the post-World War II era: imperialism and the attempts to control economic resources such as oil; neoliberalism, which signifies efforts by trans-national corporations to obtain scarce resources and cheap labor pools worldwide; international development, which is the effort by institutions such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to develop an infrastructure for global capitalism among nations of the Global South; and globalization from below through civil society, labor, and other organizations that represent grassroots constituencies. A more complete view of globalization recognizes its complexity, diversity, and the limits of planetary resources. Given the complex nature of globalization in the contemporary world, this chapter seeks to provide an ethical framework for an alternative view based on the efforts of the United Nations and grassroots organizations to envision a process whereby a more sustainable world might be achieved. Human flourishing is a worthwhile goal, though it cannot be reached unless the flourishing of the earth is also secured by leaders of the family of nations.

The New Global Reality What is globalization, and what ethical responses are required given this new reality? Jeffrey Sachs (2020) writes that there may be seven ages of globalization: the Paleolithic, Neolithic, Equestrian, Classical, Oceanic, Industrial, and Digital ages. Since World War II, the world has transitioned from the Industrial into the Digital Age, and this chapter addresses globalization as a worldwide economic system and process that has evolved over time. After Russia exploded the atomic bomb in 1949, launching the Cold War, a stable post-war world was needed for both economic and political reasons. These events have helped launch globalization for the contemporary world. DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-18

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Much of the structure for contemporary economic globalization was created in what is known as the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944. Bretton Woods, New Hampshire was a small town where leadership from the United States (US), Great Britain, and other northern European powers met to develop the economic and political foundations for the post-war world. The goals of the conference were to establish rules for international trade and to develop structures and institutions to help rebuild Europe. The conference was notable for developing international institutions and agreements to carry out these goals (Steger 2020:39). Bretton Woods also established the gold standard to insure a common valuation among diverse currencies. Since then, the US has assumed geopolitical leadership and given leadership for key institutions to manage this new world, including the United Nations (1945). Under the umbrella of the United Nations, two economic institutions were founded: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help finance reconstruction and development and the World Bank to help manage and organize those transactions. It also helped to set the rules for global commerce with the establishment of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and organizations to extend food and health care resources to civilians after the war, including the Food and Agricultural Organization and the World Health Organization (Sachs 2020:161). In 1995, GATT was replaced by the World Trade Organization (WTO) which would become the “focal point of intense controversy over the design and the effects of economic globalization” (Steger 2020:40). Globalization has become the dominant economic paradigm for the world since World War II. In a narrow sense, globalization is about finance, “the instantaneous flow of finance capital” (Ranney 2002). Jeremy Brecher et al. (2000, 2003) and David Ranney (2002, 2014) argue that globalization is essentially a movement for global capitalist hegemony in the world. They are critical of top-down trans-national efforts to engage in what many call a “race to the bottom,” increasing profits at the expense of low-wage workers and the natural environment. For multi-national corporations, the ability to send economic assets to any part of the globe at the click of a keyboard button is critical to the process. Saskia Sassen (1998) enlarges on this view, arguing that economic globalization is centered in large global cities which are the sites of the over-valorization of corporate capital and further de-valorization of disadvantaged actors, both firms and workers. Sassen’s key work, The Global City (2001), describes the intimate relationship between globalization and urbanization as the cause of the rise and primacy of global cities. In her description, she notes several characteristic themes of contemporary globalization: the global movement of capital, the emergence of a new immigrant workforce, trans-national connections, and the question of borders. Has globalization created a borderless world, or has it encouraged the strengthening and solidification of borders? Arguably, borders mean less to wealthy investors but mean much more to displaced migrant workers. While corporate capital is a major beneficiary of economic globalization, Sassen argues that local firms, workers, and environments are often exploited in the process. She goes on to note that global cities have become, in many respects, the drivers of globalization. If they are not producers of goods as in the past, they are now the command centers and the managers of globalization. As a result, global cities are networked with each other to insure maximum efficiency. Global cities are the hubs of the new world economic system that aligns them with each other. In 2000, Sassen argued that London, New York, and Tokyo were the most dominant global cities in the world, having more in common with each other than with their geographical contexts. Corporate headquarters and their executives 166

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maintain their offices in such places so that they can manage the new world economy and interact with each other across borders. Knowledge workers, technicians, and the “creative class” provide the energy and technical efficiency for such a system. Some have argued that globalization signifies the economic integration of the planet. Thomas Friedman famously described this phenomenon as the creation of a “flat world” dominated by the internet (Friedman 2007). Friedman cited the ever-present cell phone usage in Saudi Arabia and touted the “democratic” impact of the internet as examples of our connectivity (Friedman 1999). But not everyone has access to computer technology, and fewer have broadband technology or high-quality access to 5G which enable faster speeds to allow almost instantaneous communication with the rest of the world. The flow of information has become more important than the movement of goods and products (Castells 1989, 2009). For countries such as the United States, European nations, and Japan, this means the development of a service economy – “producer services” being a name for the technical infrastructure that undergirds this new arrangement (Sassen 2001). However, Joseph Stiglitz and Richard Florida have challenged the notion that the world is flat, as equality is not what has emerged in the world when it comes to internet technology, robotics, or artificial intelligence. Though the world is characterized by the sharing of information, not every place or people are benefiting (Stiglitz 2007). For urban economist Richard Florida, the world is “spiked,” and the major beneficiaries of the internet and other digital technologies are found in the advanced democracies of the Global North, including their larger cities. For Florida, globalization has changed the economic playing field, but it has not leveled it. There is a digital divide so that the global world has more valleys than peaks where information is shared, or capital invested (Florida 2005). Furthermore, Florida argues that the world is represented by three kinds of cities: peaks, hills, and valleys which have “little connection to the global economy and few immediate prospects” (Florida 2005). And even in so-called advanced democracies, not everyone has access to “free” or “lowcost” internet services. So, what is globalization given the complexity of our partially networked world? Manfred Steger characterizes globalization as “a process, a condition, a system, a force and an age” (2020:1). Jeffrey Sachs describes globalization as the “linkages of diverse societies across large geographical areas. These inter-linkages are technological, economic, institutional, cultural, and geopolitical. They include interactions of societies across the world through trade, finance, enterprise migration, culture, empire, and war” (2020:2). Sachs notes the complexity and the totality of globalization that, in many ways, connects us to all that we are and do as a human species and more. For Sachs, the key aspects of globalization are its linkages and the technological means by which those linkages are maintained. However, there clearly is resistance to aspects of economic globalization. Muslim dominated states in the Middle East resist and reject efforts by the West to colonize and dominate their lands to gain access to oil. China resents the United States and other nations challenging them for their human rights abuses. Russia seeks to carve out its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and in the Mediterranean world to combat what it perceives to be an encirclement of its nation by Western nations, especially Europe via NATO and the United States. Countries such as Iran and North Korea seek to maintain their independence and what some would argue their rogue status, as they strive to maintain their own more localized hegemonies. There are some authors who argue that the world is not at all unified and is not wellintegrated as a single economy. Rather than uniformity or conformity to the West, global 167

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actors are actually very diverse, and their connections to globalization varied. They argue that there is a contest between those who advance globalization and those who seek to protect their own culture, nation, and religious or political ideology that seems to be under siege. Globalization appears to be a form of Westernization, or what George Ritzer called “McDonaldization” (Ritzer and Dean 2021). Others argue that we are faced with a competition for empire or a clash of civilizations (Huntington 2011). Benjamin Barber assumes a binary approach to globalization in his work, Jihad versus McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy (1995). These are not mere friendly disagreements. Among environmentalists, David Korten (2006) argues that there are two competing visions of globalization, empire and earth community, with the basic difference being the ability of civil society to cooperate or compete. More sharply, Korten argues that the essence of the fight, with respect to globalization and the future of democracy, is summed up as a conflict between “the money world” and “the living world” (Korten 1998). These notions give useful context and help frame the issue for research purposes. Their arguments are not wrong, though, perhaps, partial and incomplete and may miss the complexity of the multi-faceted nature of globalization. Some writers such as Bob Goudzwaard wonder if there might be a third way, a process that would be positive. For Goudzwaard, a respected economist in the Christian tradition, the question “is not whether faith leaders should be for or against globalization. Instead, the question is, ‘What kind of globalization should we be supporting?’” (2001). There is a vast amount of literature that presents a case for a “global ethic” that supports justice, economic sustainability, peace, and the just distribution of food and the world’s goods (Kung 1991, 1998). There may be other ways of looking at globalization, but we are still subject to the “powers that be,” whether those be nationstates or global corporations. Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2021) argues that given the complexity of globalization in our time and the fate of the earth, we must consider the integrity of our connections. We are all inter-connected to the point that there can be no effective “anti-globalization” movement. The phenomenon is so pervasive that it may be a matter of coping or adapting to the rolling tide. The question is rather what kind of globalization is best for people and the planet? What kind of globalization do we want? Resistance to Western style, corporate-led, economic globalization assumes and establishes an alternative set of connections. Resistance strategies challenge the political power of nation-states and the role of multi-national businesses operating in a neoliberal context. The Saudis and other nations belonging to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) may dislike the incursion of the West in the Middle East, but their wealth is based on selling oil to advanced nations, including the United States and European nations. Despite Russia’s war with Ukraine and veiled threats to the United States and Europe, it remains a leading source of oil for Europe, India, and many other parts of the world. It also seeks to control and influence the grain trade to Europe and other parts of the world as well. As much as China conflicts with the United States over trade policy, intellectual property rights, and human rights, the United States remains a debtor nation to China, and corporations such as Apple and Walmart are dependent upon Chinese factory labor and their lower costs of production. Reactions to globalization in these countries are more about political and economic power and the ability to control both financial and commodity flows and their prices. They seek to accommodate to globalization under their own terms. Nederveen Pieterse argues that “contemporary accelerated globalization” combines radical changes in “technology, economics, finance, international institutions, culture and 168

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politics, along with travel, social and everyday life changes” (2021:32). Contemporary globalization has now become a “fluid network of intersecting nationalisms, regionalism, international institutions, and interest groups [which] is neither flat nor spiked, but is the interplay of worlds that … makes for a spaghetti bowl of crisscrossing networks [that] cannot be modeled” (Nederveen Pieterse 2021:32–33). Because of the nature of an interconnected world, it is probable that the complexity of the networks and connections that make for globalization cannot be reversed. There may be moments of de-acceleration and acceleration, but technology, trade, commerce, and the internet mean that our destinies are intertwined. Like it or not, all living beings relate to each other and the planet in an everevolving system. In such a system, there is no grand theory or Archimedean point. The parts of the system, however fractured at any point in history, do not explain the whole or the direction of our inter-connected global future. The “whole” includes worldwide connectivity with a contested global consciousness about what it all means. Such global entanglements, despite fundamentalist religious resistance or emergent nationalisms, cannot be disengaged from the whole system. Seeing the whole is difficult, but not seeing the whole may be even more difficult. For Nederveen Pieterse, globalization is a vast, though sometimes tense and fractured, network. It is a complexity of connections. Nederveen Pieterse describes a very complex, pluralistic, conflicting, competing, dynamic of change toward even greater connectivity. “Connectivity is the mainstream of human evolution and history. Every significant development involves connectivity. Globalization (no matter the start time) refers to widening and deepening connectivity and thus a wider socially accessible database” (Nederveen Pieterse 2021:194). Obviously, such a process invites resistance. These include resistance by right-wing populists, nationalists, fundamentalists, tribalists, anti-globalists, and local disputes regarding the rights of labor and of the environment. For Nederveen Pieterse, the conflicts over the meaning and process of globalization are illustrative of our diversity and our ever-growing connectivity.

Types of Globalization Since World War II, four broad movements have sought to claim their version of globalization. These include globalization by imperial reach or neocolonialism, globalization by private multi-national corporations, globalization as social development, and globalization by civil society organizations. The latter incorporates a wide variety of people’s movements for justice, equity, and global solidarity. Not all globalization is spurred by multi-national corporations; much of it is financed and led by nation states. This is true given the history of European colonization and the consequences of the Bretton Wood conference and the Marshall Plan for our time. As mentioned earlier, much of contemporary globalization was defined and executed by the United States in partnership with other nations from the Global North. The creation of the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO are institutions developed by the collaboration of nationstates. Today the United States has been accused of neocolonialism because of its efforts at effecting regime change in states such as Guatemala (1954), Iraq (1954), and Indonesia (1965). It has also been very active in securing and protecting oil reserves in the Middle East, though on foreign lands traditionally owned and occupied by other nations and peoples, often without their consent. 169

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In a complicated world, due to the economic and political consequences of World War II, European nations were not able to maintain control and investment in the colonies it controlled in Africa, Western Asia, or the Middle East. The result was de-colonization that stripped the British Empire, Germany, France, and Spain of their colonies and their place in the global power hierarchy, and since World War II, the United States has emerged as the major force of economic globalization worldwide. Nonetheless, countries in the Global South have organized recently in WTO discussions to gain concessions from the United States and European powers regarding subsides and unfair competition in the world (SCM Agreement of 1999) and to gain financial assistance to deal with climate change that effects poorer countries, much of which was created by wealthier nations of the Global North (World Trade Report 2022). The OPEC nations today represent efforts by oil-producing states to protect their interests from exploitation by nations of the Global North. In addition to the role of nation states and trade agreements, private corporations are engaged heavily in advancing a version of globalization that feeds their profits. Neoliberalism has emerged from the activities of multi-national or trans-national private corporations who have sought to control the extraction, manufacture, and distribution of goods including oil, coffee, fruit, lumber, and the many other products located in countries of the Global South. Multi-national corporations do not operate in a vacuum. Most of them are based in countries of the Global North, and they seek to influence policies set by nation-states such as the United States or Britain, or from global lending institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, or the WTO. Corporations seek to be free of regulations, taxes, or responsibility to the nations where they conduct business. The IMF uses “structural adjustment programs” to both lend and control the development of poorer nations’ economic infrastructure which benefits the role of multi-national firms. While trans-national businesses seek to minimize the enforcement of regulations, both nation-states and trans-national business corporations often seek help from a third source, the social development policies of global organizations such as the World Bank or the IMF. These entities seem to assist nations in the Global South through the lending of capital but often with accompanying indebtedness. This approach is criticized for paternalistically and bureaucratically using the expertise and resources from the Global North to create a compatible infrastructure for trade. “Foreign direct investment” is used by these groups to further their own economic interests, but they are not actually investments in the countries but the activities of the investors. So, these resources do not really assist the countries directly but render them incapable of protecting their own resources, labor rights, and environmental assets. “A key feature of foreign direct investment is that it establishes effective control of the foreign business or at least substantial influence over its decision making” (Hayes 2022). Doris Brodeur summarizes the plight of nations in the Global South upon receiving capital assistance from the Global North as follows: The hierarchical and bureaucratic structures of institutions that promote social development [policy] rely heavily on “experts” at the expense of genuine models of shared partnership working toward development goals generated by local communities. This approach generates a social ethic of paternalism that undermines democratic participation. (2012)

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The final model or force for controlling or influencing the direction of globalization is done by civil society organizations, Indigenous tribes, workers, and by residents and leadership from nations in the Global South. This civil society category includes a wide range of actors and peoples who resist top-down, statist, neoliberal, or developmental models of globalization as orchestrated and promoted by powerful nations and institutions that control the investment capital which has often exploited the labor, resources, and lands of the Global South. A cacophony of voices that seek to reform these efforts includes many in the Global North who sympathize with the rights of labor, Indigenous persons, and peoples in the Global South and are committed to environmental health and sustainability without the abuse and exploitation by privatized interests of the Global North. Efforts to steer globalization toward justice and sustainability for all the people of the planet are captured well in an eco-justice model. Rebecca Todd Peters summarizes this discussion well as follows: A democratization of power for the “two thirds” world demands a rearrangement of the present political structures that guide the work of the World Trade Organization and the Bretton Woods institutions, and it also necessitates a rethinking of capitalist ideologies that drive these institutions (2004:187). An alternative to “top-down” approaches to globalization includes a “triple bottom line” (Stiglitz 2007). This perspective argues that while profits are legitimate, they should be combined with concerns for the rights of workers and their environments. The devastating inequality and environmental degradation wrought by the dominant forms of globalization make it clear that a healthy and sustainable life on this planet requires a transformation of dominant ideologies as well as the sustainable habits and lifestyles of the global elite. (Peters 2004:208) The four types of globalization discussed here – empire, neoliberalism, social development, and eco-justice/civil society – must be evaluated with respect to human rights and environmental sustainability. An ethic for contemporary globalization must seek to balance the needs of human beings with ecological limits and planetary boundaries. To this end, Steger (2020) provides a sharp contrast between “market globalism” and “justice globalism.” For Steger, the five claims of market globalism are that globalization is about “the liberalization of global integration of markets,” that globalization “is inevitable and irreversible,” that “no one oversees globalization,” that “globalization benefits everyone,” and that globalization “furthers the spread of democracy around the world” (2020:114). On the other hand, those who argue for justice globalization have five demands. They mandate a global “Marshall Plan” that includes forgiveness of third world debt, … a tax on international financial institutions to benefit the Global South, … the abolition of offshore financial centers that offer tax havens for wealthy individuals and corporations, … stringent global environmen-

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tal agreements, … and the implementation of a more equitable global development agenda (2020:119) These are worthy goals that would allow for economic betterment while protecting the rights of labor and maintaining the health of the environment. What ethical policies and practices are needed that might secure a world that is habitable for all living beings? What will it take for more equitable human flourishing and a more sustainable eco-system to be realized? These goals are inseparable and inter-dependent.

Ethics for a More Connected World There is a legitimate debate as to whether globalization is succeeding, and various arguments for and against are presented. On the positive side, globalization does the following well: it accelerates growth, including that of nations in the Global South; increases the standard of living; benefits the consumer with a great variety of products and services; increases employment and wages; lifts millions out of poverty; protects human rights; fosters the growth of democratic governments; and increases life expectancy, literacy, health, and leisure. But there are also strong critiques of globalization that must be considered. According to some scholars, the following are detriments of top-down versions of globalization. Globalization subjects the peoples of the world to financial crises and poverty in the name of corporate greed. It results in job loss in the Global North, and the creation of low wage jobs in the Global South. It exploits local environments, increases inequality, abuses worker rights, and subjects nations of the Global South to severe trade debts due to its financial lending practices. It contributes to global warming and often results in human bondage and slavery. It threatens the sovereignty of nations and the public health of its citizens. Finally, it undermines local economies and the social fabric of agricultural and urban societies (Batterson and Weidenbaum 2001). Most, if not all these arguments are still employed today by both proponents and critics of globalization. Given the dynamics of climate change, the consequences of ongoing war, the increase in displaced persons, the escalating environmental issues, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is desperate for a path to a better future. What might be some ethical issues that are relevant to the study and practice of globalization and the growing interconnectivity of the world? The following summarizes a range of alternatives for globalization by both Christian and secular scholars, including Hans Kung (1991, 1993, 1998), a Roman Catholic ecumenical theologian, and Jeffrey Sachs (2020), a contributor to both the Millennium Development Goals (2000) and Sustainable Development Goals (2015) adopted by the United Nations. Kung wrote several compelling works arguing for “a global ethic” from an ecumenical tradition, and theologians Max Stackhouse (2001), Peter Berger (2002), and others explored how faith communities should live in a pluralistic, global society. Sachs and the writers of Earth for All from the “Club of Rome” take a more secular perspective, as they evaluate the state of the earth and its links to the global economy. From an ethical point of view, the question is “what ought to be done?” This sense of “oughtness” raises the question of our duty and responsibility to the world. What should we do to encourage the advancement of human well-being and flourishing for human and all living beings? Second, what ought to be done to ensure the sustainability and flourishing of the planet itself? Human flourishing is inter-connected with the well-being of the planet 172

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and its ability to heal and renew itself over time. If a “new world is possible,” this new world must secure the ability of humans to maintain connections with each other and with the bounty of the earth. Brodeur argues that the earthism idea of human flourishing extends beyond a narrow vision of human well-being to a conception of human flourishing as possible only within the larger context of sustainability. In other words, human life can be understood to be flourishing only when the whole of creation is flourishing. (2012) There have been numerous declarations that have sought to advance this perspective. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 sought to establish a long list of rights for human beings, including the rights to life, shelter, work, food, education, and security. Article 25 reads: Everyone has a right to standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his (or her) control. (Cited in Sullivan and Kymlikca 2007:217) However, the Declaration of Rights did not incorporate the rights of the planet or an emphasis on sustainability. The religious inter-faith community met in 1993 as the World’s Parliament of Religions and developed a “Declaration Toward a Global Ethic” to demonstrate universal religious commitment to the pursuit of human flourishing in the context of a flourishing planet. As Steger observed, “cultures steeped in Taost, Buddhist, and various animist religions often emphasize the interdependence of all living beings” (2020:96). Most religious traditions, including the three great monotheistic traditions, seek a delicate balance between planetary boundaries and human needs. Many religious leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Dalai Lama have expressed commitments to non-violence, a respect for life, solidarity with the poor, tolerance, truthfulness, and a commitment to equal rights, including gender equality. “Each one of us depends on the welfare of all. Therefore, the dominance of humanity over nature and the cosmos must not be encouraged. Instead, we must cultivate living in harmony with nature and the cosmos” (Cited in Sullivan and Kymlicka 2007:240). In 2000, an Earth Charter, which pursued an international commitment to sustainable development, was approved by the United Nations World Commission on the Environment and Development. The four pillars of the Earth Charter included 1) respect and care for the community of life, 2) ecological integrity, 3) social and economic justice, and 4) democracy, non-violence, and peace. Though a remarkable statement, the United Nations has not been able to achieve these ends. Steger connects globalization with just demands for the ethical sustainability of the planet: “Climate change and global warming are not only merely environmental or scientific issues. They are economic, political, cultural, but above all, ethical issues that have been expanded and intensified by the process of globalization” (2020:106). This view must address the key economic challenges facing humans and their planetary environment, including the persistence of deep poverty, gross social inequality, 173

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the achievement of justice and agency for women, and the creation of a food system that is healthy for both humans and the eco-system by transitioning to clean energy (DixsonDecleve et al. 2022:5). In 2015, the United Nations achieved the far-reaching Paris Climate Action Accords, which was signed by more than 170 nations, including the Republic of China. Also in 2015, the United Nations established 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Armed with these tools, global leadership is needed. These are achievable goals, and the 2030 timeline is reasonable, but it will take collaboration by a global earth community, including the world’s largest nations and their leaders.

A Concluding Framework of Ethical Practice A framework called doughnut economics has been developed by economist Kate Raworth (2017) to convey the delicate balance between the needs of human beings and the capacity of the earth to remain livable. This perspective, which has attracted attention around the world, provides two circles that must be kept in balance if we are to pursue a more sustainable eco-system. These include an outward circle that defines planetary boundaries and an inward circle that defines basic human needs. The challenge is to keep planetary boundaries and human needs in balance with each other. The outer circle contains several dangers to the planet that are problematic if not controlled. These include the nine components of ozone layer depletion, climate change, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, freshwater withdrawals, land conversion, biodiversity loss, and air pollution (2017:38). Raworth argues that we have serious overshoots in many of these categories; our earth’s life-giving systems are under unprecedented stress because we have seriously transgressed at least four planetary boundaries (Raworth 2017:44). These include climate change, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, land conversion, and biodiversity loss. The inner circle identifies key elements for human well-being and flourishing which, if insufficient, create security and health risks for humans and other life forms. These include human needs for water, food, health, education, income and work standards, peace, justice, having a political voice (democratization), social equity, gender equality, housing, social networks, and energy. Notably, many of these issues were first listed in the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. Raworth (2017) argues that we need new economic systems that are designed to distribute needed resources while respecting planetary boundaries, given the limited capacities for re-generation and re-use of scarce ecological resources on a dwindling planet (Raworth 2017). Jeffrey Sachs (2020) argues that both faith and secular leaders must agree on pursuing three particular global goals for the future. First, faith leaders from each of the world’s religions share some form of the golden rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” assumes the pursuit of equality, mutual respect, and care for each other. All people and all living forms have a right to exist and flourish. Second, Sachs argues for pursuit of the “preferential option for the poor,” which is adopted from liberation theology in Latin America. A global ethic must consider the needs of the most vulnerable in our society, and it must uphold universal human rights that “requires that each person in society have the economic means to meet basic needs” (Sachs 2020:212). Third, Sachs argues that we must pursue all means at our disposal to protect creation, meaning “the physical earth on which our own survival, and that of millions of other species, depends” (Sachs 2020:212).

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There are many globalizations, but only one path that is just and sustainable. Many scholars, leaders, and institutions have defined the many problems and challenges we face, many of which are a consequence of our economic system. They have laid out reasonable and achievable goals for the future. These goals recognize a common journey and a common faith, and though it does not mean the end of our differences, it does support the need for our respectful connections and interactions with all forms of life over the long term. A new world is possible, but human flourishing is not only dependent upon each other, it is inter-connected and inter-dependent with the sustainable flourishing of the earth for all its living species (Sachs 2020:212).

References Barber, Benjamin. 1995. Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet is Both Falling Apart and Coming Together, and What This Means for Democracy. New York: Random House. Batterson, Robert, and Murray L. Weidenbaum. 2001. “The Pros and Cons of Globalization.” Center for the Study of American Business, Washington University in St. Louis. Berger, Peter, ed. 2002. Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World. New York: Oxford University Press. Brecher, Jeremy, et al., eds. 2000. Globalization From Below: The Power of Solidarity. New York: South End Press. Brecher, Jeremy, et al., eds. 2003. Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order. New York: South End Press. Brodeur, Doris R. 2012. “The Ethics of Globalization.” Proceedings of the 8th International CDIO Conference. Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Castells, Manuel. 1989. The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process. London: Basil Blackwell. Castells, Manuel. 2009. The Rise of the Network Society. London: Blackwell. Dixson-Decleve, Sandrine, et al. 2022. Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers. Florida, Richard. 2005. “The World is Spiky: Globalization Has Changed the Economic Playing Field, But Hasn’t Leveled It.” Atlantic Monthly. October 1. Friedman, Thomas. 1999. The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Friedman, Thomas. 2007. The World is Flat 3.O: A Brief History of the 21st Century. New York: Picador. Goudzwaard, Bob. 2001. Globalization and the Kingdom of God. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House. Hayes, Adam. 2022. “Direct Foreign Investment: What it is, Types, and Examples.” Investopedia. Sept 2. www​.investopedia​.com. Huntington, Samuel P. 2011. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Korten, David C. 1998. Globalizing Civil Society: Reclaiming Our Right to Power. New York: Seven Stories Press. Korten, David C. 2006. The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. San Francisco: Kumarian Press. Kung, Hans. 1991. Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic. New York: Crossroads. Kung, Hans. 1993. A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. New York: Continuum. Kung, Hans. 1998. A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics. New York: Oxford University Press. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. 2021. Connectivity and Global Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Peters, Rebecca Todd. 2004. In Search of the Good Life: The Ethics of Globalization. New York: Continuum Press.

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Clinton E. Stockwell Ranney, David. 2002. Global Decisions: Local Collisions: Urban Life in the New World Order. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ranney, David. 2014. The New World Disorder: The Decline of U.S. Power. Scotts Valley, CA: Create Space. Raworth, Kate. 2017. Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Ritzer, George and Paul Dean. 2021. Globalization: A Basic Text. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2020. The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions. New York: Columbia University Press. Sassen, Saskia. 1998. Globalization and its Discontents. New York: The New Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2000. Cities in a World Economy. Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City, 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stackhouse, Max., ed. 2001. God and Globalization: Christ and the Dominions of Civilization. New York: Bloomsbury. Steger, Manfred B. 2020. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Stiglitz, Joseph. 2007. Making Globalization Work. New York: W.W. Norton. Sullivan, William M. and Will Kymlicka, eds. 2007. The Globalization of Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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14 ETHICS AND SOCIETY A Theory of Comparative Worldviews Tong Zhang

Abstract This chapter outlines a theist social science paradigm. The central thesis, derived from the assumption of an omnibenevolent and powerful God, is the law of divine selection. It states that the motives of people, or the worldviews they adopt, fundamentally determine their society’s organization and evolution. In particular, the more hedonic or Nietzscheist a society is, the less progressed it will be, and the more ascetic a society is, the more progressed it will be. This provides a consistent and parsimonious explanation of many puzzles in macro-historical studies, among them the Great Divergence between the West and China, the sudden eruption of the two World Wars, and the religious distribution of Nobel laureates.

Revisiting Methodological Atheism in Social Science One of the core dogmas in modern social science is methodological atheism, which maintains that “all scientific explanation must be this-worldly, never referencing supernatural or transcendental realities” (Porpora 2006:57). Until the second half of the nineteenth century, social scientists were free to use expressions such as “it is not necessary that God himself should speak in order that we may discover the unquestionable signs of his will” (de Tocqueville 1840:8). However, since the beginning of the twentieth century, any social scientist who dares to speak in favor of God in their research will be quickly declared the enemy of science and ostracized from the scientific community, as evidenced by the tragic fate of Arnold Toynbee (McIntire and Perry 1989), the famous British historian who claimed that “human affairs are recalcitrant to laws of Nature” (Toynbee 1961:609) and that history is “a vision of God’s creation on the move” (Toynbee 1987b:350). The most common reason for excluding theism from social science is the positivist attack that the concept of God is transcendental and non-falsifiable and, consequently, fails to qualify as an object for scientific studies. However, such an argument is based on a deeply flawed understanding of the nature of science (and human knowledge in general). No scientific theory can permit falsifiability for each of its elements because a scientific theory is DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-19

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“a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edge” (Quine 1951:39). Even the most commonly known scientific concepts, such as force, magnetism, and genes, are non-falsifiable “cultural posits” to work “a manageable structure into the flux of experience” and, epistemologically, differ from God “only in degree and not in kind” (Quine 1951:41). Secularists’ only epistemologically valid argument for excluding God from social science is that, as a cultural posit, it is less efficacious than other social science concepts such as subconsciousness, institutions, and economic fundamentals for rationalizing human nature and social evolution. This chapter shows that this viewpoint is also untenable and that a monotheist God can serve as the core concept of a promising social science paradigm which can answer many historical and sociological grand questions in a particularly parsimonious manner. God is commonly portrayed as the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent creator, enjoyer (bearer of meaning), and controller of the universe or a being that possesses a subset of these attributes. Such a being, if it exists, will undoubtedly affect the course of human affairs. In particular, it must, in some way, reward virtue and punish evil in the material world (Plantinga 1974; Swinburne 1998). Like the physical concept of force, which can only deliver testable implications when combined with definitions such as velocity, acceleration, and mass, theories such as Newton’s laws, and auxiliary statements about the properties of physical objects, the concept of God cannot deliver testable implications by itself. Therefore, to (re)introduce the concept of God into social science to build a theist research paradigm, we need to specify the necessary auxiliary concepts and statements about humans and human society. This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part concerns metaphysical constructions. Propositions 1 and 2 discuss the definition of God, auxiliary definitions such as good and evil, and auxiliary theories about the will and power of God. The logical implication of Propositions 1 and 2 is Proposition 3, which is a law of social evolution named the law of divine selection. In contrast to materialistic laws of social evolution, such as historical materialism and social Darwinism, it posits that the fundamental determinant of social evolution is the motive, or more generally worldview, of people rather than any material conditions. The second part generates empirical statements from Proposition 3 about the properties of various human actions and societies. Topics include what human actions can be derived from the will of humans in contrast to the will of God; the construction of ideal types of worldview, social progress, technology, and institutions; and the social consequences of worldviews. Finally, Proposition 3 is applied empirically to resolve several puzzles in macrohistorical studies, including the Great Divergence between the West and China (Weber 1915; Needham 1969; Pomeranz 2000), the sudden eruption of the two World Wars after the “greatest age of peace in Europe’s history” (Palmer, Colton, and Lloyd 2002), and the religious distribution of Nobel laureates in science (Berry 1981).

Morals and the Law of Divine Selection Throughout this chapter, God is considered narrowly as an omnibenevolent ruler who has the will and power to reward those who serve it and punish those who do not. This idea is formalized by two propositions. The first states that, for humans, motives can only come from three sources: their body, their genes, or God. 178

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Morality and the Will and Power of God Proposition 1 (The nature of morals) Any human action is teleological and is driven by one or more of the three fundamental motives: the hedonic motive, the survival motive, and the sacrificial motive, for which the hedonic motive comes from the body, the survival motive comes from the genes, and the sacrificial motive comes from God.

• The hedonic motive drives humans to pursue pleasure. • The survival motive drives humans to pursue power, which is defined as the ability to acquire life-sustaining resources.

• The sacrificial motive drives humans to sacrifice the pursuit of pleasure and power. Proposition 1 posits that humans differ from animals in nature in the sense that humans’ meaning of life is more than their body and genes. It rejects the secularist claim that humans differ from animals only in acquired characteristics, such as intelligence, technology, and institutions, but not in nature. Proposition 1 implies that right and wrong, good and evil, and virtue and vice can only be defined by the motive. The desire to satisfy other earthly entities beside the body and the genes, such as a nation-state, a religious leader, the natural environment, liberty, or justice, can always be traced back to the three basic motives. Worldview can be defined as an answer to the ultimate teleological questions: “What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of our existence?” (Kalberg 2004:140). Because human actions are always teleological, all humans hold a worldview, regardless of whether they consciously contemplate it. The second proposition posits that God is an omnibenevolent ruler who has the power to reward virtue and punish evil. Here, virtue and evil are defined with respect to the sacrificial motive; an individual or society that follows the sacrificial motive is virtuous, and an individual or society that follows the hedonic or survival motive is evil. Proposition 2 (The will and power of God)

• God wants humans to be virtuous – that is, to serve God rather than pursue pleasure and power.

• God wants and has the ability to reward the virtuous with more pleasure and power and punish the evil with less pleasure and power.

If God has both the will and power to reward virtue and punish evil in the material world, God’s will must manifest materially in human history. Assuming God possesses the attributes specified in Propositions 1 and 2, the question is whether we can derive a law-like rule for the manifestation of God’s will in human affairs. To prepare for this discussion, we term an individual or society that follows the hedonic motive hedonic, one that follows the survival motive Nietzscheist, and one that follows the sacrificial motive ascetic. What then is the reward and punishment law that can be deduced from Propositions 1 and 2?

The Law of Divine Selection The first possibility is to reward the virtuous individually with more pleasure and power and punish the evil with less pleasure and power, as in the adage that “Good will be rewarded 179

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with good, and evil with evil.” However, such a rule is self-defeating. If virtue is always rewarded with pleasure and power, it does not remain virtuous, because virtue is the voluntary renouncement of individual pleasure and power. The same goes for evil. To ensure that virtue and evil are genuine, an individual must receive less pleasure and power should they choose virtue over evil. This must also hold in any alternative worlds in which an individual’s existence is hypothesized to continue in some form after death. Because an individual receives less pleasure and power by being virtuous and more pleasure and power by being evil, God’s reward for virtue and punishment for evil must be delivered to other individuals. Consequently, for a society of individuals, the more virtuous it is, the more likely it will receive more pleasure and power, and the more evil it is, the more likely it will receive less pleasure and power. This statement is probabilistic because one society’s choice between good and evil will have consequences for another society. Reward for virtue and punishment for evil only hold strictly for the entirety of humankind throughout history. The above analysis is key to this chapter. In our world, though the virtuous are rewarded collectively, they are punished individually; though the evil are punished collectively, they are rewarded individually. The world is, thus, an altar on which the individual sacrifices of the virtuous are collectively rewarded and the individual sacrileges of the evil are collectively punished. Said alternatively, for humans to prosper, the virtuous must sacrifice themselves to redeem the sacrileges of the evil. God’s reward and punishment law can be summarized as follows: Proposition 3 (The law of divine selection)





1. For an individual, the more hedonic they are, the more pleasure they can expect; the more Nietzscheist they are, the more power they can expect; the more ascetic they are, the less pleasure and power they can expect. 2. For a society, Number 1 is partially reversed: the more hedonic it is, the less pleasure it is likely to acquire; the more Nietzscheist it is, the less power it is likely to acquire; the more ascetic it is, the more pleasure and power it is likely to acquire. This uncertainty gradually disappears with increased size of the society and over time. 3. For the entirety of humankind, Number 1 is completely reversed: the more hedonic we are, the less pleasure we will acquire; the more Nietzscheist we are, the less power we will acquire; the more ascetic we are, the more pleasure and power we will acquire.

Significantly, Proposition 3 challenges two core dogmas of modern social science: 1) materialism or functionalism, because it claims that, rather than the material conditions, the meanings of life or worldviews of the people of a society fundamentally determine its evolution, and b) Darwinism, because it claims that human society progresses by individuals sacrificing their pleasure and power rather than by individuals fighting each other for survival (power). This proposition supports Weber’s interpretive sociology, which places the study of humans’ perceived meaning of life at the center of social studies (Weber 1905; 1920). It also formalizes Toynbee’s hypothesis that “history was a theodicy in which progress was measured by an awareness of God” (Perry 1989:101) and that the study of material factors should be subordinate to the study of religious factors. The third statement of Proposition 3 is a comparative historical statement concerning the comparative development of different societies with a sufficiently large scale and a sta180

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ble combination of the motives of their people. This means the comparative development of civilizations (Toynbee 1987a; 1987b; Huntington 1996) provides the most straightforward test of Proposition 3. However, before moving on to empirical studies, more auxiliary statements about the morality derived from the three basic motives must be specified and a theoretical scheme to classify the worldviews of civilizations proposed.

Pleasure, Power, and Sacrifice Proposition 1 states that humans must choose to serve one or more of their body, their genes, and God, without which their life will be meaningless. To establish its validity, we show that the three basic motives can rationalize most of, if not all, human actions. We first examine what human actions can be derived from each of the three basic motives and then what actions can be derived from their combinations.

Pleasure Humans have a natural tendency to seek pleasure, a broad class of enjoyable mental states, and avoid pain. Pleasure and pain can take numerous distinct forms. For this analysis, it will suffice to note two characteristics of pleasure without providing a complete characterization. The first characteristic is that the body does not distinguish between reality and mental illusion. Because it takes less pain to gather material resources than to achieve illusions, the body instructs the person to indulge in intoxicating, addictive substances and behaviors and avoid repetitive tasks beyond those which satisfy basic biological needs. Consequently, a hedonist cannot be productive. The second characteristic is compassion (Hume 1751). Other people’s sufferings can cause pain to oneself, so the body will generally not drive one to hurt others. However, because the body is the ultimate enjoyer of pleasure, neither will it drive one to sacrifice oneself for other people. A hedonist’s actions can be summarized adequately as debauchery, which is to actively pursue pleasure, idleness, and cowardice and passively avoid pain. This means that a hedonist is useless and mostly harmless; they will neither do great good nor commit great evil. They will neither facilitate nor directly impede social progress and will be quickly eliminated and forgotten in any society.

Power Humans also have a natural tendency to seek power or the ability to acquire more material resources. This is because genes need as many host bodies as possible to multiply themselves, and their host bodies need resources to survive (Dawkins 1976). Because life-supporting resources are limited, genes instruct their hosts to dominate the hosts of other genes to achieve their maximal chance of survival. This survival motive can also be termed the conquering motive, the instinct to dominate, or the will to power (Nietzsche 1887). A person who follows the survival motive is a Nietzscheist. Animals acquire resources by exploiting nature and other animals. Their means of exploitation include seduction to breed many offspring, adaptation to avoid harm, and conquest to appropriate resources from others. These animal behaviors can be summarized in three categories: (conspicuous) waste, deception, and violence – examples being coloration, parasitism, and predation. Due to the efficiency of exploitation, an individual animal’s power181

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seeking is always detrimental to the animal kingdom as a whole. For example, peacocks gain individually with their beautiful tails but have a better chance of collective survival by not wasting energy to sustain them. The same conflict between individual and collective survival can be observed in human societies. Like in the animal kingdom, waste, dishonesty, and violence are more evolutionarily advantageous actions than honest work. As Nietzsche pointed out, the will to power implies that to refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation, and put one’s will on par with that of other … is a Will to the denial of life, a principle of dissolution and decay ... life is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation. (1886:88–89) Waste includes individual actions that gain the performer an evolutionary advantage at the expense of social efficiency without directly hurting other people – examples being wearing cosmetics, fine-dressing, and learning social skills. Dishonesty includes individual actions to appropriate other people’s resources without explicit physical coercion, such as fraud, deception, adultery, and stealing. Violence includes individual actions to appropriate other people’s resources with explicit physical coercion, such as murder, robbery, imprisonment, and torture.

Sacrifice The body seeks pleasure, and the genes seek power. God wants individuals to sacrifice bodily pleasure and evolutionary advantage and to abstain from hedonic actions such as debauchery, idleness, and cowardice as well as Nietzscheist activities such as waste, dishonesty, and violence. Instead, God wants individuals to pursue abstinence, diligence, courage, thrift, honesty, and non-violence. A person who follows the sacrificial motive is an ascetic. The task now is to determine in more detail the actions demanded by God. The method used here is disqualification. Considering the entire set of human actions, if an action can only serve the purpose of individual sensual gratification or power-seeking, it is not ascetic and is, thus, disqualified. This procedure identifies three broad categories of ascetic actions: learning, working, and protecting. The first category is learning, as the existence and will of God can only be understood from the philosophical abstraction of natural phenomena, human nature, and social evolution. Ascetics face two problems if they lack scientific and philosophical knowledge. First, their determination will be tempted by earthly pleasure and power and shattered by earthly pain and vicissitude. Second, they will misinterpret the will of God, which can lead to severe destruction or, equivalently, divine punishment because ascetics are collectively rewarded with great power. The second category is honest work, which is evolutionarily disadvantageous compared with waste, dishonesty, and violence. Working efficiently requires the study of practical knowledge and techniques distinct from the knowledge coveted by Nietzscheists, which is about how to impress, socialize, manipulate, cheat, intimidate, and kill effectively. 182

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The third category is protection. Humans are born evil, so the evil in humankind can never be completely eradicated. There will always be some people who are ready to hurt others for self-interests. An ascetic needs to protect others from the harm of Nietzscheists by using persuasion or coercion. The former can be used at any time, while the latter is used only against unambiguous evil.

Ideal Types of Worldviews A human’s choice between power, pleasure, and sacrifice cannot be altered by material conditions; evil and virtue simply have different manifestations under different material conditions. Only a change in worldview or perceived meaning of life can change someone’s choice between the three basic motives. Knowledge about worldviews is primarily found in traditional religions and quasi-religious secular philosophies. Because human motives can only be hedonic, survivalist, or sacrificial, a worldview is always a combination of three ideal types: hedonism, Nietzscheism, and asceticism, each of which encourages the pursuit of one of the three basic motives. This section characterizes the ideal types of worldviews and classifies some major historical and contemporary worldviews.

Hedonism Hedonism encourages the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, typically describing the world as a playground for sensual gratification. It can be classified into weak, intermediate, or strong, depending on how strongly it emphasizes the pursuit of pleasure. Weak hedonism typically justifies sensual gratification with non-hedonic motives, such as claiming that it is the source of creativity, productivity, or individual success. Intermediate hedonism encourages abstention from productive and profitable activities to avoid the pain and vicissitudes of earthly life. Strong hedonism encourages the pursuit of sensual pleasure at the expense of individual health and survival and is often held by addicts of intoxicating substances and behaviors.

Nietzscheism Nietzscheism encourages the pursuit of power. It typically describes the world as a battlefield in which conflicting parties fight each other for survival. According to Proposition 3, the pursuit of power is always detrimental to other people’s pleasure, power, and productivity. We can also classify this worldview into weak, intermediate, and strong, depending on how much it allows for hurting other people and society for self-interests. Weak Nietzscheism encourages power-seeking but condemns obvious social efficiency losses. It typically disguises the pursuit of power as the pursuit of productivity or pleasure. Its identifying feature is the encouragement of conspicuous waste. Intermediate Nietzscheism permits the pursuit of individual power despite visible damage to other people and society but condemns major destructive actions, especially violence. Its identifying feature is the legitimization of dishonesty, in addition to waste. Strong Nietzscheism permits the pursuit of individual power at any cost to other people and society. Its identifying feature is the legitimization of violence in addition to cheating and waste. 183

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Asceticism Asceticism encourages the sacrificial motive. It typically describes the world as an altar on which each individual must sacrifice themself for an omnibenevolent transcendental entity, and its extent can be determined by how much it encourages sacrificing individual pleasure and power without asking for returns. Weak asceticism usually advocates abstinence from pleasure and power-seeking but maintains that these actions must be fully rewarded in the present life or a believed afterlife. Because strict adherence to the sacrificial motive requires unconditional sacrifice, weak asceticism typically does not advocate active sacrifice, including honest work, learning, and preservation. Intermediate asceticism encourages active sacrifice but maintains that some individual return should be expected. Strong asceticism also advocates honest work, learning, and preservation, but requires unconditional sacrifice without promising any rewards. Table 14.1 provides a classification of some pertinent worldviews.

Social Consequences of Worldviews How worldviews determine a society’s evolution and progress is a further question. Like virtue and evil, social progress can only be defined with respect to the motive, here that of an ascetic. Definition 1 (social progress) Let productivity be defined as an individual or society’s ability to acquire more power for all humankind.

• A society is more progressed if it possesses greater productivity. • Humankind is more progressed if it possesses greater power or productivity. Two points are worth emphasizing. First, the progress of a society has nothing to do with its ability to acquire resources other than through production; a society can be powerful without being progressed. Second, the progress of a society is defined by its ability to produce not the actual production.

Table 14.1  Classification of some major worldviews Worldview

Hedonism

Nietzscheism

Asceticism

Catholicism (Pre-20th c.) Protestantism (Pre-20th c.) Confucianism (Lixue) Judaism (Pre-20th c.) Taoism/Buddhism Communism Nazism Neoliberalism Protestantism (Post-WWII) Machiavellism

intermediate – – – intermediate – – weak weak –

weak – weak – – strong strong weak weak intermediate

weak strong intermediate strong weak – – weak intermediate –

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The increase in the productivity of a society can only come from two sources: increase in the efficiency of inter-personal cooperation or increase in individual productivity. Besides the worldviews of a society that directly modify individual actions, the former can be achieved through progress in institutions, and the latter can be achieved by discovery of superior technologies.

Ethics, Institutions, and Technology The following argues that institutions and technology are not the autonomous fundamental drivers of social evolution but, rather, are determined by worldviews. However, ethics and institutions must first be distinguished: Definition 2 (ethics and institutions)

• Ethics are rules for human action and interaction that can be derived directly from some worldview.

• Institutions are human-designed rules for human action and interaction that cannot be derived directly from any worldview.

Not all social norms are institutions. For example, though a social norm of working hard belongs to ethics because it can be derived directly from asceticism, a concrete working schedule cannot be derived from any worldview, so it belongs to institutions. Similarly, efficiency belongs to ethics, while market structures belong to institutions; equality belongs to ethics, while political regimes belong to institutions; and justice belongs to ethics, while law enforcement procedures belong to institutions. Next, superior technology and institutions are defined. The criterion is whether they increase the productivity of an ascetic individual or society because they can always be used by Nietzscheists for more efficient power-seeking and, thereby, reduce social productivity. Definition 3 (technological progress and institutional progress)

• A technology is superior or more progressed if it increases the individual productivity of an ascetic society.

• An institution is superior or more progressed if it increases the productivity of an ascetic society, given its individual productivity.

Next, it is evident that technological and institutional progress can only be made by ascetics. Technological progress cannot come from hedonists because of the repetitive and painstaking nature of research activities. Neither can it come from Nietzscheists because of the uncertainty and non-exclusivity of its outcome. This is particularly true for the scientific progress which is foundational to technological progress as it experiences breakthroughs that lead to new paradigms (Kuhn 1962). Because scientific breakthroughs are rare and unpredictable, attempts at scientific breakthroughs are evolutionarily disadvantageous for individual scientists. Therefore, scientific progress requires sufficiently many ascetic scientists who willingly give up power-seeking (Zhang 2022). Institutional progress can only come from ascetics. In the natural state, resources are always allocated based on power rather than productivity. Given the technological level 185

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of a society, productivity increase can only happen when resources are re-allocated from the powerful to the productive. Institutional progress, therefore, must come from either the voluntary renouncement of power by the powerful or the revolution of the weak, in which the former relies on the powerful being ascetic and the latter relies on the weak being ascetic. Thus far, it has been argued that social progress is only possible when there are (sufficiently many) ascetics in a society. A more detailed characterization of how worldviews determine social evolution is now possible.

Social Consequences of Asceticism In a purely ascetic society, a) the people live to fulfill their callings, so they are individually the most productive given the existing technology and institutions; b) the intelligent members will voluntarily choose science as their vocation, so technology progresses rapidly, and scientific breakthroughs may occur; and c) the institutions that can best protect everyone’s right to fulfill their callings will rise naturally. The most important characteristic of an ascetic society is equality, which delivers liberty, security, and justice. Ascetic equality is about equality in duty, which everyone fulfills at the cost of their own power and pleasure, and equality in value, which means that everyone is equally valuable as long as they diligently fulfill their duty. This notion of equality is compatible with inequality in individual rights or power, such as opportunity, wealth, or political power, which is efficient given that people are born with differential talents in managing resources. The second important characteristic of an ascetic society is trust because the causes of mistrust, such as dishonesty, aggression, and irresponsibility, are of Nietzscheist and hedonic origins. Trust is the key to exchange, delegation, and specialization, all of which increase cooperative efficiency while creating asymmetries in information, knowledge, and power. The larger the scale of cooperation and the higher the degree of specialization, the more asymmetries they create and the more trust is needed to sustain them. Due to its high level of trust, an ascetic society can sustain large-scale and intricate social cooperation and specialization. Because Protestantism and Judaism are the only two strongly ascetic worldviews, the Protestant–Judaic West before the Secular Revolution was the only strongly ascetic society to have existed.

Social Consequences of Hedonism Without asceticism, there would have been no human civilization, so the analysis of the social consequences of hedonism and Nietzscheism alone is no different from that of animal societies. Therefore, the question is how hedonism and Nietzscheism, from weak to strong, impede social progress in an otherwise ascetic society. Because the hedonic motive is non-invasive, hedonism diverts resources from production to entertainment but has no qualitative impact on the progress of a society. When a society becomes more hedonic, it becomes increasingly dysfunctional in every social domain. A purely hedonic society can produce nothing other than addiction to intoxicating substances and behaviors, but its people will be in such a blissful mental state that they will amuse themselves to death (Postman 1984). 186

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Social Consequences of Nietzscheism Nietzscheism reduces the productivity of an ascetic society through three channels: a) reducing people’s individual productivity given the existing technology and institutions, b) slowing down or even reversing technological progress, and c) institutional regress. The following discusses the social consequences of weak, intermediate, and strong Nietzscheism separately. In a weakly Nietzscheist society, a) people spend time and resources on conspicuous waste, so their individual productivity is lower; b) by emphasizing individual success and achievement, some of the intelligent members are discouraged from science, and those who do choose a scientific career focus on conspicuous research, so scientific progress slows down; and c) people covet resources mildly even when they are not the most efficient at managing them, so the social institutions have to allocate resources based partly on power rather than exclusively on productivity. An example of a weakly Nietzscheist society is the Protestant–Judaic West after World War II. In an intermediately Nietzscheist society, a) people spend more time and resources on conspicuous waste as well as on cheating, so their individual productivity is further reduced; b) a larger number of intelligent people are discouraged from science, and those who do choose a scientific career conduct conspicuous research as well as cheating, so scientific progress slows down to the point of stagnation or even regress; and c) the stronger emphasis on power-seeking leads to repressive social institutions that further favors power over productivity. An example of an intermediately Nietzscheist society is mainland China since their “reform and opening up” in 1978. Strong Nietzscheism permits killing in addition to waste and cheating, so because a) people spend time and effort killing each other, individual productivity is even lower, b) people cannot accept a life that only yields uncertain benefits to other people in the future, systemic scientific research vanishes; and c) social institutions reward power rather than productivity, they create enormous misallocation. In a strongly Nietzscheist society, the trust level is extremely low, and kinship is the only reliable social relationship. The society exhibits extreme inequality, prevalence of violence, limited social cooperation, and a highly repressive political regime. Strong Nietzscheism can only cause full-scale regress in every social domain.

Some Puzzles in History This analysis provides a consistent answer to several historical puzzles that counter historical materialism. For example, why did the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution not happen in China, which possessed many favorable factors (Weber 1915; Needham 1969; Pomeranz 2000)? What historical discontinuity caused the two World Wars after the “greatest age of peace in Europe’s history” (Palmer, Colton, and Lloyd 2002:611)? And why are Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, and medicine highly concentrated among the Protestant–Judaic population in a world with nearly perfect international mobility for scientists (Berry 1981)? Needham provides the most accurate phrasing of the question “why, between the first century BC and the fifteenth century AD, Chinese civilization was much more efficient than occidental in applying human natural knowledge to practical human needs” (Needham 1969:190). Because Confucianism was the closest to the ascetic ideal before ascetic Protestantism, Proposition 3 implies Confucian civilization should have been the most pro187

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gressed. Moreover, Confucianism was fully adopted in China during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), and the Protestant Reformation happened in 1517 CE, coinciding with the time period identified by Needham. The answer to the second question is the rise of Nietzscheism that commenced with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and consummated in a series of works by Friedrich Nietzsche (1886; 1887). Nietzscheism was, indeed, a very influential, if not the dominant, worldview in continental Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. “The end of the nineteenth century, the great age of peace in Europe’s history, abounded in philosophies glorifying struggle. People who have never heard a shot fired in anger solemnly announced that world history moved forward by violence and antagonism” (Palmer, Colton, and Lloyd 2002:611). Suddenly, the previously trivial political and economic disputes became impossible to solve by diplomacy, because everyone started to believe that diplomatic compromises would weaken their national/racial/class power and cause them to be eliminated in the eternal struggle for survival. Nietzscheism is why, after the great age of enlightenment, peace, and progress, Europe suddenly descended into chaos and the two deadly World Wars. The third question is essentially about what causes scientific progress, as the non-linear structure of scientific progress means that the number of Nobel Prizes per capita is a better representation of scientific progress than other measures of normal scientific output. As Protestantism and Judaism are the only two strongly ascetic worldviews, the influence of which has been waning but was still present in the twentieth century, it is not surprising that Nobel laureates are concentrated among the Protestant–Judaic population. The caveat is that the Nobel Prize, a meritocratic institution legitimized by humanist liberalism, is only a situationally accurate indicator of scientific progress.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that the concept of a monotheist God is a fruitful social scientific concept. Its induced theoretical scheme can be viewed as an extension of Weber’s interpretive sociology, which claims that humans’ perception of the meaning of life is at the highest level of the hierarchy of control in human societies and fundamentally determines human actions, social relationships, and the entire process of social evolution. It supports Toynbee’s hypothesis that “man does not live under one law only; he lives under two laws: a ‘Law of Nature’ and a ‘Law of God’” (Toynbee 1987b:ch.38). History cannot be explained solely by the interaction between humans, and between humans and nature, because it is also “the interaction of God and Man” (Lampert 1945:45).

Acknowledgment This chapter is a condensation of Zhang, Tong. 2022. “Ethics and Society: A Theory of Comparative Worldviews.” Journal of Sociology and Christianity 12(2):7–28.

References Berry, Colin. 1981. “The Nobel Scientists and the Origins of Scientific Achievement.” The British Journal of Sociology 32(3):381–91. Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Tocqueville, Alexis. [1840]1999. Democracy in America. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd. Hume, David. [1751]1983. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

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Ethics and Society Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kalberg, Stephen. 2004. “The Past and Present Influence of World Views: Max Weber on a Neglected Sociological Concept.” Journal of Classical Sociology 4(2):139–63. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lampert, Evgeny. [1945]2019. The Apocalypse of History: Problems of Providence and Human Destiny. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers. McIntire, C. T., and Marvin Perry, eds. 1989. Toynbee: Reappraisals. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Needham, Joseph. 1969. The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West. Milton Park: Taylor & Francis. Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1886]2017. Beyond Good & Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Amazon: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1887]2013. On the Genealogy of Morals. London: Penguin Books Limited. Palmer, R. R., Joel Colton, and Kramer Lloyd. 2002. A History of the Modern World. New York: Knopf. Perry, Marvin. 1989. “Toynbee and the Meaning of Athens and Jerusalem.” Pp. 93–104 in Toynbee Reappraisals, edited by C. T. McIntire and Marvin Perry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 1974. God, Freedom, and Evil: Essays in Philosophy. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Porpora, Douglas V. 2006. “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36(1):57–75. Postman, Neil. [1984]2005. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Publishing Group. Quine, Willard V. O. 1951. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” The Philosophical Review 1(60):20–42. Swinburne, Richard. 1998. Providence and the Problem of Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toynbee, Arnold J. 1961. A Study of History: Volume 12: Reconsiderations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toynbee, Arnold J.. 1987a. A Study of History, Vol. 1: Abridgement of Volumes I-VI, edited by D. C. Somervell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toynbee, Arnold J.. 1987b. A Study of History, Vol. 2: Abridgement of Volumes VII-X, edited by D. C. Somervell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, Max. [1905]2013. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Amazon: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Weber, Max. [1915]1951. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Glencoe: The Free Press. Weber, Max. [1920]1993. The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press. Zhang, Tong. 2022. “Reinterpreting Science as a Vocation.” Max Weber Studies 22(1):55–73.

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PART 3

Social Institutions and Christianity

INTRODUCTION TO PART 3 Social Institutions and Christianity

The rationality of modernity stimulated differentiation of the previously deeply enmeshed structures and functions of pre-modern society into distinct, specialized social spheres, each devoted to meeting specific human needs more efficiently. The production and distribution of goods and services, the production and transmission of culture, and the maintenance of social order and control would, henceforth, be performed by one or more differentiated social institutions. Though religion had been omnipresent from time immemorial, as it morphed into a formal social institution, it gradually but resolutely differentiated from the state, the economy, and the family. Nevertheless, religion’s continuing direct or indirect impact on other social institutions remains undeniable. Furthermore, the very process of institutionalizing religion has significant effects on religion itself, as the profound differences between first century Christianity and today’s traditional institutionalized Christianity reveals. The challenge for Christianity today is the post-modern erosion of trust in all social institutions. Part 3 first investigates the role of various social institutions as agents of primarily religious socialization and then focuses on selected social institutions to elucidate their particular role in both Christian and public life in selected regions of the world. David Rohall examines recent theory and research published in two traditional sociology of religion journals on religion as a primary agent of socialization, focusing on the role of families, schools, and peers in children’s acceptance or rejection of religious beliefs and practices. He incorporates themes from life-course sociology, which includes the concept of agency and the role of historical and cultural conditions that surround agency in everyday life, which together help to explain the changes in religiosity in the Global North during the past decade. Todd Martin integrates a particular Christian theology with a sample of family science theories to understand better the way belief systems may inform the predictive and explanatory value of family theories from a positivistic approach. He uses a relational trinitarian theology as laid out in Barth’s theology of relations to illustrate how the scientific value of rational choice family theory and family life course development theory can be enhanced by incorporating knowledge gained from theological beliefs. Sristi Mondal and Anand Ranjan describe how minority Christians in southern India have been adopting dominant Hindu practices of marriage payments, reflecting entrenched property transactions and social inequalities. They reveal its effects on the growth of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-21

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urban class among Christians in India, the sustenance of endogamous groups among Christians, and the implications that such marriage payments have for the status of especially Christian women, as exchange of wealth runs parallel to the exchange of women through marriages. Valerie Hiebert analyzes how, despite the sharp decline in Christian church attendance in the past two decades, megachurches are growing and thriving in the United States. Premised on anthropological–sociological research exploring the reality-constructing power of language, she examines the extensive websites of three megachurches, distilling the co-sanctified lexicons and resulting worldviews their attendees inhabit, and concludes by offering a new megachurch characteristic for research, that of low commitment–high security belonging. Ibrahim Abraham offers a critical overview of sociological aspects of contemporary Christian music and contemporary worship music, two related genres in which contemporary Christianity engages the spectacular capacities of consumer capitalism. After analyzing tensions and contestations in these cultural forms, he identifies pertinent theoretical concepts including Emile Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence, Theodor Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, approaches to music-based subcultures, and Christopher Small’s musicking paradigm. Theodore Koutroukis recounts how churches in industrializing societies wished to help workers gain a new role in everyday life and protect the poor against the rapid rise of socialist and communist movements. He describes the Anglo-Saxon experience and the Catholic doctrines pertaining to labor, examines the various versions of Christian unions in Western countries, and discusses the current perspectives of Christian unionism while globalized capitalism and neoliberalism seem to threaten the traditional values of Christianity. Martin Munyao and Sylvia Muriuki report that political alignments in Kenya are often based on class and ethnicity, having nothing to do with the well-being of the citizenry and causing most Kenyans to lose faith in democracy. Meanwhile, the church has either been left on the margins of conversations about socio-political issues or has been part of the problem by assuming neutrality on election matters, creating a presumed divide between the sacred and secular which inhibits the Christian faithful from actively participating in the electoral process.

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15 CURRENT RESEARCH ON RELIGIOUS SOCIALIZATION IN THE GLOBAL NORTH David Rohall Abstract The sociological study of socialization emphasizes the role of primary agents of socialization such as families, schools, and peers. It also utilizes the life-course perspective that incorporates the ways historical and life events impact these processes. This chapter examines recent research on this topic to determine the kinds of research on which sociologists are currently focusing and their general findings. All the articles published in two traditional journals in the sociology of religion were reviewed between 2010 and 2019: Sociology of Religion and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (JSSR). Twenty-two articles in the Sociology of Religion and 23 in JSSR were coded as having anything to do with religious socialization in any way. These studies reveal that modern sociologists continue to focus on traditional topics in religious socialization, such as the role of the family in children’s acceptance of their parents’ religious beliefs, but modern research emphasizes the factors that explain the loss of religious practice and belief. It also shows how “irreligion” is being passed down to children and the historical and cultural factors that are intersecting with these processes. Modern research continues to investigate the role of schools in religious socialization but focuses on the impacts of higher education. Together, these findings help to explain the changes in religiosity in the Global North during the past decade.

Introduction Socialization is the process by which individuals learn the skills they need to interact successfully in society (Ritzer 2013). The most common means of doing so are through the primary agents of socialization: families, schools, and peers (Ritzer 2013; Rohall 2020). The life-course perspective in sociology adds the understanding that historical and social forces can influence these basic social processes as well as the notion of agency, which is that

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people have free will to accept or reject socialization processes (Elder 1994). Thus, no level or type of training can produce the same outcomes among children in society. Religion is only one of many areas of social life about which children learn through agents of socialization and socialization processes. Current research on religious socialization occurs amid great changes in religious belief in the United States, one of the most religious countries in the Global North. Research over the past ten years shows a clear trend away from traditional religion. As of 2017, only about a third (37%) of people in the United States (US) claim that they are highly religious, while another third claim that they are not religious at all, and only 49% of Americans said religion was “very important” to them compared to 70% in 1965 (Jones 2021; Newport 2017). Religion and religiosity continue to wane in the US and Europe, as the direction of change is clearly people becoming less religious (Pew 2015), leading many scholars to ascertain why this is happening. The goal of this chapter is to assess common themes in modern research on religious socialization, focusing on key areas of socialization theory and research, specifically, the role of families, schools, and peers as primary agents of socialization. Additional categories come from life-course sociology, which includes the concept of agency and the role of historical and cultural conditions that surround agency in everyday life.

Methods Articles from two major journals in the sociology of religion are used to gauge the scope and direction of modern research on religious socialization: Sociology of Religion and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (JSSR). More than 600 articles in the two journals between 2010 and 2019 were reviewed. While much has been written on the topic during these years, this method provides a sense of the scope and direction of research from major scholars in the field. A total of 45 articles were identified as focusing on the transmission of religion in one way or another, some being more explicitly about socialization processes than others. The key for inclusion was whether the article emphasized the acceptance or rejection of religion utilizing the rubric of life-course sociology or the framework of agents of socialization. Each of the 45 articles were coded into the categories of family, school, or peers; any article that included these topics was placed into one of these three categories. In addition, to including concepts of the life-course, categories for historical and cultural influence, agency, and timing were included. Linked lives were collapsed into the category of peers. There may have been some overlap, as several articles may have had elements of two codes.

Results The role of the family as an agent of socialization is quite large, including religious socialization. Indeed, 11 of the 45 articles had something to do with families (Table 15.1). Schools were also quite common, with nine articles, although the prominence of higher education makes this section different from traditional socialization studies which typically focus on children. Peers and linked lives – how other people in general impact our faith lives – also seemed to have produced a number of studies. Seventeen studies were coded into the historical and cultural processes category. Finally, the impact of life events and timing included several studies, but many of them overlapped with each other. Each of these areas are reviewed as follows. 196

Research on Religious Socialization Table 15.1  Article themes by journal, 2010-2019 (citations may cover multiple categories) Socialization Theme

Journal for the Social Scientific Study of Religion

Sociology of Religion

Families

Bengtsen et al. 2018 Berghammer, Krivanek, and Zartler 2017 Denton 2012 Kregting et al. 2018 Thiessen and Wilkins-Laflamme 2017 Uecker and Ellison 2012 Uecker, Stroope, and Mayrl 2016 Barro et al. 2010 Hill 2011 Kregting et al. 2018 Schwadel 2017 Small and Bowman 2011 Voas 2014 Brauer 2018 Engelberg 2016 Sepulvado et al. 2015

Denton and Culver 2015 Perry 2015 Petts 2014 Schafer 2014

Schools

Peers/Linked Lives

Agency

Doebbler and Shuttleworth 2018

Historical and Cultural Processes

Barro, McCleary, and Hwang 2010 Berghammer, Krivanek, and Zartler 2017 Brauer 2018 Conway and Spruyt 2018 Doebbler and Shuttleworth 2018 Evans and Northmore-Ball 2012 Kregting et al. 2018 McClure 2017 Muller, De Graf, and Schmidt 2014 Schwadel 2010b Berghammer, Krivanek, and Zartler 2017 Denton 2012 Thiessen and Wilkinson 2017 Uecker and Ellison 2012 Uecker, Stroope, and Mayrl 2016 Wilkinson 2018 Whitehead 2018

Life Events and Timing

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Gurrentz 2014 McFarland, Wright, and Weakliem 2011 Schleifer, Brauer, and Patel 2018

Beider 2017 Galonnier and de los Rios 2016 Jindra 2011 Olson 2019 Smith 2011 Summerau and Cragun 2016 Beste 2011 Jindra 2011 Manglos 2010 Sumerau and Cragun 2016 Smith 2011 Woodhead 2017 Hout 2016 Storm 2017 Vargas 2012 Schwadel 2010a Di 2018 Ramos, Woodberry, and Ellison 2017

Denton and Culver 2015 Schafer 2014

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Families Families are the traditional focus of many sociological studies of socialization because most people are raised in one, hence, it is the individual’s first contact with other humans. Religion and religious socialization are no different (Bengtson 2013). The interest here is to identify trends in studying the impact of families on religious acceptance or rejection. This section will focus on family forms and dynamics. Changes in family life (e.g., divorce) are placed under a different category. Like traditional research, the studies reviewed here also demonstrate that parental religiosity impacts children’s faith (Perry 2015; Petts 2014; Uecker and Ellison 2012); mothers and fathers who are more religious are more likely to have children who also practice faith. However, several family dynamics can mitigate the transmission of parental religiosity. For instance, Petts (2014) shows that being raised in a stepfamily, never-married single-parent family, or co-habiting family reduces this relationship, at least for some forms of religiosity. In one interesting study, Perry (2015) demonstrates that parental pornography consumption (especially fathers) reduces time spent on religious socialization and other factors as well. Moreover, Kregting and colleagues (2018) show that the impact of Christian socialization appears to be lessening over time. Together, these findings continue to support the importance of religious families for maintaining religious identities of young people, but several factors can also reduce the impact that families have on their children. For instance, Uecker and his colleagues (2016) show that children who leave their church as they become adults, for whatever reasons, usually do not return. However, those who become parents (married or single) are more likely to return compared to singles without children. Cohabiting couples are even less likely to return than their single peers. These findings do seem to suggest that the presence of children and the institution of marriage have an independent impact on the religiosity of young people as they become adults. They also reflect the possible long-term consequences that newer family forms may have on religious socialization, as more and more people are choosing to be single, among other alternatives to marriage in the US (Klinenberg 2012). Another striking change in family religious socialization in the past ten years is the focus on “irreligious” socialization, whereby parents and even grandparents actively steer children away from traditional religion toward a non-religious worldview (Bengtson et al. 2018). Thiessen and Wilkins-LaFlamme (2017) demonstrate the decline of religious socialization among cohorts over time and utilize interview data to show how this process works. Most people who were raised without religion report that their grandparents were very religious, but their parents moved away from religion somewhat, which led them away from religion altogether. They found four themes that contribute to disaffiliation: 1) being given the choice, 2) intellectual disagreements about faith and science or religious issues, 3) social influences such as non-religious friends, and 4) life transitions such as moving because of a job or divorce. In many ways, this study reflects many of the basic tenets of life-course sociology included in this chapter.

Schools The impact of education on religious belief is complicated, and modern research has tried to unpack that complexity. Among the articles reviewed here, Barro and colleagues (2010), 198

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for instance, found that religious conversion rates are positively related to levels of education. Conversely, Kregting and colleagues (2018) found that, on the macro-level, increases in access to education in society were associated with decreases in religious acceptance over time. In another study, McFarland and colleagues (2011) found education to be positively related to service attendance but negatively related to believing in the Bible as the word of God and practicing prayer. Among the articles reviewed in this chapter, most focused specifically on the impacts of higher education on religious outcomes. While these findings may appear contradictory, several studies clarify ways that higher education impacts individuals’ religious life. Voas (2014) found a negative relationship between higher education and religiosity but a greater likelihood to express other types of spirituality. Schwadel (2017) shows that higher education leads to religious decline among mainstream Protestants and Catholics – the groups losing religion at the highest rates in the US – at least among children from religious families. However, the study also shows that education may have a positive impact on unaffiliated students, probably because university is their first real exposure to religious thought. Hill (2011) shows that “super-empirical beliefs,” such as belief in God and miracles, are not impacted, overall, by going to university, but higher education does produce more skepticism. It also depends on the type of university that children attend. Among believing families, attending a religious university has little or a somewhat positive impact on these types of beliefs. However, attending an elite university has a negative impact on these beliefs. The study shows that, in general, going to university exposes students to materials that are skeptical of religion, which, in turn, increases students’ skepticism of religion. Similarly, the field of study the student pursues may impact religiosity over time; Schleifer and colleagues (2018) report that individuals with degrees in the natural sciences and math show the lowest rates of belief and practice relative to other fields. Attending a religious school would presumably have a positive impact on religious socialization, and, in general, this appears to be true, but schools have differing levels of religiosity themselves. Small and Bowman (2011) show that attending a Protestant institution is associated with gains in religiosity compared to students going to secular schools. Also, religious engagement in school is important; interacting with other religious peers increases the likeliness of religious commitment (see Gurrentz 2014). Overall, positive religious socialization is then continued, whereas going to a more secular school reduces the effects of being an evangelical Protestant over time (Small and Bowman 2011).

Peers and Linked Lives While it is true that adults are the primary purveyors of culture to the children of society, adults are also influenced by the people around them; we continue to be socialized and socialize others as adults. Nine studies addressed this topic in one way or another in the decade under review. The dominant theme seems to be the role that other people play in accepting religious views. Olson (2019) demonstrates the ways that religious groups in an area influence the attitudes and behaviors of the people living there. This finding reflects the simple notion in sociology that people are continually affected by and affect others around them. What is most notable about this study is that the authors also demonstrated that the presence of religious groups can impact community-level outcomes such as crime and mortality rates.

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Other studies which include the concept of linked lives focus on the role of others in defining faith and religion. Galonnier and de los Rios (2016), for instance, examine “pedagogies of conversion” in which religious converts are taught how to process their conversions and give them meaning. In this sense, the authors claim, they are taught how to “be religious.” These findings resonate with Gurrentz’s (2014) study in which Christian fraternity brothers helped shape the religious lives of their fellow members. Similarly, Engelberg (2016) shows the importance of religious networks for young, single Religious Zionists who no longer have the same connections with traditional synagogue-based communities. Beider (2017) presents the enduring impacts of socialization, showing that people maintain elements of their previous religious identity even after switching religions. Finally, at least one study did an interesting, in-depth, set of interviews to understand the push and pull factors that impact conversion decisions (Jindra 2011). Here, the role of others can be seen in a more structural context, in which the actions of significant others impact religious decisions not through direct experience of religious training but, rather, through creating an environment in which individuals want to leave or stay. The role of others in religious disaffiliation is also part of the research over the past ten years. Sepulvado and colleagues (2015) found that “nones” do form and maintain relationships with one another. It is interesting that even past interactions can impact current identities, suggesting the long-term impact of social interactions. Specifically, Sumerau and Cragun (2016) show that individuals who leave the faith utilize memories of interactions to help define their current non-religious identities. Similarly, Smith (2011) also argues that atheist identity is achieved through social interaction.

Agency Agency is one of the most unique contributions to the study of humans because it provides an explanation for why individuals react differently to the same stimuli. Regarding religious socialization, agency enables individuals raised in a religious family, in religious schools, and with religious peers, to simply walk away from their religion. While it is difficult to assess in many cases, several studies in the past ten years have tried to determine the conditions in which people choose to stay in or leave a religion. Notably, Jindra (2011) suggests that biographical accounts are the real way to determine the conditions in which people choose any one particular religion or no religion. Doebler and Shuttleworth (2018) examined conditions in which people in Northern Ireland decided to switch denominations or leave religion altogether. They found that people experiencing social frustration of one kind or another (e.g., economic, or disagreements with church politics) were more likely to switch religious affiliation or drop it altogether than people who do not experience such frustrations. In an Austrian sample, Berghammer and colleagues (2017) found that individuals who chose to leave because of the country’s “church tax” still held a private form of religiosity, while those who left for ideological reasons simply became agnostic or atheist. These findings explicate how individuals process decisions about religion; it is not simply a matter of choosing to stay or leave, because it is a much more complex process, and the outcomes are less clear. This relates to Sumerau and Cragun’s (2016) work that shows how people actively use their childhood and current life experiences in constructing their religious selves, a wholly unique identity. Smith (2011), reviewed earlier, also suggests that individuals are actively engaged in the process of accepting the atheist label. 200

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At least a few studies simply utilize the concept of agency to understand religious socialization processes more generally. Manglos (2010) shows how different people process the “born again” experience, how they think about it in general, and how these thoughts depend on the denomination to which they belong. Furthermore, children are not simply receptors of the agents of socialization. This is important because, as Beste (2011) showed, the experience of religious training is more meaningful and impactful when children perceive a sense of agency in their experience, comprehending that they are allowed to be an active part of it.

History and Culture While people have agency, the studies that focus on it cannot always explain why growing numbers of people walk away from religion, which has clearly happened in the United States in the past decade and western Europe before that. In sociology, there are at least two paths by which the process can happen. First, historical events create conditions under which individuals make similar decisions, like the US stock market crash in the 1930s or experiencing a war or famine (Elder 1999). Demographic changes can also have large-scale impacts on individuals’ thoughts and behaviors. People grow up in cohorts – people of similar age and experiences – and, as such, individuals in groups can influence other people in their networks above and beyond cultural and historical occurrences (Miller 2014). These approaches allow for some level of variability in behavior while maintaining the idea that people do not make decisions in isolation. The idea that “something” is occurring in groups is clear in a number of articles. Hout (2016) examines how one in four people in the United States consistently claim to be Catholic over the past half century, yet it should be higher given relative birth and migration rates among Catholics in the US. Schwadel (2010a) shows changes in church attendance by cohort but also demonstrates that generational differences are not the same for everyone and every group, suggesting cultural shifts can vary. In another article, Schwadel (2010b) shows that “a substantial proportion of the growth in non-affiliation is due to more Americans being raised with no religious preference rather than being due solely to an increase in disaffiliation among adults” (318). Brauer (2018) further demonstrates that there may be a breaking point in which the proportion of a cohort leaving has the critical mass necessary to become significant, thereby, explaining why such large-scale desertion of religion did not occur in the past. These types of findings are important because they allow for some degree of agency in people’s decisions while incorporating concepts of collective behaviors, in which people work in concert with their peers in a society at any point in time. What historical and cultural factors are influencing these cohorts and their decisions? A number of works that shed light on these dynamics were reviewed earlier. Kregting and colleagues (2018) attribute some of the changes to educational expansion in the Netherlands, while Berghammer, Krivanek, and Zartler (2017) point to the role of the church tax system in Austria. Even growing up in a post-communist country can influence the acceptance or rejection of religion across time (Barro, McCleary, and Hwang 2010; Evans and Northmore-Ball 2012). Another theme of research being conducted at this time focuses on the role of economic conditions on the religious faith of individuals. At least two studies in the period under review suggest that the growing welfare state in Europe may have contributed to changes in religious socialization. Conway and Spruyt (2018) show that faith is eroding in traditionally Catholic countries in which “existential security” is available to their populations. 201

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This means that people rely on the government to receive their basic needs. Storm (2017) reports a similar finding regarding government welfare expenditure. These findings resonate with Muller and colleagues (2014) who show that societal income inequality has a positive impact on religious socialization. Doebler and Shuttlesworth’s study of religious switching (both among religions but also to and from no religion) shows that Protestants living in an income-deprived area are statistically less likely to switch to “none/not stated” than Protestants who live in wealthier areas. Similarly, “nones” living in deprived areas are less likely than those in non-deprived areas to remain “none/ not stated” in 2011. (2018:736) It would appear that economic conditions set the stage for seeking help and support from either a higher power or a government, as the case may be. Cultural variations can also have a direct bearing on religious socialization processes, above and beyond individual characteristics. Di (2018) found that training in Buddhism is different in mainland China compared to the US, while Ramos and colleagues (2017) show the importance of individuals’ national backgrounds in the process of converting from one religion to another – the decision depends, in part, on where a person is from. Altogether, combining elements of larger historical–cultural changes combined with culturally specific conditions may reflect Kregting and colleagues (2018) finding that traditional religious socialization processes are having less impact on modern generations than previous ones. Several studies have endeavored to understand culture processes more broadly. In the years under review, several elements of culture have been examined, especially under the headings of diversity, individualism, and, to a lesser degree, access to media. Only one article focused on the role of technology, which is nearly ubiquitous in the Global North. McClure (2017) demonstrates that internet use is associated with being unaffiliated while watching television also reduces church attendance. Although only a single study, it certainly speaks to the impact of this part of current culture. More importantly, the internet exposes people to a world culture. Indeed, religious pluralism (Barro, McCleary, and Hwang 2010) and educational expansion (Kregting et al. 2018) are associated with religious decline. In the 2016 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture, Woodhead (2017) excelled at outlining how several cultural conditions may culminate to produce the growth of religious nones and decline in traditional religion, despite the best efforts of parents. She suggested that the quest for individual choice and the resistance of labels, combined with exposure to diversity (e.g., travel and internet) and the growth of a consumerist mindset, has led young people to avoid many commitments, including religion and religious labels. This model may help to explicate the relationships between agency, culture, and cultural change and cohort changes in religious adaptation.

Life Events and Timing Even under the best circumstances, events happen which can alter normal personal trajectories, including religious socialization. Some events are idiosyncratic, but others affect people at the same time (e.g., natural disasters). In the studies overviewed here, family disruption is more commonly examined, but health and financial issues are also included. The find202

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ing that divorce impacts religious socialization processes is not new. A divorce or loss of a parent reduces the amount of religious socialization that can occur in the first place. It may also cause young people to question their faith. Recent research supports this traditional finding but also adds some points of refinement. For instance, Denton and Culver (2015) find that parental break-up impacts White families more than African American families. Uecker and Ellison (2012) show that much of the negative consequences of divorce can be traced to the religiosity of the parents, so, perhaps, the divorce or disruption is not the cause but, rather, the religious disposition of one or both parents. Wilkinson (2018) finds that loss of one’s mother is associated with decreased service attendance but increased prayer, but these dynamics also depend, in part, on the mother’s religiosity. Denton’s (2012) work helps to understand these processes by showing that divorce has a greater negative impact on religious children than those who are less religious; it may even have a positive impact on religiosity among less religious children. The idea that life events can serve as positive or negative turning points for people is supported in some modern research. A unique finding in this series of articles is that experiencing early life victimization can increase the likelihood of having a spiritual experience (Schafer 2014). In other words, people seem to find spiritual support or meaning in these negative life events. Alternatively, Whitehead (2018) reports that children with chronic health conditions are less likely to attend religious services, while Vargas (2012) shows mixed results of financial strain associated with thoughts of religious disaffiliation, while the death of a family member decreases it.

Discussion The goal of this chapter is to do more than just review literature on religious socialization. It is designed to ascertain the topics of most interest to sociologists today in the area of religious socialization. Clearly, most of them want to understand the processes by which people are leaving traditional religion and religion as a whole. The primary focus has been to show the historical and cultural factors that have contributed to entire generations choosing to leave religion altogether. Once gone, another set of research is clearly showing that irreligious socialization is occurring. While family religious socialization is still the most powerful way that religion is transmitted across generations, some current research suggests that it is less powerful now than in the past, probably because of societal changes and the prevalence of other agents of socialization (Kregting et al. 2018). Another trend in religious socialization research is the focus on the role of higher education in the socialization process. It would appear from this review that findings are mixed, but there does seem to be a trend in which higher education can have some direct positive effects (e.g., the role of religious fraternities) and negative effects on religious beliefs (e.g., certain fields of study and going to certain types of schools). The findings are not necessarily mixed; taken together, they need to be understood in specific contexts. It does appear that, overall, higher education contributes to skepticism about religion (e.g., Hill 2011). After that, its impact may be related to several conditions, such as which field of study the student is pursuing, the type of school they are attending, and which denomination they come from. Knowing these variables will help determine how much and which direction they lead the student, toward or away from the religion to which they belong. It appears that macro-level conditions, such as increased access to education and social welfare, impact the religious choices of individuals over the generations. The role of cohort203

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processes is very illuminating, showing that individuals make decisions along with their peers, but only under certain conditions do these decisions lead to generational change (see Brauer 2018). Together, these findings reveal how large-scale social conditions filter down to individuals, while in reverse, individual decisions culminate in societal change. What appears to be missing in these studies is sufficient focus on media and the internet specifically. These studies are being conducted elsewhere but are not, at present, in the journals and time-period under review in this chapter. Ultimately, studies over the past ten years support the sociological concept that individuals are constantly in a state of socialization as well as in the process of socializing other people. What we do, even when other people cannot see us, impacts other people around us. In the focus of this chapter, religious socialization begins at the youngest ages and continues throughout adulthood as individuals are exposed to ever more of the world.

References Barro, Robert, Rachel McCleary, and Jason Hwang. 2010. “Religious Conversion in 40 Countries.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49(1):15–36. Beider, Nadia. 2017. “Religious Practices and Beliefs among Religious Stayers and Religious Switchers in Israeli Judaism.” Sociology of Religion 78(1):81–99. Bengtson, Vern L. (with Norella M. Putney and Susan C. Harris). 2013. Faith and Families: How Religion is Passed Down Across Generations. New York: Oxford University Press. Bengtson, Vern L., Phil Zuckerman, R. David Hayward, and Merril Silverstein. 2018. “Bringing Up Nones: Intergenerational Influences and Cohort Trends.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 57(2):258–275. Berghammer, Caroline, Desiree Krivanek, and Ulrike Zartler. 2017. “Looking Beyond the Church Tax: Families and the Disaffiliation of Austrian Roman Catholics.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56(3):514–535. Beste, Jennifer. 2011. “Children Speak: Catholic Second Graders’ Agency and Experiences in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.” Sociology of Religion 72(3):327–350. Brauer, Simon. 2018. “The Surprising Predictable Decline of Religion in the United States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 57(4):654–675. Conway, Brian and Bram Spruyt. 2018. “Catholic Commitment around the Globe: A 52-Country Analysis.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 57(2):276–299. Denton, Melinda Lundquist. 2012. “Family Structure, Family Disruption, and Profiles of Adolescent Religiosity.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51(1):42–64. Denton, Melinda Lundquist and Julian Culver. 2015. “Family Disruption and Racial Variation in Adolescent and Emerging Adult Religiosity. Sociology of Religion 76(2):222–239. Di, Di. 2018. “Paths to Enlightenment: Constructing Buddhist Identities in Mainland China and the United States.” Sociology of Religion 79(4):449–471. Doebler, Stefanie and Ian Shuttleworth. 2018. “Religious Identification, Switching, and Apostasy Among Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland: Individual and Cohort Dynamics Between Two Censuses 2001–2011.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 57(4):723–742. Elder, Glen H., Jr. 1994. “Time, Human Agency, and Social Change: Perspectives on the Life Course.” Social Psychology Quarterly 57:4–15. Elder, Glen H., Jr. 1999. Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience, 25th Anniversary Edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Engelberg, Ari. 2016. “Religious Zionist Singles: Caught Between “Family Values’ and ‘Young Adulthood”.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 55(2):349–364. Evans, Geoffrey and Ksenia Northmore-Ball. 2012. “The Limits of Secularization? The Resurgence of Orthodoxy in Post-Soviet Russia.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51(4):795–808. Galonnier, Juliett and Diego de los Rios. 2016. “Teaching and Learning to be Religious: Pedagogies of Conversion to Islam and Christianity. Sociology of Religion 77(1):59–81. Gurrentz, Benjamin T. 2014. ““A Brotherhood of Believers”: Religious Identity and Boundary-Work in a Christian Fraternity.” Sociology of Religion 75(1):113–135.

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Research on Religious Socialization Hill, Jonathan P. 2011. “Faith and Understanding: Specifying the Impact of Higher Education on Religious Belief.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 50(3):533–551. Hout, Michael. 2016. “Saint Peter’s Leaky Boat: Falling Integration Persistence among U.S.-Born Catholics Cince 1974.” Sociology of Religion 77(1):1–17. Jindra, Ines W. 2011. “How Religious Content Matters in Conversion Narratives to Various Religious Groups.” Sociology of Religion 72(3):275–302. Jones, Jeffrey M. 2021. How Religious are Americans? Gallup Report downloaded from https://news​ .gallup​.com​/poll​/358364​/religious​-americans​.aspx on March 31, 2022. Klinenberg, Eric. 2012. Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. New York: Penguin Press. Kregting, Joris, Paul Vermeer, Peer Scheepers, and Chris Hermans. 2018. “Why God has Left the Netherlands: Explanations for the Decline of Institutional Christianity in the Netherlands between 1966 and 2015.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 57(1):58–79. Manglos, Nicolette D. 2010. “Born Again in Balaka: Pentecostal versus Catholic Narratives of Religious Transformation in Rural Malawi.” Sociology of Religion 71(4):409–431. McClure, Paul. 2017. “Tinkering with Technology and Religion in the Digital Age: The Effects of Internet use on Religious Beliefs, Behavior, and Belonging.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56(3):481–497. McFarland, Michael J., Bradley R.E. Wright, and David L. Weakliem. 2011. “Educational Attainment and Religiosity: Exploring Variations by Religious Tradition.” Sociology of Religion 72(2):166–188. Muller, Tim S., Nan Dirk De Graaf, and Peter Schmidt. 2014. “Which Societies Provide a Strong Religious Socialization Context? Explanations Beyond the Effects of National Religiosity.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53(4):739–759. Miller, David L. 2014. Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action. Long Grove, IL: Waveland. Newport, Frank. 2017. 2017  Update on Americans and Religion. Gallup Report. Accessed on October 4, 2018 at https://news​.gallup​.com​/poll​/224642​/2017​-update​-americans​-religion​.aspx Olson, Daniel V. 2019. “Influences of Your Neighbors' Religions on You, Your Attitudes and Behaviors, and Your Community.” Sociology of Religion 80(2):147–167. Perry, Samuel L. 2015. “Pornography Consumption as a Threat to Religious Socialization.” Sociology of Religion 76(4):436–458. Petts, Richard J. 2014. “Parental Religiosity and Youth Religiosity: Variations by Family Structure.” Sociology of Religion 76(1):95–120. Pew. 2015. America’s Changing Religious Landscape. Report accessed at: https://www​.pewforum​.org​ /2015​/05​/12​/americas​-changing​-religious​-landscape/ on 10 March 2019. Ramos, Aida I., Robert D. Woodberry, and Christopher G. Ellison. 2017. “The Contexts of Conversion among U.S. Latinos.” Sociology of Religion 78(2):119–145. Ritzer, George. 2013. Introduction to Sociology. Los Angeles: Sage Publishing. Rohall, David. 2020. Symbolic Interaction in Society. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Schafer, Markus H. 2014. “Childhood Misfortune, Ultimate Redemption? A Stress Process-Life Course Analysis of Adult Born-Again Experiences.” Sociology of Religion 75(1):25–56. Schleifer, Cyrus, Simon G. Brauer, and Visha R. Patel. 2018. “Patterns of Conservative Religious Beliefs and Religious Practice across College Majors.” Sociology of Religion 79(3):299–322. Schwadel, Philip. 2017. “The Positives and Negatives of Higher Education: How the Religious Context in Adolescence Moderates the Effects of Education on Changes in Religiosity.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56(4):869–885. Schwadel, Philip. 2010a. “Age, Period, and Cohort Effects on U.S. Religious Service Attendance: The Declining Impact of Sex, Southern Residence, and Catholic Affiliation.” Sociology of Religion 71(1):2–24. Schwadel, Philip. 2010b. “Period and Cohort Effects on Religious Disaffiliation: A Research Note.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49(2):311–319. Sepulvado, Brandon, David Hachen, Michael Penta, and Omar Lizardo. 2015. “Social Affiliation from Religious Disaffiliation: Evidence of Selective Mixing among Youth with No Religious Preference during the Transition to College.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 54(4):833–841.

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David Rohall Small, Jenny L. and Nicholas A. Bowman. 2011. “Religious Commitment, Skepticism, and Struggle Among U.S. College Students: The Impact of Majority/Minority Religious Affiliation and Institutional Type.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 50(1):154–174. Smith, Jesse M. 2011. “Becoming an Atheist in America: Constructing Identity and Meaning from the Rejection of Theism.” Sociology of Religion 72(2):215–237. Storm, Ingrid. 2017. “Does Economic Insecurity Predict Religiosity? Evidence from the European Social Survey 2002–2014.” Sociology of Religion 78(2):146–172. Sumerau, J.E. and Ryan T. Cragun. 2016. ““I Think Some People Need Religion:” The Social Construction of Nonreligious Moral Identities.” Sociology of Religion 77(4):386–407. Thiessen, Joel and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme. 2017. “Becoming a Religious None: Irreligious Socialization and Disaffiliation.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56(1):64–82. Uecker, Jeremy E. and Christopher Ellison. 2012. “Parental Divorce, Parental Religious Characteristics, and Religious Outcomes in Adulthood.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51(4):777–794. Uecker, Jeremy E., Samuel Stroope, and Damon Mayrl. 2016. “Family Formation and Returning to Institutional Religion in Young Adulthood.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 55(2):384–406. Vargas, Nicholas. 2012. “Retrospective Accounts of Religious Disaffiliation in the United States: Stressors, Skepticism, and Political Factors.” Sociology of Religion 73(2):200–223. Voas, David. 2014. “Does Education Develop or Diminish Spirituality in Taiwan?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53(3):556–574. Wilkinson, Renae. 2018. “Losing or Choosing Faith: Mother Loss and Religious Change.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 57(4):758–778. Whitehead, Andrew L. 2018. “Religion and Disability: Variation in Religious Service Attendance Rates for Children with Chronic Health Conditions.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 57(2):377–395. Woodhead, Linda. 2017. “The Rise of “No Religion:” Towards an Explanation.” Sociology of Religion 78(2):247–262.

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16 THEOLOGICALLY INFORMED FAMILY THEORY Todd F. Martin

Abstract This chapter seeks to integrate a particular Christian theology with a sample of family science theories to better understand the way belief systems may inform the predictive and explanatory value of family theories from a positivistic approach. It will use a relational trinitarian theology as laid out in Barth’s theology of relations to illustrate how the scientific value of family theories such as rational choice family theory and family life course development theory can be enhanced by incorporating knowledge gained from theological beliefs.

Introduction Family theories seek to predict and explain family behavior. This chapter explores how family theory may be enhanced by incorporating theological concepts such as love, forgiveness, and sacrifice. Stage theories are abundant in sociology, but not all share the same level of impact as Auguste Comte’s (1858) linear, three-stage theory of societal development. He posited that societies begin in a theological stage consisting of a secondary progression of fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism, before progressing to a second, transitional stage of metaphysics, and finally concluding with what he viewed as the most evolved stage, that of positivity or the scientific stage. Comte’s message was clear. The more developed a society is, the more positivistic it would be in its approach to epistemology. The less evolved it was, the more likely it will rely on theological explanations of truth claims. This schema has continued to influence both the natural and social sciences for nearly 200 years since Comte’s writings, although perhaps without the monolithic adherence Comte would have anticipated. Had he written in the twenty-first century, he would have had to account for the disillusionment with enlightenment thinking and the rise of a post-positivistic approach to knowledge. Despite this qualification, Comte provides a fitting introduction to this chapter on the integration of a belief system (in this case, a DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-23

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Christian relational trinitarian theology) with positivistic family theory. Exploring how one belief system – Christian theology – can contribute to development of family theory is the goal of this chapter. It begins with a rejection of Comte’s linear and mutually exclusive approach to epistemology while still maintaining a high regard for the importance of positivistic knowledge claims. It will do this under the premise that one stage does not replace the prior stage but, rather, incorporates the previous stage. More specifically, a positivistic approach to family theory does not reject or supersede metaphysical or theologically informed knowledge but, rather, incorporates that knowledge into theory. A scientific approach to family is a better theory when it can incorporate the beliefs and values both with and about family. As James White (2005) states, “theories always contain values” (2005:162), as others have also asserted (Knorr-Cetina 1981, 1999; Longino 1990, 2002). These values shape how topics are researched and why some information is deemed superior to other evidence in explaining a phenomenon under study. The philosophical details of this argument are not the focus of this chapter. Instead, it will show how family theory and family theology can inform one another by using two family science theories and a theologically rich approach to family theology.

Religion and Family in Sociology The social institutions of religion and family have been central to sociology from the classic works of its founders. For example, Emile Durkheim saw the family and religion as the basis of social differentiation, in that the roles, rules, and regulations of a society originated in how families differentiated responsibilities and authority and how religion differentiated the sacred and profane. In Suicide (1951), Durkheim documented how it was not different religions that led to differential suicide rates but the lived beliefs of those religions that impacted levels of social integration. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s unfavorable view of religion and the normative family structure of the midnineteenth century was based on how beliefs associated with those social units worked against the socialist ideals they envisioned. Finally, Harriet Martineau spoke out from her own religious and family context, saying "In the present state of the religious world, secularism ought to flourish. What an amount of sin and woe might and would then be extinguished" (Bell 1932:21). The black box of variable relationships often includes beliefs. Models based only on variables that are easy to operationalize, measure, and collect often neglect attention to ideologies and values. In her 2010 summary of peer reviewed journals from the previous decade, in which religious variables were primary predictors of family outcomes, Annette Mahoney (2010) concluded that there is a need to move beyond markers of general religiousness and, instead, focus more on specific beliefs and practices that may increase or decrease the level of problems found across all family types. The relational spirituality framework, referred to by Mahoney and others (2014), represents a line of research parallel to that of this chapter. Mahoney’s article in a prominent family journal demonstrates the interest in integrating belief systems into family theory to better understand the impact of these belief systems on family outcomes. Mahoney’s framework is based on three sets of mechanisms: To advance in-depth research, the relational spirituality framework I created for this essay also delineates three sets of mechanisms where spiritual beliefs and practices 208

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can be substantively integrated, for better or worse, into family relationships: (a) each party’s relationship with the divine, (b) the family relationship having spiritual properties, and (c) family members’ relationships with spiritual communities. (2010:822) This framework notes that theological discrepancy across belief systems is more present around issues of family formation than around family maintenance, an important distinction not often nuanced in research. Mahoney touches on theological issues but does not explore theology beyond some tertiary comments. Although this is a solid attempt to include how religious beliefs and behaviors influence family outcomes, it does not delve into the theological foundation for bridging that relationship. Examples of couples praying together increasing their likelihood of seeking self-change or viewing one’s marriage as sacred leading to greater marital commitment and satisfaction are illustrations of the power of religious beliefs influencing family outcomes, yet the black box still exists as to where these beliefs and/or behaviors came from, or how they influence the outcome. What is the theology that leads one to believing their marriage is sacred? Or what is the theology of praying together that leads to greater self-examination? These are examples of issues this chapter seeks to address. James White, Todd Martin, and Kari Adamsons (2019) provide a way to connect family theology with family theory, still within a positivistic paradigm, seeing scientifically informed theories as the best way of doing so. After discussing philosophies of science – positivistic, interpretive, and conflict approaches – they provide a brief history of family theory and its role in furthering family science, referencing the work of Burt Adams and Suzanne Steinmetz (1993) and Ronald Howard and Louis van Leeuwen (1981), which explore the context in which the scientific study of the family developed. Like modern sociology, much of family science was developed in the Global North during the past 150 years and was shaped by its culture, values, beliefs, and ideals. In another classic history of family science, Harold Christensen (1964) addressed the perceived fragmentation of the field at the time, with critics describing it as “amateurish, trivial, scattered, often sterile, and sometimes moralistic” (1964:29). He argued that family scholars must be “emancipated” from the moral and cultural constraints that hinder their research, begging the question of whose morals. The “challenge to the future relevance of FDT (Family Development Theory) is how it deals with the debate between how a family should be versus how it could be” (Martin 2018:60).

What Is Theology? Theology is the study of the divine that also explores revelatory knowledge extending beyond empiricism – a discipline used by religious traditions to guide their understanding of how to live out their religiosity. Stanley Grenz (1998) defined Christian theology as “the systematic reflection on, and articulation of, the fundamental beliefs we share as followers of Jesus Christ” (1998:15). Notably, Hans Boersma (2021) states that the task of Christian theology is relational rather than just propositional, which provides the connecting point to family theory. A theology of family is a belief system about family and needs to be distinguished from the many good research projects that see religion as a dependent or independent variable in a model also containing family variables. 209

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What Is a Theology of Family? Christian theology of “the family” is a popular title for monographs, yet the quality of many of these texts is lacking. Ray Anderson and Dennis Guernsey (1985) highlighted the need for better thinking in the area when they asserted that “contemporary Christian approaches to the family … are too often biblically superficial and theologically shallow” (1985:5). They suggested that this paucity of solid biblical and theological models of family led to psychology stepping in where theology failed. Their solution was stated as follows: “To solve the dilemma, respected biblical and theological scholars need to develop appropriate models … rather than abandon the field to secular disciplines. Someone has to take up the challenge” (1985:6). To illustrate the potential value of a theology of family in furthering family theory development, a relational trinitarian theology will be employed here. This choice is not random but, rather, is based on a survey of existing works about its depth, detail, and theological richness and is well represented by both Protestant and Catholic theologians. John Paul (2006), Perry Cahall (2016), and Marc Ouellet (2006) are seminal scholars who build a family theology on a relational, trinitarian foundation within the Catholic tradition. Key thinkers who took up the challenge from a Protestant perspective include theologian Ray Anderson (1991) in collaboration with sociologist Dennis Guernsey (1985), Gary Deddo (1999), and the husband-and-wife team of sociologist Jack and family therapist Judith Balswick (2021). Many other works focus on family and theology, but none develop a foundation anchored in the relational nature of God as richly as these examples.

Building Toward a Relational Christian Theology of Family A relational trinitarian theology of family is rooted in theological anthropology. What does it mean to be human? How are humans motivated to act? These questions are addressed by several disciplines in the social science and humanities. Theology was historically viewed as the queen of the liberal arts because it was through theology that all other knowledge was interpreted. As Perry Glanzer, Nathan Alleman, and Todd Ream (2017) explain: In particular, we must recognize that what makes theology unique is that it is the only field of study that can properly worship the subject that it studies – God. Every other discipline and every other part of the university must learn how to seek excellence without idolatry, and it can only do this with the help of theology. (2017:10-11)

Theological Anthropology and Theology of Relations Anderson (1991) contrasted non-theological anthropologies with those from a theological perspective, which is the focus of his essays on being human. He discussed non-theological anthropologies across a Comte-inspired continuum of myth to science. The first category, speculative anthropology, is a clustering of mythical and philosophical approaches, while scientific anthropology approaches the topic from an empirical, value-free approach focusing on the “what is humanity” questions rather than the “why” and “by who” questions. Anderson summed up the limitations of non-theological anthropologies when he quoted Barth: “The fundamental problem with all non-theological anthropologies is that they proceed from anthropos rather than theos. At best, non-theological anthropologies are ‘symptoms of real humanity, not real humanity itself’” (1991:200). 210

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The bridge between a theological anthropology and a theology of family is the theology of relations among human beings. Deddo (1999) provides a comprehensive overview of Barth’s theology of relations which provides the bridge discussed above. How does one move from a theological anthropology to theology of relations and then on to a theology of family? Deddo believes a way forward can be found in Barth’s theology of relations. At the heart of his anthropology is Christology, properly distinguished from and related to it. The Christological relation sheds light on and gives life to humanity in its relationships, first with God and then with others. Deddo provides an overview of Barth’s seven spheres of being-in-relation:

1. Intra-life: Son to Father in the Spirit. 2. Jesus to the Father in the Spirit. 3. Humankind to God through Jesus. 4. Jesus to other humans. 5. Humankind: one to another. 6. Body to soul. 7. Eternity to time.

For the purposes of this chapter, Spheres 1–4 set parameters for belief about humanity and how humanity should be in relations. Sphere 5 is a broad sphere that includes the way humans relate to one another including familial relationships. Spheres 1–4 provide the bridge between theological anthropology and a theology of human-to-human interaction, which then provides the foundation for a theology of family. The importance of this section is that it develops in more detail the basis for the religious belief about family that manifests itself in family behavior. It is beliefs about family, family beliefs, and family behaviors that can be operationalized in positivistic models to test family theories. This is not a new idea. Mahoney (2010) suggested just such a strategy. Brigette Berger and Peter Berger (1983) pointed out that religion has influenced views about and behaviors of family for a long time. “Human beings have thought of family, and of specific family types, as imitations of the divine reality since time immemorial” (1983:191). Human beings were created in the likeness and image of God – imago Dei. Jesus, as the true image of God, invites us into the triune relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Barth uses the term “perichoresis” to capture the unity of the three in one God and the way in which humanity is then included in this relational nature by being created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26–27). The triune nature of God points to a plurality of relations within the Godhead, both separateness and unity. As Jack Balswick, Pamela King, and Kevin Reimer describe it, “we are created to be in relationship with God. This relationship is to be characterized by uniqueness, unity, and reciprocity. Similar to the interrelationships with the Trinity, humans experience simultaneous communion with God that does not jeopardize our particularity” (2016:45). Dennis Hiebert continues the thought by stating, “Humans are built to long for completion and wholeness in relationship with a human ‘other,’ just as their spirituality is longing to be complete and whole again in relationship with the divine ‘wholly other’” (2013:199). This relational being is then extended through the incarnation of Jesus Christ who came as a human to dwell among humans in the role of reconciler of the fallen creation to the creator. The fourth relation is Jesus’s response back to us. He does not just act as mediator on our behalf but as a brother and a friend. The last human relationship mentioned in Barth’s theology of relations is the human to fellow human relation. This is the basis of a theology 211

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of relations in which human relations are understood to be an extension of the relational triune God, the template for human action. The implication of this belief system or theology on human and familial interaction is significant.

Theology of Family A theological anthropology, with its theology of relations based on relational trinitarian theology, is the bridge to a theology of family and its importance to family theory. Deddo provides the most theologically mature presentation of this approach, but it is Balswick and Balswick who develop the concepts and integrate them in more practical ways, delivering an accessible introduction to a theology of family. The Trinitarian model reflects the nature and relationality (distinction and unity) and becomes a core ideal and a central theme of understanding family relationships … The relational process – be it the initial forming of the marital relationship, nurturing and guiding in the child-rearing years, building new family structures, or dealing with the end of life – involves the fundamental issues of forming unity while embracing each person’s distinctiveness. (2021:5) The Balswicks credit Deddo with “building a strong case for applying Trinitarian theology to family relationships” (2021:5-6). Whereas Deddo explores a variety of family issues in light of trinitarian theology, the Balswicks apply that theology to the field of family science while also generating theologically informed family models.

The Parent–Child Relationship as the Basis of Family What constitutes a family is the seminal question leading to the possibility of measuring family. James White, Todd Martin, and Eric Sayer (2016) present a mathematical model that uses inter-generational dyads as the basic building block for family structures. Theologians have also contemplated this question, providing an illustration of how the two fields overlap with one another. The dyad is the smallest unit of family, but there are differing views of what that unit is. Frederick Brunner (1970), a contemporary of Barth, suggested the basic dyad is the conjugal unit, while Barth saw the parent/child relationship as the basis. Barth argued his point based on the fact that all experience the parent/child relationship as a child, but not all will as a parent, nor will all experience marriage. Therefore, the intergenerational unit is the basic building block of family. God’s self-revelation in parent/child familial terms, rather than as mother/father/child triad, also supports this approach to the basic unit of the family being understood as the inter-generational dyad. Anderson and Guernsey (1985) build on Barth’s approach when they state: The central focus of the Bible’s view of the family is not on the family as a collective unit but on the relationship between parents and children. It is upon this relation that both the command and the promise rest. In other words, the parent/child relation is the core relation for the development of persons, not the concept of family as a social construct. (185:32) 212

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Integration of a Christological Trinitarian Theology and Family Theory The family theory text by White, Martin, and Adamsons (2019) provides a comprehensive overview of common theories in family science. The authors state clearly that the focus of the text is on a positivistic approach to researching the family. Interpretivist and conflict approaches are discussed, but positivism remains a philosophy of science based on the work of scholars such as Karl Popper (1963). They allow values and ideologies to be incorporated but only with certain criteria being met. There is no question that systems of belief about families can be part of a family theory or that carefully studying those beliefs might improve a family theory. There is also no doubt that beliefs about family science can affect family theories … our caution is only that ideologies among family scholars that are philosophical or political may be usefully connected with a particular family theory, but they are not within or constitutive of the theory itself. (White, Martin and Adamsons 2019:27) This creates the opportunity for the integration of a theology (system of belief) with family theories. Those theories may be pre-existing, or they may be newly generated from this belief system, and as long as the theory can be tested outside the belief system, it is still a valid positivistic approach to family theory building. In other words, it is not the belief system that is being tested, but rather a set of propositions extended from the beliefs that can be tested. Philosophical ideas may guide the research process, but they are not the focus of the research. As the authors explain, “Those who attempt to not use their research as a vehicle for their own values, the values of their religion, or their political values would be clearly identified as positivist” (White, Martin, and Adamsons 2019:28). The idea of integrating beliefs and values in positivistic theory building has been supported as early as Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte (Turner, Beeghley, and Powers 2011), and was central to family theory building from its inception, as outlined by Ernest Mowrer (1932), until its height of influence in the late 1970s. David Cheal (1991) states that earlier attempts to study family from a purely objective perspective have now been cast in doubt. Today, in what is described as a post-positivistic period of theory building, the integration of beliefs and values with testable propositional theories is more accepted. The argument here is that there is value in incorporating a theological belief system into positivistic approaches to family theory because the idea of value neutral approaches to family science is more a Weberian ideal type rather than a reality. The histories of family theory development all include a recognition of the cultural and historic context in which the theories were developed and how those contexts shaped those theories. To move family development theory forward, there is a need to move beyond its mid-twentieth century ideals and biologically influenced stages (Martin and White 2022).

Family Theory The integration of a relational trinitarian theology with both rational choice theory and family life course development theory exemplifies how family theory could be enhanced by theology. The following two examples are drawn from Family Theories: An Introduction (White, Martin, and Adamsons 2019). 213

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Rational Choice Summary of Theory Rational choice theory is based on the assumption that humans will make choices that maximize their rewards while at the same time trying to minimize their costs. The theory has roots in Greek philosophies seeking to understand how to live a happy (successful) life, while Enlightenment philosophers such as Bentham and Mills focused on the utility of choice. The question rational choice seeks to answer is how the individual can increase pleasure while reducing pain. Family theorists such as Gary Becker (1991) and James Coleman (1990) have developed propositions regarding marriage, divorce, fertility, and a variety of other family experiences and choices using rational choice theory. The theory assumes that actors are rational and motivated by self-interest and that analysis needs to begin with the individual.

Key Concepts Economic concepts such as rewards and costs, profit and utility have replaced emotional and experiential concepts like happiness and pain. Relationships and roles are evaluated and commodified as outcomes, alternatives, and comparative options. People now have forms of capital such as human (Becker (1994), social (Coleman (1990), and cultural (Bourdieu 1984) capital that can be leveraged and exchanged in the marketplaces of relationship. Social media and dating apps such as Tinder are predicated on the supply and demand principle.

Propositions Propositions of rational choice include:

• Actors in a situation will choose whatever behavior maximizes profit. • Actors in a situation in which there are no rewards seek to minimize costs. • When immediate profits are equal, actors choose according to which alternatives provide the most in the long term.

• When long term profits are equal, actors choose the alternative that provides the most profit in the short term.

At the micro-level, personal interactions such as dating and mate selection are highly influenced by this approach. Marital satisfaction and stability have also been studied with this approach. Becker (1994) suggested partners are always looking for new and better options while considering barriers or costs. Fertility and divorce have likewise been examined using this approach. The economic costs associated with these family outcomes are clearly calculable.

Theological Integration Rational choice theory is based on the human motivation of self-interest and is based on historical philosophies that present humans with a choice of pleasure or pain. Understood in the context of a theology of relations that sees human beings as created in the image and 214

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likeness of God, the principles of the theory remain intact, but the definitions of key concepts take on different meanings. A few examples illustrate the integration of the relational nature of God and human beings. A relational trinitarian theology alters the key tenets of rational choice theory. Concepts such as profit and loss are calculated differently. Time becomes a metric that also takes on a different value. For example, in Mark 8:36, Jesus asks, “For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” In Luke 14, Jesus uses an example that admonishes his disciples to count the cost of following him. He refers to a direct economic parallel by asking what person would build a building without first counting the cost to do so, but then states that his followers need to be willing to give up everything to follow him. In the context of rational choice theory, the idea of costs and rewards continue to exist but must be translated in order to understand their new meaning. The difference the theology makes is that it sees costs and rewards through a distinctly different lens. Many religions talk of an afterlife that is the reward for those who lived virtuously or the punishment for those who did not. This belief must then be taken into consideration regarding temporal life choices. The apostle Paul contrasts these two approaches to this life and a promised one to come when, in 1 Corinthians 15:32, he writes: “If I fought with wild animals at Ephesus with a merely human perspective, what would I have gained by it? If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” Regarding the relational nature of actors, when actors are viewed in terms of the type of capital they possess, relations are viewed as objects that can enhance or detract from the pursuit of happiness. Consider Paul’s instruction to the Philippians in Chapter 2 Verse 4: “Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.” A common critique of exchange theory is that it is tautological, involving circular reasoning immune to falsification. A person may want to validate their own decision-making and believe that they have maximized their utility when, in fact, it may not be truly known whether they did. Jonathan Turner et al. (2011) argued that the reward is defined by what a person values; the values of a belief system affect the value of choices. For example, in Matthew 13, Jesus presents a parable that challenges traditional views of value. “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.” The use of rational choice theory in everything from marriage patterns to fertility outcomes is affected by the values the participants bring to the choices they make. Even with purely cognitive motivations, the understanding of a theology of relations would allow propositions to be better nuanced to incorporate the beliefs and behaviors of adherents. A better understanding of the impact of the theology of individual and family behavior would help to develop existing ideas about the economic motivations of family behavior (Becker 1991) or traditional marital stability models that recognize barriers to self-interested decisions (Levinger 1999).

Family Life Course Development Summary Family life course development theory is a consolidation of several stands of research. Initially, Reuben Hill and Evelyn Duvall worked to create a grand family theory that sought 215

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to harmonize life cycle, social systems, human development, life span and life course, and life events and life crises approaches to studying family. The theory has been critiqued for its focus on traditional nuclear families and has been superseded by two of its independent parts: life course theory, which has been re-envisioned in recent years (Martin and White 2022), and family stress theory (Martin 2018).

Key Concepts The definition of family is at the heart of the theory because the concept of development must be objectively applied to a particular unit under study. Positions and roles within a family connect with the concepts of norms and normality. Stages, events, transitions, and pathways all point to the measurement and comparative nature of the theory. Variation and deviation from the norm help the theory predict the pathways that different families follow and why, as well as diverse family outcomes based on earlier sequenced events and stages.

Propositions Family development is a group process regulated by societal timing and sequencing norms. Although social norms vary culturally and across time, when societal timing and sequencing norms are out of sync, it is more likely that disruption will occur. Transitions from one family stage to another are predicted by the current stage and the duration of time spent in that stage. Individuals and families systematically deviate from institutional family norms to adjust their behavior to other institutional norms.

Theological Integration Family development life course theory is cited frequently in topically arranged texts. Specifically, family ministry texts frequently apply the stage theory aspects of family development life course theory. Although this strategy is popular, it highlights the lack of theological integration being addressed here. Rather than taking a specific secular theory and adding biblical texts to Christianize it, real integration seeks how a theological understanding of family can inform the theory. One specific example of this is the theory’s focus on the basic building block of a family. Recent developments have focused on the definition of family and the predictors of family transitions rather than on the traditional, biologically influenced development stages of the theory. As discussed earlier, Martin and White (2022) argue that the basic definition of a family begins with the inter-generational dyad of parent and child. Debates about whether the parent/child dyad or the conjugal dyad is the basis of family is also debated in theology. Anderson and Guernsey (1985) asked what the first, necessary concept for the theology of family should be. “Do we start with marriage (Brunner) or with the parent/child relationship (Barth)” (1985:75)? They go on to cite Christopher Lasch (1977) to develop the argument that the church is “handmaid” to modern culture and with the emphasis of American sociology on the transfer of much of family functioning to the state, the personal sphere was all that remained. Shifts from loyalty to companions marked marital relationships, a trend that continues today with the rise of individualized marriages (Amato 2010). Parenting and marriage are both central theological themes, but it is the parent/child relationship that 216

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first describes God in Trinity, and it is the terminology with which God relates to humans. Barth’s critique of contextualized theology is that it begins with culture rather than beginning with God’s self-revelation in the person of Jesus. Application to family development life course theory moves it away from the normative Western nuclear family formation pattern toward the importance of the parent/child relationship. A move away from the conjugal and individualistic aspect of marriage to procreation and socializing responsibilities and expectations of a parent is one implication of integrating the theory and theology.

Summary This chapter demonstrated the potential utility of combining a belief system and positivistic family theories. Religious beliefs continue to influence the behaviors of individuals and families, and when theology is used to inform scientific theories, they benefit. The specific example used in this chapter was a relational trinitarian theology as laid out in Barth’s theology of relations. Some applications of this theology to the study of family are more theological, some more developmental, and some more sociological. A theology of family was built upon a theological anthropology and theology of relations. Once the belief system was defined, the ideas were applied to rational choice family theory and family life course development theory as examples of how theology could enhance family theory; values and ideology can, indeed, contribute to a scientific approach to the study of family. Hopefully, this will inspire other family researchers to see the value in better integrated belief systems in their research.

References Adams, Bert N., and Suzanne K. Steinmetz. 1993. “Family Theory and Methods in the Classics.” Pp. 71–94 in Sourcebook of Family Theory and Methods: A Contextual Approach, edited by Pauline G. Boss et al. New York: Plenium. Amato, P.R. 2010. “Research on Divorce: Continuing Trends and New Developments.” Journal of Marriage and Family 72(3):650–66. doi: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2010.00723.x. Anderson, Ray S., and Dennis B. Guernsey. 1985. On Being Family: A Social Theology of the Family. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Anderson, Ray S. 1991. On Being Human: Essays in Theological Anthropology. Pasadena, CA: Fuller Seminary Press. Balswick, Jack O., Pamela Ebstyne King, and Kevin S. Reimer. 2016. The Reciprocating Self: Human Development in Theological Perspective: Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Balswick, Jack O., Judith K. Balswick, and Thomas V. Frederick. 2021. The Family: A Christian Perspective on the Contemporary Home: Baker Academic. Becker, Gary S. 1991. A Treatise on the Family: Enlarged Edition: Harvard University Press. Becker, Gary S. 1994. “Human Capital.” University of Chicago Press Economics Books. Bell, H. I. 1932. “Letters of Harriet Martineau.” The British Museum Quarterly 7(1):21–22. Berger, Brigitte, and Peter L. Berger. 1983. The War over the Family: Capturing the Middle Ground. New York: Anchor Press. Boersma, Hans. 2021. Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew. Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brunner, Frederick D. 1970. A Theology of the Holy Spirit. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Cahall, Perry J. 2016. The Mystery of Marriage: A Theology of the Body and the Sacrament. Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications. Cheal, David J. 1991. Family and the State of Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Todd F. Martin Christensen, Harold T. 1964. Handbook of Marriage and the Family. Chicago: Rand McNally. Coleman, James. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Comte, Auguste. 1858. Positive Philosophy. Honolulu, HI: C. Blanchard. Deddo, Gary W. 1999. Karl Barth's Theology of Relations: Trinitarian, Christological, and Human: Towards an Ethic of the Family. New York: Lang. Durkheim, Emile. 1951/1897. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Glanzer, Perry, Nathan Alleman, and Todd Ream. 2017. Restoring the Soul of the University: Unifying Christian Higher Education in a Fragmented Age. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic. Grenz, Stanley J. 1998. Created for Community: Connecting Christian Belief with Christian Living. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Hiebert, Dennis. 2013. Sweet Surrender: How Cultural Mandates Shape Christian Marriage. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Howard, Ronald L., and Louis Th van Leeuwen. 1981. A Social History of American Family Sociology, 1865–1940, Vol. 4. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press. John Paul, II. 2006. Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. Translated by M. Waldstein. Boston: Pauline Books & Media. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1981. The Manufacture of Knowledge. Oxford, UK: Pergamon. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lasch, Christopher. 1977. Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged. New York: Basic Books. Levinger, George. 1999. “Duty toward Whom?” Pp. 37–52 in Handbook of Interpersonal Commitment and Relationship Stability, edited by Jeffrey M. Adams and Warren H. Jones. New York: Springer. Longino, Helen E. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Longino, Helen E. 2002. The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mahoney, Annette. 2010. “Religion in Families, 1999–2009: A Relational Spirituality Framework.” Journal of Marriage and Family 72(4):805–27. doi: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2010.00732.x. Mahoney, Annette, and Annmarie Cano. 2014. “Introduction to the Special Section on Religion and Spirituality in Family Life: Pathways between Relational Spirituality, Family Relationships and Personal Well-Being.” Journal of Family Psychology 28(6):735. Martin, Todd F. 2018. “Family Development Theory 30 Years Later.” Journal of Family Theory & Review 10(1):49–69. doi: 10.1111/jftr.12237. Martin, Todd F., and James M. White. 2022. “Family Development Theory.” Pp. 179–201 in Sourcebook of Family Theories and Methodologies: A Dynamic Approach, edited by K. L. Adamsons, A. FewDemo, C. Proulx and K. Roy. New York: Springer. Mowrer, Ernest Russell. 1932. The Family: Its Organization and Disorganization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ouellet, Marc. 2006. Divine Likeness: Toward a Trinitarian Anthropology of the Family. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Popper, Karl R. 1963. “Science as Falsification.” Conjectures and Refutations 1:33–39. Turner, Jonathan H., Leonard Beeghley, and Charles H. Powers. 2011. The Emergence of Sociological Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. White, James M. 2005. Advancing Family Theories. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage White, James M., Todd F. Martin, and Eric Sayer. 2016. “Family Structures and Measurements for Studying Families: A Project.” Paper presented at the Theory Construction and Research Methodology Workshop: Families and Human Rights: Promise and Vulnerability in the 21st Century, November 1, Minneapolis, MN. White, James M., Todd F. Martin, and Kari L. Adamsons. 2019. Family Theories: An Introduction. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

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17 MARRIAGE PAYMENTS AMONG CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES IN SOUTHERN INDIA Sristi Mondal and Anand Ranjan Abstract Marriage in India is a resilient social institution because of its presumed significance in providing socio-economic security to its members, integrating groups or communities, and ensuring social mobility, circulation of wealth, socially sanctioned filial ties, and biological reproduction. Marriage payments have been intrinsic to the matrimonial process among Hindus for centuries. However, scholars have argued that marriage among the minority Christians in India has been adopting dominant Hindu practices with changing lifestyle, employment opportunities, class mobility, and demographic circumstances, thus, reflecting entrenched social inequalities. Therefore, this chapter first explores the institutional relationship between the practices and ideas of Christians and their embeddedness in a Hindu society in southern India with reference to property exchanges. Second, it analyzes the proliferation and extent of these property transactions and the growth of the urban class among Christians in India. Third, it examines the institutional connection between these marriage payments and the sustenance of endogamous groups among the Christians. The shifting nature of marriage payments is fundamental to the intricacies of inter-personal relationships among concerned marrying groups. Finally, this chapter explores the implications that such marriage payments have for the status of both Christian men and women in southern India, but especially for Christian women, as exchange of wealth runs parallel to the exchange of women through marriages.

Introduction Marriage in India is a resilient social institution because of its presumed significance in providing socio-economic security to its members, integrating groups or communities, and ensuring social mobility, circulation of wealth, socially sanctioned filial ties, and biological reproduction. Marriage payments have been intrinsic to the matrimonial process among DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-24

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Hindus for centuries. Endowments during a daughter’s marriage can be classified either as stridhan (women’s wealth) or a dowry, depending upon its nature, to whom it is given, and who has rights over it. While Stanley Tambiah (1973) argued that a dowry was a form of “pre-mortem inheritance” in which women had their rights transferred to them during marriage, it has been challenged by scholars such as Triloki Madan (1975), Rajni Palriwala (1989), and Mysore Srinivas (1984). Scholars have viewed dowries as attempts to ease a woman’s entry into the in-laws’ house (Das 1975) or attempts by the wife-givers to justify parallel status with the wife-takers (Tenhunen 2008). Others have situated the expanding monetary value of dowries in relation to conspicuous consumption, rising costs of living, or upward economic mobility for the affinal families as well as de-valuation of women and daughters in the context of patri/virilocal marriage (Palriwala 1989). While dowries were a dominant Hindu practice in northern India, it was gradually adopted by specific other religious communities in southern India (Beck 1972; Gough 1956), including the minority Christians, and by changing lifestyles, employment opportunities, class mobility, and demographic circumstances, thus, reflecting entrenched social inequalities (Caplan 1994). According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center (2021), Indian Christians do not have any clear majority denomination. While 37% of Indian Christians identify as Catholic, several other denominations also persist. Protestant denominations including the Baptists constitute about 13% of Indian Christians, about 7% of Indian Christians identify with the Church of North India, and 7% with the Church of South India. Almost 76% of Indian Christians reiterate that religion is immensely important in their lives, and that they engage in a variety of traditional Christian practices such as donating money to the church, attending church services weekly, accepting the role of the pastor or priest in different rites of passage, and having an altar or other religious symbols at home for worship. Simultaneously, their co-existence and physical proximity to the neighboring religious communities, especially Hinduism, probably explains why a substantial proportion of Indian Christians follow religious beliefs and practices that are not necessarily associated with Christianity, such as belief in karma and the purifying power of the Ganges River. This is also due to the fact that the majority of Christians in India, especially in southern India, are lower caste Hindu converts who retained particular beliefs of their previous religion after conversion. Christianity in India could be analyzed through narratives of cultural convergence, syncretism, and composite culture (Doss 2018; Robinson 2009). However, Rowena Robinson (2009) cautions that syncretism must not obscure the signifying differences among religious communities because differences are manifested through their mediation. The relationship between religious communities and the nature of their acculturation is shaped by the prevailing socio-political and cultural context. Though Christianity, being a minority religion in India, is primarily influenced by Hinduism in places where Hinduism is the base environment, it may also borrow the religious tradition of other religions such as Islam or local tribal worldviews. Thus, historicization of the complex interaction among different religious communities is essential. In this context, this chapter explores the institutional relationship between the practices and ideas of Christians and their embeddedness in southern Indian Hindu society with reference to property exchanges. It analyzes the proliferation and extent of these property transactions and the growth of the urban class among Christians in India. It also examines the institutional connection between these marriage payments and the sustenance of endogamous caste/class groups among Christians. The shifting nature of marriage payments is fundamental to the intricacies of inter-personal relationship among 220

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concerned marrying groups. Finally, this chapter concentrates on the implications that such marriage payments have for the status of both Christian men and women in southern India, but especially women, as exchange of wealth runs parallel to the exchange of women through marriages.

Dowry and Bridegroom Price: Rationale, Assessment, and Implications for Class Brahmanical codes of conduct were reinforced in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu churches. In the Protestant community in Madras, the capital city, Lionel Caplan argues that there is neither condemnatory nor laudatory references to a “bridegroom price” (wealth that the family of the wife-givers transfers to the bridegroom’s parents/family) in either testament of the Bible (1994:361). Here, it is essential to distinguish between a bridegroom price and a dowry. While these terms are often used synonymously, the daughter is excluded from the bridegroom price, but not from the dowry. A bridegroom price is usually transferred to the parents of the groom who utilize it as a fund to get their own daughters married or compensate for the resources expended on them. On the other hand, a dowry refers to the transfer of wealth to the groom or his parents, over which the bride may or may not have rights, but which is sometimes endowed on the young couple for their benefit (Caplan 1994). Notwithstanding the moral condemnation, public disapproval, and legal position of dowries, the unabated practice of paying a bridegroom price accentuates the need to reflect critically on the socio-structural conditions that reinforce its persistence. Most urban Christians, as Caplan (1994) noted, feared that their daughters would remain unmarried if they did not pay a bridegroom price in an extremely saturated Indian marriage market. The need for endogamous unions created a “cultural notion of scarcity” (1994:362) and restricted the demographic availability of “suitable” men among the Madras Christians, as well as for the general Indian middle-class population. Some Christian families thought that such resources could be used in case the newly married couple decided to setup a neolocal residence. Others justified such practice as a meaning for recouping the investment in a son’s education, a response that is widely shared by other communities and regions in India as well (Rao 1972; Srinivas 1962; Van der Veen 1972). Moreover, during spouse selection, the occupations of grooms are rank ordered. A permit to work or the possibility of settling abroad constitute a desirable qualification in contemporary matrimonial matchmaking in India. Implicit in such marriage payment negotiations is the prospective bride’s accomplishments and personal qualities. The more well-educated or occupationally prosperous a bride is, the greater is the bargaining power of the wife-giving family in lessening the amount of the bridegroom price. This holds true for the wider Hindu Indian society, in which physical beauty, household skills, and educational qualifications become parameters during dowry negotiations (Kapadia 1955). In many cases, the bridegroom price is re-couped by wife-taking families to secure husbands for their own daughters, thus, leading to what Jack Goody calls a “circulating pool of resources” (1973:17). Because a substantial number of Christian marriages are not only confined by religion but also by caste in India, possibilities for differential bridegroom price exchanges looms large. For instance, the exchanges among Syrian Christians in Madras are higher than other Christian groups in the city – the reasons being a matter for future empirical investigation. Furthermore, while stridhan is the property of the bride that is conferred by her natal family, a bridegroom price or dowry is allocated to the bridegroom 221

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or his family. Though scholarly literature is still unclear whether the payment is made to the groom or his family, it is widely acknowledged that the bride is excluded from such resources. In India, the practice of hypergamy – a woman marrying “up” her class or caste – is widely performed, while hypogamy – the reverse – is condemned. In such a scenario, scholars have found a substantial link between the dowry and the status position or class of families concerned (Goody 1973:19). The families that are higher in the hierarchy tend to follow dowry customs, as families of prospective brides want their daughters to marry up. As this practice becomes entrenched in Indian society, the poorer a groom’s family is, the more difficult it is for them to secure brides. Thus, these families must pay a “bridewealth” (the wealth that is given to the wife-givers by the wife-takers) to secure brides. While this holds true for the urban Protestants in Madras (Caplan 1994), one must also critically trace the circumstances that led to the emergence and flourishing of an upper middle-class among them that affected the nature of marriage payments. The Christian community in southern India, owing to their accessibility to educational institutions, gained qualifications that secured high salaried or high-status jobs that could raise their standard of living. While this also holds true for a certain section of the non-Brahmin Tamil population in the neighboring areas who shifted from agricultural to salaried occupations (Kapadia 2014), there remain specific sections who fail to access institutional privileges because of a lack of resources. These opportunities are embedded in a socio-political and historical context. As Caplan (1994:367) observes, after the Second World War, Madras became a hub of industrial development and prospered in the fields of services and administration. While Indian independence led to the emigration of colonial elites, the Dravidian movement attempted to dismantle Brahmin near monopoly in crucial areas of life in southern India, especially public sector employments. Such developments were accompanied by migration of people to cities to enter the professional and executive cadres that were vacated either by the Europeans or the Brahmans or to join the newly created ones in the wake of ensuing industrialization. Although there have been Christian elites in Madras for decades, even centuries – mainly theologians, intellectuals, or teachers based in Madras Christian College – it was only during the post-independence period which saw the rise of a significant section of the upper middle-class Protestant population (Caplan 1977). With increasing competition and saturation of job opportunities, these classes follow specific marriage policies for the purpose of holding on to their standard of living post-marriage. Furthermore, the amount of the bridegroom price may also communicate a sense of distinction within the community and caste. Kathleen Gough (1956) argued that the economic rank of a family is often assessed in terms of the amount of money that its members are able to pay to the groom during their daughter’s marriage. Conversely, the economic rank of the bridegroom’s family is assessed in terms of the amount that they can demand from the bride’s family (1956:834). However, the situation is complicated when, in some instances, the social status of the bridegroom’s family is adversely affected if they ask for or accept any form of wealth transfers or marriage payments. Additionally, there is a section among the upper middle-class Protestants who condemn the transfer of resources to the groom’s family while widely practicing the conferment of property to daughters during marriage. Though they are also concerned with status maintenance within the community/ society, the reason could be traced to the relationship between caste-specific marriages and bridegroom price. These specific groups are not affiliated with any caste group or endogamous social unit. 222

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To analyze the peculiarity of marriage practices among this specific section of the Protestant community, one needs to examine the influence of Western missionaries in southern India. Although their mission policy initially aimed to convert the highest castes to Christianity, a lack of success compelled the missionaries to focus on caste groups lower in the ritual hierarchy. These groups did convert to Christianity, not individually but as mass movements. Bishop Pickett’s (1933) study suggested that this is how almost four-fifths of those who converted to Protestantism did so in southern India. The mass conversion of same-caste people in a particular region enabled the converts to reproduce themselves through endogamous marriages. On the other hand, there have been members of higher castes who converted to Christianity either as small family units or individually. Such individual conversion had different connotations than mass conversions because it defied other members of their caste group or local community, thus, affecting the most intimate social relationships. Hence, they got isolated from their caste group and kin – their connubial alliances. Therefore, the people who converted to Christianity outside mass conversions confronted difficulty in finding spouses for marriage. They were also not able to sustain intra-caste unions, forcing them to transcend their caste boundaries. The subsequent generations achieved upward social mobility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a result of the socio-historical and political events substantiated earlier. They eventually proclaimed themselves to be part of the urban upper middle-class. Simultaneously, this group of people who are of mixed ancestry due to the inter-caste unions of their previous generations and, as such, cannot claim affiliation to a particular caste, is not only restricted to descendants of the special cases of individual converts who married outside their caste but also comprises the offspring born of subsequent mixed marriages undertaken by those who belong to the mass conversion groups. Therefore, the kind of marriage is contingent on the forms of conversion that individuals or groups have undergone. This leads to two types of domestic units among the urban upper middle-class, caste households consisting of same caste group members or casteless households comprising members who cannot claim same caste identity.

The Value of Marriage: Marriage Payments among Caste Households and Casteless Households Matrimonial arrangements among caste households provide substantial significance to the caste status of the prospective affine. Extensive inquiries are undertaken to assure caste status, especially when matrimonial alliances are being considered among households from different regions. Members belonging to formerly “non-inter-marrying sub-sections of the same caste” (Caplan 1994:372) have begun to initiate affinal alliances among themselves in the metropolis. Furthermore, given that matrimonial alliances in India are less individualistic and more about bringing families and groups together, such ties are occasionally created with families that reside in different urban centers across India. In Madras in southern India, Caplan (1994) argued that a system of hypergamy existed in which Christians predominantly preferred that a bridegroom’s earning potential and educational/professional credentials should exceed that of the bride. This is one of the fundamental reasons that explains the gradual shift from the practice of bride-price to dowry/ bridegroom payments. Indira Rajaraman (1983) argued that as men were progressively getting employed in higher salaried occupations of the organized sector, they were being featured as more desirable for matrimonial alliances. At the same time, the mere potential 223

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of accomplishments can construe one as a desirable marriage partner as well. Moreover, the status of a particular domestic unit is based on the occupation of the concerned family members as well, for instance, the senior members. Consequently, wedding invitations specify the present or pre-retirement designation of the fathers of prospective brides and grooms. Sometimes the professional background of mothers is also specified if they are gainfully employed. However, notwithstanding the centrality of household reputation and its socio-economic status in marriage considerations, greater emphasis is being increasingly placed on the prospective groom’s achieved status. Such changes in forms of marriage payments are not restricted to the Protestants in southern India but have also permeated the marriage practices of other religious communities as well. In the arranged marriages of the Hindu non-Brahmin community of Tamil Nadu, the bridegroom’s family was expected to make the largest wedding presentation and bear the entire wedding feast expenses because the wedding was held virilocally. This approximated a bride-price system among them (Kapadia 2014). However, urbanization and increased availability of salaried jobs had encouraged the men to escape the clutches of uncertain non-salaried occupations. This phenomenon, combined with greater opportunities for higher education among the men, had enhanced the status of salaried men who experienced upward mobility, and marriage became a means to preserve their status. The Christian communities gradually started practicing an exclusive marriage policy in which bride-price gave way to dowry payments as endogamy became pervasive. The expenditure on reception, material endowments, and the bridegroom price (that is, dowry) is borne by upper middle-class caste Christians. There is a kind of competition among families of prospective brides to pay the groom’s family as much as possible in the form of gold, cash, or immovable property to secure their daughter’s future. For instance, Karin Kapadia (2014) notes that Christian Paraiyar men in one of the churches of the Virgin Mother Street demanded dowry in the form of more jewelry being put on their brides by her natal family during the wedding. Though the jewelry represents wealth that is owned by the wife, the husband also has the discretionary power to sell it if he wills. Such inflated bridegroom price outraged young women, who, despite also having high educational credentials and salaried occupations, were forced to embrace unrelenting dowry demands. This is because the social preference for women marrying up in hypergamous unions “comes at a cost,” even in a social milieu in which compulsory heterosexual marriage is the norm. Overall, it not only led to the de-valuation of women and their natal family but also echoed the emerging trend that men no longer marry women; instead, they “marry money” (Kapadia 2014:41). While women of all strata were adversely affected by the inflated dowry demands, it was the impoverished families or families with many daughters who were hit the hardest. Upwardly mobile salaried men, rising dowry demands, plus the social preference for caste endogamous unions not only led to impoverished parents incurring debt to get their daughters married but also resulted in the insidious treatment of daughters as financial liabilities. In many cases, daughters of impoverished families were left unmarried because of their inability to meet the dowry demands of the prospective grooms’ families. On the other hand, the system of bride-price is still prevalent among men of poor families because they do not earn lucrative salaries to demand dowry from the families of eligible brides. Because women of all classes prefer to marry up, eligible men of the poorest classes have a restricted pool of potential spouses from which to choose. Hence, they pay the bride-price to get married. Furthermore, rapid urbanization and global capitalism lend legitimacy to a form of self-interest during marriage negotiations in arranged marriage setups in which 224

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class becomes a crucial determinant in creating a new kind of binary between the marriageable and the unmarriageable, primarily based on economic and educational stratification within caste groups. On the other hand, in casteless households or in instances in which marriages are not caste-specific, the practice of dowry payments (or bridegroom price to be more precise) is less pervasive. Not having a preference for caste endogamous unions ensures that the circle of potential grooms and brides is wider and more varied than it is for caste households. Therefore, families of prospective brides often transcend the confines of their caste group in case they do not find a suitable groom in their own caste or in a context in which exorbitant dowry demands are made. Similarly, in the context of other religious communities, Chirayil Kannan (1963) highlights that it is these dowry demands that prevent women from marrying within their own caste and, in a way, foster inter-caste marriages. Impoverished families whose financial crisis constrain their dowry payment capacity are also compelled to forget their caste exclusiveness during matrimonial negotiations in an arranged marriage setting. Similar arguments have been made by Lina Fruzzetti (1982) while studying arranged marriages among the Hindu Bengali community in West Bengal. C.G. Deshpande (1972) considers inter-marriage among castes a kind of solution to the problems posed by inflated dowry demands for those who are unable to meet these demands. Alternatively, the families of prospective grooms often tend to oppose inter-caste marriages because it implies that they would not receive their expected dowry claims (Kannan 1963). As already indicated, the practice of mixed (or inter-caste) marriages was more widespread among the descendants of individual converts to Christianity and those of a mixed ancestry. In the context of an arranged marriage, matrimonial arrangements in casteless households were similar to those of caste households in how the parents or senior members of the family initiated matrimonial alliances and made subsequent arrangements. At the same time, a substantial number of marital links were initiated by concerned couples as well. These marriages were socially regarded as “love marriages,” yet, in most cases, it was the respective parents or senior members of the family who negotiated the precise wedding arrangements. Therefore, the freedom exercised by couples discarding traditional parentarranged marriages, choosing their own spouse, and rejecting the system of dowry cannot necessarily be read as rebellion against parental or familial authority because the marriage process and wedding arrangements are ultimately controlled by parents or family members. One of the reasons couples accept parental control is because of their material dependence on families for attaining education at colleges/universities and, thereafter, suitable employment opportunities (Caplan 1994). Furthermore, casteless households are less concerned about maintaining status or pedigree through caste endogamous unions and more concerned about forging matrimonial alliances with families that are socially considered good families. In most cases, inter-caste marriages receive strong religious approval from both the church and the community. Scholars have argued that caste endogamous marriages ensure that property exchanges and transfer of wealth are restricted within a specific closed group to ensure that the pool of resources circulates within that group. However, casteless Christians marry across a wider, more open, and heterogeneous circle of potential marriage partners, in which the “competitive bidding” (Caplan 1994:377) for suitable men does not translate into exorbitant dowry demands. Nonetheless, parents do transfer a portion of their wealth to the brides in the form of jewelry or any other household items that may or may not be directly related to dowry demands made by the groom’s families. 225

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The desire to confer property to daughters during her wedding is shared by both Christians and Hindus, especially in southern India where the proportion of the Christian population is greater than in other regions of the country. Such transactions had immense implications for the process of acculturation whereby the matrilineal castes in the northern regions of the state of Kerala had berated dowry payments, whereas the dowry formed the basis of marriage in southern Kerala. Chris Fuller (1976) explained that the state of Travancore and Cochin in southern India has witnessed large-scale migration and settlement by Syrian Christians who were popular for their commercial success. Matrilineal reformers in the Travancore region admired such success and attributed it to their expanding familial network through matrimonial alliances that were also anchored in dowry transactions. However, this process of acculturation and how Syrian Christians influenced matrimonial arrangements and marriage payments among different castes of other religious communities is more complicated, and its nuanced analysis lies beyond the scope of this chapter.

Marriage Payments, Women’s Inheritance, and the Status of Women The practice of giving a dowry is an ancient tradition in India that was generally associated with the higher Hindu castes. More so, it was initially practiced in different regions in northern India, and later permeated into the marriage practices of the south. Traditionally, it referred to the official transfer of a woman’s share of her natal property to her during her wedding. A well-dowered daughter reflected the social standing of her parents and enhanced their social standing. However, in contemporary times, the practice of dowrygiving is not only confined to the Hindu upper castes. It has been gradually embraced by lower castes and many ethnic and religious groups through a process of “Sanskritization” (Srinivas 1984), which is the process by which the cultural values and practices of the Hindu upper castes are adopted by castes lower in the caste hierarchy. With time, as focus shifted from ascribed status to achieved status, especially during marriage negotiations, socio-economic class assumed pivotal significance, though the relevance of caste continued. A dowry became one of several ways for upwardly mobile families to display their wealth and affluence during their daughter’s wedding (Chacko 2003). Elizabeth Chacko (2003) describes how, until the early twentieth century, the practice of a dowry was common among only the patrilineal Hindu Brahmin communities and the Syrian Christians who had allegedly converted from Hindu upper castes. During colonialism, the Portuguese converted communities to Christianity who, nevertheless, also claimed their ancestry to the Hindu royal lineage. Their access to education and economic capital enabled them to acquire new skills and enter professions that ensured upward social mobility. They enforced rules of endogamy to maintain their social aspirations and the cohesiveness of their group. Historically, the customs and traditions of the Syrian Christians in Kerala also resembled elite Muslim trading communities in southern India, though they were sufficiently integrated with the regional Hindu cultural, social, and moral codes. They adhered to the principles of ritual purity borrowed from Hinduism that hierarchized society. Though they had their own churches, practiced unique Syrian rites, and structured their inner lives by a Christian worldview and ethics, prominent Syrian Christian families also sponsored Hindu temple festivals (Fuller 1976; Robinson 2009; Visvanathan 1993). After conversion, they retained their caste titles and continued membership in caste associations, constructing burial grounds along caste lines, and getting married on auspicious days signifying appropriation of Hindu customs in reconfiguring Christianity in India (Doss 2018). 226

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Lifecycle rituals involve Christian symbolism as well as connections emanating from local cultures. For instance, Christians endorsed Hindu rituals that mark a girl’s first menstruation to indicate her readiness for marriage, an auspicious occasion that denotes her transition of puberty, and celebrating her fertility. Rites of passage such as marriage manifested similarities with Hindu practices, particularly the use of ritual essentials including milk, sandalwood paste, rice, and areca nuts. In the majority of these societies which are fundamentally patrilineal and patrilocal, a demarcation is made between the natal family and the affinal family, in which marriage represents a transition from the former to the latter. Therefore, marriage ceremonies and associated customs, including prescriptions and prohibitions in the choice of a spouse, are distinctly similar to the local/regional cultural context. Before the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961, the Syrian Christians in southern India, especially in Kerala, contributed a portion of the dowry to the church. Denominations proposed the amount or percentage of the dowry based on the family income of the bride. Following this practice among Christian communities, the clergy in the Muslim-dominated regions, such as northern Kerala, demanded a certain portion of the dowry during weddings. In contemporary times, almost all caste or religious groups have adopted the custom of a dowry in one form or another, be it cash, jewelry, household goods, or otherwise. However, what began as a transfer of the bride’s share in her natal property during her wedding (stridhan), subsequently, transformed into a form of transaction in which dowry payments like cash do not necessarily remain with the bride anymore. Though these payments are sometimes used for the benefit of the couple, in most cases they are used by the bridegroom’s family to compensate for the amount spent on their son’s education, to pay off debts/loans, or to subsequently circulate it as dowries for their unmarried daughters. Hence, instead of empowering women and providing them with financial security, the transfer of wealth at the wedding disenfranchises women. Women become a medium which ensures the circulation of resources between the natal family and the affinal family.

Conclusion The practice of dowry among Christians indicates how strands of Hindu tradition get embedded in the everyday lives of Christians. When Christian communities convert from patrifocal Hinduism, the convergence of different material, social, cultural elements reinforce this structure. Though Christian symbols dominate post conversion, the web of significations explicates associations that complement Hindu rituals. These Indian Christian converts challenged notions of hegemonic and monolithic identity propagated by the missionaries and interrogated the supremacy of Eurocentric missionaries during the colonial regime in India. If a dowry is generally viewed as pre-mortem inheritance and a means to ensure a woman’s status in an affinal household, it obfuscates the empirical instances of a woman’s unequal inheritance and her powerlessness in terms of property-related decision making or property control. Furthermore, the gradual institutionalization of the practice of a dowry and its widespread diffusion have led to a concomitant escalation in instances of domestic violence. Even further complicating the position and experiences of women is the legal prohibition of a dowry that not only aimed to curtail the practice of coercive dowry payments but also had widespread repercussions for women’s agency. While widowed women or divorced women could reclaim their dowries from their in-laws before the legal prohibition of a dowry, they cannot make similar claims after the enactment of the Dowry Prohibition Act because doing so would be deemed illegal. 227

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Therefore, improvements in educational opportunities for women, rising rates of female employment, increasing life expectancy for women, and an improving sex ratio do not necessarily guarantee a better quality of life for women; such factors do not necessarily produce higher levels of social development. A closer look at the prevailing social customs and cultural mores, especially with reference to marriage practices, marriage arrangements, and family structure, illustrates entrenched gendered inequalities behind the façade of egalitarian relationship between men and women. The widespread practice of dowry payments, discriminatory inheritance rights, and dowry-related violence against women undermine the status of women among the Christian communities in southern India. In broader view, while this chapter focused on a micro-analysis of the marriage payments among Christian communities in southern India, the scenario is somewhat similar among other religious communities elsewhere in India.

References Beck, Brenda E.F. 1972. Peasant Society in Konku: A Study of Right and Left Sub-Castes. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Caplan, Lionel. 1994. “Bridegroom Price in Urban India: Caste, Class, and Dowry Evil among Christians in Madras.” In Family, Kinship and Marriage in India, edited by Patricia Uberoi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Caplan, Lionel. 1977. “Social Mobility in Metropolitan Centres: Christians in Madras City.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 11(1):193–217. Chacko, Elizabeth. 2003. “Marriage, Development, and the Status of Women in Kerala, India.” Gender and Development 11(2):52–59. Das, Veena. 1975. “Marriage among the Hindus”. In Indian Women, edited by Devaki Jain. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Govt. of India. Deshpande, C.G. 1972. On Inter-Caste Marriage: An Empirical Research Work. Poona: Uma Publications. Doss, M. Christhu. 2018. “Indian Christians and the Making of Composite Culture in South India.” South Asia Research 38(3):247–67. Fruzzetti, Lina. 1982. The Gift of a Virgin: Women, Marriage and Ritual in a Bengali Society. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Fuller, Chris. J. 1976. The Nayars Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack. 1973. “Bridewealth and Dowry in Africa and Eurasia.” In Bridewealth and Dowry, edited by Jack R. Goody and Stanley J. Tambiah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gough, E. Kathleen. 1956. “Brahman Kinship in a Tamil Village.” American Anthropologist 58(5):826–53. Kannan, Chirayil Thumbayil. 1963. Inter-Caste and Inter-Community Marriages in India. Mumbai: Allied Publishers. Kapadia, Karin M. 1955. Marriage and Family in India, 3rd ed. London: Oxford University Press. Kapadia, Karin M. 2014. “Marrying Money: Changing Preference and Practise in Tamil Nadu.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 27(1):25–51. Madan, Triloki Nath. 1975. “Structural Implications of Marriage in North India: Wife-Givers and Wife-Takers among the Pandits of Kashmir.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 9(2):217–43. Palriwala, Rajni. 1989. “Re-affirming the Anti-Dowry Struggle.” Economic and Political Weekly 24(7):942–44. Pickett, J. Waskom. 1933. Christian Mass Movements in India. Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House. Robinson, Rowena. 2009. “Negotiating Traditions: Popular Christianity in India.” Asian Journal of Social Science 37(1):29–54. Rajaraman, Indira. 1983. “Economics of Brideprice and Dowry.” Economic and Political Weekly 18(8):275–79. Rao, Madhugiri S.A. 1972. Tradition, Rationality and Change: Essays in Sociology of Economic Development and Social Change. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan.

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Marriage Payments in Southern India Salazar, Ariana Monique. 2021. “8  Key Findings about Christians in India.” Pew Research Center, July 12. https://www​.pewresearch​.org​/fact​-tank​/2021​/07​/12​/8​-key​-findings​-about​-christians- in-india/ Srinivas, Mysore Narasimhachar. 1962. Caste in Modern India and Other Essays. Mumbai: Asia Publishing House. Srinivas, Mysore Narasimhachar. 1984. Some Reflections on Dowry. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1973. “Dowry and Bridewealth and the Property Rights of Women in South Asia.” In Bridewealth and Dowry, by Jack R. Goody and Stanley J. Tambiah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tenhunen, Sirpa. 2008. “The Gift of Money: Rearticulating Tradition and Market Economy in Rural West Bengal.” Modern Asian Studies 42(5):1035–55. Van der Veen, Klass. 1972. I Give Thee my Daughter: A Study of Marriage and Hierarchy Among the Anvil Brahmins of South Gujarat. Assen, Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum Ltd. Visvanathan, Susan. 1993. The Christians of Kerala: History, Belief and Ritual among the Yakoba. Chennai: Oxford University Press.

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18 MEGACHURCHES IN THE UNITED STATES Co-Sanctified Lexicons as Worldviews Valerie Hiebert Abstract This chapter analyzes how, despite the sharp decline in Protestant Christian church attendance in the past two decades, megachurches are growing and thriving. Premised on anthropological-sociological research exploring the reality-constructing power of language, this qualitative research employs discourse analysis methodology to conduct a content analysis of the websites of three megachurches in the United States. Employing Fishman’s concept of co-sanctified lexicons, it identifies the distinctly different worldviews embedded in each of their lexicons. Lakewood Church in Texas builds on the rugged individualism of the American Dream, offering a worldview in which God serves you, as evidenced by your success in the world. West Angeles Church of God in Christ, an African American church in California, offers a worldview deeply rooted in their slave history, civic and religious emancipation, and religiously emotive and euphoric “hush arbors” of the Deep South. Mars Hill Bible church in Michigan offers a worldview that characterizes the individual as a pilgrim on a journey, writing a story together with the community, in which the nature of truth is narrative rather than factual. This chapter concludes by offering a new theme to existing research on megachurches, that of low commitment–high security belonging.

Megachurch Success Amid Protestant Church Decline In the US market of religion, megachurches are thriving. At the same time, there is a significantly steady rise of religious “nones” in America, those raised in religious families who are walking away from formal religious belief, experience, and expression (Drescher 2016; Bass 2012; Putnam and Campbell 2010). According to Michael Lipka and Claire Gecewicz (2017) of the Pew Research Center, “nones” are people who self-identify as no longer participating in formal religion. The Barna research group has documented a significant increase in “nones” which they are labeling as “post-Christians,” with 44% of US 230

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-25

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adults now in this category (Barna 2015) with the exodus being “most pronounced among Protestants” (Drescher 2016:16). Megachurches draw anywhere from 1,500–40,000 attendees, “employing large numbers of staff and occupying substantial sites” (Percy 2020:107) and are typically Protestant. They are “the very largest of the large” churches (Eagle 2020:46). “Rapid growth remains a hallmark of very large congregations” (Thumma and Bird 2015:2), with the largest “20 percent of churches having between 60 and 65 percent of all the people, money, and fulltime staff” (Chaves 2006:333). In short, “most churches are small [and getting smaller], but most people are in large churches” (Chaves 2006:333). Despite the remarkable growth of the megachurch movement, current research is limited (Ellingson 2009, 2010, 2013), and an increasingly important challenge “for scholars of contemporary religion is to explain the emergence and growth of megachurches” (Ellingson 2010:248), despite the overall decline in Christian religious adherence in the Global North. Megachurches have become quite adept at “modifying aspects of the faith to meet consumer demands” (Roberts and Yamane 2012:207), and a number of related themes have emerged in the research: 1) consumerism; 2) individualism; 3) the provision of therapeutic comfort; 4) engagement with anti-establishment sentiments; and 5) the cultural relevance of megachurch practices (Ellingson 2010; Carney 2012; Roberts and Yamane 2012; Bowler 2013). These themes are general and broadly recurrent across megachurches at the same time as their implementation by particular megachurches is flexible and variable. While much of the early quantitative megachurch research has inferred that all megachurches are the same, recent closer examination of US megachurches using qualitative methods (Wellman, Corcoran, and Stockly 2020; Tucker-Worgs 2011; Corcoran and Wellman 2016; Wellman, Corcoran, Stockly-Meyerdirk 2014; Wellman 2008; Barnes 2010) indicates that they do not nearly all share these common thematic elements. Hence, this research utilizes the qualitative approach of discourse analysis of language on the websites of three very large megachurches because it is language, specifically the powerful co-sanctified lexicons, that each megachurch creates and employs to establish a powerful and protected worldview, that megachurch attendees are welcomed to inhabit, and that appears to be garnering continuingly larger numbers of congregants.

Language To begin, it is useful to take a brief look at language and worldview theory. The seminal work of linguistic anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, captured succinctly in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, suggests that “the linguistic system of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas, but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity” (Wardhaugh 1992:219). This strongly echoes the language philosopher Wittgenstein’s now famous phrase, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein 2001:68). Berger and Luckmann eruditely explore these same theories from a sociological perspective in The Social Construction of Reality (1966). Their central thesis proposes that the construction of reality results from the social processes of externalization, objectivation, and internalization. The human world must be created by humanity’s own activities in that world. Hence “the ‘stuff’ out of which society and all its formations are made is human meanings externalized in human activity” (Berger 1967:8), and not only do humans produce a world, but they also produce themselves in that world – externalization. Once 231

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constructed, this human social and material world stands outside of the individual and the collective, attaining facticity and objective reality – objectivation. When this objective facticity is reabsorbed into individual consciousness “in such a way that the structures of this world come to determine the subjective structures of consciousness itself” (Berger 1967:15), internalization has occurred. One no longer merely possesses these meanings but, rather, comes to “represent and express them … drawing them into oneself and mak[ing] them one’s own” (Berger 1967:15). As a result of this “genesis amnesia” (Bourdieu 2008:436), both possess and are possessed by meanings. According to Berger and Luckmann, the human symbol system of language is primary to the three-part process of reality construction they advance. Language is the core facticity external to us that is irrefutably necessary for the creation of all that is externalized, objectivated, and subsequently internalized. With language, “an entire world can be actualized at any moment” (Berger 1967:54), constructing “immense edifices of symbolic representation that appear to tower over the reality of everyday life like gigantic presences from another world” (Berger 1967:55). Without language, the worlds we create, objectify, and internalize eventually cease to exist. When we fully recognize that conceptualizations of even the most metaphysical concepts, those which deal with what is presumably in some sense beyond language, can only be conceptualized and activated by language is when we begin to understand the true depth of our vulnerability to language. According to the sociological theorizing of symbolic interactionism, “all that humans are can be traced to their symbolic nature” (Charon 2004:60). “A person learns a new language, and as we say, gets a new soul … [They] become in that sense a different individual” (Mead 1934:283). Ultimately, language allows us to conceptualize a reality beyond the tangible. Concepts such as love, peace, freedom, and even God are all only possible through language (Charon 2004). All religions typically have language lexicons (vocabulary that is specific to their religious tradition and its history) that are sacred to them and, hence, set apart and sanctified. Joshua Fishman (2006) observes that religious theologies and their surrounding cultural landscapes change and, in the process, the traditional, sanctified lexicon of any one religious tradition may be challenged by these new ideas and contexts and new forms of expression evolve and emerge. Sometimes, the new ideas or ways of expressing them become equal, or more predominant, in day-to-day use in a specific religious tradition. When this happens there is a blending of the old, sanctified lexicon with the new and increasingly sanctified ways of talking, resulting in a co-sanctified lexicon (Fishman 2006). As the following research examines how megachurches achieve their success within a climate of either indifference or hostility toward religion, identifying and tracking their language evolution provides a window into that success. Communities of discourse, such as megachurches, are capable of creating “selfcontained and self-sustaining environment[s]” (Carney 2012:61) through their language choices and reinforced by their sheer size. A detailed analysis of megachurch co-sanctified lexicons provides a lens through which to observe the mechanisms by which language is harnessed in megachurch contexts to create powerful and totalizing worldviews. The following exploration has been accomplished by employing the content analysis methodology of discourse analysis to examine the very large websites of three highly successful American megachurches. Linguistic ethnography (Edwards 2009) focuses on “examining aspects of the structure and function of language in use” (Johnstone 2008:4 (emphasis added)). James Wellman observes that church websites are “an electronic representation of how the church imagines itself and how it relates itself to the lived world of its 232

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members and potential visitors … that shapes and guides thoughts, feelings, and actions” (2008:147). Church websites are a window into the worldview of the churches they represent, and much of what follows in the examination of the three megachurches chosen for this study provides nuanced detail regarding each of their worldviews as encapsulated by their co-sanctified lexicons. Wellman goes on to suggest that these church websites go “beyond the description of reality to construct it, and directs what one sees and how it is seen” (2008:147 (emphasis added)). Routine interaction with their websites, which are a “medium of communal networks, ideological guidance, and ritual activity” (Wellman 2008:152), “habituates” interactants to the “imagined world” they present, making them real. All quotes without citations throughout this chapter have been taken from the church websites. The three megachurches selected were as varied as possible. Two are non-denominational and one is denominational. Lakewood Church is located in Houston, Texas, the Bible Belt of the Deep South; West Angeles Church of God in Christ is located on what has historically been understood as the main street of Black Los Angeles, California; and Mars Hill Bible Church is located in one of the oldest suburbs of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their founding dates are 1943, 1959, and 1999, respectively. Lakewood meets in what was previously the multi-sport Compaq Centre of Houston and is known for its prosperity gospel preaching; West Angeles is a predominantly African American church steeped in the traditions of Pentecostalism and social activism, meeting in a church with a 103foot stained-glass tower; and Mars Hill meets in an unadorned, old anchor store of an abandoned mall and is known for its “hipster” vibe. Their histories, ideologies–theologies, geographical locations, and surrounding cultural milieus are each significantly different from the other two.

Lakewood Church The co-sanctified lexicon of the Lakewood Church is built on the foundation of the spiritual royal status of the Osteen family and the pinnacle, figurehead role of Pastor Joel Osteen within that nexus. It constructs him as the ultimate Christian source of truth, vested in powerful religious authority and, at times, almost God-like in how he is presented relative to Christian concepts of salvation. Though Lakewood has a very large staff, the term “pastor” is reserved for only Joel Osteen, with the rest of the family being referred to as overseeing pastoral ministry (Paul Osteen), co-pastor (Victoria Osteen), wife of founding Pastor (Dodie Osteen), and associate pastor (Lisa Osteen). Of the facial images present on its website, 48% are members of the Osteen family, with Joel Osteen comprising 61% of those (Hiebert 2022:127). Repeated claims of their direct lines of communication with God, including miraculous healings, further entrench their power and prestige as spiritual royals. This is particularly true of Joel Osteen, whose facial picture is at one point paired with the question, in large font, “Ready to Accept Christ?”, subconsciously associating Joel Osteen with Christ and salvation. The plethora of asymmetrical naming patterns employed on the website consistently place Joel Osteen at the top of the spiritual power and status pyramid. Further image-text pairings can be found on the Lakewood website that infer Joel Osteen as a Jesus figure and Joel and Victoria as everyone’s “Best Friend,” along with their many claims that they “love” every one of their more than 40,000 attendees. The veneration of Joel Osteen is the mechanism by which power and authority is handed to him to create, invoke, and enforce a particular and distinctive co-sanctified lexicon. 233

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A common mechanism by which Joel Osteen invokes his power is by re-lexicalizing his listeners – the process of replacing an established meaning of a word with a new meaning, and thus altering the identity of the entity the word is semantically naming or describing. Using inferred contrastive sets, such as “Just Do It,” “You Can Live Your Best Life Now,” “Preparing for Promotion,” “Digging Deeper,” “God’s Best for You,” and “How to be Happier” (which infer that you are currently not doing it, living your best life now, anticipating a promotion, or living deeply), Osteen reframes these statements about what you are not into statements about what you are soon to be, if only you will follow his wisdom. The listener is re-lexicalized from an unhappy failure without the confidence to take the best that God has to offer (happiness, promotion, wisdom) and, instead, cast as one who soon will have all these things and is, thus, welcomed to re-construct their own identities into a Lakewood version of what a successful Christian should look like. These types of relexicalizing statements are scattered generously throughout the more than 500 pages of the Lakewood website, constantly reinforcing the theme that God can take you from “ordinary to legendary!” Lakewood’s co-sanctified lexicon draws heavily on ideologies of the American Dream, first conceptualized by James Adams as “a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens” (Adams 1931:xx), along with the veneration of a rugged individualism to achieve rags-to-riches success which captured the imagination of Americans so significantly that it is now woven into the very fabric of America. Within the Lakewood co-sanctified lexicon, these ideologies are expressed through the themes of victory, boldness, visioning a positive future, blessing, financial success, and healing. Lakewood takes the American Dream and infuses it with God’s blessing and purpose, continually reinforced in their co-sanctified lexicon by Pastor Joel and the rest of the Osteen royals. Victory over cancer, storms, weight loss, winning at life, marriage, home, and work are all framed as the result and evidence of godliness. A successful Lakewood Christian is a victorious Christian. Always achieving. Always winning. Always overcoming. Throughout the Lakewood website, attendees are called to claim victory through bold declarations for a bright and promising future, such as “Claim Your Inheritance,” “Break Out! Go Beyond Your Barriers,” and “Live Your Dream Today.” It is through this process of bold claims that attendees fulfill the Lakewood mandate of visioning a positive future by recognizing that “You Are Made for More,” “God has a Bright Destiny for You,” “Your Best Life Now,” and “Become A Better You.” The excessive use of the above language choices encourages a very self- and material-focused worldview. If one achieves victory and a positive future through these bold claims, the Lakewood attendee then lives with blessing, financial success, and healing, as they “shift into greater blessing.” Blessing as a reward for making the right type of bold claims is another dominant theme within the Lakewood lexicon, most frequently manifested through financial success and healing. Blessing is not conceptualized as something one gifts to another but as something one has the right to claim boldly from God for self. Notably, much of the most powerful vocabulary within the Lakewood lexicon has either small or large elements of hyperbole; linguistically, the volume is always on high. Everything is big, miraculous, instant, mighty, and legendary (to name but a few motifs), all serving to create a reality of significant personal demandingness. Furthermore, the balance of emphasis is overwhelmingly on not only the right for individuals to seek a future filled with deserved blessing, financial success, healing, and victory but also on the moral imperative that this should be so. Within Lakewood discourse, it is all about the self. Notions of civic or biblical ethics of obligation and duty to community and others is virtually non-existent. 234

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Lakewood’s co-sanctified lexicon is potentially all-consuming because of its three layers: 1) the immense size and weight of the co-sanctified lexicon; 2) the awe-inspiring quality of the sacred power granted to the lead voice who creates and employs this co-sanctified lexicon, namely Joel Osteen; and 3) the hyperbolic nature of much of the lexicon, employing emotional, expressive, and over-sized language to convey messages meant to be taken literally. The reality of a God who is singularly focused on making people happy is now presented as a simple fact (Berger and Luckmann’s objectivation stage). Possessed by this meaning, internalization is now complete for the Lakewood attendee. The most subtle of Lakewood’s language practices is also, arguably, its most pervasive. Above all, the Lakewood lexicon insists that 1) individual Christians must flourish as individuals, 2) that individuals are expected to evidence this through their involvement with Lakewood, and 3) that Lakewood itself, as demonstrated most potently by the royal spiritual family of Lakewood, is a church that thrives and flourishes. Their co-sanctified lexicon is constantly reminding its reader of the grandness and success of Lakewood, leaving no room for paradox, disease, mediocrity, poverty, pain, or sadness as an accepted part of the human journey. There is room primarily for conversations of overcoming through boldly claiming in the name of God in order to be victorious; the result is a subtle, yet powerful form of exclusion. In the worldview/reality that the Lakewood co-sanctified lexicon creates, only those who can demonstrate adeptness in employing the Lakewood lexicon and the resulting personal success it purportedly achieves can be considered victorious Christians. To speak of failure is in itself already a failure. Failure to meet the moral duty to flourish at Lakewood would “threaten to undermine the moral and social order of the group” (Wilkins 2011:311). The Lakewood worldview, as created by their co-sanctified lexicon, creates a reality in which God serves the individual, rather than the individual serving God.

West Angeles Church of God in Christ The co-sanctified lexicon of the West Angeles Church is markedly different in content than that of Lakewood and, in some cases, opposite. Drawing deeply from their African American slave history, much of their lexicon memorializes their slavery experiences, with themes of freedom, bondage, release, vigilance, deliverance, and the promised land featuring prominently in their language choices and subsequent reality construction. While Lakewood’s lexicon is focused on the American Dream of health and prosperity for the individual, West Angeles’s lexicon is focused on the responsibility to care for the well-being of the community. Despite plantation owners of the Deep South being highly selective in what evangelical preachers taught slaves – requiring them to obey their masters – the belief that deliverance and freedom from oppression is a part of Christian salvation birthed quickly among Black slaves. Employing their African indigenous “preference for nature, the field and barns, bushes and forest, over buildings, churches, and pews” (Vondey 2012:152), slaves sought out secret places to gather, worship, and pray. Risking horrific beatings if they were caught, the “hush arbors,” created by cutting down bushes full of green leaves to deaden sound, became intensely emotive and expressive forms of worship. Temporarily shedding the intense struggles and vulnerabilities of their enslaved lives, loves, and labor, these temporary forms of “embodied intoxication” (Shilling and Mellor 2011:17) served to sustain their seemingly unendurable lives. The powerful sense of hope and endurance fostered by these plantation prayer meetings pervaded the slave community, actualizing the belief that 235

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deliverance and freedom from oppression is central to Christian salvation, which remains a central tenet of Black Pentecostalism to this day. Spiritual salvation and social justice always dance together in the Black liturgy of African American Pentecostalism.

Black Liturgy The opening page of the West Angeles church website includes a large caption that reads “Home of Deliverance and Family.” Sermon titles include “Break Free, don’t go back to Herod,” “There is a Way Out,” “Just Wait a Little Longer,” and “Living Through Affliction,” with each of these titles appearing a minimum of ten times through various hyperlinks. Various sermons include references to “stand[ing] upon our watch,” “the promised land,” “taking the mind cuffs off,” and “it’s time to join the revolution.” The prayer wall frequently employs the language of “deliverance,” “release,” being “set free,” and “bondage.” Rather than choosing to write slavery out of their past in an attempt to assimilate into the current cultural context, the West Angeles church calls its congregants to memorialize, embrace, and write their slave history into the present through the significant presence of these primary motifs in their co-sanctified lexicon. When a lexicon that constructs worldview is a constant reminder of an unjust history, it is reasonable to suggest that it encourages focus on dealing with present-day injustices, potentially producing a sense of active agency. Within the West Angeles co-sanctified lexicon are three notable themes: rousing worship, visceral music, and Black matters.

Rousing Worship The intensely emotive, religiously improvisational nature of plantation prayer and praise remains a central part of the Black liturgy of West Angeles. Dispersed generously throughout the West Angeles lexicon are 1) experiences of “powerful worship,” “anointed worship and profound insight,” being “on their feet in thunderous praise and worship,” “rousing sermon[s],” the “sanctuary erupt[ing] in hand-claps, spontaneous dance, and all-out calland-response praise,” along with 2) calls to “saints praying on their knees,” “experience[ing] an outpouring of unyielding power,” experiencing a “fire in your soul,” “anointed preaching,” and singing to “raise the praise.” As was the case during their secret hush arbor prayer meetings, this type of emotionally rousing experience of collective effervescence functioned “not so much [as] a flight from reality as a celebration of their discovery of the strength with which to face it” (Smith 2006:219), both historically and currently. The significant emphasis of the West Angeles lexicon on the need to feel specific things likely results, at least for some and perhaps many, in the pressure to do considerable emotion work, which can include everything from surface “acting” to deep internal manipulation of emotions. Their co-sanctified lexicon asks its participants to feel free and empowered, with active agency to change the unjust conditions of their lives and their communities because God wants justice for them.

Visceral Music Steeped in a rich history of slave songs which were highly emotive, the rousing worship language of the West Angeles co-sanctified lexicon often pairs emotion and music experientially. Hence, in addition to the already potent cocktail of a co-sanctified lexicon that creates a very all-encompassing emotional culture, West Angeles adds the additional emotion and 236

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reality creating power of this unique combination of emotion-laden, slave song music. The “divine liberation of the oppressed from slavery” (Cone 1972:33) is a historically abiding central motif in Black spirituals. The West Angeles website gives considerable focus to identifying the power of music, including a full discussion entitled “Perfect Harmony: The Power of Music and Why We Sing.” Music is “euphoric,” “singing creates community,” “connects us to our history,” “keeps us focused on our purpose,” “connects us to God … through our heartbeats, our breathing, our pulse … all of life has rhythm and rhythm is the basis of song.” Unlike Lakewood, where music is primarily performance-based, the democratic nature of singing at West Angeles – everyone in attendance is encouraged to participate quite literally in embodied intoxication – deepens the power of the experience for everyone and the collective worldview it creates.

Black Matters Despite the numerous denotative and connotative meanings of “black” as gloom, soiled, evil, or negative, West Angeles, along with the rest of the Black Lives Matter movement, is doing the work of re-constructing the discursive identify of “Black” as something positive, supportive, and empowering. There are numerous reiterations of the phrase “black matters” in their co-sanctified lexicon, most of which are focused on it being “time to redefine ourselves,” and that the Black church is “the place where our dignity as people is inviolate.” In the context of the liminality in which African Americans are “free, yet not free,” the overt presence of the celebration of Blackness within the West Angeles co-sanctified lexicon functions as a compelling construction of the dignity and worth of African Americans, valorizing their collective and individual identities.

Re-lexicalizing through Inferred Contrastive Sets Like Lakewood, West Angeles also uses inferred contrastive sets to re-lexicalize their congregants. The bondage to freedom motif is consistently operative throughout their cosanctified lexicon, reminding them of their slavery past and inferring the need to protect and expand their current freedom. Sermon titles such as “Break free, don’t go back to Herod,” “There is a way out,” “Living through affliction,” and “How to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat” function to infer that, though their freedom is not yet fully realized, it can be. A second re-lexicalizing motif is that of blessed to be a blessing, instilled via Bishop Charles Blake’s (lead pastor) variety of iterations of “we are blessed that we might reach out to those less fortunate,” which are plentiful throughout the West Angeles lexicon. Each iteration serves to suggest that the identity of being blessed immediately infers the responsibility to be a “blesser,” that is, to help others. One is not blessed so that they can revel in their blessed state – one is blessed so that they can bless others.

Mars Hill Bible Church Religious “nones,” upon closer examination, contain many religious “somes” – those who continue to incorporate spiritual practices into their lives while remaining divorced from formal religious institutions, having grown weary and wary of the religious control those institutions typically exercise (Drescher 2016). The Mars Hill co-sanctified lexicon reflects a profound awareness of these spiritual seekers (also known as church refugees), offering 237

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a way of talking that constructs a worldview in which religious commitment is a journey rather than a destination. The metaphor of journey, which features dominantly in the Mars Hill co-sanctified lexicon, functions to re-lexicalize their attendees from theological gatekeepers who should be concerned with their orthodoxy to pilgrims on a journey who are exploring meaningful orthopraxy. A journey is an experience in and of itself, irrespective of whether there is a target destination or whether a destination is reached; both are beside the point. The journey itself is the point. Their co-sanctified lexicon is filled with a plethora of journeying references, including everything from “journey with others in our community” to “journey through the [biblical] text” to “journey into your future.” Terms such as embark, walk along, navigate, explore, and bumpy ride all reinforce the journey metaphor. The closest Mars Hill comes to a creedal statement is a document entitled “The Directions,” which further employs journey metaphor language rather than the statement of beliefs that is typical of church creedal statements. Along with the fluid metaphor of journey, the Mars Hill co-sanctified lexicon equally employs the metaphor of story in a further form of re-lexicalizing their attendees. Stories are fluid, open to multiple interpretations through different readers and within individual readers, and also open to multiple interpretations through the contexts and cultures of the collective reading community that engages a particular story. Stories have room for paradox. “Exploring your story,” “a part of our story,” “learn from your past story,” and “[God’s] story becomes our story” are a small sampling of the many ways in which Mars Hill’s co-sanctified lexicon transforms the biblical text, and all engagement with its content, into a narrative experience in which their attendees are a character in the narrative rather than reading a book of instructions. The Bible, treated by evangelicals historically as the ultimate instruction book not only for their own lives but everyone else’s as well, is re-cast as a “narrative” and a “story” in the Mars Hill co-sanctified lexicon. The centrality of embracing story is epitomized in their development of narrative theology: We believe that, as a community and individuals, God is calling us to participate in God’s unfolding story of love, rescue, resurrection, and restoration. Our Narrative Theology Statement embeds our beliefs in context, perpetually inspiring our community to participate in what God is doing in the world. Again, unlike the fixation on defending truth that is typical of evangelicals, the Mars Hill discourse focuses on embedding belief in contexts of community and participation, stories of faith rather than the story of faith – everything is enroute, in process, or evolving in some way, conceptualized as either journey or story or both. Someone is not a defender of the faith, but, instead, they are re-lexicalized as a pilgrim in a grand story. Within all this re-lexicalizing is a very subtle shift from “I” to “we.” Mars Hill’s co-sanctified lexicon is populated with “we” statements – journeying and playing a role in a story are all collective experiences, and this reinforces their strong sense of community and collective responsibility. Further, the colloquial nature of much of Mars Hill’s co-sanctified lexicon highlights and reinforces their commitment to informality and non-institutionalization. They refer to their Sunday mornings as times of gathering rather than a church service and encourage potential attendees to “stop here for a bit of a scoop.” Virtually everything in their cosanctified lexicon avoids “churchy” language and, instead, uses this type of ambiguous “laid back” language to describe themselves and their contexts. This commitment to informality is also present in their systems of address; they avoid the terms “pastor” and “sermon” 238

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which invoke notions of power and theological gatekeeping for church refugees, preferring, instead, to talk of teachers and teachings. Additionally, the Mars Hill co-sanctified lexicon frequently employs the secular language of human rights and social justice, converging it with an interpretation of the biblical text that emphasizes social justice. Their co-sanctified lexicon includes the concepts of transformation and restoration in abundance, and these are frequently woven into their human rights discourse, such as “restoration of our relationships with God, each other, ourselves, and creation” so that everyone can become “a transformational presence in the world.” Mars Hill’s co-sanctified lexicon, which demonstrates a sophisticated awareness of the deep suspicions of metanarrative typical of post-modernism, is “seeking a philosophical and ontological intellectual practice that is non-dogmatic, tentative, and non-ideological” while, at the same time, not shying “away from affirming an ethic, [and] making normative choices” (Rosenau 1992:16).

Introducing a New Theme to Megachurch Research In addition to the themes of megachurch research already present in these three megachurches, the linguistic ethnographies of this research have distilled an additional characteristic of megachurches that can provide critical purchase on the phenomenon of their success: low commitment–high security belonging (Hiebert 2022). While each of the highly successful megachurches of this study are markedly different in their theologies, self-concept, congregant interactions, and the worldviews they create, they share the commonality that each provides a uniquely secure haven without the cost of high commitment. Run primarily by paid staff, this allows megachurch attendees to maintain distance and freedom from the volunteer responsibilities of running the church, hence, very low commitment along with the possibility and likelihood of remaining virtually anonymous if that is their wish. Paradoxically, without requiring attendees to invest, megachurches, nevertheless, offer a place to belong. From the greeters at the door to the multitude of programs attendees are welcomed to join, they come packaged as a “ready-made” community, without having to provide personal energy in caring for that same community.

Conclusion Lakewood employs its co-sanctified lexicon to create a haven/home for those drawn to a stylishly expansive and extravagant suburban, middle “gentry” home that promises the same. West Angeles employs its co-sanctified lexicon to create a haven/home that is a fortified castle, sturdy and resilient, designed to keep out harm, taking in those escaping harm, and expanding beyond their haven to build a world with less harm. Mars Hill employs its co-sanctified lexicon to build not a home, but a hostel haven, a commune, a place for those weary of religious and life travails to pause and rest with other sojourners, carving out a sense of connection and belonging within a spiritual context. Each co-sanctified lexicon creates a uniquely “nourishing total sacred cocoon” (Wellman et al. 2020:152). Each lexicon produces themselves in the world – externalization. For the attendees, this social religious world stands outside of themselves as the objective reality of religious “facts.” Re-absorbing this reality into consciousness (a process facilitated by the co-sanctified lexicons) in such a way that it is no longer remembered as having, at one point, been construction results in a profound internalization of the worldview created and sustained by each respective co-sanctified lexicon. Not only do they possess the meanings 239

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that are created, but they are also possessed by them. And with it, “an entire world can be actualized at any moment” (Berger 1967:54), constructing “immense edifices of symbolic representation that appear to tower over the reality of everyday life like gigantic presences from another world” (Berger 1967:55). Each co-sanctified lexicon creates and maintains its own unique and powerfully sustaining worldview – a world to inhabit, a low commitment place to belong.

References Adams, James Truslow. 1931/2012. The Epic of America. New Brunswick: First Transaction Publishers. Barna Group. 2015. “2015 Sees Sharp Rise in Post-Christian Population.” Barnes, Sandra L. 2010. Black Megachurch Culture: Models for Education and Empowerment. New York: Peter Lang. Berger, Peter L. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday. Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin Books. Bowler, Kate. 2013. Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. New York: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2008. “Structures and the Habitus.” In Social Theory: Roots and Branches: Readings, 3rd ed., edited by Peter Kivisto. New York: Oxford University Press. Butler, Diana Bass. 2012. Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. New York: Harper One. Carney, Charity R. 2012. “Lakewood Church and the Roots of the Megachurch Movement in the South.” Southern Quarterly 50(1):61–78. Chaves, Mark. 2006. “All Creatures Great and Small: Megachurches in Context.” Review of Religious Research 47(4):329–346. Charon, Joel M. 2004. Symbolic Interactionism: An Introduction, an Interpretation, an Integration, 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall. Cone, James H. 1972. “Black Spirituals: A Theological Interpretation.” Theology Today 29(1):54–69. Corcoran, Kate E., and James K. Wellman Jr. 2016. ““People Forget He’s Human:” Charismatic Leadership in Institutionalized Religion.” Sociology of Religion 77(4):309–332. Drescher, Elizabeth. 2016. Choosing our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of America’s Nones. New York: Oxford University Press. Eagle, David E. 2020. “The Growth of the Megachurch.” Pp. 43–67 in Handbook of Megachurches, edited by Stephen Hunt. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV. Edwards, John. 2009. Language and Identity: Key Topics in Sociolinguistics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ellingson, Stephen. 2009. “The Rise of the Megachurches and Changes in Religious Culture: Review Article.” Sociology Compass 3(1):16–30. Ellingson, Stephen. 2010. “New Research on Megachurches: Non-denominationalism and Sectarianism.” Pp. 247–266 in The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion, edited by Bryan S. Turner. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Ellingson, Stephen. 2013. “Packaging Religious Experience, Selling Modular Religion: Explaining the Emergence and Expansion of Megachurches.” Pp. 59–74 in Religion in Consumer Society: Brands, Consumers and Markets, edited by François Gauthier and Tuomas Martikainen. New York: Routledge. Fishman, Joshua A. 2006. “A Decalogue of Basic Theoretical Perspectives for a Sociology of Language and Religion.” Pp. 13–25 in Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion, edited by Tope Omoniyi and Joshua A. Fishman. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Hiebert, Valerie. 2022. “Megachurch Success in the Age of Radical Modernity: An Analysis of the Role of Co-Sanctified Lexicons in Three American Cities.” Dissertation: Western Sydney University. Johnstone, Barbara. 2008. Discourse Analysis, 2nd ed. Singapore: Blackwell Publishing. Lipka, Michael, and Claire Gecewicz. 2017. “More Americans Now Say They’re Spiritual but Not Religious.” Pew Research Center.

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Megachurches in the United States Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Percy, Martyn. 2020. “‘Your Church Can Grow!” A Contextual Theological Critique of Megachurches.” Pp. 102–127 in Handbook of Megachurches, edited by Stephen Hunt. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV. Putnam, Robert D., and David E. Campbell. 2010. American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon and Schuster. Roberts, Keith A., and David Yamane. 2012. Religion in Sociological Perspective, 5th ed. Los Angeles: Sage Publishing. Rosenau, Pauline. 1992. Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shilling, Chris, and Philip A. Mellor. 2011. “Re-Theorizing Emile Durkheim on Society and Religion: Embodiment, Intoxication and Collective Life.” The Sociological Review 59(1)17–41. Smith, Timothy L. 2006. “Slavery and Theology: The Emergence of Black Christian Consciousness in Nineteenth Century America.” Pp. 313–330 in Critical Issues in American Religious History: A Reader 2nd ed., edited by Robert R. Mathisen. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Thumma, Scott, and Warren Bird. 2015. Recent Shifts in America’s Largest Protestant Churches: Megachurches 2015 Report. Leadership Network and Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Tucker-Worgs, Tamelyn N. 2011. The Black Megachurch: Theology, Gender, and the Politics of Public Engagement. Waco: Baylor University Press. Vondey, Wolfgang. 2012. “The Making of a Black Liturgy: Pentecostal Worship and Spirituality from African Slave Narratives to American Cityscapes.” Black Theology 10(2):147–168. Wardhaugh, Ronald. 1992. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishers. Wellman, James K. Jr. 2008. Evangelical vs. Liberal: The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest. Oxford Scholarship Online. Wellman, James K. Jr., Katie E. Corcoran, and Kate Stockly-Meyerdirk. 2014. ““God is Like a Drug:” Explaining Interaction Ritual Chains in American Megachurches.” Sociological Forum 29(3):650–672. Wellman, James K. Jr., Katie E. Corcoran, and Kate J. Stockly. 2020. High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilkins, Amy C. 2011. “Collective Emotions and Boundary Work among Evangelical Christians.” Pp. 311–325 in Inside Social Life: Readings in Sociological Psychology and Microsociology, 6th ed., edited by Spencer E. Cahill and Kent Sandstrom. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1921/2001. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge Classics.

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19 CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN MUSIC AND CONTEMPORARY WORSHIP MUSIC Ibrahim Abraham Abstract This chapter offers a critical overview of sociological aspects of and approaches to contemporary Christian music (CCM) and contemporary worship music (CWM), two related genres of abidingly evangelical popular music in which contemporary Christianity engages the spectacular capacities of consumer capitalism. Identifying CCM as musically diverse, yet united by the shifting values of American evangelicalism, and recognizing CWM as a sophisticated congregational practice increasingly integrated into the everyday lives of listeners, this chapter analyzes tensions and contestations in these cultural forms. It also identifies important theoretical concepts pertinent to the study of CCM and CWM: Emile Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence, Theodor Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, approaches to music-based subcultures, and Christopher Small’s musicking paradigm.

Introduction The related popular music genres of contemporary Christian music (CCM) and contemporary worship music (CWM) are located at the intersection of abidingly evangelical Christianity and contemporary consumer capitalism, where desires to experience and proclaim Christian beliefs in sometimes exuberantly Pentecostal performances meet with technological innovations including laser shows and digital streaming. For David Martin (2016), the historical relationship between music and Christianity has been problematic but predictable, with expanding boundaries of musical legitimacy. For Tom Wagner, the tension between the sacred and the secular in Christian music illustrates Christians’ consistently contradictory desires to transcend the world “through practices rooted in the world” (2017:93). Indeed, the sites of contestation and contradiction in CCM and CWM are sites where the most advanced aspects of the “culture industry,” to use a term made famous by the Marxist sociologist and musicologist Theodor Adorno, meet the most basic aspects of Christian practice: worship and evangelism. Focused on the Anglophone world, this 242

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chapter offers a critical overview of sociological aspects of and approaches to CCM and CWM, introducing scholars to important themes, methodological debates, and theoretical disputes. CCM and CWM are difficult to disentangle, as both have their origins in the “Jesus Movement,” the charismatic evangelical fraction of the 1960s hippie counterculture which dressed conservative Christianity in the rebellious sound and style of modern folk and rock music. Wagner (2017) differentiates CWM from CCM through musical intentions and the primarily congregational context of CWM performance, but there is no absolute distinction between the two, with many CCM musicians performing on Saturday night doubling-up as CWM musicians in church on Sunday morning. Many CCM artists experience “worshipful” aspects of their performances in secular spaces, moreover, with musicians and fans claiming charismatic experiences during Christian rock concerts (Abraham 2017). The line between CCM and CWM has been further blurred by the emerging popularity of CWM in everyday listening, even though musicians acknowledge the limitations that the congregational origins of CWM place upon lyrics and performance styles. Although CCM and CWM are widely accepted etic (outsider) terms in sociological studies, the terms should be used with care to avoid implicit theological judgments creeping into sociological analysis. Applying the label “worship” to a specific subgenre of pop and rockinfluenced music that emerged within theologically conservative, White, North American evangelical churches raises legitimate critiques that it privileges certain theological and cultural norms. Much the same is true for the label CCM, as artists are not only known to disavow the label for personal, missional, or commercial purposes, but beliefs are never static in the youthful field of popular music, and some successful Christian musicians ceased identifying as Christians (Busman 2020). Care is also required when comparing Christian music to “secular music,” as this chapter does, referring to cultural fields unregulated by religious beliefs or institutions. In this regard, this chapter follows Bryan Wilson’s (2016) sociological study of secularization and the creation of religiously indifferent entertainment industries. Christians obviously make secular music, Christian sentiments are hardly absent from secular popular music, and CCM responds to secular market trends, but non-Christians play only discrete roles in CCM and CWM, often behind the scenes. This chapter begins with a study of CCM, emphasizing the complexity of genre rules and conflicts over authenticity. The second section focuses on CWM, emphasizing tensions between standardization and spontaneity in the sometimes self-identified “Spirit-led” genre. The third section introduces four important theoretical approaches to CCM and CWM: Emile Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence, Theodor Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, approaches to music-based subcultures, and Christopher Small’s musicking paradigm.

Contemporary Christian Music While its antecedents can be traced back to the Protestant Reformation, CCM emerged out of the Jesus Movement, a youthful charismatic revival movement overlapping the 1960s hippie counterculture and the 1970s “Me generation” (Stowe 2011; Young 2017). Calvary Chapel, a Pentecostal church in California, was central to the Jesus Movement, pioneering ministry to youth subcultures and fostering many CCM and CWM artists through its label Maranatha! (Powell 2002). The “father” of CCM was Larry Norman, who claimed that the title of his first album with the band People!, We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus and a 243

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Lot Less Rock and Roll, was censored by Capitol Records. While he may have exaggerated Capitol’s hostility, the idea of secular industry interference gifted CCM a powerful origin story (Stowe 2011). There was no clear distinction between CCM and CWM at this early, folk-rock stage, but through the 1970s and 1980s, CCM emerged in non-congregational genres, including heavy metal, punk, and hip-hop, although CCM’s most successful performers, such as Amy Grant, were firmly within the accessible pop-rock subgenre which still dominates today. The diversity of CCM points to the challenge of defining CCM. While the relevant industry group, the Gospel Music Association, employs an inclusive theological definition, and some commentators joke about “Jesus-per-minute” ratios in songs (Stowe 2011:109), CCM is often a marketing label, sometimes overriding musicians’ self-identification. The concept of genre rules has proven useful in the sociology of popular music for assessing the identity or authenticity of a musical work or performer (Frith 1998). CCM lacks strict musicological or instrumental rules and is defined, instead, by commercial and juridical rules, mediated by Christian companies and fandoms, by semiotic rules – principally its lyrics – and by ideological and behavioral rules reflecting conservative evangelical norms. These genre rules have encouraged CCM to evolve as evangelical cultural practices have, such that when evangelicals become critical consumers of secular popular culture in the late twentieth century, CCM became more sophisticated in trying to satisfy its more worldly audience. Like other genres of popular music, CCM is an internally contradictory cultural form. As Richard Middleton (1990) argues, rock music combines innovation with nostalgia, rebelliousness with conformity, and sincere self-expression with commercial calculation. CCM employs new cultural expressions and technological developments to communicate generally conservative Christian values, presenting itself as dissenting from the conformity and sinfulness of society while assimilating the cultural practices and commercial strategies of trans-national media companies that have invested in the Christian market, increasingly so since the 1990s (Mall 2020). Therefore, when Christians create popular music as Christians, they combine the contradictions and competing values of Christianity with the contradictions and competing values of popular music. Because CCM is as much an iteration of popular music as Christianity, praiseworthy or problematic aspects of CCM are just as likely to have their origins in secular popular music practices as in Christian beliefs. As a leading sociologist of popular music, Simon Frith (1998) argues, rather than conclusively taking sides in cultural and social conflicts, popular music mediates conflicts through its own modality. Hence, most controversies within contemporary Christianity are reproduced and unresolved within CCM. Although some Christians consider certain genres of music beyond religious redemption, such that CCM musicians cannot help leading audiences astray, Christian attitudes toward CCM generally fall between cynicism toward commercial entertainment and embrace of gifted artists’ sincere spiritual expressions (Abraham 2017). To allay suspicion of being superficial entertainment, or commercial exploitation, CCM must perform at least one of two religious services: evangelize non-Christians or provide Christians with faith-strengthening alternatives to secular music (Romanowski 2000). CCM, therefore, re-produces another of the foundational tensions within popular music: providing entertainment while also presenting deeper truths. Further tension exists around CCM’s deeper truths which must be personally professed by individual artists, while also being orthodox and universal according to the standards of the genre’s largely evangelical audiences. 244

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The authenticity of CCM relies upon a rhetoric of sincere self-expression. The Christian music industry deploys a rhetoric of “thriving and embattled,” Christian Smith’s (1998) description of American evangelicals, arguing for the utility of cultural conflict in strengthening identity. The Christian music industry implies the secular industry is unwelcoming to Christianity, and its artists refuse to comply with that industry’s censorial standards – a position complicated for Christian subsidiaries of secular corporations. One can trace this rhetoric of authenticity back to Romanticism’s emphasis on individual expression and affect, as in Charles Taylor’s (1989, 2007) important studies of modernity. Taylor is aware there are Christian correlations and cross-fertilizations here; however, Romanticism’s ideology of individual genius and the elevation of individual experience and expression to the level of spiritual truth – indispensable to secular folk and rock music – is antithetical to Christianity. As Barry Alfonso’s (2002) interviews with CCM artists illustrates, valuing the messenger above the message is a constant temptation within CCM, which seeks to cultivate celebrity and generate sales without purposefully prioritizing either.

Contemporary Worship Music CWM can also be seen in continuity with top-down and bottom-up Christian traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – evangelical hymns on one hand, and vernacular gospel music on the other (Evans 2006). CWM is similarly subjective and emotive but wedded to the cultural tastes, technologies, and sensibilities of post-World War II (WWII) generations, reflecting religion as experiential and therapeutic (Miller 1997; Heelas & Woodhead 2005). CWM also owes its evolution to the Jesus Movement, with old and new lyrics put to folk and rock music in typically Pentecostal churches in the 1960s and 1970s. Developments in CWM often emerge from influential Pentecostal church networks, beginning with Calvary Chapel, as noted above. Other Pentecostal churches have championed subsequent waves of CWM, including the US-based Vineyard network, which initially emphasized congregational participation – in which “the intimacy and the sound of congregational voices [would] dominate” (Stowe 2011:224–225) – and the Australian-based Hillsong network, which exemplifies virtuosic CWM. In his broad overview of CWM, Wagner (2017) emphasizes the “instrumental” and “intentional” aspects of this genre which, like any other genre, serves specific social, cultural, and personal functions. Mark Jennings, whose work on CWM is partly based on his experience as a worship musician, argues that, in the case of charismatic CWM, the music has a “catalytic” function, trying to create “sound which catalyzes the divine-human encounter” (2014:25). CWM aims to produce such religious affect in a reasonably reliable manner that personal ecstatic experiences do regularly occur during Pentecostal services (Miller and Yamamori 2007). If charismatic congregants do not experience these ecstatic encounters, which are usually more subtle than popular perceptions of charismatic experience, “then the service and the music have not served their purpose” (Jennings 2014:32). But worship musicians cannot be too deliberate; there is a difference between music as a catalyst for supernatural experience and music directly producing generic effervescence in a calculated manner. A South African musician described this as a tension between “social” experience and “spiritual” experience, with the spiritual nature of CWM requiring her to “somehow intuitively hit the right spiritual button” (Abraham 2021a:140). During Pentecostal/charismatic revivals in the late twentieth century, worship musicians often had significant freedom within church services, emphasizing the “Spirit-led” nature 245

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of the music and the broader movement. The comparatively unstructured musical worship in these services was distinguished from more standardized services, especially in mainline churches. As one church musician related, this was “a time when the wilder and the less conformed, the less structured, the better. That means that God’s more present” (Abraham 2021a:139). However, to the extent that it is possible to generalize, Pentecostal services are now more standardized, especially in megachurches, which account for much of the impact of CWM on wider Christianity. CWM is often performed in a block at the beginning of a service, curated for maximum affect, beginning with up-tempo songs and finishing with slower ones (Jennings 2014; Wagner 2017). For some evangelical insiders, this constitutes a scandalous return to “liturgy” (Perkins 2015) but, from an outsider perspective, demonstrates the continuity of core aspects of Christian life: “nothing new under the sun,” as Evans titles his chapter on the history of worship music (2006:21). The global popularity of CWM spills beyond evangelical churches, evidence of porous denominational boundaries and the role of music as a theological resource. Although much CWM can be described or critiqued as “performance-driven” by emphasizing high production techniques and virtuosity (Evans 2006), CWM songs are performed within congregations with vastly different cultures, musical styles, and theologies. Many mainline churches utilize CWM, sometimes alongside traditional hymns, and while this juxtaposition can be jarring, given the doctrinal density of older hymns, some CWM songwriters “riff” off the hymnal. CWM lyrics have a “generalist theological foundation” that carries them across national and denominational boundaries (Evans 2015:183), proving inoffensive to all but the most progressively critical Christians (Abraham 2021a). There is utility in lyrical generality, for, as Erik Routley argued, the alternative to fragmenting congregations on musical tastes – a proxy for age for Routley, but also race and class – is to embrace music that appeals to “as many kinds of people as possible” (1980:134–137). CWM’s lyrical generality also reflects most genres of secular popular music, in which lyrics are not especially important (Frith 1989). To the extent CWM follows generic aspects of popular music, scholars should be careful about approaching CWM lyrics as they might approach the lyrics of Charles Wesley’s hymns, let alone the content of a sermon. The intense scrutiny to which some Christians have subjected lyrics, in moral panics around secular heavy metal and hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s, and later in analysis of CWM, should be recognized as merely one way of approaching the function of lyrics. Studies of music in listeners’ lives reveal contradictory interpretations of the same lyrics and songs (Abraham 2015). While CWM is intended for corporate worship in churches, it is difficult to distinguish structurally from pop-rock, Christian or otherwise. CWM songs commonly follow the verse-chorus format of the four-minute rock song, arguably indicative of CWM’s replication of radio-friendly formats (Perkins 2015). Indeed, the musicological genre rules of worship music adhere closely to the norms of the radio-friendly pop-rock of bands such as Coldplay or U2, with some CWM employing similarly sophisticated studio production techniques (Evans 2017). Wagner’s close musicological analysis of CWM identifies the strategic use of stadium rock-style suspended chords in the genre, found to “provoke strong physio-emotional responses such as tears” (2017:95). While Lee Marshall (2011) notes such approaches are rare in the sociology of popular music, because sociologists tend toward the unmusical – religiously or otherwise – and fear falling into subjective idealism by identifying fixed relationships between music and meaning, critiques of standardization and emotional manipulation are common in sociological studies of the culture industry. 246

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The popularity of CWM and its generic features has led it beyond congregational spaces, again blurring the distinction between CCM and CWM. Listeners use CWM as a “technology of the self” to maintain religious awareness in everyday life (Parascandalo 2013). Abraham’s ethnography of contemporary evangelicalism illustrates this practice through an informant who has purged secular music from his life, replacing it with CWM to maintain religious mindfulness: “it’s like constantly having a heart for worship” (2017:130). One cannot separate this changing consumption of CWM from ever-changing technology, particularly the digitization of music. Although playlists on streaming services such as Spotify can curate mixes of CCM and CWM for relatively passive listeners (Mall 2020), the digital era also enables consumers to access culture from a position of mastery, from “an online tower, isolated from their surroundings” (Calvo-Sotelo 2021:210). This is possible because of instantaneous access to digitized media via licit or illicit streaming and instantaneously “unfollowing” unwelcome information. This curatorial and censorial power leads to a kind of cultural omnipotence; individuals can become gods in discrete digital worlds (CalvoSotelo 2021). On the other hand, the same technological and cultural developments allow CWM listeners to cocoon themselves emotionally within a familiar evangelical atmosphere.

Theoretical Approaches to CCM and CWM This third section highlights three established sociological approaches relevant to the study of CCM and CWM: Durkheim’s theory of effervescence, Adorno’s theory of the culture industry, and theories of music-based subcultures, as well as introducing a musicological paradigm – “musicking” – of sociological relevance.

Effervescence There are few more famous studies of religion than Durkheim’s classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995), based on armchair anthropology of Indigenous Australian religion. Durkheim treats religion as a social phenomenon concerned with social unity and regulation, so when Christians gather in musical worship, whatever else they do, they affirm their common morality: “This moral remaking can be achieved only through meetings, assemblies, and congregations in which the individuals, pressing close to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments” (1995:429). The most relevant part of this process is the “effervescence” created by rituals: In the midst of an assembly that becomes worked up, we become capable of feelings and conduct of which we are incapable when left to our individual resources. When it is dissolved and we are again on our own, we fall back to our ordinary level and can then take the full measure of how far above ourselves we were. … The result is the general effervescence that is characteristic of revolutionary or creative epochs. The result of that heightened activity is a general stimulation of individual energies. People live differently and more intensely than in normal times. (1995:211–213) Durkheim’s theory has been applied to contemporary musical worship, especially in Pentecostal contexts (Jennings 2015). In their study of global Pentecostalism, Donald Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori are as Durkheimian as possible without explicitly invalidating 247

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religious beliefs. Emphasizing the effervescence of social connections and the centrality of music to Pentecostal experience, they methodologically, agnostically argue that comparing church services to frat parties “does not preclude the possibility that the Holy Spirit is also present” (2007:132–134). Observing experienced CWM leaders follow the cues of the congregational “conscience collective,” Jennings makes broader and deeper use of Durkheimian notions of effervescence, exploring the role of musicians in facilitating collective effervescence without directly causing it (2014:80–84). However, it is important to recognize the problematics around the potentially undirected nature of musical effervescence, including the imprecision of music, which “is not a moral agent” (Myrick 2021:8). Jennings (2014) identifies similar emotions being stirred-up at political rallies and secular rock festivals, and whether one identifies these with a life-affirming higher purpose depends on one’s personal outlook. Even CWM runs the risk of becoming untethered from Christian tradition, Jennings (2008) observes, slipping into subjective experiences of transcendence if not framed by the orthodoxy of sermons and, more broadly, the orthopraxy of quotidian congregational life. Megachurches, with their floating congregations and sometimes self-help-style sermons, may in turn need the effervescence of CWM to stay rooted in Christian tradition, or risk becoming a “church of magic” with customers, not congregants (Durkheim 1995:42). Moreover, with many churches becoming increasingly diverse, the role of music in rituals aimed at unifying the congregation seems increasingly important and challenging.

Culture Industry The culture industry critique emerged from the work of the Frankfurt School of Western Marxists who turned their formidable critical faculties on both capitalist and socialist societies. The difficult work of Theodor Adorno has been most influential in this regard, grounded in Marxist and German Romantic philosophy. While criticism of Adorno and the Frankfurt School is ubiquitous, especially for disregarding the critical capacities of everyone other than like-minded intellectuals, they, nevertheless, “set the terms of debate” for latter studies of popular music (Strinati 2004:46–47). Adorno’s key texts on popular music critiqued its standardization, employing the term “culture industry” to analyze the industrial organization of creativity, such that popular culture is produced in a profit-seeking, top-down manner, amounting to a kind of “prescribed fun” (1991:103). Adorno applied this critique to popular music in multiple ways, from standardized song structures to an entire cultural process designed to establish “a system of response mechanisms” to music (1990:256–259). Adorno argued that standardized music creates standardized societies and individuals and, with parallels to Durkheimian approaches, that some listeners may be “rhythmically” or “emotionally” obedient, seeking hedonistic escape or seeking films and music as collective catharsis (1990:264–266). Applying the culture industry critique to CCM, Eric Gormly laments a missed opportunity to challenge the culture industry given CCM fandom’s obsession with authenticity, as alas, CCM assimilated into the “hegemonic culture” of American capitalism, becoming “virtually indistinguishable” from the secular music industry (2003:255–259). The culture industry critique has also been applied to CWM, especially in megachurches where the full array of cultural industry practices is observable. Worship songs are meticulously crafted but treated as disposable when there is a new recording to sell (Perkins 2015). Furthermore, Hillsong megachurch’s local musicians seek to replicate recordings precisely, making them 248

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instantly recognizable in the belief that innovation distracts worshipers (Wagner 2014; Abraham 2018), an approach applied to megachurch services generally, with every aspect regulated. Adorno’s critique of standardization includes listeners’ responses, evident in churches where musicians must “model the correct way to experience the presence of God” (Jennings 2008:163), such that unconventional performers or performances risk distracting the congregation (Abraham 2021b). In his critical insider application of the cultural industry critique, Dave Perkins argues that CWM and CCM have become standardized for radio formats, with listeners abstracted to a figure named “Becky,” a 34-year-old mother listening to Christian music in her SUV. Becky’s influence is such that “the Christian culture industry effectively puts Becky’s face on every future worshipper who will experience a particular worship song … off the rack and ready-made” (2015:239). This standardization provokes resistance, with Christian alternative rock labels and stations creating the anti-Becky: Todd, a young punk and heavy metal fan driving a pick-up truck (Myrick 2020).

Subcultures The sociology of popular music overlaps the sociology of subcultures, with “subculture” serving in British sociology as a “catch-all” for “any aspect of social life in which young people, style, and music interact” (Bennett 1999:599). In American sociology, the term has been used in non-musical contexts in studies of minority integration and religion, notably evangelicalism (Dowd and Dowd 2003; Abraham 2017). As a consciously oppositional form of rock music, punk became the proto-typical music-based subculture, partly through the influence of the University of Birmingham’s Marxist-influenced Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s, decoding youth subcultures as abidingly working-class “resistance” to social subordination and alienation from established working-class culture (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979). This approach was challenged on methodological grounds in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, post-modern post-subculture theories gained prominence, rejecting the Birmingham School’s focus on class while favoring ethnography over semiotics and critical theory (Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003). Contemporary youth subcultures are often depicted as fluid identities emerging from within – not against – consumer capitalism. Stripped of its focus on class, the Birmingham School approach to subcultural “resistance” has, nevertheless, proven resilient because it grants subcultures a seriousness postsubcultural approaches cannot. Peter Magolda and Kelsey Ebben Gross follow the early semiotic approach in their study of evangelicalism as an “oppositional collegiate subculture,” describing students re-purposing facets of university life to “create a distinct style that is pregnant with complex meaning and structures that challenge dominant groups,” including Friday-night worship services replacing parties and cheap jewelry with religious messages as counterpoints to conspicuous displays of wealth (2009:266–267). However, post-subculture approaches have moved away from concerns with subcultural homology, the alignment of all facets of one’s identity, such as music and fashion. In his statement on this post-modern approach to subcultures, David Muggleton recalls an ethnographic encounter with a stereotypical punk who is “a Southern Baptist metal head!” (2000:46–47) – the exclamation point driving home the implication that music is divorced from deeper meaning. 249

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Much of the work on Christian youth subcultures has focused on the idea of resistance against dominant social values and dominant Christian cultures, just as the Birmingham School argued working-class youth subcultures played out their contradictions with British society and their working-class parent cultures. A good example is Amy McDowell’s (2018, 2020) research on evangelical punks defining themselves against “mainstream Christians” as well as mainstream secular society. Similarly, Erika Gault (2015) considers Christian hip-hop a triply articulated subculture set against commercial hip-hop, conservative Black churches, and unjust secular society. Her later work explores a fourth site of alienation and resistance for Black Christian hip-hoppers: conservative Christian antipathy toward antiracist activism (Gault 2022). Two “post-subcultural” approaches employed in the study of CCM and CWM are the scenes perspective and neotribal theory. The scenes perspective is a descriptive way of analyzing geographic or generic affiliations, loosened from concerns with common class origins or ideologies. Marcus Moberg recognizes that, while scenes are useful mapping devices, they lack “theoretical weight” (2011:414–415). On the other hand, neotribal theory is adapted from Michel Maffesoli’s (1996) social theory, applied to transient and diverse groups that briefly coalesce through spontaneous connections. There are Durkheimian parallels and religious analogies in Maffesoli’s philosophy, which has been applied to evangelical music festivals at which young people “form temporary communities in which their faith is shared, celebrated and expressed” (De Kock, Roeland, and Vos 2011:333), and megachurches where worshipers experience music-based collective effervescence but share few social commonalities (Abraham 2021a).

Musicking The final theoretical approach here is a musicological approach relevant to sociological studies of CCM and CWM: Christopher Small’s musicking paradigm. Rather than considering music as artifacts such as recordings or hymn books, Small considers music a verb: “[t]o music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing” (1998a:9). The musicking paradigm emphasizes “the primacy of people as the progenitors, practitioners, adapters, and interpreters of musical pieces” (Marchesini 2021:213), and the paradigm is focused on the relationships inherent in music, between individuals in the congregation, for example, or between an individual and God. Music’s importance arises from its power to offer “a public image of our most inwardly desired relationships, not just showing them to us as they might be but bringing them into existence for the duration of the performance” (Small 1998b:69–70). The musicking paradigm has become influential in musicological approaches to CWM. Mark Porter emphasizes the “grassroots-focused fluidity” of the approach, illustrating its utility in congregational contexts for understanding the contradictory experiences of church members (2016). Along with studies of “relational ethics” in Christian music, such as Nathan Myrick’s (2021) work, Porter and the broader Christian congregational musicking paradigm focus on congregations as complex spaces, sometimes on the verge of collapsing under the weight of the critical faculties and individual differences of ordinary Christians. At a time when power relations within Christian communities are under intense scrutiny and congregational diversity is increasingly considered virtuous, the musicking 250

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paradigm holds great promise for sociologists seeking to make sense of the complexities of music in contemporary Christian life.

Conclusion This chapter has critically analyzed the inter-related and abidingly evangelical popular music genres of CCM and CWM. The complexities of these labels were identified, describing the relevant genre rules and urging clarity and caution to avoid inadvertently invalidating other Christian musical expressions. The analysis of CCM focused on the organization and authentication of the genre, recognizing the impact of shifting evangelical attitudes. The analysis of CWM focused on the intentional or catalytic nature of the genre, the progressive standardization of charismatic worship, and the increasing erasure of differences between CCM and CWM as standardized worship imitates pop-rock formats and becomes integrated into listeners’ everyday lives. Finally, this chapter identified four important theoretical concepts for the study of CCM and CWM: effervescence, the culture industry, subcultures (and post-subcultures), and the musicking paradigm, the latter a musicological approach appropriate for sociologists eager to engage with the contested contemporary cultures of Christian music.

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20 THE IMPACT OF WESTERN CHRISTIANITY ON TRADE UNIONISM Theodore Koutroukis Abstract The intense social problems that were created in industrializing society teased the interest of some churches because they wished to help workers gain a new role in the everyday life of industrial civilization. Furthermore, those churches tried to remain a reliable protector of the poor against the rapid rise of socialist and communist movements. Using a historical framework, this chapter first describes the Anglo-Saxon experience and the Catholic doctrines pertaining to labor. It then examines the various versions of Christian unions and studies their impact on employee relations in Western countries. In conclusion, it discusses the current perspectives of Christian unionism, while globalized capitalism and neoliberalism seem to threaten the traditional values of Christianity.

Introduction In The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), T.S. Eliot noted that religion should be integrated into people’s social life and emphasized that we should ”accept the modern world as it is and simply try to adapt Christian social ideals to it” (1939:32). Using a historical framework, this chapter aims to assess the impact of Christianity on the trade union movement. First, an overview of Roman Catholic teachings on labor and Anglo-Saxon experience with them will be given. Then various versions of Christian socialism and Christian democracy within trade unions in Western countries will be examined as well as their implications on employee relations. In conclusion, perspectives of Christian unionism in current socioeconomic environments will be discussed. The constitution of western Europe as a trans-national community based on either Roman Catholic or Protestant Christianity in any given area has developed, to a high degree, both the social and the spiritual needs of humans. More specifically, it has been marked by the consolidation of a Christian civilization which put workers’ social rights at the center (Philpot and Shah 2006). The origins of Christian unions have been linked with the reaction of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches to phenomena such as industrialization, 254

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secularization, and de-Christianization of the working class. In the early years of Christian unionism, the union leaders came from the middle-class and the clergy. Some decades later, Christian unions became more progressive and independent from religious institutions, and their leaders arose from the working class itself (Barnes 1962). In this spirit, Christian unions appeared to function, inter alia, as the guardians of Christian values in social life.

Historical Background: The Anglo-Saxon Experience Immediately following the Industrial Revolution, churches had a rather indifferent or even hostile attitude toward industrial relations conflicts and to the emerging trade unions themselves. In fact, the reactions of part of the clergy to the dynamic industrial action movements resulted in losing some of their influence on the emerging working class for the benefit of socialist ideas, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century. Later, though, both Catholics and Protestants changed their mind and, discerning the burning labor, social, and economic issues of the day, began to voice reform messages (Kaufman 2004:73). The Methodist Church in Britain played a very important role in this development. Methodists had a decisive influence on the creation of trade unions in the first steps of organizing and bolstered the traditional foundations of the Anglo-Saxon community organization model with their own moral values (Davis and Dhaliwal 2007). As Edward Thompson (1979) pointed out, Halćvy’s opinion was that the British experience of the peaceful transition from agrarian to industrial society happened because Methodists prevented, to a large extent, revolution in the 1790s. Indeed, Methodist anti-conformism played a significant role in promoting Christian socialism with the support of trade unions and strengthening the producer’s cooperative movement. Most likely, the methods that Methodists used to familiarize the lower classes with the cooperation in associations, the establishment of rules for their self-government, the constitution of raising funds, and the communication between several parts of the United Kingdom (UK) contributed to that development. The Methodist church adopted an orthodox Wesleyanism, resulting in Methodism being seen as a religion for the poor (Thompson 1979). Moreover, many believe that there are several similarities between Christianity and collectivism; their goals are similar, and they both start from the belief that evil in society stems from the incessant accumulation of wealth and the competition of the individuals (Poole 1981; Sagar 2012). In short, Methodism was partly responsible for inspiring the self-confidence and building the capacity to organize in the British working class (Thompson 1979). Many labor leaders and militant clerics called for Christian social reform, not as part of a  socialist project, but as an alternative middle way and demanded the establishment of a legislative framework for labor protection, the encouragement of labor unions, the introduction of unemployment benefits, and the adoption of some elements of collectivism (Williams 2016). A similar initiative in the UK was the Labour Church movement, which was an expression of British moral socialism. This organization wanted to become the religious expression of the labor movement and was called theological socialism. The first Labour Church was founded in Manchester in 1891 by Unitarian (and former Calvinist) clergyman John Trevor (Bevir 1999; Johnson 2015). Notably, the  founding congress  of the Independent Labour Party of Britain, which took place in Bradford in 1893, was accompanied by a service of the Labour Church attended by about 5,000 people (Bevir 2011). 255

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The main principles of the Labour Church were the following: 1) the labor movement must be included in religious movements; 2) the religious dimension of the labor movement is not a certain social class but, rather, a dimension which unites individuals coming from all social classes who wish to cooperate to abolish the slave trade; 3) the labor movement has not adopted a sectarian or dogmatic religious view; it has provided each person the freedom to develop their unique relationship with the “Supreme Force”; 4) labor will be emancipated when individuals learn God’s economic and moral laws and apply those “regulations” wholeheartedly; and 5) everyone may develop their personal character and improve social conditions equally and that development will be vital in liberating individuals from prevailing moral and social bonds (Bevir 2011). The ideological movements of  Christian  democracy  and  Christian socialism were very active in many aspects of Christianity in Europe. In the United States (US), the social evangelists who were Protestants (the Social Gospel Movement) also proclaimed that the moral principles and practices of the gospel cannot be separated from the study of economic and labor problems (Kaufman 2004). The development of labor unions in the UK and the US were accelerated after Pope Leo XIII’s era when Catholics were active in friendly organizations that adhered to Catholic values and culture (Aspinwall 1997). One such organization was the Knights of Labor, which was formed in 1869 in Philadelphia, but developed mainly after the historic strike of 1877 (Foster 1956).

The Roman Catholic Approach The great turning point in the relationship of the Roman Catholic Church with the working class took place in 1891 with the encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which Pope Leo XIII noted that unions bring capital and labor closer together, and it is highly desirable that they multiply output and become more effective (Kaufman 2004). This encyclical recognized the fundamental role of trade unions which was linked to the “right to associate,” and to promote the formation of associations advancing the essential interests of workers. Trade unions grew out of the workers’ need, especially the industrial ones, to collectively protect their rights against entrepreneurs or owners of the means of production. As long as trade unions promote their goals having the “common good” in mind, they offer a generally beneficial effect on society and solidarity among people, and thus, unions are a necessary element of social life (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2004). After Rerum Novarum, the ecclesiastical social doctrine of the Church has been that labor relations should be characterized by the cooperation of social partners. Unions fight for the promotion of social and labor rights, but they should not fight against anyone else such as their employer, for example.  This is a clear rejection of the Marxist concept of class  struggle. According to the pontifical encyclical, trade unions must act as the representatives of the employees,  taking into account the proper regulation of economic life, but they should also aim to educate the social consciousness of the workers so that they feel that they are actively involved in economic and social development and that they contribute to the common good (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2004). Trade unions and the other forms of workers’ brotherhood must also work in cooperation with other socio-economic organizations and take an  interest in the administration of  public affairs. Furthermore, trade unions must exert influence in the field of  political conflict and dialogue, making political leaders more sensitive to labor problems and also making sure that workers’ rights are respected. However, trade unions must not take on the 256

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characteristics of a political party or fight for power. Nor should they promote the goals of political parties associated with them, because then they will lose their role in promoting the common good of society as a whole (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2004). In addition, unions are mandated to develop solidarity with precarious, flexible, casual, and part-time workers and to take responsibility for exercising their right to decent work. Overall, the encyclical Rerum Novarum approached the labor issue in an exemplary manner, which influenced the later social teaching of Catholicism. The fundamental principles supported by Leo XIII were later elaborated in other social encyclicals (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2004). In the early 1930s, Pope Pius XI published the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno in commemoration of the 40 years of Rerum Novarum. It was during the inter-war period, when totalitarian regimes were consolidated in Europe and class struggles were exacerbated. The encyclical warned of the consequences of the lack of respect for trade union freedom and highlighted the potential of solidarity and cooperation to overcome economic and  social  inequalities. The same  encyclical  noted that wages must be proportional to the needs of the worker, while the state must apply  the principle of subsidiarity  in its relations with the private sector. The encyclical denied liberalism in the sense of rampant competition while affirming the value of private property (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2004). In the turbulent times since the economic crisis of 1929, Pope Pius  XI  had promoted the implementation of a moral law that  enriched human relations with  justice and love to transcend the conflict of the social classes. Then in 1981, Pope John Paul II published the encyclical Labourem exercens. This encyclical described spirituality and work ethics by employing an intense theological and philosophical contemplation. With the 1987 encyclical  Sollicitudo rei socialis, Pope John Paul II celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Populorum progressio, addressing the issue of underdevelopment in the Global South and advocating  a development worthy of human dignity (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2004). In 1991, Pope John Paul II published a third social encyclical, the Centesimus annus, in which he affirmed the basic principles of the Christian perception of social and political organization and expressed his respect for democracy and a free economy in the context of solidarity. At the center of the Catholic Church’s pastoral interest was also the relationship between labor and capital as expressed through employee participation in decision-making, property, and its benefits (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2004). The social teachings of the church listed some rights of workers that should be legislated: 1) the right to fair wages; 2) the right to rest; 3) the right to working environments and production processes that will not affect workers’ health or moral integrity; 4) the right to preserve their personality at the workplace without affecting their conscience or dignity; 5) the right to reasonable subsidies for the survival of the unemployed and their families; 6) the right to pension as well as insurance for old age, illness, and/or work related accidents; 7) the right to social measures related to maternity; and 8) the right to congregate and cooperate. The social teachings of the church also recognized  the legitimacy of strike  when it appears as an inevitable or, at least, necessary instrument, provided that all other ways of overcoming the conflict of interests have proven insufficient. The Catholic Church also recognized that trade unions, pursuing their  particular  goal  in the service of the common good, constitute an indispensable element of social life. In any social system, both  the 257

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labor force and the capital are necessary in the process of production. The trade unions are the pioneers of struggles for social justice and the rights of working people in their particular professions. Additionally,  trade unions must influence political power in order to properly sensitize it to the problems of the labor force and urge it to respect the rights of wage earners (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2004).

The Many Faces of Christian Unionism When socialists and communists succeeded in controlling many unions and adopted an anticlerical attitude, hundreds of faithful Catholic workers abandoned those organizations and founded new ones, which were declared alternative principles according to Christian social doctrine (Vignaux 1943). The Catholic labor movement began in the nineteenth century but grew strong after the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891, initiating establishment of Catholic unions mainly in European Catholic countries in the period 1890–1910 (Foster 1956). Those unions were an alternative to the anti-clerical and secular approach of organizing that was driven by socialist and anarchist circles. Moreover, they declared the need to transform capitalism, protect worker interests, and spread the Christian doctrine among wage earners (Cordova 1968). The churches themselves faced the social question and realized they could promote a change in the hearts of both the poor and wealthy through more systematic pastoral care. Furthermore, overcoming social problems was believed to be possible through a romantic return to a medieval corporate society (Schneider 1982). Catholic doctrine has conceptualized the ideal state as a “communitas communitatum,” a community of communities (Sommerville 1914:14). Thus, if labor organizations could concentrate only on their economic activity, Catholics may feel free to join them. Wilhelm Emmanouel von Ketteler (1811-1897), the influential Bishop of Mainz, was one of the pioneers of Catholic social thought. In The Labour Question and Christianity (1865), he recorded his influences as St. Thomas Aquinas and romantic political theory as well as his debate with the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle. Bishop Ketteler fostered practical initiatives and measures to assist the poor working class, such as worker cooperatives and journeymen’s associations, which later evolved into Christian trade unions (O’Malley 2008; Bock 1967). In 1899, four dozen representatives from several German regions adopted the Mainz Guidelines, a declaration that recognized the principles of inter-confessionality and the political party neutrality of trade unions. That declaration pointed out that unions should organize workers from all confessions of Christianity and avoid any debate on confessional issues. Moreover, they must remain apolitical (Schneider 1982). According to the Mainz Guidelines, workers have a right to receive appropriate remuneration from capitalist enterprises, but it was also noted that employees and employers express the producers’ interests against consumers. Eventually, both sides of the industry might assert the highest returns for their essential contribution to the production of goods and services. As the collaboration of both sides is necessary for the production process, their relationship must be characterized by a spirit of compromise. The unions in particular should submit reasonable claims, and strikes should be used as a last resort and then only if it is likely to be successful (Schneider 1982). Catholic hierarchy in the US, inspired by Paul Weber’s writings and Monsignor John A. Ryan’s pioneering actions, fully supported union organization campaigns and calls for 258

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social justice. Clerics believed that the dominance of a secular world was a threat for the church itself and, thus, made a continuous effort to be involved in working class struggle for dignity and improvement of working and living conditions in order to re-spiritualize the world (Rosswurm 1992). Within that framework, the Roman Catholic Church promoted several initiatives, such as schools for priests, national social action, conferences for clerics and laity, labor schools, labor priests, and chapters of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) (Rosswurm 1992). As Collen Doody pointed out, several Catholic workers brought their religion into the work environment, and other employees used the supernatural intercessory powers of the Virgin Mary (2011). That reliably explains why Archbishop Edward Mooney favored Catholic workers to join the American Congress of Industrial Organizations in order to improve their income and act as a moderating force against radical left organizers within trade unions (Doody 2011). The members of the Catholic labor movement emerged as apostles of the papal encyclicals, imparting spiritual power, social rights, fair treatment,  Christian principles,  and brotherhood. In other words, they tried to offer the Mystici Corporis Christi (Mystical Βody of Christ) to the workers (Lubienecki 2015). However, Christian trade unionists did not participate actively in a framework of a confessionally determined Christianity. They were committed to avoid every action that might conflict with the Catholic or Protestant convictions of trade union members, as they claimed to represent only the purely economic worker’s interests and nothing else (Schneider 1982). The social messianism in the spirit of Gaudium et Spes, as experienced by the Roman Catholic Church, offered a new Christian perspective on contemporary problems such as justice and development (Kepel 1995) and advocated the settlement of social and economic inequalities (Poole 1981). Besides, Roman Catholic labor activists desired fewer working hours and better wages, employee health and safety, better working and living conditions and, in general, all the benefits that organization of labor is supposed to provide (Sommerville 1914). In other words, Catholic workers have a religion-motivated duty to join unions in order to foster their own interests (Sommerville 1914). Similar evangelical efforts to organize German workers took place in 1890 through the founding of the Protestant Social Congress (Liebersohn 1986).

Social Christianity in Practice The Catholic unions adopted a policy based on religious values, proclaimed the cooperation of the classes, accepted capitalism as a socio-economic system, and called for the launch of reforms such as recognition of trade unions, establishment of collective agreements, institutionalization of labor inspections in industries, enforcement of the eight-hour day, and adoption of special legislation for women (Foster 1956). The purpose of social Catholicism was to create a good society, characterized by industrial peace and respect for labor rights by businesses (Abbott 2006), though several scholars have disagreed on the capacity of Catholic unions to play a beneficial role in a market economy (Dijkema 2014). Thus, Christian trade unions proposed that the economic and industrial regime should conform to moral laws and the needs of all humans. In this sense, appropriate institutions were proposed to assure employee and employer participation in the governance of the economy and the direction of professions. Furthermore, those unions proposed the implementation of works councils within industrial and/or commercial undertakings (Pawuels 1946). 259

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Another dimension of Catholic Church intervention in everyday working life was the action of labor priests. These activists supported union struggles and actions using public speaking, picket-line involvement, and other pertinent actions. They played a significant role through the legitimization of organizing campaigns and reforms (Rosswurm 1992). Labor priests developed strong social action in Latin America as well, as they were inspired by liberation theology. Furthermore, in Germany, the Catholic Church organized social circles for workers (Erdman 1913). In non-Catholic countries, Catholic unions still attempted to influence the trade union movement. They founded organizations such as the ACTU, and with  the participation of some Protestants, they founded the International Secretariat of Christian Trade Unions (1908) as well as trans-national secretariats for different professions and industrial sectors (Foster 1956; Cywinscki 2011). ACTU’s goal was to become a real power by cultivating the name of Christ within organized labor and disseminating the message of trade unions into many Catholic laborer’s homes as well as, in reverse, by carrying the Christian gospel into every labor organization (Rosswurm 1992). ACTU aimed to promote unionism within the American workforce based on Christian values by educating unionists and Catholic workers on these principles and putting them into practice (Dayyani n.d.).  Furthermore, they urged  Catholic wage earners to join labor unions in their workplace, preventing at the same time their participation in Marxist unions. ACTU also promoted the establishment of supervisory boards in industrial councils involving representatives of both employees and employers by sector to promote production and productivity for the benefit of all (Dayyani n.d.). However, the Catholic Church has gradually moderated its commitment to foster the establishment of industrial councils, an institution which reflects several socialist ideas as well. For example, Paul Weber’s social vision included an anti-capitalist and democratic plan for ending class struggle and promoting economic democracy. Weber, who was the Detroit ACTU leader, wrote that class conflict would end, and economic democracy would be established when capital and labor would get organized in professional associations, which would make co-decisions on key economic issues such as prices, investments, and working conditions. Moreover, Weber pointed out that organized labor has a right to participate in economic governance equally with the employer-side (Rosswurm 1992). Yet, during the 1940s and 1950s, many Roman Catholic laborites believed that industrial councils, in combination with profit-sharing and labor-management cooperation schemes in several declining industries, were achievable goals. The principal actions of the ACTU were 1)  promotion of profit-sharing schemes, 2) creation of a speaker’s bureau and organization of the educational activities of employees in labor schools, 3) tackling corruption and oppression in trade unions, 4) promotion of the Catholic Labor Defense League that helped workers in the (legal) settlement of their grievances and labor problems, and 5) the prevention of the communist influence on trade unionism (Dayyani n.d.) However, the Catholic trade unionists had limited participation in the International Association for Labor Legislation founded in 1900 in Paris, which was the forerunner of the International Labor Organization. ACTU leaders tried to provide an unromantic program based on the wisdom and experience of the Roman Catholic Church. Accordingly, employees have a right to 1) have a secure job, 2) have an adequate income to support their families, 3) be involved in collective bargaining procedures through union representatives, 4) receive a share of company profits, 5) organize strikes and picketing, 6) pay a fair price for the goods they buy, 7) work 260

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decent hours, and 8) work in decent conditions (Ward 1956). In return, wage earners have a duty to 1) deliver honest work for an honest daily wage, 2) organize in a bona fide trade union, 3) strike only after exhaustion of all other legitimate means of negotiation, 4) avoid taking any violent actions, 5) respect the right to property, 6) implement any agreements freely made with their employer, 7) enforce honesty and fair treatment within unions, and 8) cooperate with employers that respect their rights (Ward 1956). The latter cooperation aims to overcome industrial conflicts by setting up “guilds” (to self-regulate industry) and several producer cooperatives (in which employees could participate in business ownership and profits). However, radical social Catholicism acted in a different spirit. In the strikes organized by Doris Day, a Catholic spiritual and social activist who led the Catholic worker movement in the US, participants also held up signs on which papal encyclical excerpts were written. The Catholic worker movement opposed both the materialism of American society and the conformism of the official Catholic Church. While this movement was Catholic, it was also anarchist, pacifist, and combined direct aid to the poor and the homeless with actions against violence (Dayyani n.d.). The efforts of Day and her colleagues to establish better working conditions were sadly misunderstood, especially in those times when workers’ right to organize increased fears of the communist threat or triggered anti-union reflexes (Lubienecki 2013). Italy and Germany had the largest and strongest Christian unions until the inter-war period. When fascists and Nazis came to power, they destroyed the independent unions in both countries, and those Christian-oriented unions have never regained their former influence in the post-war era (Barnes 1962). Contrarily, several examples such as the United Automobile Workers of Detroit have shown that Catholic unions have fought against the increasingly fascist beliefs among employees during the late New Deal period (Pehl 2012). Mutatis mutandis, social evangelists, who represented the Social Gospel Movement, also appeared in North America. Significant cases included the Christian Labor Association in Michigan (Repas 1964) and the Methodism-oriented Winnipeg Labour Church (Brown 1994). Last but not least, the considerable Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC) was based on Dutch-Calvinist socio-cultural principles and adopted a conciliatory attitude concerning industrial relations (Cywinski 2011). Social Christianity also put into practice programs of a welfare capitalism, promoting values that employers considered desirable for their workers, such as temperance, thrift, discipline, devotion to the business, and independence from unions. In this vein, many companies employed industrial chaplains, and most of those companies were “union-free” (Fones-Wolf and Fones-Wolf 2015). The appointment of chaplains in factories was partly an intellectual incentive aimed at maintaining a productive and dedicated workforce, while it rendered unions undesirable or  simply  unnecessary. Therefore, while unions sought to address workers’ problems through collective action, many industrial chaplains preached a gospel approach that downplayed the collective solidarity of social groups and emphasized individual solutions (Fones-Wolf and Fones-Wolf 2015). Social Christianity found its political expression in the political parties of Christian Democracy and Christian Socialism. These parties adopted Christian principles aimed at creating a better society by promoting personal development, social justice and brotherhood, commitment to political democracy and the mixed economy, horizontal and vertical pluralism, the principles of subsidiarity and social solidarity, and systems of joint consultation in industry. 261

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During the post-war years, several political parties were formed based on other social cleavages apart from social class, for example, religious identity or the clerical–anti-clerical split. Pertinent cases were the Christian Democratic parties in Chile and Italy (Valenzuela 1991), which had organizational ties with both trade unions and employer  associations. However, the economic and labor policies of the  Christian Democratic Party of Germany often led to clashes with trade unions. Acting in the political center, they enjoyed notable working-class support and were usually supported by Catholic unions (Kalyvas and van Kersbergen 2010). In another direction, the activation of Christian socialism in certain counties, such as the US, was also begun by Christian labor unions, which declared their wish for a strong state and de-centralized cooperatives of producers (Bosco 2018). The influence of Christianity has not been limited to the advanced industrialized countries of the Global North. Although Christian unions were rather weak at the trans-national level, their effect was notable within several countries (Barnes 1962). Regional Christian organizations have also appeared in several continents, such as the Pan African Union of Believing Workers, the American Center of Christian Trade Unionists, and the Brotherhood of Asian Trade Unionists in various continents (Cordova 1968). At the global level, Christian unions united worldwide in the World Confederation of Labour (WCL), which was originally founded at The Hague in 1920 as the International Federation of Christian Trade Unions. WCL tried to foster an ecumenical concentration of labor leadership to face business attacks on unionization and workers’ interests in the era of globalization. Its main aims were 1) to gain the application of their constitutional principles in everyday life, 2) to help in establishing and developing unions inspired by the WCL principles in every field of economic activity, 3) to ensure respect for trade union freedom all over the world, 4) to provide its members with moral and material assistance and a possibility to collaborate with each other within the confederation, 5) to promote dignity for the workforce and better living conditions, and 6) to foster union solidarity worldwide. Finally, in 2006, WCL merged with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in a new organization called the International Trade Union Confederation (WCL n.d.).

Conclusions This chapter aimed to assess the impact of Christianity on trade union movements. The intense social problems raised by industrialization teased the interest of churches because they wished to help workers gain a new role in their everyday life in industrial society. Furthermore, churches tried to remain a reliable philanthropic protector of the poor and homeless, while socialist and communist movements were rising rapidly. Christian unions appeared to be a reaction to the spread of socialist ideas and movements which might alienate the working class from the church. But they did not avoid the accusations of acting to prevent communist interference in unions. In addition, these unions fought against the intervention of emerging fascists and National Socialists in organized labor during the inter-war period. Apart from the divide between Christian/Reformist and left-wing unions, cleavages have also existed between Roman Catholic and Protestant unions as well. Christian unions acted as reformist trade unions and fostered the cooperation of social classes against the revolutionary perspective adopted by Marxist unions. The Rerum Novarum encyclical and the Methodist Church advocated class cooperation and the dialogue of social partners. Unions would fight to improve the living and working 262

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conditions of their members, but they would not fight against any other stakeholder/class in society. In that context, Christian unions tried to foster the Industrial Councils, the bipartite and tripartite boards that could facilitate employee–employer cooperation at the national level, and implementation of economic democracy in order to end class conflict, including profit-sharing schemes, worker participation in management, and so on. Moreover, those unions should not act as political parties nor express the political aims of just one social class. Christian trade union leaders favored the development of a loyal and non-radical workforce and undertook various initiatives to educate it. Thus, social Christianity fostered values which could enrich the workforce with abilities such as discipline, cooperation, and commitment. According to social Christianity movement declarations, the economy must serve all individuals and society, unionism must serve democracy and solidarity, and the value of private property must be affirmed. Nonetheless, since the fall of communist regimes, social Christianity has been obliged to face the ecumenical issues of the trade union movement, as the new economic giants (e.g., China and India) have not been affected by Christian values and have challenged the social structures in post-industrial countries and the Global South. Financial capital, powerful global companies, international migration flows, climate change, and other characteristics of (post-)modernity have forced Christian movements to revise their position in the uncharted waters of an emerging new world. Although Christian unions have accepted both the free-market economy and the cooperation of socio-economic classes, globalized capitalism and neoliberalism have threatened the traditional values of Christianity. It remains to be seen whether Christian unionism will confront the post-industrial capitalism that is a menace to traditionalism or search for a new balance between God and Mammon.

References Abbott, Keith. 2006. “Industrial Relations and Catholic Social Doctrine, 21st Century Work: High Road or Low Road.” Proceedings of the 20th Conference of AAIRANZ 1:7–15. Aspinwall, Bernard. 1997. “Rerum Novarum and the Church in the Transatlantic World.” Pp. 465– 495 in Rerum novarum : Écriture, contenu et réception d’une encyclique. Rome: École Française de Rome. Barnes, Samuel H. 1962. “Christian Trade Unions and European Integration: Organizations and Problems.” Relations Industrielles 17(1):15–33. Bevir, Mark. 1999. “The Labour Church Movement: 1891–1902“ Journal of British Studies 38(2):217–245. Bevir, Mark. 2011. The Making of British Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bock, Edward Cornelius. 1967. Wilhlem Emmanouel Ketteler: His Social and Political Philosophy. Ph.D. dissertation, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma. Bosco, Robert M. 2018. “DSA’s Religion and Socialism Commission: A Social Movement Analysis“. Critical Research on Religion 6(2):151–167. Brown, Joanne C.1994. “The Form Without the Power? Wesleyan Influences and the Winnipeg Labour Church.” Pp. 65–84 in Canadian Society of Church History, edited by Bruce Guenther. Calgary: University of Calgary. Cordova, Efren. 1968. “The Changing Character of the Christian International.” Relations Industrielles 23(1):70–108. Cywinscki, Adam. 2011. Christian Labour Association of Canada: Competing from the Outside: An Analysis of the Competitiveness of a Small Alternative Union. Masters Thesis. Hamilton, ON: MacMaster University. Davis, Mary, and Dhaliwal Sukhwant. 2007. “The Impact of Religion on Trade Union Relations with Black Workers.” Information, Society and Justice 1(1):65–69.

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Theodore Koutroukis Dayyani, Peyman. n.d. The Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. http://www​.catholichistory​.net​/ Events​/ACTUFounding​.htm Dijkema, Brian. 2014. “Catholic Social Thought Unions: A Response to Baird.” Journal of Markets and Morality 17(2):533–538. Doody, Coleen. 2011. “Grappling with Secularism: Anti-Communism and Catholicism in Cold-War Detroit.” American Communist History 10(1):53–72. Eliot, S. Thomas. 1939. The Idea of a Christian Society. London: Faber and Faber Limited. Erdman, A. 1913. Church and Trade Unions in Germany. Berlin: Generalkommissionder Gewerkschaften. Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth, and Ken, Fones-Wolf. 2015. “Managers and Ministers: Instilling Christian Free Enterprise in the Post War Workplace.” Business History Review 89(1):99–124. Foster, William Z. 1956. Outline History of the World Trade Union Movement. New York: International Publishers. Johnson, Neil W. 2015. So Peculiarly Its Own: The Theological Socialism of the Labour Church. Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham. Kalyvas, Stathis N., and Kees van Kersbergen. 2010. “Christian Democracy“. Annual Review of Political Science 13:183–209. Kaufman, B. 2004. The Global Evolution of Industrial Relations: Events, Ideas and the IIRA, Geneva: ILO. Kepel, Gilles. 1995. The Revenge of God. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Liebersohn, Harry. 1986. “Religion and Industrial Society: The Protestant Social Congress.” American Philosophical Society 76(6):1–63. Lubienecki, Paul E. 2013. The American Catholic Diocesan Labour Schools: An Examination of Their Influence On Organized Labour in Buffalo αnd Cleveland. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Case Western Reserve University. Lubienecki, Paul E. 2015. “Catholic Labour Education and the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists: Instructing Workers to Christianize Workplace.” Journal of Catholic Education 16(2):99–124. O’Malley, Martin. 2008. Wilhelm Ketteler and the Birth of Modern Catholic Social Thought: A Catholic Manifesto in Revolutionary 1846. München: Herbert Utz Verlag. Pauwels, Henri. 1946. “The Christian Trade-Union Movement.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 247:56–61. Pehl, Matthew. 2012. “Apostles of Fascism, Communist Clergy and the UAW: Political Ideology and Working Class Religion in Detroit 1919–1945.” Journal of American History 99(2):440–465. Philpot, Daniel and Timothy S. Shah. 2006. “Faith, Freedom, and Federation: The Role of Religious Ideas and Institutions in European Political Convergence.” Pp. 34–64 in Religion in an Expanding Europe, edited by Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. 2004. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Citta del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Poole, Michael. 1981. Theories of Trade Unionism: A Sociology of Industrial Relations. London: Routledge & Keagan Paul. Repas, Bob. 1964. “History of the Christian Labor Association.” Labor History 5(2):160–182. Rosswurm, Steve. 1992. “The Catholic Church and the Left-Led Unions: Labour Priests, Labour Schools, and the ACTU.” Pp. 119–137 in The CIO’s Left-led Unions, edited by Steve Rosswurm. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Sagar, Peter. 2012. “The Free Churches and the Growth of Trade Unions in North-East England. Schneider, Michael. 1982. “Religion and Labour Organizations: The Christian Trade Unions in the Wilhelmine Empire.” European History Quarterly 12:345–369. Sommerville, Henry. 1914. Trade Unions in Catholic Social Guild Pamphlets. London: Catholic Truth Society:1–24. Thompson, Edward P. 1979. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworht: Penguin. Valenzuela, Samuel J. 1991. “Labour Movements and Political System: A Conceptual and Typological Analysis.” WP167. Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Vignaux, Paul. 1943. “Why Christian Unions?“ In CFTC, General Outlook on Christian Syndicalism as Seen by the CFTC. Paris: Editions de la CFTC.

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Christianity’s Impact on Trade Unionism Ward, Richard J. 1956. “The Role of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists in the Labor Movement.” Review of Social Economy 16(2):79–100. Williams, Anthony A.J. 2016. Christian Socialism as a Political Ideology. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Liverpool: Liverpool. WCL. n.d. Brief Historical Survey. https://web​.archive​.org​/web​/20070928164016​/http:/​/www​.cmt​ -wcl​.org​/cmt​/ewcm​.nsf/_​/ADE​7EA5​D9CA​B04D​AC12​56E1​3004F24DF​?OpenDocument

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21 FAITH ON THE BALLOT, FAITH IN THE BALLOT The Democratic Process in Kenya Martin Munyao and Sylvia W. Muriuki Abstract Democracy in Africa is at times a loose term and sometimes elusive. Recently, Kenya has witnessed tensions that have occasionally escalated to violence due to disputed election results. The year 2022 brought a high degree of political rhetoric that led to new political alignments by the political elites. However, these alignments are often class and ethnic-based, and have nothing to do with the well-being of the Kenyan citizenry. Consequently, most Kenyans have lost faith (trust) in the electoral process. Meanwhile, the church has either been left on the margins of conversations about socio-political issues or been part of the problem. Currently, church leaders have assumed neutrality on election matters, creating a presumed divide between sacred and secular matters, a divide that inhibits Christian faithful from actively participating in the electoral process and, hence, leaves them without a voice. Yet faith is always on the ballot in one way or another, and the Kenyan electorate must be educated accordingly. Alternative narratives on leadership in Kenya are necessary for positive social change toward substantial social justice.

Introduction For the last four election cycles, Kenya has witnessed tensions that have, at times, escalated to violence due to disputed election results. With this backdrop, the year 2022 saw new political alignments by the political elites that are usually class and ethnic-based, not formulated for the benefit of the public good. Consequently, the majority of the electorate have lost faith (trust) in the electoral process. All the while, the Christian church, which ought to be a pillar of social justice, has either been left on the margins of conversations about socio-political issues or has been part of the problem. Currently, church leaders have taken a neutral stance on election matters, creating an assumed divide between sacred and secular matters. This divide inhibits the Christian faithful from actively participating in the electoral process from beginning to the end. 266

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As Kenya draws closer to another election, voter apathy has been evident. Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has raised concerns over less interest from people participating in voter registration. According to Scheaffer Okore, a leading columnist at The Nation, a national newspaper in Kenya, 25% of the potential 4.5 million eligible voters will not vote in the upcoming election (Okore 2022). As a political commentator on social issues, Okore explains the disillusionment and apathy of Kenyans regarding whether voting will bring about any of the tangible changes that people seek. Since declaring its independence from Britain in 1963, not much has changed regarding the democratization process and political participation of the citizenry in Kenya. Politicians have been riding on tribal and, lately, social cards with their political rhetoric. There is increased weaponization of the tribe for easy traction during elections. Kenyans are aware that ethnic identities, and their related privileges and oppressions, follow them all the time not just during campaigns (Okore 2022). This furthers oppression of the masses, and the mtu wetu (our person) patronage syndrome is used to anesthetize the ensuing pain of economic and social injustices meted out on the same people who voted. Thus, disillusionment permeates every aspect of Kenyan life, including social and religious spaces. Religion, especially Christianity, has played a central role by being used or weaponized against people during elections. In terms of whether the electorate will participate in the democratic electoral process, it can be posited that religious faith itself is on the ballot. Voter apathy is an outcome of a faith decision. For some, it is because of the political deceit leading to rampant corruption in the political class that has been the norm in the past. However, a case can also be made that the election exercise is itself a sacred process from beginning to end, as one’s religious faith is on the ballot. When the democratic process is unjustly compromised, it discourages Christians from political participation because faith (trust) in the ballot is lost. Consequently, the Kenyan masses are left without a voice of reason. In this chapter, it is suggested that faith (trust) in the ballot needs to be redeemed and restored to Kenyans who have lost faith (trust) in their democratic process, leading to voter apathy in future elections. To redeem faith in the ballot, the Kenyan electorate must be informed that their religious faith is of fundamental consideration on the ballot. This chapter will call for alternative narratives of leadership in Kenya and for social change. This will be achieved through interrogation of religious faith and civil education as significant variables in driving sociopolitical revolution in Kenya.

Historical Background of Political Parties in Kenya and Their Link to Democracy Pre-independence Democracy is a contested term with no single definition, but it literally means rule by the people. It is coined from the Greek word demos, meaning people, and kratos, meaning rule. From a minimalist understanding, democracy is a political system in which its principal positions of power are filled through a competitive struggle for people’s vote (Schumpeter 1947). Today, this conceptualization of democracy is insufficient. It is, therefore, applied together with Robert Dahl’s (1971) polyarchy, which means a highly inclusive and extensively participatory political process whereby free, fair, competitive elections are held; civil rights and political freedoms necessary for political debate and electoral campaigning are respected; free media exists; and civil society is free to operate. For political competition to 267

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occur, political parties are indispensable actors that organize and mobilize citizens for political participation. Political parties are channels for recruiting leaders for political office. Therefore, they are the most important organizations in electoral politics and the democratization process. They are central to the survival and progress of democracy (Levitsky and Way 2010). Without them, political contests cannot take place. A political party is defined as any political group identified by an official label that presents at elections and is capable of placing candidates for public office (Sartori 2005a) They are well suited for interest aggregation and representation functions that are critical to a healthy democracy (Sartori 2005b; Van De Walle and Butler 1999), and they promote vertical accountability by giving citizens an opportunity during elections to either replace or maintain their elected leaders; they are the most important institutions in providing the citizens with linkage to political process (Van De Walle and Butler 1999). The most visible way citizens participate in the political life of their country is elections, and they have become almost globally accepted as the legitimate mode of establishing democratic governments. Through elections, governments derive their legitimacy from the citizens, who, as sovereigns, give power to their elected leaders to act on their behalf and promote their interest. In Kenya, elections are held every five years. However, the process of elections and the resultant electoral outcomes have made many citizens lose faith in elections. Electoral cycles experience violence, creating fear and anxiety during the election year instead of it being a time to be anticipated hopefully. All elections in Kenya, apart from 2002, have experienced violence of some kind. The electoral processes are flawed, lacking strict adherence to the law and are conducted in a manner inconsistent with the constitution, as was the case in 2017 (Kanyinga and Odote 2019). Consequently, faith in the ballot has eroded because the political contest is neither competitive, free, nor fair. The formation and mobilization of voters by political parties is based on ethnicity, preventing genuine competition. Ethnic minorities and marginalized groups such as women and youth find it difficult to compete in ethno-regionally formed and organized political parties dominant in certain regions. The coalition formations that have become the trend in the last two elections are no better. They are nothing but tribal groups formed on the basis of tribal arithmetic to capture power (Khadiagala 2010). Faith in the ballot has become more elusive because of political parties falling short in presenting genuine opportunities for political participation and representation. Political parties do not provide opportunities for their members to contribute to their policies. Instead, decision-making power is vested in the party leaders who, in most cases, are the owner of the party, and this personal rule disconnects citizens from contributing to policies adopted by political parties, which do not advance the interests of the citizens. Further, the main reason for seeking elections is not to represent the citizens but to realize personal gain. Political power has become a lucrative venture; beyond the hefty salaries, it has many benefits and networks for easy self-enrichment. The title of becoming a mheshimiwa (Kiswahili for “honorable member”) gives them opportunities for self-enrichment and extending patronage (Kanyinga and Mboya 2021). This character and behavior of Kenyan political parties has its roots in the historical and social context of colonial heritage and the post-independence environment in which they were formed and continue to evolve; they were born out of struggle for liberation from oppressive colonial rule. The colonial state was socially stratified, with the white minority at the apex, followed by the Asians comprising Goans, Pakistanis, Indians, and Arabs. At the bottom were the majority of Africans who had no political representation in the Legislative 268

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Council (LEGCO). Instead, Local Native Councils were established to manage native grievances (Munene 2015). Struggle for liberation from land alienation, forced wage labor, unfair taxation, and lack of political representation gained momentum across the country – the earliest being the East African Association formed by Kikuyu young men led by Harry Thuku to protest against increased white-supremacists and lack of political representation in the colonial administration. Thuku was later arrested and exiled (Hornsby 2013), and this watered the ground for more resistance from the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), which emerged in 1924–1925, the Young Kavirondo Association (later, the Young Kavirondo Taxpayers Welfare Union), the Ukambani Members Association, and the Taita Hills Association (Nasong’o 2007). This was the beginning of ethnic parties. At the same time, new African theology was emerging from the growing sects and radical African preachers teaching the theology of liberation, such as Dini ya Musambwa (western Kenya) and Kikuyu Karing’a (Orthodox Kikuyu Central Kenya). They constructed a counterideology to western Christianity by combining the African tradition with Old Testament teaching (Nasong’o 2007) and laying the foundation for the emergence of the Mau Mau militant group. In 1944, KCA transformed into a Kenya African Union (KAU), the first ever national party (Ogot 1995a). The growing socioeconomic differentiation and increased Mau Mau resistance against colonialism reached its peak with the declaration of the state of emergency in 1952. KAU was proscribed and any nationwide associations prohibited (Ogot 1995a). Political activities were confined to regions apart, marking the origin of ethno-regional parties.

Post-independence After independence, the opportunity to establish a united nation-state with strong parties was lost. Two ethnic parties emerged to compete for independence elections: the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and Kenya African Democratic Party (KADU) competed for power during the independence elections of 1963. KANU was dominated by the two main ethnic groups (Kikuyu and Luo), while KADU was part of a Kalenjin political alliance of Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi and Taita Towett, Coast African People’s union of Katana Ngala and Francis Khamisi, Maasai United Front of Justus Ole Tipis, and Masinde Muliros African Peoples Party. They was a consensus of “big men” (persons who wielded a lot of power in politics because of their status or wealth) rather than political parties with proper structures (Oloo Adams 2010). KADU comprised small tribes across the country, namely Luhya, Maasai, Kalenjin, and coastal ethnic groups. The formation of KADU was a result of the “white tribe” that was determined to ensure their interests were not threatened by independence. They lured other small tribes into a coalition out of fear of domination by the two large tribes (Munene 2017). Immediately after independence, KADU dissolved itself and joined KANU, making Kenya a de facto one-party state. The constitution was amended in 1964, centralizing power and creating an imperial presidency (Kanyinga and Odote 2019). Ethnic, personal, and ideological divisions emerged inside KANU, such as Jomo Kenyatta and his deputy, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, differing ideologically on how best to develop post-independent Kenya, leading to the fragmentation of elites. Oginga Odinga advocated for a socialist model, seizure of European settler farms without compensation, and rapid Africanization of civil service and public sector jobs, while Kenyatta preferred the capitalist development strategy 269

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(Throup 2020). Capitalism emerged as the preferred development model. The African elite consolidated their positions through the development of policies adopted at independence that promoted economic inequalities, leading to the emergence of a powerful elite class. The disruption of party politics immediately after independence and the constraints put on political participation presented limited opportunities for communities to participate in the political life of their country, resulting in elite fragmentation and the rise of patronclient ties. It is contended that politics in Kenya became highly ethnic, with “big men” linking their communities to the state while, at the same time, acting as channels for extracting resources from the center to their communities (Adar 1998). The climax of fragmentation of elites was the formation of Kenya’s Peoples Union (KPU) by Oginga Odinga in 1966, with 33 defectors from KANU. This led to the general election later that year, resulting in the final exit from KANU by Oginga Odinga, and KPU remained predominantly a Luo party after that. Following the unrest after Kenyatta’s visit to Nyanza in 1969 after the assassination of Tom Mboya, KPU was banned, and its leaders detained. The de facto oneparty state continued throughout the 1970s with no meaningful opposition to KANU. In 1978, President Daniel Arap Moi came to power after the death of Jomo Kenyatta, continuing in the authoritarian footsteps of his predecessor. However, in 1982, there was a drastic change in politics in Kenya, as it became a de jure one-party state following a botched coup d’état by junior members of the Kenya air force (Ogot 1995b). Political participation was limited within KANU, constraining the space for political participation and competition. This resulted in increased political agitation for political pluralism internally by civil society groups, religious organizations, and academicians. Externally, the third wave of democratization associated with the end of the Cold War was sweeping through the continent (Huntington 1993). With the threat of losing allies to the Soviet power now removed, the authoritarian regimes in Africa that were tolerated by the West during the bipolar power struggles between the East and the West came under pressure to allow for multi-party politics. President Moi was pressured to allow for political pluralism by donor states and Bretton Woods institutions suspending financial assistance to Kenya. In 1991, Section 2(a) of the constitution was repealed, returning the country to multi-party politics (Makau 2008). The political liberalization was done without establishing the requisite institutions for genuine democratic contest. Therefore, political contest was not free and fair. The push for more political reforms exploded into a violent electoral conflict in 2007–2008 that brought the country to the brink of civil war, attracting intervention by the international community. The opportunity for political reforms presented itself following the recommendation of the independent review commission popularly known as the Kriegler report, which recommended, among other things, a review of the constitution. The new constitution was promulgated in 2010, ushering in a new dawn of politics in Kenya. The 2010 Constitution of Kenya sought to institutionalize political parties by mandating that parliament enact legislation to regulate political parties (Kenya 2010). Subsequently, the Political Parties Act 2011 was established as the legal framework that guides the activities of political parties. More specifically, Section 33 of the Political Parties Act established the Office of Registrar of Political Parties as an independent body to register, regulate, monitor, investigate, and supervise political parties to ensure compliance with the act (Kenya 2012). Despite the political reforms undertaken by the 2010 constitution aimed at institutionalizing political parties, they have not reformed. Political parties remain poorly structured and organized. They are poorly institutionalized and weakly linked to the society they are 270

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supposed to represent. They remain largely patronizing ethnic vehicles to power, presenting no genuine competition and participation for power. This has made voters lose faith in the ballot and on the ballot.

The Role of Christianity in the Democracy of Kenya: A Historical Perspective Connected to the rise of political party democracy in Kenya, religion has either positively or negatively contributed to Kenya’s democratic processes. Kenya’s political woes are rooted in a long history of ethnic and political contestations which can be blamed partly on colonial and post-colonial regimes (Tarus 2022). These had subsequent consequences on the allocation of national resources. For example, the land which is an important source of livelihood for many has been at the center of post-colonial party politics. The colonial project in Kenya worked hand in hand with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionary enterprise (Munyao and Tanui 2021). To this day, various Christian denominations are geographically located according to their colonial sphere of influence in the country. For instance, the African Inland Church (AIC) concentrated missionary work among the Kamba and Kalenjin lands; the Friends mission among the Luhya; the Methodist mission among the Ameru people; the Church Missionary Society (CMS) among the Luo, Kikuyu, and coastal areas; Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) among the Gusii people; the Church of Scotland among the Kikuyu, Meru, and Embu (Tarus 2022). This has had huge implications for the democratization of the country, as religion and politics play a significant role in the public space. This, too, has a connection to not only the church’s response to political and social issues in the country but also to people’s perception of democracy. Ideally, the church is supposed to be the public watchdog on societal issues that citizens experience, especially issues deriving from historical injustices. However, the church’s responsibility of fighting the injustices in the country has been relegated to individual clergy instead of the organized church. Individualized efforts to stand up against despotic leadership in the country has been met with brutal force and even state-sanctioned persecution of the clergy involved. For many years in Kenya, the strongest criticism of President Daniel Arap Moi’s autocratic rule came from individualized church leaders, especially the Anglican Bishops Henry Okullu and David Gitari (Karanja 2006). The two church leaders ably led the church and, in part the entire country through the transition from a one-party dictatorship to a multi-party state. This liberative journey was full of confrontations between the clergy and the state over issues of poor governance. The two clergymen represented the church in an individual capacity as the most articulate exegetes of scripture considering the sociological and political conditions facing the country, and their works have since been admired by most evangelical leaders of the Global South (Karanja 2006). The Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) was at the forefront of the struggle for democracy and human dignity. As already noted, the ACK was predominantly strong in regions that were against President Moi’s rule. The membership of the ACK cuts across the entire social, economic, and intellectual spectrum and is drawn from all over Kenya, especially the Coast, Central, and Nyanza provinces (Karanja 2006). This explains the resistance mounted by the two clergymen. Nevertheless, contrary to such clergy-led struggle for justice, conditions have changed in the past decade. The church has since collaborated with the powerful politicians to snuff out the activist spirit that was in the church. The allure of money given by politicians to the churches to help with church projects, calling pastors for national days of prayer, and other 271

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relationships have created an unholy alliance between the church and the state, which has pocketed the church and is killing the church’s prophetic role and mission in society. There needs to be another generation of clergymen in Kenya who will take up the character of the late Bishops Okullu and Gitari to drive the church toward social justice for all. We argue that raising another generation of activist clergy for the people is going to be an uphill task, as the church, to this date, has no theology of the public. As Wandia Njoya has lamented, “On political and social questions, theology and the church in Kenya remain comfortable within the state paradigm of provision of services, a default setting that the church inherited from colonial missionaries” (Njoya 2022). In fact, according to Njoya, the church–state relationship has led the church to having no theology of the public at all. That is why the church in Kenya has become a supplementary service provider to the government and her operatives used to endorse government sanctions and gracing public functions to make prayers. For the public to have faith restored in government institutions, it must regain faith with the church again.

Restoring Public Trust in the Tools of Democratization in Kenya There has been a misconception that the church in Kenya is apolitical, meaning that the church should not be involved in political issues of the land. Instead, the church should focus exclusively on church matters and serve its congregations. This notion is also propagated by some secular quarters, such as the politicians, and unfortunately, is also believed and emphasized by some religious quarters such as church leaders. The reality is that, whether the church takes a political or apolitical position, either stance is still a political statement in and of itself. Whether Christians and the church get involved in political matters is a matter of Christian faith and relationship with God. Faith is on the ballot, whether Christians choose to participate or abscond. The issue of political activity is a faith decision. The issue of voter apathy is a faith problem. Kenyan Christians, today, pray to God to raise leaders who will restore public trust once again so that all citizens can be encouraged to participate in political decisions for their country. Then the voice of God will be heard once again in their political and social spaces to tackle societal issues. Several points might help the Kenyan church reclaim a redemptive position on politics. First and foremost, a biblical perspective on political and social issues must be redeemed. The Bible is replete with social justice mandates from cover to cover. God desired to be the King for his people so that He could rule with justice. But as complex governments began to appear, God’s justice was forgotten, and corruption crept in among the ranks of earthly kings. So, God sent prophets to speak truth to power in the midst of such chaos. For these prophets, this mission was daunting, knowing fully that they risked their lives to call out corruption. The situation has not changed today. Christians maintain that God is still calling men and women to stand up to corrupt government administrations that are misruling his people. Justice in all its forms – retributive, restorative, procedural, and distributive (Hiebert 2022) – remain mandates for the church today. This role must not be relegated to other quarters, as it is the heartbeat of God for his people. Second, church leaders, and especially members of the clergy, must accept the divine calling to stand with their congregations and not be complicit with political power. Third, the church must acknowledge that there is no such thing as secular versus sacred matters regarding social and political issues of a country. The impact of misrule from the political class is felt across the board, including by church members. For example, inflation in the 272

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country will be felt across the population, regardless of political or religious affiliation and, thus, is a national matter that needs to be addressed based on the convictions of faith. Only then will faith be restored on the ballot because only then can right choices be made between right and wrong, honorable and dishonorable, respectable and shameful.

Conclusion There is historical evidence that religion was never divorced from social and political issues in Kenya; both colonial and post-colonial history is revealing that Christianity was directly associated with such issues in the country. Therefore, to use the secular versus sacred divide to insinuate that the church should not get involved in social and political issues is dishonest. The early post-colonial church stood up to the social and political demagogues who oppressed the poor through misrule and poor governance. That has been superseded, over the years, because of corruption within the national ranks and also owing to the church–state unholy alliance. This has burned the electorates trust in the ballot because the masses have been left as orphans on the altar of the church–state relationship. To restore faith in the ballot, Christians must redeem a biblical perspective of activism. This involves moving the pulpit to the streets as a nexus of faith and politics. Once the congregants and various constituents realize that there is someone fighting for them to restore sanity, integrity, and accountability in national politics and governance, then faith will be restored on the ballot. This supports the thesis of this chapter that faith on the ballot is only possible when there is faith in the ballot. Choosing to participate in the political process of the nation involves faith. The church has a place in the political and social space of a country. It must not abandon that duty to politicians only.

References Adar, Korwa G. 1998. “Ethnicity and Ethnic Kings: The Enduring Dual Constraint in Kenya’s Multiethnic Democratic Elecoral Experiment.” Journal of the Third World Spectrum 5(2):71–96. Dahl, Robert A. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hiebert, Dennis. 2022. “The Recurring Christian Debate about Social Justice: A Critical Theoretical Overview.” Journal of Sociology and Christianity 12(1):49–76. Hornsby, Charles. 2013. Kenya: A History since Independence. New York: IB Tauris. Huntington, Samuel. 1993. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. vol. 4. Norman: University of Oklahoma. Kanyinga, Karuti, and Collins Odote. 2019. “Judicialisation of Politics and Kenya’s 2017 Elections.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 13(2):235–52. doi: 10.1080/17531055.2019.1592326. Kanyinga, Karuti, and Tom Mboya. 2021. The Cost of Politics in Kenya: Implications for Political Participation and Development. The Hague: Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy. Karanja, John. 2006. “The Biblical, Prophetic Ministries of Henry Okullu and David Gitari.” Historical Society of the Episcopal Church 75(4):580–604. Kenya, Government of. 2012. “Political Parties Act, 2011.” 2012(11). Kenya, Republic of. 2010. “Constitution of Kenya, 2010.” Khadiagala, Gilbert M. 2010. “Political Movements and Coalition Politics in Kenya: Entrenching Ethnicity.” South African Journal of International Affairs 17(1):65–84. doi: 10.1080/10220461003763858. Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press. Makau, Mutua. 2008. Kenya’s Quest for Democracy:Taming the Leviathan. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

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Martin Munyao and Sylvia W. Muriuki Munene, Macharia. 2015. Historical Reflections of Kenya: Intellectual Adventurism, Politics and International Relations. Nairobi: University of Nairobi Press. Munene, Macharia. 2017. Kenya: A Political Test of Nationhood. Nairobi: Fig Tree Books. Munyao, Martin, and Philemon Kipruto Tanui. 2021. “Whiteness in Christianity and Decoloniality of the African Experience: Developing a Political Theology for “Shalom” in Kenya.” Religions 12(11):1006. doi: 10.3390/rel12111006. Nasong’o, Shadrack. W. 2007. “Negotiating New Rules of the Game: Social Movements, Civil Society and the Kenyan Transition.” Pp. 19–57 in Kenya: The Struggle for Democracy, edited by Goodwin R. Murunga and Shadrack W. Nasong’o. London and Dakar: CODESRIA Books and Zed Books. Njoya, Wandia. 2022. “The Church Will Provide: The Church and Public Education in Kenya.” Pp. 163–180 in The African Church and COVID-19: Human Security, The Church, and Society in Kenya, edited by Martin Munyao, Joseph Muutuki, Patrick Musembi, and Daniel Kaunga. Lanham: Lexington Books. Ogot, Bethwell. A. 1995a. “The Decisive Years 1956–63.” Pp. 48–79 in Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, edited by Bethwell A. Ogot and William Robert Ochieng. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Ogot, Bethwell. A. 1995b. “The Politics of Populism.” Pp. 187–213 in Decolonization and Independence iin Kenya, edited by Bethwell A. Ogot and William Robert Ochieng. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Okore, Scheaffer. 2022. “Countering Voter Apathy for Elections.” Nation Media Group, April 17. Oloo Adams. 2010. “Party Mobilization.” Pp. 31–60 in Tensions and Reversals in Democratic Transition: The Kenya 2007 General Elections, edited by Karuti Kanyinga and Okello Duncan. Nairobi: Society for International Development (SID) and Institute for Development Studies (IDS), University of Nairobi. Sartori, Giovanni. 2005a. Parties and Party Systems. Colchester, UK: European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). Sartori, Giovanni. 2005b. “Party Types, Organisation and Functions.” West European Politics 28(1):5–32. doi: 10.1080/0140238042000334268. Schumpeter, Joseph. 1947. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. 2nd ed. New York: Harper. Tarus, David. 2022. “The Entrenchment of Ethnocentricism in Kenya’s Political Landscape and the Church’s Responses to It.” Pp. 36–53 in Moral Pedagogies for Africa: From Ethnic Enmity to Responsible Cohabitation. London and New York: Routledge. Throup, David. W. 2020. “Jomo Kenyatta and the Creation of the Kenyan State 1963–1978.” Pp. 43–55 in The Oxford Handbook of Kenyan Politics, edited by Nic Cheeseman, Karuti Kanyinga, and Gabrielle Lynch. New York: Oxford University Press. Van De Walle, Nicolas, and Kimberly Smiddy Butler. 1999. “Political Parties and Party Systems in Africa’s Illiberal Democracies.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 13(1):14–28. doi: 10.1080/09557579908400269.

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PART 4

Social Change and Christianity

INTRODUCTION TO PART 4 Social Change and Christianity

As a social institution, religion is typically conservative in seeking to conserve the status quo of society, not progressive in seeking to progress beyond it. After all, that which is sacred commands respect, and social practices handed down through hallowed tradition as God-ordained are highly resistant to change. Nevertheless, Christianity is at least as notable sociologically as an agent of social change than as an agent of social control. Social change can occur from proactive social movements, despite reactive social movements, or independently from social movements. There have been times and places in world history when Christianity has promoted social change, has prevented social change, or has itself been altered by social change; Christianity is far from impervious to or detached from cultural forces. Indeed, Christianity frequently serves as a priest of culture, speaking for the establishment from its center but occasionally also as a prophet to culture, speaking to the establishment from its margins and mobilizing change. Part 4 first documents Christian action taken to mitigate the social inequalities of class, race, and gender in various global regions, to build peace in Africa, and to adjust to social circumstances altered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and then describes how Christianity itself, in turn, has been profoundly altered by evolving culture. Victoria Turner offers seven scenarios of how British Christianity, beginning in the eighteenth century, has taken initiatives to help the working classes in response to structural and cultural changes in British society. She includes the 1730 Evangelical Revival, the University Settlements, the close contact of soldiers during World War I, the Iona Community, the postWorld War II Labour government, and finally, the rise of communism, as church decline and a more general, societal concern for the poor eventually displaced the church and its sense of social responsibility. Clinton Stockwell introduces some of the foremost leaders of the Social Gospel Movement which emerged in the United States in the late nineteenth century, reflecting the increased social consciousness and responsibility of more liberal, mainline Protestantism. He unpacks the historical context, ideology, and shortcomings of the movement, as well as its lasting impact on the doctrine and practice of mainline churches, ecumenical councils, and social movements in the later twentieth century. Madeleine Cousineau presents liberation theology as the belief that salvation is linked to efforts to bring about a just society. She summarizes the academic, pastoral, and spiritual DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-30

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dimensions of the theology, describes its impact in Latin America during the past 50 years, evaluates criticisms of the theology, and addresses whether it is in decline or showing evidence of resilience. Shaonta’ Allen unveils how Christianity is weaponized as a tool for oppressing Blacks in the United States and delineates the nuances of Black Christian political ideologies, including Black liberation theology. She provides a genealogy of Black resistance, assessing how Christian faith facilitated social action during the Slavery Abolition Movement (as the “invisible” institution), the Civil Rights Movement (as the “socio-political” institution), and the present and ongoing Black Lives Matter Movement (as the “socio-cultural” institution). Anne Kubai reviews peacebuilding efforts in South Sudan, Burundi, and the Central African Republic, countries characterized by fragility and protracted intra-state conflicts due to their failure to achieve a shared vision of the benefits of peace. She employs William Zartman’s concept of “ripeness” to reflect on the propitious moments when parties in protracted intra-state conflicts might be more amenable to opening peace negotiations and highlights the active role of churches and religious organizations in peacebuilding. Izak Lattu explores the construction of a “click Christian holy communion” (e-koinonia) in virtual space during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, which deconstructed and reconstructed the concept of the worship sphere from a physical place to a digital space. Building on cybertheology, he details how the pandemic rendered the inaccessible sacredness of the church building an impediment to worship, but how the home was able to replace the holy sanctuary, replete with a sacred digital altar, a sacred imagination, and a digital unisonance. Dennis Hiebert examines the post-modern turn away from organized, institutionalized Christianity toward an obstruse, resurgent spirituality in Western culture; observes that it is more a re-discovery of classic Christian spiritual texts, practices, and lifestyles than a new vision and experience; and assesses its magnitude, meaning, and consequences. He concludes that Christian spirituality is a sense of the transformed self in a relationship of desire for the holy, Wholly Other, and is ultimately built on the negative theology of Christian mysticism.

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22 POVERTY IN WORKING CLASSES AND CHRISTIAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN BRITAIN Victoria Turner Abstract This chapter is an introduction to some of the ways British Christianity has responded to class divisions from the eighteenth century until today. It does not intend to be a comprehensive survey of all initiatives to reach the working classes that existed during this period but, instead, highlights how the church responded to large sociological and cultural changes in British society. It takes a broadly chronological approach, beginning with the 1730 Evangelical Revival and tracking to the ministry of Thomas Chalmers in Scotland. The model of the University Settlements is then explored, before examining how World War I impacted the British class divide. That experience inspired the beginning of the Iona Community, which aimed to re-introduce the church to the working class. Post-World War II saw the British Labour government respond to the needs of the working classes and somewhat displace the work of church social movements. As a result, the rise of communism was deemed a threat to the longevity of the church. Finally, and most recently, church decline has posed theological questions for these social movements that questioned the relevance of their service to their call to preach the gospel and expand the church.

The Evangelical Revival The beginning of the Evangelical Revival in Britain is usually traced to Wales during the Spring of 1735 and the conversions of schoolteacher Howel Harris and shortly after, Daniel Rowland (Bebbington 1989). The two men toured South Wales sharing their newly acquired message that salvation could be known in this life. Also in 1735 in England, George Whitefield toured Oxford and its surroundings, teaching of the “new birth” he had experienced. His mentor, Charles Wesley, reached full assurance of his faith in 1738 alongside his brother John. Reginald Ward reflects on how early evangelicalism united around certain themes such as,

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The close association with mysticism, the small-group religion, the deferred eschatology, the experimental approach to conversion, anti-Aristotelianism and hostility to theological system, and the attempt to reinforce religious vitality by setting it in the context of a vitalist understanding of nature … formed a sort of evangelical hexagon lasting until the original evangelical cohesion began to fail. (2006:4) In contrast to the later, rigid system that comprised evangelicalism, the early movement drew from eclectic ideas and changing intellectual and social contexts. However, a narrative of conversion did permeate the period. As historian Kirsty Murray explains, The first stage of conversion was “conviction,” that is, the sinner became utterly convinced of his or her own sinfulness and unworthiness before God. This was followed by repentance and the placing of faith and trust fully in the atoning power of the death of Christ. The individual would then, through the grace of God, be redeemed and experience the joy of salvation. (2002:109) The redeeming act of conversion would then extend to the person’s life, transforming their actions to be in accordance with a Reformed ethic. This concept became a “dominating ethic as the humanitarian strains of Enlightenment philosophy permeated British and American society” (Murray 2002:109). Spiritual conversion and moral conversion were inter-connected. Historian David Bebbington explains that “a converted character would work hard, save money and assist his neighbour” (1989:21), and this social consciousness is what would separate him from his pagan contemporaries. Attention was paid to influential traveling preachers, the cross-denominational Sunday School Movement, and home social justice endeavors including Bible distribution projects, in order to ignite the piety of the average lay person within their own context and community (Martin 1983). This re-animation of the faith and encouragement toward sharing pulpits and projects challenged the English church especially, which, during the eighteenth century, had become more elite in its clergy and was rapidly losing the pattern of parish visitations (Bebbington 1989). The revival went some way to close this gap between the clergy and the less-well-off laity (Stone and Stone 1995). Philanthropy was a big theme from the revival’s inception, with John Wesley being famous for his generosity and dying with virtually nothing after giving it all away (Bebbington 1989). But alongside charity, accessibility was also promoted within this movement which was given the label “radial.” Prominent figures were often banned from preaching in many churches, so they began open-air preaching, a normal practice in Wales and Scotland, but unheard of in England (Smith 2015). George Whitefield ignited the method in England and was soon joined by John Wesley in 1739, after overcoming his unease at the indecency of the practice. Yet the decency of the church building was a barrier to the poor, who occupied designated seats further away from the altar and bore the burden of “proper dress” to attend. In contrast, open-air preaching involved everyone, sometimes thousands, with no reservations or place hierarchies. As the movement moved away from the established church, small groups began to form and the emphasis on personal conversion led to the followers developing a strong sense of identity and belonging (Hylson-Smith 1992). However, the individualistic conversion emphasis countered this community element. The aim was 280

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not to alleviate the evil of poverty but, rather, to achieve inward spiritual conversion, which then would lead to outward physical change.

Expanding the Parish: Thomas Chalmer’s Initiatives to Tackle Urbanization Later, nineteenth century Scotland was a time famous for being unfriendly for the poor and weak, who, caught in the rapid industrial revolution, quickly moved from their countryside villages and towns to urban areas and worked without political representation or legal protection (Drummond and Bulloch 1978). The middle classes were obsessed with discussing the condition of the poor, but from the perspective of “civilizing” their behavior rather than feeling horror at the existence of their suffering. Lauren Goodlad explains that middle class identity in Victorian Scotland became characterized by questioning how they could mold the working classes to “look like them” (2001:592). The Church of Scotland turned Free Church minister and leader Thomas Chalmers, born in 1780, epitomized this vision. There will, I prophesy, be a great amelioration in the life of general humanity. The labouring classes are destined to attain a far more secure place of comfort and independence in the commonwealth than they have ever yet occupied, and this will come about not as the fruit of any victory gained on the arena of angry and discordant politics, but far more surely as the result of growing virtue and intelligence and worth among the labourers themselves. (quoted in McCaffrey 1981:46) Chalmers added another motivation alongside the moral rehabilitation of the poor, and this was the evangelistic conversion experience that would save them in the afterlife (Brown 1983). The importance of this is demonstrated in a letter he sent to his contemporary James Brown in 1819, in which Chalmers stated that “the salvation of a single soul is of more value than the deliverance of a whole empire from pauperism” (quoted in Brown 1983:138). Chalmers was a complicated character, known mostly for leading the socially liberal Evangelical party (incorporating about a third of the established churches’ ministers) to separate from the Church of Scotland in the Great Disruption of 1843, creating the Free Church of Scotland (Brown 1983). He was also well-known for his lectures in astronomy, economics, and mathematics. Chalmers grew up in a comfortable middle-class life, entered St. Andrews University at the age of 11, and became a minister in 1803. He began ministering to the Tron Church in central Glasgow in 1815 and, from there, became pre-occupied with how to heal the class divide (Roxborogh 1999). The newspapers at the time reported how Glasgow was hit with the “universal stagnation of trade” and a general sense of depression around the city (Furgol 1987:86). The traditional social order existent in small towns and rural areas was replaced with the “chance” of economic fortune and the emergence of a “new individualism” (McCaffrey 1981:41). As responsibility for relief of the poor moved from the realm of the churches toward secular governments, the role of the church in the life of the poor dwindled. Exacerbated by the migration of the working classes to urban areas, city churches could not keep up with rapidly increasing urban populations. Churches were also off limits to working-class families who could not afford the seat rents and could not dress appropriately to attend. 281

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Beyond his evangelistic motivations, Chalmers saw the industrialization of Scotland as a threat to the communal and religious Scottish identity with which he grew up, and he attempted to re-instate this identity through an all-encompassing parish ministry that would be responsible for the practical and spiritual life of all its inhabitants (Brown 1983). In 1817, he wrote an article entitled “Connexion between the Extension of the Church and the Extinction of Pauperism” in which he outlined his dislike of the new public provision of relief for the poor, arguing instead that the eradication of pauperism would come more effectively from personal relationships in the community that would transform the morals of the “undeserving” poor (Chalmers 1935). Chalmers’s theories were put into practice with the new parish of St. John’s in Glasgow in 1819, with the area comprising more than 10,000 people (Furgol 1987). His experiment attempted to re-create the ideal of an eighteenth century rural parish instead of impersonal governmental relief for the poor. To accomplish this, he withdrew the area from the city’s poor-relief program, leaving administrative help to come only through the parish via a model of voluntary help. After visiting the 10,000 souls in his care, Chalmers decided that a team was needed for this work, and he established a pattern of parish visitations through the lay leadership in his congregation called the Eldership in Presbyterian churches (Hanna 1854). The deacons in the church would then be responsible for administering financial support that came from donations to the church and seat rents from the wealthier attendants. However, help from the community or employment opportunities were sought first before assistance came from the limited parish funds that were meant more for emergencies (Shaw 2004). Monthly meetings were held to discuss the spiritual and physical needs of their community. The team approach to alleviating poverty in the district was later described as an early form of social casework (Young and Ashton 1956). Although the personal, individual method has continued to be used, Chalmers’s theory – overcoming pauperism was more about moral transformation than economic justice – has subsequently been criticized, though it was not as drastic a change as might be imagined (Goodlad 2001). Stewart Brown, who has compiled the most recent biography of Chalmers, found that despite Chalmers’s aims for this group to become a “friend of the poor,” the deacons eventually amalgamated into an “impersonal and perhaps callous group of poor-relief managers” (1983:135). Lauren Goodland (2001) also comments on how Chalmers’s model was ultimately a Victorian, middle-class Enlightenment-inspired form of paternalism. Despite these important shortfalls, Chalmers’s educational work has been remembered fondly, as dedication to personal contact with his pupils was an innovative pedagogy (McCaffrey 1981). The social ties between teachers and the community were described as an extended family (Goodlad 2001).

Moving to the Poor: The University Settlement Movement In 1883, Samuel Barnett, vicar of St. Jude’s Church, London, gave a lecture at Oxford University in a successful attempt to create support for his missionary project. The next year, the first University Settlement was founded near his and his wife Henrietta’s church, called Toynbee Hall. As evidenced by Charles Booth’s famous London Poverty Map of Whitechapel, the area was over-crowded, poor, and full of criminal activity. The Barnett’s encouraged privileged university students and graduates to live in these deprived slums of London to do missionary work alongside working-class people. By 1911, 282

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there were 45 University Settlements in Britain (Grimley 2004), and many of the schemes from the settlements went on to be implemented by the government (Scotland 2007). Famous characters such as Barclay Baron, William Temple, Neville Talbot, and Geoffrey Fisher volunteered with the Oxford Bermondsey mission (Snape 2009). Theologically, these settlements and missions were inspired by Liberal Anglican “idealist” stances of the state. It was argued that state and society were the same, and the unity of society was emphasized over the reality of class divide. T.H. Green’s work from the 1860’s, in which he advanced an “essential Christianity,” was especially influential for the University Settlement Movement. Green emphasized the continuing divine immanence of Christ in humanity, meaning that the aims of the church and the state were the same, and the role of Christianity was to help make persons better citizens (Grimley 2004). Beyond practical charitable help, University Settlements also assisted lower classes to grow into “active citizenship” through education and to become “good” members of society (Snape 2015:53). The settlements became bases for trade unions, as well as adult education of a practical and theoretical kind. They founded libraries, displayed art, and ran a plethora of clubs and societies for young people, including a program which allowed impoverished children to eat lunch and go on country holidays (Scotland 2007). The program can be criticized for being paternalistic because its essence was rooted in an idea similar to Chalmers’s project, in which elevation of the poor was pursued individually through education and societal molding for the lucky few who came into contact with the mission. Nevertheless, a cultural shift from the motivation to convert souls toward a motivation to meet the practical needs of the community can be seen. Additionally, the distinction between the “deserving” and “non-deserving” poor was being challenged with the creation of public galleries and libraries and the emerging belief that leisure time should also be an equal right for all.

The Uniting Event of World War I Michael Snape’s research of British men who served during World War I discusses how chaplains found that the religious education of soldiers was generally lacking, both in those who attended public schools at which religiosity would become a monotonous routine and those who attended council schools in which, he claims, intellectual rigor was missing (2007). Yet diffusive Christianity was evident in the urban working class who served during the war through the “phenomenal popularity of hymn singing” (Snape 2007:53), occasional prayer, and willingness to attend services run by the YMCA or the padres (Snape 2005). For working-class people, hymn singing especially elicited a sense of nostalgia for singing in childhood and for fond memories of Sunday school, as well as an appreciation for their permission to express emotions that were otherwise suppressed in the toxic masculine culture of war (Williams 1999). Also notable was the sentimentality of religious objects. Bibles, for instance, were respected, circulated, and understood as amulets that could bring luck (Snape 2007). In all, the horror of the war enabled Christianity to become an emotional salve for struggling soldiers stuck in the “stiff upper lip,” emotionally closed culture of Britain. The University Settlements discussed previously inspired Philip “Tubby” Clayton to build Talbot House (Toc H), a soldiers’ rest and recreation center, in 1915 in Poperinge, a small Belgium market town near the front line of Flanders Field. Clayton, who was involved with John Stansfeld’s Oxford Bermondsey Mission founded in 1897, stated that the Bermondsey 283

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mission was the “true cradle” of Toc H. The British army had commissioned Clayton, one of its chaplains, to open a club for the troops where the formalities and hierarchies of the army were irrelevant. The first Toc H base became a touch of home comfort for men in military service with hot food, carpets, comradery, and a quiet chapel in the upper room. The chapel became an important part of the house, a place of “peace” created from the cumulation of hopeful prayers (Rice and Prideaux-Brune 1990). Clayton (1929) documented that the war was the least popular topic of discussion in the house. When the men returned home, they missed both the fellowship and the broad denominational welcome they had found at Toc H, so Clayton carried on the movement to continue this “wartime fellowship and comradeship” in the post-war world (Robinson 2013). Linda Parker reflects that “in a very real sense, Clayton believed that the suffering of the war could be redeemed by the Toc H movement, not least in its breaking down of class barriers” (2013:196). The extension of this model into the battlefields, coupled with a lack of hierarchy, created an inclusive, welcoming space. One of the most influential men involved with Toc H after the war was Church of Scotland minister Rev Dr George MacLeod. Born in 1895, MacLeod was the grandson of Norman MacLeod, moderator of the Kirk, chaplain to the queen, and a popular, yet sometimes controversial, Victorian celebrity, who mingled with figures such as David Livingstone (MacLeod 1876). The younger MacLeod had quite a legacy to live up to when, after his role as an officer in World War I, he decided to train for ministry at the University of Edinburgh. After his training, he ventured to Union Theological Seminary in New York for post-graduate work and there met Tubby Clayton. After his time at Union, MacLeod served as a Toc H padre in Glasgow (Ferguson 1990). However, post-war, the maintenance of this ecumenical model of Toc H proved to be problematic, and MacLeod resigned on the grounds of Anglicans having the right to decide not to share the celebration of the eucharist with other churches (Toc H 1926). For MacLeod, this was unacceptable because his vision of Toc H was one that transcended class and denominational boundaries.

The Iona Community Project MacLeod eventually moved to Govan Parish Church in Glasgow, where in 1930, an estimated 80% of workers in the industrial, ship-building area of the city were unemployed. He carried on his work with young men in Toc H style through the Pearce Institute, an outreach social club connected to the church and directly connected to his flat. MacLeod described the situation at Govan upon his arrival as, “the people of Govan weren’t coming to the Church. So we went out and began preaching in the street” (quoted in Blythe 2011:22). His outdoor preaching could attract upward of 400 people, and attendance at his church increased in response. Venturing into the habitations of the working men, their lunchtime hangouts, and the town hall seemed to win MacLeod respect. He was also careful to preach contextually and did not shy away from local politics, even inviting debate and heckling (Blythe 2011). The full-time exposure of living in a working-class area was quite a cultural shock for the privileged MacLeod, who grew up with servants, attended a private boarding school, and read for his first degree in Oriel College, Oxford. He soon suffered mental breakdowns which forced him to leave. As Clayton wrote to him, “I am glad you have left Govan … had you gone on in the Pearce Institute you would have been worn out in a few years, whereas Iona will enable you to be mature without becoming old” (Clayton 1939). 284

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However, MacLeod’s departure did not signal the end of his work with the working classes but, rather, a significant methodological shift. In 1938 MacLeod created a “brotherhood” who would live together on the Scottish island of Iona during the summer months to work alongside craftsmen and rebuild the Iona Abbey. The aim of the venture was not necessarily to rebuild the abbey, which was merely a means to another end. The ultimate objective was that the summer would be a training opportunity for divinity graduates to learn about working-class culture before venturing into their ministry posts (MacLeod 1938). These young ministers would spend two summers on Iona and have apprenticeships in urban industrial churches in Scotland where they would serve in pairs. MacLeod wrote that “teams” are necessary to overcome the challenge of the day, rather than ministers fulfilling their individual role in ministry (1938). He emphasized that the aim of the experiment on Iona was to influence the housing schemes positively, not to create an isolated, secluded brotherhood. MacLeod’s project quickly caught public attention through his influence as a radio broadcaster and the magazine that he published for the community called The Coracle. By 1940, the community already had 2,647 paid subscribers (MacLeod 1940), and the mission had extended from the island of Iona into the parishes. Most of these parishes had two Iona men serving alongside the already appointed minister. The men would specialize in activities such as youth work, reducing drunkenness, increasing membership with parish visitations, or working with the community to improve their area. This movement was very similar to the University Settlements discussed previously, which saw young people from privileged places enter poor communities to try to alleviate the difficult conditions of that neighborhood. In fact, in 1941, two Iona men were invited to serve in Bermondsey, London, at the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement (MacLeod 1941). The distance between the training on Iona and the field of working-class parishes exemplified the class divide between the Church of Scotland and its urban areas. The idea that privileged graduates needed a program that placed them in difficult and strange circumstances (with employed, skilled craftsmen) to prepare them for ministry in industrial areas is reflective of MacLeod’s struggle with his exposure to Govan. Furthering this, the placement of men in teams in these parishes suggested not only that the church was lacking numbers in these areas but that the context was deemed too difficult for one man to face on his own. The reinforcement of a partner, and the idea of community necessary to make these areas seem accessible, could be regarded as feeding the narrative of these areas being impenetrable, dangerous, alien, and risky.

Government Action and the Threat of Communism After World War II, the UK elected a socialist party into government in 1945. Alongside the famous nationalization of free health care, education, unemployment, and sickness protection, housing became the responsibility of the government (Abel-Smith 1992). Already at the time of the inception of the Iona Community, communism was being framed as a threat to Christianity. “[W]e have enough books to declare the essentially superior nature of the Kingdom of God over Fascism and Communism; what men begin to want to see is a little evidence … has the church anything to say in action?” (MacLeod 1938). With these parliamentary acts, the church became less important in the quest to help the poor. The attraction of communism for the working classes through the active trade unions became even more of a threat with the post-war reforms that saw the state take on some of the caring 285

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roles the church previously practiced. McFarland and Johnson actually compare the (overstated) rise of communism in Scotland to the Evangelical Revival, stating that the Church of Scotland “feared that Communism would capture energy and imagination of Scottish working-class elites as Calvinist disputation had in previous generations” (2009:341). From 1944 on, the Iona Community also began to retreat from the parish system and concentrate on its mission to working-class young people. With help from a yearly grant of £20,000 for seven years donated by Sir James and Lady Gwendolyn Lithgow in 1943, the venue of 214 Clyde Street in Glasgow was purchased to create a youth-centered Community House (Ferguson 1990). The Community House sought to explore faith, politics, and real-world issues through debate, fellowship, and creativity. Class enrollment for courses such as “mission preparation, divine healing, political and industrial, drama, film direction, international and country dancing, youth leadership and meaning of the faith” was 2,464 for the period 1951–1953 (MacLeod 1953:23). During this period, MacLeod constantly emphasized what he termed “incarnational theology.” In a letter to the trustees of the youth grant, he explained that “[t]he key to the new road is the recovery of a real belief in the incarnation. You will not change anything without changing everything … we must become involved at every point” (MacLeod 1947). This emphasized his belief that it was the church’s responsibility to be involved with the whole person not just their spirituality. Being involved with people also meant interrogating the structures that controlled their lives. MacLeod encouraged the young people he worked with and others in the community to lobby members of parliament, go on protests, and speak for their neighbors.

Secularization and the Work of the Church in Question The energy that propelled young people to work for justice within the church from the mid-1940s throughout the 1950s dissipated as church attendance faded from their normal weekly routine (Brown 2001). Church membership in the UK decreased from 10.6 million in 1930 to 5.5 million in 2010, and taking population increases into consideration, that is 30% of the population down to 11.2% (Faith Survey). The “progressive atrophying of the church-going habit” (Savage et al. 2006:14) means there was much less expectation for church attendance, no familiar pattern of churchgoing for young people to follow, and much less generational cultural transmission. The church became something “strange” and “other.” An example that illustrates the increased distance between the working classes and the church is the Gorbals Group experiment in Scotland. The Gorbals area was a slum in Glasgow, where 63% of the occupied housing was deemed unfit for human habitation in 1963, and 99% of the housing to be of the lowest structural category (Harvey 1987). The Gorbals Group, made up of around 25 members living in these communities to create a Christian fellowship and help elevate the social conditions, was assembled by Geoff Shaw, Walter Fyffe, and John Jardine in 1957 as an official experiment of the Glasgow Presbytery. It was envisioned as a bottom-up experiment, meeting the local community where they were. As established, it was intended to be a lasting Christian presence, but it flourished only as structural help, not as recruitment to the Church of Scotland. In John Harvey’s recollection of the experience, he questions whether this project could be deemed a success. It helped people but not necessarily through faith (Harvey 1987). Another venture was undertaken by John Bell and Graeme Maule (Bell and Maule n.d.), who both moved to the community from the Church of Scotland as youth workers to 286

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expand their scope, namely reaching non-churched young people (Brink n.d.). Their most ambitious project began in 1982 and was called Columban Houses. They had teams of young people train on Iona to live in community on welfare in council estates to enable them to help others in difficult positions as one of them. They could then bring disadvantaged young people to Iona and help them day to day to get into work and education and off drugs (Ferguson 1988). Bell, in an interview, recalled the backlash this project received from many. The young people would “pool” their benefits to live in a community, but for some, it was too countercultural and “taking advantage” of the government. The anticapitalistic stance of living without regard to economic worth and alongside those who had fallen through the cracks of Margaret Thatcher’s years of austerity, individualization, and the planned breakdown of the solidarity among the working class was completely against the status quo and, for John Bell, one of his proudest projects. Alongside the Columban Houses, Bell and Maule’s experimental, creative, and integrated worship with young people was extremely popular. The “Last of the Month” included a worship service, workshops, and hospitality, and usually brought in around 300–500 young adults, ranging from working-class unemployed individuals to many surrounding students. However, this radical project fell away with the worship resources created for the youth events becoming the focus and professionalized. Today, one of the most well-known attributes of Millennials and Generation Z is their mistrust of institutions and structures but their enduring spirituality. Grace Davie terms this “believing without belonging” (1994), and Steve Aisthorpe has written about “churchless Christians” (2016). One significant factor of young people distancing themselves from church structures stems from their desire for authenticity and desire to see evidence that the church practices the message it teaches (Root 2017). The British church seems ripe for a time of introspection. Charles Pemberton’s work interrogating the church’s willingness to provide foodbanks, but not question the reasons for their necessity in one of the world’s richest countries, is a good example of this (2020). Joerg Rieger is also questioning the normality of capitalistic logic in church culture (Rieger 2022).

Conclusion This chapter has been a whistle-stop tour of the recent history of Christian social movements and the working classes in Britain. It has been noted how the Victorian strategy of elevating the working class to make them “decent” to the middle and upper classes endured until World War I. The close contact and shared sacrifice of men on the front line of war then created a cultural shift, from which their reliance on each other later shifted the church landscape back at home as well. Eventually, the political landscape also shifted, as a more general, societal concern for the poor displaced the church and its sense of social responsibility. With this shift, liberating politics that had no concern for religion, but an ability to mobilize the masses, became a threat to the church. Overall, Christianity in the UK has been on a steady decline, and this has disrupted the church’s sense of responsibility toward the working classes. The Gorbals Group and Columban Houses revealed that working in urban, deprived areas was seen as a “side project” for churches that preferred statistical attendance improvements rather than long-term relationships with working-class people. Today, theologians are questioning the church’s willingness to embark on charitable pursuits without questioning the reasons or sources of the need for charity. 287

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References Abel-Smith, Brian. 1992. “The Beveridge Report: Its Origins and Outcomes.” International Social Security Review 45(1–2):5–16. Aisthorpe, Steve. 2016. The Invisible Church: Learning from the Experiences of Churchless Christians. Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press. Bebbington, David. 1989. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730’s to the 1980’s. London: Routledge. Bell, John, and Graeme Maule. “A Second Eye on the Shape of Tomorrow.” Internal Youth Co-ordination Paper (John Bell Collection, gifted to the author 30/08/2019). Blythe, S. 2011. “George MacLeod’s Open-Air Preaching: Performance and Counter-Performance.” Theology in Scotland 18(1):21–33. Brown, Callum. 2001. The Death of Christian Britain. Abingdon: Routledge. Brown, Stewart. 1983. Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chalmers, Thomas. 1935–42. “Connexion between the Extension of the Church and the Extinction of Pauperism“ Vol. 20. in T. Chalmers, The Collected Works of Thomas Chalmers 25 vols. Glasgow. Clayton, Philip Byard. 1929. Plain Tales from Flanders. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Clayton, Philip Byard. 1939. “Letter to G. MacLeod 20/10/1938.” MacLeod General Correspondence to 1939. NLS. Acc.904/60. Davie, Grace, 1994. Religion in Britain since 1945. Oxford: Blackwell. Drummond, Andrew L., and James Bulloch. 1978. The Church in Late Victorian Scotland 1874– 1900. Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press. Brink, Emily. n.d. “For Whom the Bell Toils: An interview with John Bell of the Iona Community.” Reformed Worship, accessed 12/10/2021 via https://www​.reformedworship​.org​/article​/march​ -1993​/whom​-bell​-toils​-interview​-john​-bell​-iona​-community. Faith Survey. “Christianity in the UK.” accessed 08/04/2022 via https://faithsurvey​.co​.uk​/uk​-christianity​.html Ferguson, Ronald. 1988. Chasing the Wild Goose: The Iona Community. London: Fount Paperbacks. Ferguson, Ronald. 1990. George MacLeod: The Founder of the Iona Community. London: William Collins & Co Ltd. Furgol, Mary. T. 1987. “Thomas Chalmers’ Poor Relief Theories and their Implementation in the Early Nineteenth Century.” University of Edinburgh PhD. Accessed 20/03/2022 via file:​///C:​/User​ s/447​91/Do​wnloa​ds/Fu​​rgol1​​987​.​p​​df Goodlad, Laura. M. E. 2001. ““Making the Working Man Like Me:” Charity, Pastorship, and Middle Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain; Thomas Chalmers and Dr. James Phillips Kay.” Victorian Studies 43(4):591–617. Grimley, Matthew. 2004. Citizenship, Community, and The Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State Between the Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hanna, William. 1854. Memoirs of Thomas Chalmers, D.D., Vol. I. Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox. Harvey, John. 1987. Bridging the Gap: Has The Church Failed the Poor? Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Hylson-Smith, Kenneth. 1992. Evangelicals in the Church of England 1734–1984. London: Bloomsbury. MacLeod, Donald. 1876. Memoir of Norman MacLeod D.D., Vol. I. London: Daldy, Isbister & Co. MacLeod, George. 1938. “A New Community on Iona: Problem of the Housing Schemes.” MacLeod, George. 1940. “Friends.” The Coracle. Vol. 5. December. MacLeod, George. 1941. “Future Action.” The Coracle. Vol.6, June. MacLeod, George. 1947. “The State of the Iona Youth Trust: A Survey with No Apology for Christmas Seasoning.” Iona Youth Trust Minutes 1947–1952. NLS. Acc.9084/329. MacLeod, George. 1953. “Community House, 214 Clyde Street, Glasgow.” The Coracle. Vol.23, November. Martin, Roger. H. 1983. Evangelicals United: Ecumenical Stirrings in Pre-Victorian Britain, 1795– 1830. London: The Scarecrow Press. McCaffrey, J. F. 1981. “Thomas Chalmers and Social Change.” The Scottish Historical Review 60(169):32–60.

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Working Class Social Movements in Britain McFarland, Elaine W., and Ronnie Johnson. 2009. “The Church of Scotland’s Special Commission on Communism, 1949–1954: Tackling ‘Christianity’s Most Serious Competitor.” Contemporary British History 23(3):337–361. Murray Kirsteen. 2002. “Missionary Kingdoms of the South Pacific? The Involvement of Missionaries from the London Missionary Society in Law-Making at Tahiti, 1795–1847.” University of Edinburgh PhD thesis. N/A. 1926. “Toc H in Scotland.” Toc H Journal IV(3):106–107. Parker, Linda. 2013. ““Shell-Shocked Prophets:” Anglican Army Chaplains and Post-war Reform in the Church of England.” Pp.183–197 in The Clergy in Khaki: New Perspectives on British Army Chaplaincy in the First World War, edited by M. Snape. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group. Pemberton, Charles R. 2020. Bread of Life in Broken Britain: Food Banks, Faith & Neoliberalism. London: SCM Press. Rice, Judith, and Kenneth Prideaux-Brune. 1990. Out of a Hop Loft: Seventy-five Years of Toc H. London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd. Rieger, Joerg. 2022. Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Robinson, Alan. 2013. “The Royal Army Chaplains’ Department and the Legacy of the First World War.” Pp.199–211 in The Clergy in Khaki: New Perspectives on British Army Chaplaincy in the First World War, edited by M. Snape. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group. Root, Andrew. 2017. Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding to the Church’s Obsession with Youthfulness. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Roxborogh, John. 1999. “The Legacy of Thomas Chalmers.” International Bulletin of Mission Research 23(4):173–176. Savage, Sara, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, Bob Mayo, and Cray Graham. 2006. Making Sense of Generation Y: The World View of 15–25 Year-Olds. London: Church House Publishing. Scotland, Nigel. 2007. Squires in the Slums: Settlements and Missions in Late-Victorian London. London: IB Tauris. Shaw, Ian. J. 2004. “Thomas Chalmers, David Nasmith, and the Origins of the City Mission Movement.” Evangelical Quarterly 76(1):31–46. Smith, John Howard. 2015. The First Great Awakening: Redefining Religion in British America, 1725–1775. Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Snape, Michael. 2005. The Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War. Abington: Taylor and Francis. Snape, Michael. 2007. God and the British Soldier: Religion and the British Army in the First and Second World Wars. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. Snape, Michael. 2009. The Back Parts of War: The YMCA Memoirs and Letters of Barclay Baron, 1915–1919 - Church of England Record Society. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer. Snape, Robert. 2015. “The New Leisure, Voluntarism, and Social Reconstruction in Inter-War Britain.” Contemporary British History 29(1):51–83. Stone, Lawrence, and Jeanne Fawtier Stone. 1995. An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ward, William Reginald. 2006. Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, S. C. 1999. Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c.1880-1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Young, A. F., and E. T. Ashton. 1956. British Social Work in the Nineteenth Century. London: Routledge.

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23 THE SOCIAL GOSPEL MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES Clinton E. Stockwell

Abstract The Social Gospel Movement was a reform movement in Protestantism in the United States of America that emerged in the late nineteenth century. After the American Civil War, Protestantism in the United States divided into two camps: one more conservative, which gave birth to the fundamentalist movement, and the other more liberal, which delivered the Social Gospel Movement. The social context for the latter was the dominance of the Gilded Age and the extremes of economic inequality fostered by the “robber barons” or “captains of industry.” This chapter describes the evolution and character of the Social Gospel Movement in the United States from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries (1885– 1925). It describes the historical context, leaders, ideology, and shortcomings of the movement and argues that the movement was organic and developing. It had a lasting impact on the doctrine and practice of mainline churches, on ecumenical councils such as the National and World Council of Churches, and on social movements such as the Civil Rights Movement and liberation theology in the late twentieth century.

The Historical Context The Social Gospel Movement was a reform movement in Protestantism in the United States of America that emerged in the late nineteenth century. After the American Civil War, Protestantism in the United States divided into two camps: one more conservative, which gave birth to evangelical revivalist and “fundamentalist” movements, and the other more liberal, which delivered the Social Gospel Movement. Dubbed “social Christianity” before 1900, the Social Gospel Movement emerged as a response to three great social forces: industrialization, immigration, and urbanization. It was also inspired by significant intellectual trends in society, including Marxism, Darwinism, theological liberalism, biblical criticism, imperialism, and religious nationalism. 290

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-32

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The overall historical context for the Social Gospel era included the dominance of the Gilded Age and, with it, the growth of capitalism, business monopolies, and extremes of wealth and poverty. Henry George, in his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, explored the contradictions in the economic system of the United States, observing that, despite the great gains in capital accumulation, workers were experiencing greater poverty and immiseration and that the growth of economic inequality was fueling violent tensions between capital and labor. Writers such as Walter Rauschenbusch were influenced by George and lobbied for land reform, for the reform of taxation laws, and for increased wages, safety, and security for factory workers. The Social Gospel Movement was also influenced by conflicts between two opposing religious movements in the United States competing for cultural dominance in late nineteenth century America: biblical conservatism and theological liberalism. While the fundamentalism of the former rejected social Darwinism and a critical reading of the Bible, Social Gospel leaders of the latter embraced higher criticism, evolutionary models of society, and a “this-worldly” view of salvation in the here and now. The Social Gospel was, thus, shaped not just by theology and ideology but also by the changing nature of society that had emerged in the United States by 1900. Protestant and Catholic leaders were responding to the forces of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization in diverse ways. While some focused on the personal sins of the individual, others focused on education or the pursuit of social justice, which included efforts to “Christianize” institutions and social structures. It was liberal Christians who thought that the political, social, and cultural institutions had to be transformed. Donovan Smucker summarized the vision of the Social Gospel as believing in an “earthly hope of transforming the ruthless economic and social systems through the development of Christian Socialism as a manifestation of the Kingdom of God” (1994:9).

The Theologies of the Social Gospel Social Gospel leaders believed in the immanence of God and stressed the implications of the doctrine of the Incarnation, believing that God was uniquely present in Jesus who was fully human and shared human sufferings (Ely 1889; Peabody 1904). In the terms of classical liberal theology, Social Gospel leaders stressed the “brotherhood of man” and the “fatherhood of God” to accentuate both human solidarity and the integration of church and world. These doctrines were anathema to fundamentalist churches that stressed the uniqueness and particularity of the Christian faith and preached the necessity of individual salvation for an other-worldly “heaven” beyond the material artifice of the physical world. However, the Social Gospel Movement was not monolithic, and there were significant divisions within it. Some were very pessimistic about social institutions, blaming groups such as the new immigrants for urban and nationwide problems. Others were optimistic and triumphant, believing in the transformative possibilities of the Social Gospel. Josiah Strong, a congregationalist minister and president of the Evangelical Alliance, gave his own list of the “seven deadly sins” that were threatening a Protestant empire in the United States. As a “nativist,” he believed that Catholicism, the city, immigration, socialism, alcoholism, Mormonism, and Romanism were in league with each other and, together, were threats to an Anglo-Saxon Christian civilization (Strong 1885:159). For Strong, these forces were not just creating the social conditions of inequality but were threats to democracy, Christianity, 291

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and civilization itself. Voicing his concerns in Our Country (1885), he reflected anti-urban, anti-immigrant, and anti-Catholic perspectives. The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center. The city has become a serious menace to our civilization … Because our cities are so largely foreign, Romanism finds in them its chief strength. For the same reason the saloon, together with the intemperance and the liquor power which it represents, is multiplied in the city. Of course, the demoralizing and pauperizing power of the saloons and their debauching influence in politics increase with their numerical strength. (Strong 1885:128) Strong was concerned about the political and economic problems that immigrants brought to the US because many of the workers who were fueling labor–capitalist conflicts were recent immigrants. Some were German, but many others were of Irish or Scottish descent like the “Molly McGuires” (a secret society of Irish immigrants) of previous years. Furthermore, after the publication of Our Country, several incidents supported Strong’s point of view. The “anarchists” in Chicago during the Haymarket Riot of 1886 were primarily of German immigrant descent and published a newspaper in German to appeal to German workers. Later, the Pullman Strike of 1894 appealed to a mostly working class, white ethnic population. The new immigration brought groups to the country who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestant but, instead, were rural, Catholic persons from southern and eastern Europe who knew little English. Prior to 1860, 95% of all immigrants came from northern and western Europe: English, German, Dutch, Scottish, and Irish. After 1860, the character of immigration to the US changed significantly. From 1861– 1900, 68% came from northern and western Europe, while 22% came from southern and eastern Europe. However, from 1901 to 1920, 58% came from southern and eastern Europe, and only 23% came from northern and western Europe. The fear of labor uprisings was linked increasingly to the fear of immigrants and foreigners. For Josiah Strong, American cities were “foreign,” dominated by “Romanism” (adherents of Roman Catholicism), intemperance, “liquor power,” unequal wealth, starvation, poverty, socialism, superstition, and irreligion (1885:141). Statistically, Strong had a persuasive case, but in practice, he focused more on the individual worker than the institutions controlled by monopoly capital. While Social Gospel leaders like Strong were “nativists” concerned about the growing immigrant population and the increase in the number and size of large cities, other Social Gospel leaders targeted the rise of monopoly capitalism for creating the economic structures of economic inequality. For Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1932), the era from 1875 to 1900 was a critical period for religion in the United States. It marked both the transformation of American Protestantism as well as a clear division within its ranks. The intellectual climate was dominated by Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, Charles Darwin’s treatise on evolution, and the rise of higher criticism of the Bible in German universities. These changes created problems for the church, as the fundamental teachings of the Bible, such as the virgin birth of Christ and the belief in miracle healings, were called into question. How would religious leaders in the churches respond to these challenges? Liberals thought that Marxism was beneficial in that it helped to identify and analyze class conflicts, and they accepted social Darwinism because it supported the notion of inevitable social progress. Populism in

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the late nineteenth century would morph into progressivism in the early twentieth century, with the result of a “culture war” emerging between the liberals of the Social Gospel and the conservatives of the evangelical churches.

Washington Gladden Many consider Solomon Washington Gladden (1836–1918) to be the “father of the Social Gospel.” After attending Williams College, he taught school and privately studied for the ministry under Moses Coit Tyler, a Congregationalist minister and American historian. Gladden served several churches in New York and Massachusetts before accepting a pastorate in Columbus, Ohio in 1882. Gladden, also a Congregationalist, was the editor of a journal, The Independent, and became involved in labor disputes and political reform efforts as a member of the Columbus City Council from 1900–1902. Unlike Strong, Gladden supported labor and did not blame them for urban problems. Through his ministry as pastor of the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio from 1882–1914, Gladden authored numerous articles on labor issues and what was then called “the social question.” He summed up his thoughts in numerous writings, including Applied Christianity: Moral Aspects of Social Questions (1886), The Christian Pastor and the Working Church (1898), Social Salvation (1902), Christianity and Socialism (1905), and Recollections (personal biography) (1909). He also sat on numerous boards and gave leadership to several reform organizations including the American Economic Association, the American Missionary Association, and the Evangelical Alliance (Curtis 2001:36 ff). Gladden rejected Calvinism at an early age and was drawn to liberal theology. Liberalism was much more optimistic about human nature and rejected original sin and conservative teachings on a literal heaven and hell. Liberal theology, biblical criticism, and Social Darwinism were three strong social forces that influenced his thinking and practice. In 1875, Gladden supported the rights of shoe workers to strike in Springfield, Massachusetts. Recognizing that many corporate leaders were members of the churches, he wrote an 1876 book, Working People and Their Employers, to advocate for workers’ rights. In the 1880s, Gladden took the side of labor, traveling to Cleveland to support a labor dispute. He supported the right of labor to organize, have a shorter work week, and have an inspection of working conditions and advocated for legislation that would curtail the power of corporations and monopolies. Gladden’s theology articulated common liberal themes of the “fatherhood of God” and the “brotherhood of man” as the basis of his critique of capital and his support of workers. He also believed that society was experiencing a gradual evolution and development toward progress for the whole human family. Unique among Social Gospel leaders, he was concerned about the rights of African Americans, workers, and women – very progressive for the time (Gladden 1909:366) – and believed that public works should be controlled by municipal authorities. Gladden was also an advocate of civil rights and traveled to meet with W.E.B. DuBois at Atlanta University to learn more about conditions faced by African Americans in the American South. Shocked with what he learned, Gladden gave a sermon in 1903 entitled “Murder as an Epidemic,” which condemned the practice of lynching which had escalated as a serious social problem in the 1890s. Gladden was one of the few Social Gospelers who specifically addressed issues of racial injustice (Dorn 1967). He maintained his leadership in the Social Gospel Movement until his death in 1918.

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Walter Rauschenbusch Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) was born seven years after his parents immigrated to the United States. German culture and language dominated the life of Rauschenbusch’s parents, and Walter grew up bilingual. He was educated in the United States at the University of Rochester and the Rochester Theological Seminary as well as in Europe at Westphalia and the University of Berlin. His four trips to Europe exposed him to the leading scholars on both continents. Rauschenbusch was influenced by a combination of activists, scholars, movements, and situations that contributed to his emerging theology and ethical practice. In the area of sociology and economics, he cited W.D.P. Bliss, Phillips Brooks, Edward Bellamy, Henry George, Richard T. Ely, Giuseppe Mazzini, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen, Leonhard Ragatz, Jaco Riis, Shaftesbury, Tolstoy, and the Fabian socialists. But he was also heavily influenced by the major liberal and biblical-critical theologians of his time. His education was ongoing and eclectic. For 11 years, beginning in 1886, Rauschenbusch was a pastor in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. He became pastor of the Second German Baptist Church which was a congregation of 125 persons of working-class German descent near a notorious slum area. While pastoring this congregation, Rauschenbusch saw firsthand the effects of poverty, unemployment, overcrowding, and economic exploitation. He also made his acquaintance with the social teachings of writers such as Henry George and activists such as Jacob Riis. Rauschenbusch argued that social reform must occur in this age on this earth where persons are held accountable to the Creator as stewards. His hope in a new social order led him to contemplate a this-worldly social significance of the Kingdom of God that seemed obvious in the New Testament. This led Rauschenbusch to reject the individualism and the other- worldliness that characterized fellow Baptist clergy. However, Rauschenbusch’s social ethic was not merely derived from an isolated study of biblical theology. Rather, his concern for social justice and reform developed because of his experience with the poor in the city. In 1892, together with two other New York City pastors, Rauschenbusch organized the Brotherhood of the Kingdom for the purpose of obtaining a better understanding of the Kingdom of God. Other notables invited to join the group included Samuel Zane Batten, a young Philadelphia minister, and William Newton Clarke, a theologian from Hamilton, Ontario. Many significant personalities came to the meetings at various times, including Josiah Strong, William Howe Tolman, and W.D.P. Bliss. The release of Christianizing the Social Order in 1912 was regarded by the Brotherhood as representative of the group’s purpose, namely “to establish the social nature of Christianity” (Rauschenbusch 1912). In 1893, the Brotherhood of the Kingdom issued a pamphlet setting forth the “Spirit and the Aims” of the group, the overall goal being the practical realization of the Kingdom of God in the world. To this end, members pledged to promote these ideas from pulpits and in the press and to communicate the ideals to the common people, “encouraging the religious spirit in efforts of social amelioration” (White and Hopkins 1976:76). The Brotherhood was never comprised of more than 50 persons and met for 20 years on a farm in the hills behind “Marlboro on the Hudson,” usually in early summer. The purpose of the group, as stated by Rauschenbusch, was “to permeate modern social movements with the religious ideal, and to inspire modern religious forces with the social ideal, and to attempt this by emphasizing Jesus’ teaching of the Kingdom of God” (Sharpe 1942:124–125). While in New York, Rauschenbusch did not neglect the practical matters of politics, though on a limited scale. He supported Henry George for mayor in the late 1880s and

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worked with Jacob Riis to secure safe public playgrounds, fresh air centers, and decent housing. Also, he authored an influential article in support of the Brooklyn Streetcar employees. With fellow members of the Brotherhood, the group responded in support of strikers in the coal mines of 1897. Rauschenbusch also actively sought ecumenical participation to address social ills because church unity on social issues was one of his overriding passions. In 1897, Rauschenbusch was called to consider a professorship at the Rochester Theological Seminary, which he accepted after much deliberation. He began as a professor in the German department but was quickly moved to the English department as Professor of Church History. After ten years of teaching, Rauschenbusch began to write, releasing books that would shake the world of progressive Christianity. Rauschenbusch’s books: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Christianizing the Social Order (1912), and A Theology of the Social Gospel (1917) were written to help analyze his experience and to develop an agenda and rationale for engaging the city and its problems. A colleague and fellow urban minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, recognized the significance of this experience and quoted Rauschenbusch as saying that his passion for social reform came from his experience as a pastor. [It] did not come from the church, it came from outside. It came through personal contact with poverty, and when I saw how men toiled all their life-long, hard, toilsome lives, and at the end had almost nothing to show for it; how strong men begged for work and could not get it in hard times, how little children died – oh the children’s funerals, they gripped my heart. (Landis 1957:xv–xvi) In 1908, the Federal Council of Churches was organized to spread the ideals of the Methodist Social Creed and the work of the Brotherhood. Dores Sharpe said this regarding Rauschenbusch’s influence in the Federal Council: “In the light of the actual happenings it would be just to say that the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America is the lengthened shadow of Walter Rauschenbusch. He lives and speaks in the Federal Council” (Ward 1942:406). The Federal Council of Churches released their “Social Creed of the Churches” in 1908, written by Henry F. Ward and Frank Mason North, which captured the concerns and issues of the Social Gospel as a movement. Vida Scudder, a socialist and feminist leader, noted with enthusiasm the major points of the creed. “Churches must stand,” she argued, “for equal rights,” complete justice, protection of the family, the abolition of child labor, the regulation of the conditions facing women workers, the abatement of poverty, the conservation of health, provisions for the elderly in old age, the right of employees to organize, the reduction of work hours, a living wage, and the “application of Christian principles to the acquisition and use of property” (Scudder 1916:7–9). Notably, many of these issues were later endorsed by the New Deal of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the 1930s, as well as by the National Council of Churches in the post-World War II era. The National Council of Churches was built on the previous work of the “cooperative foundations of the Evangelical Alliance (1867) and the Federal Council of Churches in America” (Crow 1990:798-9). Rauschenbusch died in 1918. He was devastated by the catastrophe of World War I, which not only saw the Allies defeat his German countrymen but also crushed optimistic liberalism’s faith in inevitable human progress. However, the Great War did not dissolve the Social Gospel Movement; instead, it evolved and transformed. It took a more realistic turn 295

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in formulations of the National Council of Churches, in the creeds of the mainline denominations, and in the writings of “realists” such as Reinhold Niebuhr, a realism rooted in the writings of Rauschenbusch. Niebuhr was both a beneficiary and critic of the Social Gospel. He would argue that sin has its roots not just in social structures but also in the will and nature of the human being as the “inevitable product of human freedom” (Fox 1985:179). Niebuhr would articulate this point of view in his classic study, The Nature and Destiny of Man (Niebuhr 1941–1943). The First World War proved to be a great challenge to the Social Gospel but was not its demise.

Other Prophets of the Social Gospel Numerous other writers and teachers were dedicated to advancing the Social Gospel. In 1894, evangelical reformer and Social Gospel crusader William Thomas Stead penned the book, If Christ Came to Chicago. This work was replete with maps of the location of the brothels and saloons in Chicago’s infamous Levee District. It was used by both those seeking to eradicate the moral evils of the district as well as those who sought its temptations. Stead argued that if Christ came to Chicago, the poor would be fed, the homeless housed, vice eradicated, and corrupt politicians would be chased out of office. He was a contributor to the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and he authored an influential essay for the Parliament titled “The Civic Church.” He would later help found The Civic Federation in 1894, a political watchdog and reform group in Chicago that examined the city’s financial transactions and links to corruption (Phillips 1996:139–140). Tragically, Stead was a victim of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Francis Greenwood Peabody introduced elective courses on social ethics at Harvard Divinity School in 1880. He believed that moral problems arose from social situations and that ministers were natural leaders for social reform and should be mediators in community affairs. Though he was a Unitarian and a Christian socialist, his approach was surprisingly conservative. Rather than changing social institutions, Peabody argued that personal character was the most important factor; if the individual changed, it would eventually impact social systems. Jesus did not “teach a doctrine of ‘economic justice’ or the ‘redistribution of goods,’” rather Jesus’s teaching was more about the “greater problem of spiritual regeneration and preparedness” (Peabody 1904:215). In 1892, Graham Taylor accepted the position of “Social Economics” at the Chicago Theological Seminary, and eventually would start an extension school, the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, and a social settlement house, the Chicago Commons. Chicago Commons was a settlement house and a training center for seminary students and social workers on Chicago’s Near West Side. The Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy would later become the prestigious School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, training social workers from the 1920s. Taylor reflected the more pragmatic concerns of the Social Gospel Movement in his teaching and practice. His efforts combined education, philanthropy, and politics as he campaigned for the election of “progressive” candidate William Dever as alderman in 1902 and for mayor of Chicago in 1923. Dever is credited for chasing the criminal Capone gang out of the city of Chicago (Stockwell 1996).

Legacy and Critical Perspectives The leaders of the Social Gospel Movement and those outside the movement but also engaged in progressive reform efforts influenced each other. Rauschenbusch and others 296

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were influenced not just by Christian socialists but also by economists and progressive reformers such as Henry Demarest Lloyd, Henry George, and Jacob Riis. Economists such as Richard T. Ely had close ties to the churches. Jane Addams, baptized a Presbyterian, sought to practice Christianity in tangible ways at Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago. Other motives [influencing] the settlement are the result of a certain renaissance going forward in Christianity. The impulse to share the lives of the poor, the desire to make social service irrespective of propaganda, express the spirit of Christ (and) is as old as Christianity itself. (Addams 2011:72) Though Addams noted the influence of the Social Gospel on her practice, she conducted her work at Hull House in a non-sectarian manner. She was also an activist and leader for national political movements including temperance, women’s suffrage, and world peace. The shadow of the Social Gospel Movement was long and impacted both women’s rights and civil rights in the following decades. While there were but few women theorists at the time, they were notable and included Vida Scudder, Ida B. Tarbell, and Charlotte Perkins Gillman. Scudder was a self-proclaimed Christian socialist, Tarbell investigated corruption in the Standard Oil Corporation, and Gillman was a leading sociologist, who, along with settlement house leaders like Jane Addams and Mary McDowell, was an articulate feminist and supporter of women’s rights and women’s suffrage. There were many more on the ground working in settlement houses and philanthropic institutions, including Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet officer under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nevertheless, there were also glaring weaknesses in the movement that have troubled many recent interpreters. Social Gospel crusaders such as Josiah Strong was a nativist, a Social Darwinist, and a champion of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Very few Social Gospel leaders other than Washington Gladden directly addressed discrimination against and lynching of African Americans. The biggest issue for Social Gospel leaders at this time had to do with capital, economic disparities, and the crowding of mostly eastern European immigrants in large cities. In Jane Addams’s Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895), there were few African Americans in her neighborhood, whereas there were large numbers of Irish, Bohemians, Poles, Italians, and Russian Jews. Though the Great Migration of African Americans from the American South was underway, some of the leaders of the Social Gospel had limited contact with them. Much has been written about the “long civil rights movement” that had its origins in the Social Gospel (Cook 2016). While Reinhold Niebuhr critiqued its optimism with a more realistic view of human nature, he was also influenced by the systemic view of evil in his groundbreaking book, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). And while it is true that most Social Gospel leaders did not specifically address issues of racial justice, they, nevertheless, impacted the direction of civil rights in the subsequent years (Luker 1991; Dorrien 2018). Martin Luther King Sr. was influenced by Social Gospel teachings, and King’s son, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. studied under Benjamin Mays at Morehouse College (Carson 1994), who edited a book on the writings of the Social Gospel (Mays 1950). King enrolled to do graduate study at the Colgate Rochester Theological Seminary where he read Rauschenbusch with great interest. The clearest statement of the influence of Walter 297

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Rauschenbusch on King came in King’s book, Stride Towards Freedom (1958). As King attested, It has been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch, that any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul, is a spiritually moribund religion, only waiting to be burned. (1958:91)

Conclusion The Social Gospel Movement has done much to define the character of Protestant mainline churches in the United States and around the world. The National Council of Churches and the modern ecumenical movement support many of the same goals and concerns that were first articulated by the Social Gospel leadership and the Federal Council of Churches that was established back in 1908. The concerns of social justice and racial and gender inclusion remain goals and challenges faced by today’s North American churches.

References Books: Addams, Jane. 2011. Twenty Years at Hull House. Empire Books. Addams, Jane. 1890. What is Christian Socialism? Boston: Society for Christian Socialists. Addams, Jane. 1895. Hull-House Maps and Papers. T.Y. Crowell. Brackney, William H. General Editor. 2018. Walter Rauschenbusch: Published Works and Selected Writings. Volume 1: Christianity and the Social Crisis and Other Writings. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Brackney, William H. General Editor. 2018. Walter Rauschenbusch: Published Works and Selected Writings. Volume II: Christianizing the Social Order and Other Writings. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Brackney, William H. 2018. Walter Rauschenbusch: Published Works and Selected Writings. Volume III: A Theology for the Social Gospel and Other Writings. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Curtis, Susan. 2001. A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Dorn, Jacob H. 1967. Washington Gladden: Prophet of the Social Gospel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Dorrien, Gary. 2018. Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Social Gospel. New Haven: Yale University. Dorrien, Gary. 2018. The New Abolition: W.E.B. DuBois and the Black Social Gospel. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edwards, Wendy J. Deichmann, and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, eds. 2003. Gender and the Social Gospel. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Ely, Richard T. 1889. Social Aspects of Christianity and Other Essays. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Fox, Richard. 1985. Reinhold Niebuhr: A Bibliography. New York: Pantheon Books. Gladden, Washington. 1886. Applied Christianity: Moral Aspects of Social Questions. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Gladden, Washington. 1898. The Christian Pastor and the Working Church. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons. Gladden, Washington. 1902. Social Salvation. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Gladden, Washinton. 1905. Christianity and Socialism. New York: Eaton & Mains. Gladden, Washington. 1909. Recollections. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

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The Social Gospel Movement in the USA Landis, Benson Y., Compiler. 1957. A Rauschenbusch Reader: The Kingdom of God and the Social Gospel. New York: Harper and Brothers. King, Jr., Martin Luther. 1958. Stride Toward Freedom. New York: Harper Collins. Luker, Ralph E. 1991. The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mays, Benjamin E. 1950. A Gospel for the Social Awakening: A Selection from the Writings of Walter Rauschenbusch. New York: Associated Press. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1932. Moral Man and Moral Society. New York: Charles Scribner’s. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1941–3. The Nature and Destiny of Man. 2 Vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s. Peabody, Francis Greenwood. 1904. Jesus Christ and the Social Question. New York: McMillan. Phillips, Paul T. 1996. A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo American Social Christianity 1880–1940. Pennsylvania State University. Rauschenbusch, Walter. 1907. Christianity and the Social Crisis. New York: MacMillan. Rauschenbusch, Walter. 1912. Christianizing the Social Order. New York: MacMillan. Rauschenbusch, Walter. 1917. A Theology of the Social Gospel. Nashville: Abingdon. Scudder, Vida. 1916. The Church and the Hour: Reflections of a Socialist Churchwoman. Leopold Classic Reprint. Sharpe, Dores R. 1942. Walter Rauschenbusch. New York: MacMillan. Smucker, Donovan E. 1994. The Origins of Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Ethics. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Strong, Josiah. 1885. Our Country: Its Possible Future and its Present Crisis. American Home Missionary Society. Trimiew, Darryl M. 2001. “The Social Gospel Movement and Question of Race.” Pp. 17–37 in The Social Gospel Today, edited by Christopher H. Evans. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press. Visser ‘T Hooft, W.A. 1962. The Background of the Social Gospel in America. Bethany Press. Ward, Harry F. 1942. The Social Creed of the Churches. Sagwand Press. White, Ronald C., Jr. 1990. Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel, 1875– 1925. San Francisco: Harper and Row. White, Ronald C., Jr., and C. Howard Hopkins. 1976. The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Articles and Essays: Bateman, Bradley W. 2022. “The Social Gospel and the Progressive Era.” Divining America, National Humanities. Accessed March 9, 2022. http://nat​iona​lhum​anit​iescenter​.org​/tserve​/twenty​/tkeyinfo​/ socgospel​.htm> Bodein, Vernon P. 1937. “The Development of the Social Thought of Walter Rauschenbusch.” Religion in Life. VI:420–31. Bowden, Henry W. 1966. “Walter Rauschenbusch and American Church History.” Foundations IX (July–September):234–500. Britt, Bill. 2019. “Opinion: Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Social Gospel.” The Alabama Reporter. Accessed 3/10/2022: Opinion | Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the social gospel (alreporter​.c​om). Carson, Clayborne. 1994. “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the African American Social Gospel.” Pp. 159–178 in African American Christianity: Essays in History, edited by Paul E. Johnson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cook, Vaneesa. 2016. “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Long Social Gospel Movement.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 74–100. Crow, P.A. 1990. “National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.“ Pp. 798–9 in Dictionary of Christianity in America, edited by Daniel G. Reed. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press. Dickinson, Richard. 1957–8. “The Church’s Responsibility for Society: Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr, Brothers Under the Skin.” Religion in Life XXVII:163–71. Dorn, Jacob. 1999. “The Social Gospel and Socialism: A Comparison of the Thought of Francis Greenwood Peabody, Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch.” Church History 62:82–100.

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Clinton E. Stockwell Fishburn, Janet Forsythe 2003. “Walter Rauschenbusch and “The Woman Movement”: A Gender Analysis.” Pp. 71–86 in Gender and the Social Gospel, edited by Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Fosdick, Harry Emerson. 1957. “An Interpretation of the Life and Work of Walter Rauschenbusch.” In A Rauschenbusch Reader: The Kingdom of God and the Social Gospel, compiled by Benson Y. Landis. New York: Harper and Brothers. Herbst, Jurgen. 1961. “Francis Greenwood Peabody: Harvard’s Theologian of the Social Gospel.” Harvard Theological Review 54:45–69. Lasch, Christopher. 1990. “Religious Contributions to Social Movements: Walter Rauschenbusch, the Social Gospel and its Critics.” Journal of Religious Ethics 18:7–25. Luker, Ralph. 1977. “The Social Gospel and the Failure of Racial Reform, 1877–1898.” Church History 46(1):80–99. Marney, Carlyle. 1959. “The Significance of Walter Rauschenbusch for Today.” Foundations 11:13–260. McCree, Mary Lynn. 1970–3. “The First Year of Hull House, 1889–1890, in Letters by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr.” Chicago History (New Series): 1–2. McGiffert, Arthur C. 1938. “Walter Rauschenbusch: Twenty Years After.” Christendom. Ill:96–109. McKelvey, Blake. 1952. “Walter Rauschenbusch’s Rochester. “Rochester History. XIV. Moellering, R. L. 1956. “Rauschenbusch in Retrospect.” Concordia Theological Monthly XXVII:613–33. Nelson, Janet R. 2009. “Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel: A Hopeful Theology for the Twenty-First Century Economy.” CrossCurrents 59(4):442–456. Nicklasen, Fred J. 1970. “Henry George: Social Gospeler.” American Quarterly 22:649–74. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1958. “Walter Rauschenbusch in Historical Perspective.” Religion In Life 527–360. Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. 1930–2. “A Critical Period in American Religion.” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 64:523–546. Smucker, Donovan E. 1958. “Multiple Motifs in the Thought of Rauschenbusch.” Encounter XIX:14–20. Stockwell, Clinton E. 1996. “Graham Taylor: Urban Pioneer.” Journal of the Chicago Theological Seminary LXXXVI(1):1–23. Stockwell, Clinton E.. 1998. “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants? The Protestant Legacy of Urban Social Justice in Chicago.” Pragmatics: The Journal of Community Based Learning 19:6–9. Strain, Charles R. 1978. “Walter Rauschenbusch: A Resource for Public Theology.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 43:23–24. Vulgamore, Melvin L. 1967. “The Social Gospel Old and New: Walter Rauschenbusch and Harvey Cox.” Religion in Life 36:516–33.

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24 LIBERATION THEOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA Madeleine Cousineau

Abstract Liberation theology is the belief that salvation is linked to efforts to bring about a just society. It differs from other theologies insofar as it is more than an academic discipline. It is also a pastoral policy known as the preferential option for the poor and a form of spirituality that motivates and sustains people in their struggles to put an end to poverty and other forms of oppression. This chapter will begin by clarifying these three aspects of liberation theology, summarizing the belief system and theologians’ use of sociological concepts, and reviewing explanations by social scientists of its emergence. Then it will describe the impact this theology has had in Latin America during the past 50 years, focusing on countries that have been the subjects of social science research, and noting similarities and differences between them. The subsequent section will discuss criticisms of liberation theology and address the question of whether it is in decline or is showing evidence of resilience. The chapter will conclude with suggestions for future research.

Introduction Latin American liberation theology has been capturing the attention of social scientists for more than 50 years. It has also been the subject of criticism and controversy because of its potential to challenge religious and social orders. This chapter begins with a brief summary of the main ideas of the theology, then reviews explanations by social scientists of its emergence, describes its impact in Latin America, and summarizes criticisms of the theology and responses to those criticisms. The focus is on Roman Catholicism in Latin America for two reasons: 1 Liberation theology originated and has remained visible in the Latin American Catholic Church. 2 Most of the social science literature on the subject is related to this church. DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-33

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Definition Liberation theology is the belief that salvation is linked with the struggle to bring about a just society. This definition does not separate this-worldly from other-worldly salvation. People of faith have the responsibility to build the Kingdom of God here and now (Gutiérrez 1973; Levine 2022; Morello 2013b). This means that in a world filled with poverty, the gospel requires economically privileged people to let go of their advantages in order to support the poor in their struggles for liberation (Neal 1987). In Latin America, pastoral agents – priests, sisters, and lay people who work with the poor – provide this support by using a method of discussion, “see-judge-act,” derived from Catholic Action (Cleary 2004; Cousineau 1997; Gutiérrez 1973; Mackin 2015; Romero 2009). People come together to talk about their everyday lives (see), reflect on common experiences in the light of scripture (judge), and explore ways to alter oppressive situations (act). Practical action is, thus, only one dimension of liberation theology.

Dimensions of Liberation Theology The dimensions of this theology are academic, practical, and spiritual. It is similar to other academic disciplines insofar as it can be researched and reported, taught in universities and seminaries, and debated in ways that are detached from everyday experiences of non-academic people. However, liberation theology is also identified with a practical pastoral strategy – the preferential option for the poor – that was institutionalized through conferences of bishops, pastoral programs, and grassroots groups known as base ecclesial communities (CEBs). In these groups, which began as subdivisions of parishes, lay leaders assist people preparing for sacraments, organize Bible study, and lead Sunday worship in the absence of a priest. Critical reflection on the Bible often leads to social activism, but this is not essential to the definition of CEBs, which are primarily religious in their origin and purpose (Cousineau 2003; Levine 1992; Romero 1989; Smith 1982; Wright and Wolford 2003). Because many liberation theologians work in poor communities, they ground their writings in everyday experience, linking the academic dimension with the practical and the spiritual. Although most pastoral agents are not professional theologians, their theology provides both practical direction for their work and personal meaning for their lives, that is, liberation spirituality (Sobrino 1988). This spirituality also supports poor people who are engaged in activism to transform society.

Christianity and Sociology The roots of liberation theology are in Catholic social teachings, specifically encyclicals by Pope Leo XIII, John XXIII, and Paul VI as well as documents of the Second Vatican Council (1963–1965). These formed the basis for a moral imperative to confront widespread poverty and injustice (Morello 2013b). A reading of the works of liberation theologians also reveals their connection to scripture (see, for example, Boff 1978; Gebara and Bingemer 1988; Gutiérrez 1973; Sobrino 1988, 2008). The biblical passages they most frequently cite are those related to justice and liberation, including the Prophets, Exodus, and the teachings of Jesus about wealth and poverty. The theologians looked to sociology for an understanding of the structural causes of inequality. They saw that development theory, which assumed that all societies could follow one path to prosperity along capitalist lines, had failed to explain the persistence of poverty 302

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in Latin America (Berryman 1987; Gutiérrez 1973). They found a more plausible explanation in Marxian class analysis, especially as related to dependency theory (Cardoso and Faletto 1967). Critics of the theology would view this selective application of class analysis as evidence of devotion to Marxism, which will be addressed later in this chapter.

Social Scientific Explanations of the Emergence of Liberation Theology1 Early social scientific research on liberation theology presented the church as a source of social change, as it shifted from alliances with economic elites to support of workers’ rights, land reform,  and other progressive  causes (Adriance  1986; Berryman 1984, 1986; Bruneau 1974, 1982; Cleary 1985; De Kadt 1970; Della Cava 1976; Dodson 1974; Gómez de Souza 1978, 1982; Hewitt 1989; Levine 1981, 1988; Mainwaring 1986; Neuhouser 1989; Ribeiro de Oliveira 1981; Smith 1982; Vallier 1970). In explaining this change in church policy, some analysts (notably Bruneau, Della Cava, Hewitt, Neuhauser, and Vallier) employed an elite model focusing on initiatives by bishops whom they perceived as developing social programs as a means of maintaining influence over society. Others (including Adriance, Berryman, Gómez de Souza, Mainwaring, and Ribeiro de Oliveira) called attention to the activities of priests, sisters, and lay church workers who organize poor people into base communities. Because these researchers emphasized the combination of institutional directives with work at the grassroots level, their model may be viewed as integrative. The elite model appeared to be validated in the 1990s by the retrenchment of the hierarchy from the liberationist position (Burdick 1993; Cousineau 1997; Drogus 1999; Fleet and Smith 1997; Hewitt 1993; Mariz 1994; Peña 1995). This occurred during the papacy of Pope John Paul II, who set the agenda for censuring liberation theologians, criticizing clergy involvement with left-identified movements, and weakening social activism. The Vatican executed this agenda by appointing conservative bishops and placing Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. More recently, Daniel Levine (2012) has written a critical summary of the whole body of literature on religion and politics in Latin America since the 1970s, along with a nuanced analysis of ways that religion continues to support social change. He notes that the church helped to produce a generation of leaders of struggles for social justice. Levine’s analysis corroborates the observations of researchers who point out the enduring influence of progressive Catholicism in secular movements of workers, landless farmers, Blacks, women, and the homeless (Apolinário 2019; Burdick 2004; Cousineau 2020; Drogus and StewartGambino 2005; French 2007; Mackin 2015; Wright and Wolford 2003).

The Development of Liberation Theology An antecedent of liberation theology in the 1940s was Catholic Action, which recruited lay leaders among factory workers, farmers, and students (Adriance 1986; Mackin, 2015; Morello 2013b). Although this was a defensive strategy to prevent those sectors from becoming communist, it provided a model for lay activism and also influenced priests who served as advisors to Catholic Action groups. Among these was the Brazilian Helder Câmara, who would become an archbishop and a key figure in the development of the preferential option for the poor, and the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez, the best known of liberation theologians (Gómez de Souza 1982; Morris 2015; Pasara 1989). In addition to Brazil and Peru, Catholic Action was introduced in several other countries, including Argentina, 303

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Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, and Venezuela (Calder 2004; Smith 1982; Gill 1998; Greene 1987; Levine 1981; Phillips 2015; Touris 2010). Its model of lay leadership and method of see-judge-act would later be adopted by base communities. The earliest signs of CEB-like groups appeared in the early 1950s in the dioceses of Natal and São Luís in northeastern Brazil, where the clergy shortage necessitated parish de-centralization and training of lay leaders (Adriance 1986). Another early manifestation appeared in 1963 in Panama, where a group of missionary priests created a model for lay leadership that spread to neighboring countries (Berryman 1986). This was important for three reasons:

• Leadership training enabled lay people to serve a new role in the church. • Bible discussions related to everyday experiences helped participants develop critical consciousness.

• Leadership skills often transferred to action beyond the church. Base communities also influenced the pastoral agents who organized them. They began expressing a concept of church as the People of God rather than as obedient followers of the hierarchy. Fathers Gutiérrez and Câmara integrated this concept into their beliefs. When Father Câmara became an auxiliary bishop in Rio de Janeiro in 1952, he began taking initiatives beyond the local level. That year he organized the National Conference of the Brazilian Bishops (CNBB) and served as its secretary general until 1964. In 1955 he helped found the Latin American Bishops’ Council (CELAM) and served as its secretary general from 1963 to 1966 (Morris 2015). In those early years, the CNBB and CELAM supported pastoral programs that would lead to liberation theology. In 1968, a general conference of CELAM in Medellín, Colombia provided institutional approval for the preferential option for the poor and the CEBs. The term “theology of liberation” came into use around this time. Gutiérrez proposed it in a talk he gave in 1968, and three years later published his first of several books, which, together with the Medellín conference and new models of pastoral work appearing in several countries, launched the theology.

The Impact of Liberation Theology Brazil has the most visible manifestations of the theology, with 70,000 base communities (Valle and Pitta 1994), at least 18 of the more than 50 Latin American liberation theologians (Bingemer 2016; Boff and Boff 1987), and a variety of pastoral programs that reach out to workers, street dwellers, Indigenous people, and others on the margins of society (Cousineau 2020; French 2007; Hagopian 2008). Brazil has also had many progressive bishops, who, although a minority of the hierarchy, exerted considerable influence through the CNBB. Beyond Brazil, liberation theology has impacted the church in most countries of Latin America. However, national hierarchies have varied in their support of this new way of being church, and in no country have progressive bishops ever been the majority. Yet in some countries, such as Brazil, Chile, and Peru, they have been influential minorities. The most notoriously conservative bishops have been in Argentina, where several had close connections with the brutal military regime between 1976 and 1983, and where the progressive Bishop Enrique Angelelli, was assassinated shortly after the military came to power 304

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(Gill 1998; Morello 2015; Touris 2015). Close behind Argentina are Honduras, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Colombia. Although there is little research on the first three, the conservatism of the Colombian hierarchy is well documented (Levine 1992). In Central America, Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980, stood out as an exception within a relatively conservative hierarchy (Berryman 1994). Mexican bishops are somewhere in the middle, with many seeming to support progressive statements while taking little action on them (Mackin 2010). Nevertheless, even conservative bishops could not prevent pastoral agents from organizing base communities. All the countries that are subjects of published studies have CEBs (Adriance 1995; Berryman 1994; Calder 2004; Cleary 2004; Fleet and Smith 1997; Gill 1998; Greene 1987; Kovic 2004; Lesbaupin 2000; Levine 1992; Norget 2004; Phillips 2015; Romero 2009; Touris 2010). Despite variations, they have common characteristics such as lay leadership, preparation for sacraments, Sunday worship, and Bible discussions. In each country, at least some CEB members have engaged in social activism. The influence of the Medellín conference led to the formation of organizations of progressive clergy, including Priests for the Third World in Argentina, Golconda in Colombia, Priests for the People in Mexico, Oficina Nacional de Informacion Social in Peru, and Centro Gumilla in Venezuela (Fleet and Smith 1997; Levine 1992; Mackin, 2012; Morello 2013a; Pasara 1989; Touris 2010). Some national hierarchies implemented social programs, such as the Vicariate of Solidarity in Chile and social pastorals in Brazil (Fleet and Smith 1997; Hagopian 2008). One program, the Pastoral of the Street, began in Brazil in 1987, gained the support of the national bishops’ conference, and continues to have an impact. It was organized by religious sisters who reached out to homeless people using the method of see-judge-act. Street dwellers mobilized by the Pastoral eventually created the National Movement of the Street Population and the National Movement of Recyclers (Cousineau 2020).

Criticisms of Liberation Theology Soon after the Medellín conference, conservatives in the church began pushing back. The charge was led by Cardinal López Trujillo, secretary general of CELAM, who attempted to reverse the actions taken at the Medellín conference by organizing another conference in Puebla, Mexico in 1979. However, progressives managed to maintain influence there as well, and the concluding document reaffirmed the preferential option for the poor. López Trujillo continued his attack, accusing liberationists of adopting Marxism, glorifying guerrillas, and advocating violence (McGovern 1989). Prominent critics in the United States included Michael Novak (1986) and Paul Sigmund (1990). Although these scholars praised liberationists for their commitment to the poor, they objected to their support of socialism. They expressed the developmentalist view that if Latin America would adopt capitalism, its economic problems would be solved. The greatest threat to liberation theology came from the Vatican, specifically from Cardinal Ratzinger, who declared that some theologies of liberation “reduce the gospel to an earthly gospel and propose a novel interpretation of the faith … (that) springs uncritically from Marxist ideology” (McGovern 1989:52). In 1983, Ratzinger sent the Peruvian bishops a document criticizing the work of Gutiérrez and asking them to issue a condemnation of it. When the bishops refused, he called for a summit meeting in Colombia, apparently to obtain a condemnation from CELAM. Again, he met with refusal (Lernoux 1989). In 1984 and 1986, 305

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Ratzinger wrote two “Instructions,” the first alleging that liberationism reduced faith to politics, adopted Marxism uncritically, and undermined church authority. The second stated that spiritual freedom was more fundamental than earthly liberation (McGovern 1989). Ratzinger’s best-known offensive was the silencing of Leonardo Boff, prohibiting him from writing, teaching, or speaking for an undetermined period (Lernoux 1989; McGovern 1989). This was mainly a reaction to Boff’s book, Church: Charism and Power (1985), which Ratzinger apparently interpreted as a threat to episcopal authority. Because criticisms of liberation theology frequently focus on its alleged adherence to Marxism, its defenders claim that theologians only use Marxian sociology for class analysis, while their main belief system is derived from scripture (Boff and Boff 1987; Lancaster 1988; Levine 1988). They also suggest that the critics have not read the major works of liberation theologians with any attention, because Gutiérrez, Boff, Sobrino, and others write less about Marxism than about traditional themes of grace, sin, the church, Jesus Christ, and the mystery of God (Berryman 1984). The concern that liberationists want to create a separate church, with base communities challenging episcopal authority, is countered by the observation that most CEB members are loyal to their bishops (Levine 1988). Finally, defenders of the theology view many of its critics as protective of their own economic and political interests and challenge them by asking, “What part have you played in the effective and integral liberation of the oppressed?” (Boff and Boff 1987:9).

Rumors of Demise A different kind of attack on liberation theology is the claim that it is in decline or even dying (Hagopian 2009; Hewitt 1993; Leffel 2017; Mackin 2015). One factor that may have made this position appear plausible was the conservative Vatican climate under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. However, this did not destroy the theology. Theologians continued writing, CEBs continued meeting, and CELAM continued affirming the preferential option for the poor. A second factor creating the impression of decline is the focus by some researchers on São Paulo (Drogus 1999; Hewitt 1993), where liberation theology was a top-down innovation. Cardinal Arns was proactive in encouraging base communities, even building hundreds of meeting halls for them. When the Vatican subdivided his archdiocese and appointed more conservative bishops for the new ones, people were left without the episcopal support on which they had come to depend, and CEBs decreased in size and number. In contrast, in dioceses that had always had fewer progressive bishops, the CEBs showed greater resiliency (Cousineau 2003). A third factor is the view of liberation theology as a social movement, which became common after the publication of a book linking it to social movement theory (Smith 1991). However, liberation theology is not really a social movement (Levine 2022), which, by definition, is an organized effort to promote or resist change in society. Although liberationists frequently support secular movements, this does not make the theology anything other than a religious movement (Hadden 2000). Liberation theology might be judged to have failed as a social movement because it did not change society; however, as a religious movement, it has succeeded in promoting ecclesial innovations – the preferential option for the poor and base communities – that the church continues to support. A fourth factor is exaggerated expectations. Levine (2012) addresses the alleged demise of liberation theology by stating that the Catholic Church was never as revolutionary as 306

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many observers had thought and that base communities were never as political as many had claimed. In other words, exaggerated expectations led to disillusionment. None of the authors who write about the death of liberation theology seem to consider a fifth possibility: attempted assassination. There is ample evidence of violence against liberationist bishops, priests, sisters, and lay people by militaries in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela (Berryman 1984; Brysk 2004; Cáceres 1989; Calder 2004; Catoggio 2013; Della Cava 1988; Dodson 1974; Fleet and Smith 1997; Greene 1987; Klaiber 1992; Lernoux 1980; Levine 1992; Morello 2015; Pasara 1989; Phillips 2015; Touris 2015). These attacks on church people were the result of an organized plan by Latin American governments to suppress dissent. It was known as the Banzer Plan, named after a Bolivian dictator and supported by the CIA of the United States (Lernoux 1980). In addition to arresting, torturing, and even murdering bishops, pastoral agents, and CEB members, there were propaganda campaigns to discredit them as communists. The viewpoint of the military was revealed in documents from a conference of Latin American armies at which liberation theology was defined as an instrument of the “International Communist Movement,” which, therefore, must be defeated (Duchrow 1990). The participants in the conference recognized the limits of violent repression and advocated the use of “low-intensity conflict,” including psychological operations. This last point is echoed by Jennifer Marshall, a researcher with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative American think tank, who has written about the use of religion in counterpropaganda. Because she views liberationism as dangerous, she is open about stating that the “U.S. government actively combated liberation theology … as part of an aggressive public diplomacy effort” (Marshall 2008:114). As evidence, she cites the example of when Pope John Paul II publicly rebuked priests who were part of the Nicaraguan junta, the US government utilized media outlets to magnify that message throughout the world. Although a combination of violent attacks and psychological operations might have defeated liberation theology, its resilience has been affirmed by an unexpected source: the US State Department. This was revealed in embassy cables sent to the Vatican during the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI (Kovalik 2013). The first came in 2007 from the US Embassy in Brazil, shortly before the pope’s visit: [A] major contextual issue for the visit is the challenge to the traditional Church played by liberation theology … Pope John Paul II beat down “liberation theology,” but in the past few years, it has seen a resurgence in various parts of Latin America. The second came in 2008 from the US Embassy at the Vatican: Also important – and disturbing – to the Holy See is the resilience of Latin American liberation theology. During his time as the powerful Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the 1980s and 1990s, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger opposed liberation theology for its overt sympathy for revolutionary movements. Two points about these cables are noteworthy. One is a commonality of purpose between the Vatican and the US government: opposition to liberation theology. The second is the observation that this theology will not disappear. At the same time that many scholars were claiming it was in decline, the State Department was expressing concern about its resilience. 307

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Despite attempts to suppress liberation theology, it continues to develop and evolve beyond its original focus on social class to include concerns about inequalities related to race, gender, and Indigenous cultures as well as environmental issues (Bingemer 2016; Boff 1995, 2008; Falcon 2008; Gebara 1999, 2007; Irarrázaval 2000). Other signs of strength are the endurance of base communities (Gómez de Souza 2000; Lesbaupin 2000) and the emergence of similar theologies in Asia and Africa (Bingemer 2016). Finally, evidence of the continued institutional affirmation of liberation theology is the inclusion for the first time of sisters and lay people at the 2021 CELAM conference in Mexico City and Pope Francis’s urging that the attendees listen to the poor (San Martín 2021).

Conclusion Liberation theology appears to be alive and well. Although never the dominant paradigm in Roman Catholicism, it has a persistent influence on belief and practice. The preferential option for the poor remains meaningful to marginalized people who are struggling to make changes in society as well as middle-class people who work in solidarity with them. Furthermore, the impact of a change in church leadership, with a pope who understands poor people’s struggles and validates their spirituality, cannot be overstated. As a Brazilian theologian wrote: “Things have changed radically in the Vatican since Francis became pope … People who asked naively, ‘Is liberation theology dead?’ now see clearly that it is not” (Bingemer 2016:1). Liberation theology has been manifested in a variety of ways in different contexts, but not all Latin American countries have been studied in depth. This suggests possibilities for future studies, including:

• Research in countries that have been less studied than others, especially Argentina,

Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, and Uruguay, to learn about progressive pastoral programs that have developed with or without initiatives from bishops. • Research in countries with leftist governments, including Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. • Studies of Indigenous, Black, and women’s theologies. • Studies of earth-centered theology, which converges with both Indigenous beliefs and eco-feminism. There is still much to learn about the relationship between religion and struggles for social justice. In this regard, liberation theology, the preferential option for the poor, and base communities remain important areas for sociological study.

Acknowledgment The author would like to thank Daniel Levine and Gustavo Morello for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

Note 1 An earlier version of this literature review appeared in Cousineau (2020).

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25 BLACK CHRISTIANITY AND BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENTS IN THE UNITED STATES Shaonta’ E. Allen Abstract Christianity thrives in many ethno-racial groups across the globe. In the United States of America, the faith manifests in particular ways among Black and white communities. What is especially fascinating is how Christianity is weaponized as a tool of oppression for some yet inspires resistance for others. This chapter surveys the legacy of Christianity in Black communities and in Black liberation movements and summarizes how and why Black Christianity has and continues to operate as a separate racial project from broader (white) Christianity. It then provides a genealogy of Black resistance and articulates the unique role Black Christianity has played in sustaining it. Specifically, this chapter will draw on race, religion, and social movements literature to assess how Christian faith facilitated social action during the Slavery Abolition Movement (as the “invisible” institution), during the Civil Rights Movement (as the “socio-political” institution), and during the present and ongoing Black Lives Matter movement (as the “socio-cultural” institution). Additionally, this chapter discusses social gospel theology, Black liberation theology, and womanist theology to re-iterate how religion is racialized (and gendered) within the Black community. Altogether, this chapter de-constructs the broad “Black Church” moniker, delineating the nuances of Black Christian political ideologies.

Introduction In the United States of America, religion has always been racialized. Christianity, in particular, has been practiced, and, at times, even weaponized, differently across social groups. While Christianity thrives in many ethno-racial groups across the globe, in the United States, it manifests in distinct ways among Black and white communities. Why does religion operate as a tool of oppression for some, yet inspire resistance for others? This is one paradox of Christianity in the United States. DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-34

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This chapter focuses on the legacy of Christianity in Black communities and in Black liberation movements. The contention here is that Black religion and Black politics have been intertwined from the outset. Within the context of the United States specifically, race distinctly impacts individuals’ access to resources, economic opportunities, and quality of life (Du Bois 1995; Harris 1994; Darity Jr. and Myers Jr. 1998; Pager 2003; Stefancic and Delgado 2012). Prominent anti-Black sentiments force Black Americans to rely on a variety of individual and collective strategies to combat the negative effects of racism. Many forms of such resistance to Black oppression have been formulated in the Black Christian church, the oldest Black social institution (Du Bois 2003) and the earliest space where a Black oppositional consciousness could be formed (Peck 1982; hooks 1989; Morris 2001). The subversive nature of early Black Christianity inspired W.E.B. Du Bois’s proclamation that The Negro Church is the only social institution of the Negroes which started in the African forest and survived slavery … It is natural, therefore, that charitable and rescue work among Negroes should first be found in the churches and reach there its greatest development. (1898:4) Du Bois’s words about the intersection of Black faith and social reform efforts compel this review of the Black Christian tradition and the role it has played in Black liberation efforts over time.

Black Christianity: A Racial Project Black Christianity in the United States of America operates as a racial project. According to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s racial formation theory, Racial projects are efforts to shape the ways in which human identities and social structures are racially signified, and the reciprocal ways that racial meaning becomes embedded in social structures. We see racial projects as … taking place all the time, whenever race is being invoked or signified, wherever social structures are being organized along racial lines. (2015:13) Winant additionally notes that “racial projects link significations or representations of race, on the one hand, with social structural manifestations of racial hierarchy or dominance, on the other” (2001:100). During America’s formative years, Christianity was intentionally divided along racial lines in an effort to substantiate a racial hierarchical system. In this regard, Black Christianity is undoubtedly a racial project because both race and religion are historically situated domains that continuously interact in order to shape how Black people have “created, lived out, [and] transformed” their racial identities. In many ways, Christianity reflects the broader culture of the United States. It mirrors racial segregation, and as a result, Black and white communities have infused and continue to infuse their cultural practices and ideologies into the faith in distinct ways. Allison Calhoun-Brown confirmed this trend when stating, “Black churches and their congregations have been separate and distinct from both mainstream religious organizations and white society” (2000:169). Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya (1990) label 314

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Black Christianity’s distinctiveness as the “Black Sacred Cosmos.” They define this as “a unique Afro-Christian worldview that was forged among Black people from both the African and Euro-American traditions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (1990:17). Joseph Washington, a Black religious studies scholar, once stated, “In the beginning was the Black Church, and the Black Church was with the Black community, and the Black Church was the Black community” (Pinn and Pinn 2002:15). Here, Washington captures how the Black Church and the Black community were, at one point in time, perceived as inextricably linked. This was especially the case when the American color line was most pronounced during Jim Crow segregation. While the relationship between the Black community and the Black Church is not characterized this way in contemporary scholarship, earlier scholars reported how the Black Church encompassed the majority of Black social life (Mitchell 1970; Ellison and Sherkat 1999). Specifically, the Black Church provided a significant social space to the community and served as the incubator of Black culture (Gilkes 1998; Pattillo-McCoy 1998; Barnes 2005). It is unsurprising that the Black Church is often referred to as the heart and soul of the Black community. For example, one scholar says, “The Black capacity to ‘creatively survive’ oppression comes from the ‘soul’ of the community”: the Black Church (Trulear 1985:53). Another notes that the Black Church is “the conscience of the Black community, and the matrix out of which self-awareness and identity, the Black soul, grew” (Williams 1971:261). In other words, the Black Church is characterized as the heart and the soul of the Black community because it has displayed a continual commitment to racial progress for Black people over time. The following section sketches three waves of Black liberation efforts and the role that Black Christianity has played in each.

Black Christianity and Black Movements Black political resistance is a spiritual endeavor. It is predicated on hope for a liberated future, a radical imagination that surpasses contemporary understandings, and sustained faith in the notion that Black people’s humanity will one day be fully recognized. Throughout US history, Black communities have labored toward racial justice, and simultaneously across this time, the Black Church operated in various institutional capacities. A genealogy of these liberation efforts reveals how Black Christianity undergirded each movement.

Slavery Abolition Movement and the “Invisible” Black Church The oppressive nature of US chattel slavery negatively implicated the development of Black institutions such as the Black family, yet allowed, and in many cases encouraged, the adoption of Christian beliefs. The transference of Christianity from slave owners to enslaved Africans was not a uniform process. Enslaved Africans were spiritual people prior to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, so believing in God was not necessarily something forced upon them. Rather, they carried memories of their old gods into the United States. Slave owners had varied opinions about the importation of Christianity into slave communities. Many were initially against it. As Albert Raboteau notes, “Some masters did not allow their slaves to go to church and ridiculed the notion of religion for slaves because they refused to believe that Negroes had souls” (2004:220). Others believed that proselytizing enslaved Africans into Christianity would be beneficial for not only destroying their social cohesion upheld 315

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by lingering native cultural practices but also in serving as a mechanism of social control (Frazier 1974; Costen 1993). One of the earliest waves of Black liberation efforts was the Slavery Abolitionist Movement, which lasted from 1830–1870. Its primary objective was to eradicate the legalized system of racial and economic exploitation that was US chattel slavery. Also evident in this movement was political agency within the lives of enslaved Africans. That is, despite the constraints placed upon every aspect of their lives, enslaved communities still found ways to resist their oppression. One area in which this agency was particularly apparent was in their religious lives. Although slave owners often dictated how enslaved Africans engaged the Christian faith, enslaved communities resisted by finding innovative ways to incorporate their native African traditions and spirituality into their Christian praxis (Raboteau 2004). For this reason, during this time, the Black Church was referred to as the “invisible institution” (Frazier 1974). This title “refers to secret religious meetings held by enslaved Africans, during which they forged a Christian tradition that responded more appropriately to their concerns and condition” (Pinn and Pinn 2002:12). Scholars have additionally characterized the early Black Church as a “protest organization” (Lincoln 1968; Morris 1984) precisely because it was born in the midst of Black struggle during slavery. This element of protest is evidenced by enslaved Africans’ determination to modify the version of Christianity they embodied beyond the surveillance of white slave owners. These unapologetic yet unauthorized religious meetings “were illegal and could result in severe punishment” (Pinn and Pinn 2002:12). Nonetheless, the Black Church originated in these subversive moments, and the inherent link between Black faith and Black protest was established. The Black Church was a meaningful institution both during slavery and in the transition out of slavery into “freedom.” It evolved from originally having no structure to becoming the most structured aspect of Black life. This church structure was pivotal to the success of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM).

The Civil Rights Movement and the Socio-Political Black Church While slavery was overturned with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and fully recognized on Juneteenth 1865 when the last enslaved Africans were notified of the proclamation at Reedy Chapel A.M.E. Church in Galveston, Texas (Hunter 2022), anti-Blackness remained the law of the land through legalized “Jim Crow” segregation. The Civil Rights Movement, which lasted from 1954–1968, set out to abolish the tradition of racial segregation plaguing the US social landscape by promoting integration and unity across racial and ethnic groups. At this time, the Black Church had become the epicenter of Black social life. Because Black people had limited access to community-wide amenities, they often relied on the church to replicate those convivial opportunities (Du Bois 2003; Billingsley and Caldwell 1991). Thus, in addition to its primary religious functions, the Black Church provided social resources – familial, educational, and financial – as well as political resources to the Black community (Barnes 2004). In this, its characterization as a “socio-political” institution becomes evident. Many scholars have analyzed the institutional role of the Black Church in the Civil Rights Movement and found that it assisted in a variety of ways (Morris 1984; Morris 1996; Raboteau 1999). For instance, Josef Sorett notes how “Churches have provided 316

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Black people with an institutional base, a space of ecumenical organizing, and a horizon for imagining the terms of Black life” (2016:22). In offering space for Black people to organize and imagine new realities for the Black community, the Black Church operated as a social movement scene (Leach and Haunss 2007; Creasap 2012). Not only did churches facilitate organizing, but they also played a significant role in distributing information to the community. Christian Smith describes how “rapidly and efficiently information is transmitted to the Black community from the pulpit. This reliable channel for disseminating information greatly enhances the possibility for mass action” (1996:33). Church music also contributed to the radicalization process (Morris 1996; Danaher 2010). The church promoted resource mobilization (Tilly 1978; McAdam 1982; Morris 1984; Simms 2000; Brown and Brown 2003) by offering “social communication networks, facilities, audience, leadership, and money to the movement” (Calhoun-Brown 2000:170). While the Brown vs. Board of Education decision legally overturned Jim Crow segregation laws, internalized anti-Black sentiments among white communities would sustain America’s racial apartheid system for several years. However, things began to change when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, which prohibited discrimination based on race and other social identity markers. This law, among others, ushered in the “color-blind” era (Bonilla-Silva 2013, 2015), which had many implications for Black social life, including Black religious life (Barber 2015). Most pointedly, integration, to an extent, weakened the Black community’s institutional dependence on the Black Church. As such, Black Americans began taking advantage of their new access to the social amenities previously denied to them as well as exercising their options to worship in multi-racial churches (Emerson and Woo 2006; Edwards, Christerson, and Emerson 2013) or practice their faith without a church affiliation at all (Dillon 2015). These changes in the symbiotic relationship between the Black Church and the Black community influenced the nature of Black political action as well.

Black Lives Matter and the Socio-Cultural Black Church Black Lives Matter (BLM), as the contemporary wave of the ongoing Black liberation struggle, began in 2013. This movement sees racial conflict as the byproduct of a social structure predicated upon capitalistic exploitation and settler-colonialism. This framing differs from extant approaches to understanding racism which often reduce racial inequality to the product of an individual's moral failing. Perceiving the race problem, and more specifically anti-Blackness, as a structural rather than personal issue, has compelled the movement to embrace a more radical agenda advocating for transformative societal change (Taylor 2016; Ransby 2018; Garza 2020). However, the BLM movement is not aligned with religious institutions in any official capacities. When reflecting on the structure of BLM, movement co-founder Alicia Garza stated, “A platform in King’s day might have been a church congregation, whereas today a platform could be a social media page” (2020:244). Further describing the religious distinctions between the CRM and BLM movements, Barbara Ransby states, Another set of political actors on the streets of Ferguson in the summer and fall of 2014 were local faith-based civil rights groups that joined forces to form the broadbased Don’t Shoot Coalition. In a different time, the local male clergy would have been in the forefront. But this time was different. Ferguson marked a pivotal turning 317

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point in the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black Freedom Movement in terms of class, gender, and the politics of sexuality. (2018:93) Although BLM is quite distinct from the CRM, religious elements are, indeed, prevalent in both. Nevertheless, the BLM movement has overwhelmingly rejected the movement structure established by the CRM organizers, which centered male leaders and heavily relied on religious institutions and resources. Instead, the women and queer leaders of BLM established an intersectional movement that would address the political concerns of all members of the Black community (Carruthers 2018; Clark, Dantzler, and Nickels 2018; Nummi, Jennings, and Feagin 2019; Claytor 2020). This is evidenced by the emergence of submovements such as #SayHerName and #AllBlackLivesMatter to counteract the impact of early media narratives which focused nearly exclusively on male victims of state-sanctioned violence and police brutality. According to Tehama Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith, this [BLM] movement was founded by queer, Black, Millennial women, and its platform not only rejects the politics of respectability, but it requires its participants to take seriously the notion that since Black communities are diverse (e.g., family structure, gender, sexuality, immigration status), so are the needs of its members; it centers an intersectional approach to Black politics. (2019:190) It is evident that the BLM movement goals are centered around identifying root causes of race, class, and gender inequality and imagining new ways to eradicate them (Taylor 2016; Ransby 2018). The Black Church has operated as a socio-cultural institution throughout the BLM movement. Indeed, contemporary Black Christians “are intentionally embracing some symbolic aspects of the Christian religion while rejecting elements they deem problematic … Still, Black Christians today might make deliberate efforts to define their faith, rather than be defined by it” (Allen 2019:8). In this socio-historical moment, engagement with Black Christianity at the cultural level is particularly prominent in popular and digital culture via GIFs, memes, and other virtual trends (Smith-Shomade 2016) and through its longstanding influence on Black institutions, such as historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Black Greek letter fraternities and sororities (BGLOs), and other Black voluntary associations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League, all of which have supported Black political engagement over time. For Black Christians involved in the BLM movement, their religious convictions influence their racial politics and engagement with Black culture, and in turn, these politics and cultural values inform their social action (Chapman 1996).

Racialized Religion and the Role of Black Theology Black Christianity is not a monolith; there is much diversity within this racialized religious tradition. From different denominational beliefs and practices to the accommodation of regional aesthetics, Black Christianity is embodied and expressed in distinct ways across the United States. Denominations dictate the various ways believers embrace and 318

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perform their Christian identities. These different approaches to Black religiosity are so wide-ranging that Jason Shelton and Ryon Cobb established a new coding scheme to distinguish “between traditional and nontraditional liberal and conservative Protestant affiliations with roots inside and outside of the Greater Black Church … captur[ing] similarities and differences in African Americans’ religious sensibilities” (2018:738). Denominational differences can be quite stark in practices, beliefs, and politics, and political beliefs have a strong impact on how Black Christians engage with faith. Darren Sherkat and Christopher Ellison (1991) identified what they called “religious switchers” – those who transferred from one denomination to another – and found that a switch is often for political reasons, with members leaving conservative churches for more liberal ones that better align with their activist leanings. Understanding various prominent Black theological approaches helps explain how politics are woven into Black Christianity and how this has changed over time.

This-Worldly and Other-Worldly Theologies A long-standing debate within Christian communities across the globe is whether adherents should focus on matters of this world, which the faith defines as temporary, or, instead, pay their attention to the eternal life they are promised through Jesus Christ. Mary PattilloMcCoy characterized the this-worldly versus other-worldly debate as the “tension between fighting problems of the world and looking hopefully toward salvation in the next world” (1998:770). Aldon Morris (2001) argued that other-worldly beliefs produce a “culture of subordination” that represses collective action. Du Bois’s (1995) concept of “religious fatalism,” which referenced the early tendency for Black Christians to seize upon the comforting dream of eternal life, makes the same point. John Delehanty used “comfortable church culture” to illustrate how other-worldly ideologies seem to “limit the sustained political engagement with systemic problems” (2016:54). Ultimately, other-worldly theology offers a justification for churches to opt out of addressing social problems such as racism and poverty. This-worldly theology, on the other hand, perceives that God cares about social inequality and sides with those who are oppressed. Black Christians who adopt this-worldly theology commit themselves to resisting societal ills and understand this liberative work to be part of their role and responsibility as a member of Christian faith. Rupe Simms reported how biblical teachings are used by some Black Christians “to ‘conscientize’ the masses and strengthen their opposition to the existing order” (2000:108). In doing so, he illustrated the effectiveness of using popular and widely accepted artifacts, such as religious beliefs, as tools to mobilize people toward a political goal. Social gospel theology, Black liberation theology, and womanist theology are the most common theologies across Black Christian denominations, and all fall within the this-worldly category.

(Black) Social Gospel Theology The social gospel, at large, is “the activists’ interpretation of the Gospel of Christ” (Pinn 2007:218). Social gospel theology originated, formally, during the 1890s. As a theology, or a systematic study of religious beliefs, the social gospel, from its outset, attempted to respond to society’s sin of inequality. This tradition is distinct in that it addresses systemic and institutional issues and believes it can pursue “social salvation” while responding to 319

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such issues (Evans 2015:196). In this regard, some scholars refer to the social gospel as a social movement. Rejecting literal interpretations of scripture and apocalyptic end time scenarios, social gospelers focused on using religion to address social problems and respond to injustices. While many social gospelers believed in the indispensable role of their religious institutions to create societal change, their idealism took root as a movement both within and outside these bodies. (Evans 2017:223) The Black Church helped demonstrate the utility of the Social Gospel Movement (Dorrien 2015, 2018). Because of their commitment to providing poverty-alleviating social services through their various ministry efforts, Evelyn Higginbotham (1993) referred to Black churches as “mediating structures,” as they worked to transition the Black community from struggle to self-determination. James Cone similarly argued that “The Black struggle for freedom was born in the church and has always had religious overtones” (1999:127). While the social gospel tradition pushed factions within the broader Christianity community to enact their faith in an innovative way, some members of the religious community perceived that it fell short in particular areas. Certain Black Christians believed that social gospel theology could more pointedly target society’s sin of racism and, consequently, began to carve out their own Black social gospel (Luker 1991; Dorrien 2015, 2018). This racialized social gospel, embraced by the 1960s Black Christian community, includes, but is not limited to, comprehensive social and human services such as settlement houses, food banks, prison visit programs, and support for homeless communities (Billingsley 2003; Barnes 2004; Littlefield 2015; Chaves and Eagle 2016). Anthony Pinn charts this history more clearly when noting that African American ministers who found troubling the lack of attention to racism by white social gospelers rethought social Christianity in light of African Americans' experience, [and so] churches with the necessary resources formalized this commitment by constructing “institutional” churches that provided job training, childcare, educational opportunities, and housing as part of their religious instruction. (2007:219) The Black social gospel ultimately paved the way for the emergence of Black liberation theology in the late 1960s.

Black Liberation Theology Liberation theology first originated in Latin America, particularly among Catholic communities, as a way to read resistance to oppression into the gospel (Gutiérrez 1972). Due to its applicability to other systems of injustice across the globe, it was later adopted by other racially oppressed religious communities such as Black and Palestinian Christians. Many theologians contributed to delineating how the gospel of Christ mirrors the plight of Black people in the United States of America. James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011) is considered a foundational text on Black liberation theology because it crystalizes the distinction between Black and white Christianity, revealing how Black people can align 320

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with the promise of Christianity in ways white people cannot imagine. By connecting the crucifixion of Christ with the oppression of Black people in such a physical and embodied manner, Cone (1997) conceptualizes the faith in a way that inherently excludes white people. In this tradition, Black people are able to exist within the broader Christian umbrella yet hold starkly different understandings of the faith. Black liberation theology is one of the most prominent this-worldly ideologies. Cone explained that the “purpose of Black Theology is to place the actions of Black people toward liberation in the Christian perspective, showing that Christ himself is participating in the Black struggle for freedom” (1970:53). Black liberation theology reached its peak in the 1970s while encouraging a provocative re-imagining of religious and racial politics. While this theological approach remains popular, it was also criticized for its oversight of other axes of inequality perpetuating oppression in the Black community.

Womanist Theology Womanist theology draws on and departs from Black liberation theology, addressing how Black Christianity can improve regarding combating the sexism (Barnett 1993; Grant 1989; Lincoln and Mamiya 1990) and LGBTQIA+ intolerance (Ward 2005; Jeffries IV, Dodge, and Sandfort 2008) it has promoted in the past. Like Black liberation theology, womanist theology forces Christianity to grapple with its complicity in sustaining both sexism and racism in society while also drawing attention to the Black Church’s role in promoting cis-heteropatriarchy. Womanist theologians describe this praxis as “asking new questions of the Black Church community, in order to examine and confront openly the ideological nature and function of patriarchy in the Black Church” (Sanders et al. 1989:93). They go on to note that, “a womanist liberation theological ethic rejects heuristic concepts such as ‘heteropatriarchal familialistic ideology’ and ‘compulsory heterosexism’ but seeks instead heuristic models that explore sacred power and benevolent humanity” (Sanders et al. 1989:93). Womanist theologians often describe this approach as reading the Black woman into the scriptures (Gilkes 2001; Floyd-Thomas 2006; West 2006; Cannon, Townes, and Sims 2011). Put succinctly, “a Black womanist liberation Christian ethic is a critique of all human domination in light of Black women’s experience, a faith praxis that unmasks whatever threatens the well-being of the poorest woman of color” (Sanders et al. 1989:94). Black theology remains a prominent framework for bridging social justice ideologies with Christian faith, specifically ones concerned with Black liberation. Altogether, these theological traditions demonstrate how religion is racialized (and politicized) within the Black community, thus, operating as a long-standing racial project. As scholars continue to interrogate the intersection of race and religion with politics and social movements, it will be increasingly important to also consider how theology might be dictating political ideologies and behaviors.

Conclusion This chapter has provided an overview of the legacy of Christianity in Black communities and in Black liberation movements. In doing so, it has elucidated how Black Christianity has and continues to operate as a racial project because when religion is racialized in this way, it contributes to racial identity formation and reifies race as a prominent organizing aspect of society. 321

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While the body of literature on white Christian nationalism continues to grow, a similar level of attention should be paid to the tradition of Black Christian radicalism. Lincoln recounted that Black religion is self-consciously “Black.” Its claims to an identity as a separate way of faith rest upon the presumed uniqueness of the Black experience in America and elsewhere in the world, and upon the theological understanding that God is on the side of the oppressed. (1974:115) The sociological imperative is to examine this social fact and assess its implications for how we think about race, religion, and social movements. And this imperative extends beyond the Black–white racial binary. Recent sociological literature on religion has fixated on white Christians (Whitehead and Perry 2020; Butler 2021), multi-racial churches (Edwards et al. 2013), and those categorized as “nones” (Pew 2015) and “dones” (Packard and Ferguson 2019), resulting in a surprising neglect of the large demographic whose daily actions and attitudes are governed by their race, faith, and spirituality. Religion remains a powerful force in society. In this regard, it remains increasingly important that sociologists understand racialized religion (Yukich and Edgell 2020), that is, the religious beliefs, behaviors, and sense of belonging (Schnabel 2020) of racialized communities.

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Black Christianity and Black Liberation Carruthers, Charlene A. 2018. Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Chapman, Mark L. 1996. Christianity on Trial: African-American Religious Thought Before and After Black Power. New York: Orbis Books. Chaves, Mark, and Alison J. Eagle. 2016. “Congregations and Social Services: An Update from the Third Wave of the National Congregations Study.” Religions 7(55):1–9. Clark, Amanda D., Prentiss A. Dantzler, and Ashley E. Nickels. 2018. “Black Lives Matter: (Re) Framing the Next Wave of Black Liberation.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 42:145–172. Claytor, Cassi P. 2020. Black Privilege: Modern Middle-Class Blacks with Credentials and Cash to Spend. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cone, James H. 1970. “Black Consciousness and the Black Church: A Historical-Theological Interpretation.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 387(1):49–55. Cone, James H. 1997[1975]. God of the Oppressed. New York: Orbis Books. Cone, James H. 1999. Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968–1998. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Cone, James H. 2011. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. New York: Orbis Books. Costens, Melva W. 1993. African American Christian Worship. 2nd ed. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. Creasap, Kimberly. 2012. “Social Movement Scenes: Place-Based Politics and Everyday Resistance.” Sociology Compass 6(2):182–191. Danaher, William F. 2010. “Music and Social Movements.” Sociology Compass 4(9):811–823. Darity Jr., William A., and Samuel L. Myers. 1998. Persistent Disparity: Race and Economic Inequality in the United States since 1945. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Delehanty, John D. 2016. “Prophets of Resistance: Social Justice Activists Contesting Comfortable Church Culture.” Sociology of Religion 77(1):37–58. Dillon, Michele. 2015. “Christian Affiliation and Disaffiliation in the United States: Generational and Cultural Change.” in Handbook of Global Contemporary Christianity, edited by S. J. Hunt, pp. 346–365. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Dorrien, Gary. 2015. The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dorrien, Gary. 2018. Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B., ed. 1898. Some Efforts of American Negroes for Their Own Social Betterment. Atlanta, GA: Atlanta University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1995[1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Group. Du Bois, W. E. B. 2003 [1903]. The Negro Church. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Edwards, Korie L., Brad Christerson, and Michael O. Emerson. 2013. “Race, Religious Organizations, and Integration.” Annual Review of Sociology 39:211–228. Ellison, Christopher G., and Darren E. Sherkat. 1999. “Identifying the Semi-Involuntary Institution: A Clarification.” Social Forces 78(2):793–800. Emerson, Michael O., with Rodney Woo. 2006. People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Evans, Christopher H. 2015. “The Social Gospel as ‘the Total Message of the Christian Salvation.’” American Society of Church History 84(1):196–198. Evans, Christopher H. 2017. The Social Gospel in American Religion: A History. New York: New York University Press. Floyd-Thomas, Stacey. 2006. Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society. New York: New York University Press. Frazier, E. F. 1974. The Negro Church in America. New York: Schocken Books. Garza, Alicia. 2020. The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart. New York: Penguin Random House. Gilkes, Cheryl T. 1998. “Plenty Good Room: Adaptation in a Changing Black Church.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 558:101–121. Gilkes, Cheryl T. 2001. If It Wasn't for the Women…: Black Women's Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community. New York: Orbis Books.

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Black Christianity and Black Liberation Raboteau, Albert J. 1999. African-American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Raboteau, Albert J. 2004[1978]. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press. Ransby, Barbara. 2018. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Sanders, Cheryl J., Cherly T. Gilkes, Katie G. Cannon, Emilie M. Townes, M. S. Copeland, and bell hooks. 1989. “Roundtable Discussion: Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5(2):83–112. Schnabel, Landon. 2020. “Religion across Axes of Inequality in the United States: Belonging, Behaving, and Believing at the Intersections of Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality.” Religions 11(6):1–27. Shelton, Jason E., and Ryon J. Cobb. 2018. “Black Reltrad: Measuring Religious Diversity and Commonality Among African Americans.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56(4):737–764. Sherkat, Darren E., and Christopher G. Ellison. 1991. “The Politics of Black Religious Change: Disaffiliation from Black Mainline Denominations.” Social Forces 70(2):431–454. Simms, Rupe. 2000. “Christ is Black with a Capital “B”: African-American Christianity and the Black Studies Project.” The Western Journal of Black Studies 24(2):100–111. Smith, Christian. 1996. Disruptive Religion: The Force of Faith in Social Movement Activism. New York: Routledge. Smith-Shomade, Beretta E. 2016. “‘Don’t Play with God!’ Black Church, Play and Possibilities.” Souls 18(2–4):321–337. Sorett, Josef. 2016. “A Fantastic Church? Literature, Politics, and the Afterlives of Afro-Protestantism.” Public Culture 29(1):17–26. Stefanic, Jean, and Richard Delgado. 2012. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2016. From #BLACKLIVESMATTER to Black Liberation. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. New York: Random House. Trulear, Harold D. 1985. “Sociology of Afro-American Religion: An Appraisal of C. Eric Lincoln’s Contributions.” The Journal of Religious Thought 42(2):44–55. Ward, Elijah G. 2005. “Homophobia, Hypermasculinity and the US Black Church.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 7(5):493–504. West, Traci C. 2006. Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Whitehead, Andrew L., and Samuel L. Perry. 2020. Taking American Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Preston N. 1971. “Toward a Sociological Understanding of the Black Religious Community.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 54(3):260–270. Winant, Howard. 2001. “White Racial Projects.” in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, edited by Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray, pp. 97–112. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yukich, Grace, and Penny Edgell. 2020. Religion is Raced: Understanding American Religion in the Twenty-First Century. New York: New York University Press.

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26 PEACEBUILDING IN FRAGILE, WAR-TORN SOCIETIES IN AFRICA Anne Kubai

Abstract This chapter covers peacebuilding in three countries in the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes regions of Africa – South Sudan, Burundi, and Central Africa Republic (CAR) – characterized by fragility and protracted intra-state conflicts. The first section presents a preamble to peacebuilding in these African countries, while the second section illustrates how the warring parties have been wrestling with peace (dis)agreements in each country. The last section revisits William Zartman’s “ripeness” concept to reflect on when, or at what point, parties in protracted intra-state conflicts might be more amenable to opening peace negotiations. The active role of churches and religious organizations in peacebuilding is also highlighted. The chapter emphasizes that, though each conflict is different in important respects, the distinctive characteristics of each case are crucial determinants of the propitious moments for initiating peacebuilding. It suggests that agreements signed by the various groups failed to bring about peace because commitment to ending hostilities is contingent upon a shared vision of the benefits of a peaceful resolution, in which power is the prize to be won. And because there cannot be more than one winner in a war, taking an opportunity when a ripe moment appears is often not an attractive option.

Introduction In academic discourse, “the meaning of the term ‘peacebuilding’ has become broader; it now tends to cover activities undertaken before, during, or after a violent conflict to prevent, end, and/or transform violent conflicts and to create the necessary conditions for sustainable peace” (Reychler 2010:4). Political transitions, especially in fragile and conflictaffected countries, do not occur along a smooth or simple trajectory; the peacebuilding path is fraught with tensions, creating turbulence that affects the political and social fabric in profound and sometimes unexpected ways). Therefore, inclusive peacebuilding activities 326

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-35

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are needed during conflicts to negotiate short-term goals, such as cease-fires and cessation of hostilities, and to create dialogue needed for establishing long-term peace processes. This is important because, “accountability, reconciliation, truth-telling and reparations are the instrumental objectives that pave the way toward broader targets, thereby establishing a framework for the building of sustainable and effective democratic processes and institutions” (Huyse and Salter 2008:181) which can promote peace and security. During the past two decades, peacebuilding has attracted the attention of scholars in various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, yielding a growing body of knowledge both theoretical and empirical. Knowledge has also grown among practitioners, particularly in the development and humanitarian sectors. The humanitarian-peacebuilding-development nexus approach is now recognized as crucial to the social and economic re-construction of fragile and conflict-affected societies. This discussion of peacebuilding in fragile and war-torn societies addresses a crucial aspect of peacebuilding in protracted conflict settings. Notably, the concepts of peace and peacebuilding are not static; they are subject to the impact of both local and global dynamics over both time and space. Therefore, this chapter is limited to exploring specific contexts of intra-state peacebuilding in countries marked by protracted political violence, fragility, and instability, with a view to foregrounding the complexity of peacebuilding. In many cases of protracted intra-state conflicts and violations of human rights, sustainable peacebuilding has proven to be challenging. There is no satisfactory answer as to why because cases of intra-state violence and peacebuilding are marked by a variety of factors and actors, though they may sometimes have some common features. In addition, peacebuilding processes have proven to be unpredictable, often unfolding in unexpected ways, as illustrated in the case of Rwanda. Nevertheless, to reflect on when, or more precisely, at what point parties in protracted intra-state conflicts might be more amenable to starting peace negotiations, William Zartman’s concept of “ripeness” is helpful (1985, 2000, 2001, 2006, 2008). The concept addresses a significant question for peacebuilding, namely, when or at what point in a protracted conflict is peace most likely to be negotiated successfully? Zartman suggests that “parties resolve their conflict only when they are ready to do so, when other alternatives are blocked. Even proposals that have been there before appear attractive now, and parties to the conflict grab them only at the right moment” (2001:8). He further notes that ripeness of time is one of the absolute essences of diplomacy. “Certain mediation initiatives are not advisable because the conflict is not yet ripe” (2001:8). The essence of the ripe moment is the recognition that the warring parties are in “a mutually hurting stalemate optimally associated with an impending past or recently avoided catastrophe” (2001:8). An interesting question is how parties know that they must seize the moment. What internal and external conditions help the parties to perceive ripeness and, therefore, initiate peace negotiations? One can also question the extent to which individual subjectivities of the responsible parties can influence their determination of the ripe moment other than chance pertinent factors, or some combination thereof. Available evidence suggests that there are many cases in which increased suffering resulting from conflict might strengthen resistance to peace negotiations rather than encourage them. Not all moments deemed ripe lead to peace negotiations, and more suffering does not necessarily lead to a way out of an impasse. More importantly, peacebuilding processes are complex and fraught with both short-term and enduring challenges, including a deep sense of personal loss, pain, trauma, and memories of the survivors of mass political violence and/or grave violations of human rights. To these can be added the competing 327

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demands of justice and reconciliation as well as social and religious identities, all of which are often non-negotiable. Examples presented in this chapter are drawn specifically from three African cases: South Sudan, Burundi, and Central African Republic (CAR). They have been selected for two reasons:



1. Geographically, these countries are in the Horn and the Great Lakes regions, two of Africa’s most volatile regions prior to the currently unfolding crisis that has engulfed the Sahel. Though these countries are different in important respects, they have endured protracted intra-state violent conflicts, resulting in loss of life and displacement of sections of the population. For several decades, the citizens have endured deadly conflicts and multi-dimensional challenges to peacebuilding. 2. Though these countries are affected by war to differing degrees, and each country context is shaped by local cultural, historical, and political circumstances, the countries are linked by their fragility, such as the phenomena of communal violence and intra-state rebel groups and religious militias, often operating trans-nationally across international borders. In addition, diverse militia and rebel groups are also involved as non-state actors in the local conflicts. Therefore, besides the potential benefit of a comparative lens, a regional approach is helpful for understanding the intricacies of peacebuilding in the wider context of Africa’s Horn and Great Lakes regions. In these case studies, we see the impact of numerous unsuccessful peace initiatives, and the role the churches and religious organizations play.

Peacebuilding is clearly both a large global and local issue. It is complex, not least because every fragile and conflict-affected context has its peculiarities but also due to the inherent unpredictability of peace processes and their outcomes. Nevertheless, international peacebuilding perspectives demonstrate the challenges, lessons, and prospects of peace initiatives where relevant.

Why Peacebuilding? In the analysis of conflict trends, the so-called post-Cold War period is described in peace literature as marked by a wide range of violent conflicts and the phenomena of both intrastate as well as inter- and intra-ethnic struggle, which does not fit well with the conventional definition of civil war. This calls to mind Robert McNamara’s apparently prophetic warning that, with the end of the Cold War, the previous intra-state conflicts would re-emerge, perhaps with more intensity than before. The end of the Cold War in 1989 did not, and will not, in and of itself, result in an end to conflict. We see evidence of the truth of that statement on all sides. The Iraq invasion of Kuwait, the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, the turmoil in northern Iraq, the tension between India and Pakistan, the unstable relations between North and South Korea, and the conflicts across the face of sub-Saharan Africa in Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. These all make clear that the world of the future will not be without conflict, conflict between desperate groups within nations and conflicts extending across national borders. Racial, religious, and ethnic tensions will remain. Nationalism will be a powerful force across the globe. Political revolutions will erupt as societies advance. Historic disputes over political 328

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boundaries will endure. And economic disparities among and within nations will increase as technology and education spread unevenly around the world. The underlying causes of Third World conflict that existed long before the Cold War began remain now that it has ended. (McNamara 1999:86) These observations could not be truer today. As noted elsewhere (Kubai and Angi 2019), these situations have become known as “complex political emergencies.” Unlike conventional inter-state warfare, they target social structures and networks, with the usual result of “destruction of the affected people’s political, economic, social-cultural and health infrastructures” (Mollica et al. 2004:2058). Complex political emergencies create a wide range of problems experienced at the individual, family, community, and societal levels. Societies that have experienced complex political emergencies and human rights violations are marked by an erosion of normal protective support systems and a fractured social fabric which, in turn, increases the risks of diverse problems and amplifies pre-existing problems of social justice and inequality (Clancy and Hamber 2008). Peacebuilding in such circumstances requires a multi-pronged approach to heal often deeply wounded war-torn communities. Conflict should be understood “as a process of destruction or deterioration rather than as an event … [R]econstructing society after armed conflict is equally a multi-faceted process that moves beyond addressing individual needs” (Hamber and Gallagher 2014:2) to include social and economic justice issues. Thus, peacebuilding requires multiple dimensions as it includes the (re-)building of a new social fabric, often based on new webs of inter-personal, family, and community social relations. It is usually not possible for peacebuilding processes to re-create the conditions of life for individuals and communities before the devastation caused by the conflict. For instance, life that has been lost cannot be brought back, limbs that have been lost can only be replaced with prosthetics, and people whose lives are shattered can only pick up the pieces and “move on” as said in Rwanda and northern Uganda (Kubai 2022a, b). Similarly, a fractured social fabric cannot be restored to its original state of wholeness, yet new social relationships can be developed and eventually contribute to repairing the broken social fabric or creating a new one. However, it is often difficult to predict how the outcomes of such processes will turn out, as many cases have shown. In societies emerging from armed conflict, peacebuilding deals with the political, economic, and psychological aftermath of large-scale violence. It seeks to address the root causes of the violence, such as social exclusion, denial of political power, political oppression, and economic marginalization, as well as the well-being of the people concerned. For instance, building trust among neighbors and providing a sense of security is crucial to sustainable positive and transformative peacebuilding. Many people define their identity in terms of their social relations embedded in beliefs and practices and place the communal good above that of individuals (Triandis 2001; Kubai 2018). However, this does not mean that their individual identities are unimportant, and people usually negotiate multiple identities, the importance of which varies according to context. In everyday life, the communal ethos is demonstrated in a web of human relations and in people’s commitment to community affairs. Intra-state conflicts target the “human software” (Kubai 2022a) of societies, that is, the socially intangible and deeply embedded structures and networks, usually resulting in the “destruction of the affected people’s political, economic, social-cultural, and health infrastructures” (Mollica et al. 2004). 329

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Massive attacks on civilian populations, massive loss of homes and belongings, and massive displacement of people leave them not only impoverished but also confused and frightened. Building sustainable, inclusive, and transformative peace, therefore, requires re-imagining a way that contemporary fragile and conflict-affected societies can transcend cycles of intra-state violence and conflict which characterize twenty-first century Africa and other parts of the world.

Wrestling with Peace (Dis)Agreements Zartman argues that mutually hurting stalemate is grounded in cost-benefit analysis and it is fully consistent with public choice of notions of rationality … and public choice studies of war termination and negotiation … which assume that a party will pick the alternative which it prefers, and that a decision to change is induced by increasing pain associated with the present (conflictual) course. (2001:7) Furthermore, Zartman suggests that parties are likely to consider peaceful options if they cannot take unilateral action, such as escalation to victory, and when the “deadlock is painful to both of them, though not in equal degree or for the same reasons” (2008:1). Parties are more likely to explore peaceful options when they realize that the status quo is a negative sum situation, a perception which can be enabled by a mediator. Often, the number of casualties, the material costs of the conflict, a mutually hurting stalemate, and the need for a way out might indicate that the moment is ripe to explore the path to negotiations. However, there are cases in which increased suffering resulting from the conflict might boost resistance rather than generate perceptions that foster negotiations. Thus, not all ripe moments lead to negotiations, and more suffering does not necessarily lead to a way out of an impasse. Yet, “pressure on a party in conflict often leads to psychological reaction of worsening the image of the opponent, a natural tendency which is often decried as lessening chances of reconciliation, but which has the functional advantage of justifying resistance” (Zartman 2001:12). Parties and actors in conflicted societies often wrestle with peace initiatives and agreements, implying not only the competition for victory but also the perils of peacebuilding in which often “in the end no winners, no losers” emerge (Kubai and Angi 2019:1). South Sudan, Burundi, and the CAR are instructive examples.

South Sudan After the referendum that led to South Sudanese independence in July 2011, Africa’s youngest state was faced with the momentous task of building a cohesive society out of deeply divided communities. Decades of debilitating civil strife had left a trail of devastation, intercommunal mistrust, and abject poverty across the country. The country plunged into a horrific civil war in December 2013, 29 months after its independence, and it continued despite numerous peace agreements and attempts at peacebuilding. The root causes of conflict in South Sudan include the absence of common identity among the fighting groups at both the national and regional levels and, more importantly, weak and inept institutions, widespread insecurity, and a vacuum of law, with the attendant entrenched corruption, grave human 330

Peacebuilding in Societies in Africa Table 26.1  South Sudan: Key peace agreements since the civil war began in December 2013 Peace Initiative

Date

Signatories and Key players

Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (ARCRSS)

August 2015

Declaration of Agreement on a Permanent Ceasefire (Khartoum Declaration) Agreement on Outstanding Issues on Security Agreements Agreement on Outstanding Issues of Governance The Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R-ARCSS) Amending the Revitalized Peace Agreement (R-ARCSS):

June 27, 2008

Inter-governmental Authority in Development and the Parties: Transitional Government of National Unity of the Republic of South Sudan (TGoNU), the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army-In Opposition (SPLM/A-IO), the South Sudan Opposition Alliance (SSOA), Former Detainees (FDs), Other Political Parties (OPP) (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) Khartoum-led negotiations

July 6, 2018

Khartoum-led negotiations

August 6, 2018

Khartoum-led negotiations

September 12, 2018

Inter-governmental Authority in Development (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia)

August 4, 2022

Parties to the R-ARCSS

Source: Table drawn by this author with data from signed peace agreements, reports, and other documents.

rights violations, and impunity, all exacerbated by ethnic rivalries and exclusionary politics. From a humanitarian perspective, violence at the regional and local levels remains an obstacle to achieving sustainable peace in the country. As shown in Table 26.1, numerous peace agreements have been signed between/among the warring parties, and multiple actors, facilitators, and mediators continue to search for sustainable peace in South Sudan. Also, the role of the church in South Sudan’s liberation struggle, and its subsequent involvement in peace efforts, is outstanding. The church used its moral authority to be the ecumenical voice. When there was no functioning government, no civil society, no United Nations, no secular NGOs, and even the authority of the local chiefs was eroded by the young “comrades” with guns … wherever there were people, the church was there, providing many of the services that one would normally expect from a government: health care, education,

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emergency relief, food, shelter, and even security and protection. People of all religions looked to the church for leadership. (Ashworth and Ryan 2013:47) The People-to-People Peace Process is an instructive example of how the church has used its moral and religious authority to create a model of grassroots peacebuilding. The model is founded on the following key elements: trust building, telling stories, traditional reconciliation methods, communities’ acknowledgment of their role in building sustainable peace, and the significance of Christian ritual and symbolism (Ashworth and Ryan 2013). The Pope’s prayer and appeal for peace in South Sudan and the Rome Ceasefire Agreement, mediated by the Community of St. Egidio in 2020, are examples of the Catholic Church’s high profile peace initiatives. Nevertheless, the conflict persists. Evidently, the ripe moment for peace in South Sudan has not yet occurred. It seems, therefore, that in this complex conflict, a mutually hurting stalemate might never be recognized by the opposing parties or even occur. Even when the government seemed to be weakened by the tenacity of the rebel groups, and as divisions emerged within and among the warring parties, new groups joined, and the war acquired new impetus. Notably, in January 2020, the leaders admitted that “We (are) mindful of the unprecedented suffering of the people of South Sudan caused by devastating civil war and the urgent need to cease hostilities” (World Council of Churches 2020:1). Nevertheless, “in November, president Salva Kiir Maryadit and opposition leader Riek Machar Teny postponed the formation of the Transitional Government of National Unity to February, saying the conditions at that time were not conducive” (WCC 2020:1). The leaders’ acknowledgment of what can be identified as a hurting stalemate, and their decision to postpone the formation of the Transitional Government of National Unity, lends credence to the suggestion that ripeness depends on the parties’ mutual perception that a negotiated solution is not only possible but also beneficial and their willingness to find it. Therefore, “ripeness is only a condition necessary, but not sufficient for the initiation of negotiations” (Darby and Ginty 2001:9). The persistence and recurrent escalation of conflict despite numerous peace negotiations suggests that a mutually hurting stalemate has a locus in the social and political dimensions of the conflict. Though inter-communal relations are broken, the social fabric is torn asunder, and livelihoods are decimated, the moment must, nonetheless, be perceived as entwined with these factors that create a fluid situation for all involved. It is possible to identify psychosocial dimensions in the subjective and objective elements, the suffering that becomes unbearable, forcing the warring parties to seek a way out. However, this had not happened in South Sudan after eight years of leaders wrestling with peace initiatives. Looking elsewhere offers evidence of when parities can start negotiating peace successfully in protracted inter-state conflicts.

Burundi Burundi obtained independence in 1960; however, the Tutsi–Hutu struggle has dominated intra-group relations and the political landscape, leading to a 12-year (1993–2005) armed conflict during which thousands of people were killed and others displaced. “For many Tutsis, control of the military was seen as vital for their physical survival as a minority. While for the majority Hutus, the Tutsi-dominated army was the main obstacle in realizing their political rights” (Nantulya 2015:1). The agreement known as the Arusha Accords is 332

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credited with taking Burundi out of the devastating protracted civil war. Article 3 noted that since independence, conflict had persisted and resulted in “massive and deliberate killings, widespread violence and exclusion.” Furthermore, there were different views on and interpretations of the root causes of the conflict due to “the current political, economic and socio-cultural situation” in the country. The parties recognized “that acts of genocide, war crimes and other crimes against humanity have been perpetrated since independence against Tutsi and Hutu ethnic communities in Burundi.” Article 4 recognized that “The conflict is fundamentally political, with extremely important ethnic dimensions” and that it “stems from a struggle by the political class to accede to and/or remain in power” (Arusha Accords 2000:17). As illustrated in Table 26.2, the predominant element in the peace initiatives in Burundi is the myriad actors in a protracted conflict setting marked by recurrent massacres of genocide proportions. In June 2004, the African Mission in Burundi (AMIB) was replaced by a 5,600-strong United Nations (UN) peace support mission, the UN Operation in Burundi, with the hope that it would facilitate the implementation of the Ceasefire Agreements and stabilize the situation which would be managed by the newly created national defense and security structures (Boshoff and Very 2006). In addition, the church has been an important peacebuilding actor, for example, when the major Tutsi parties rejected the powersharing mechanisms proposed in Pretoria. To strengthen its organizational capacity, the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) appointed religious leaders – ten of the 17 Provincial Electoral Commissions were chaired by priests or pastors. By appointing many religious leaders, CENI “intended to reinforce its neutrality and reassure the Burundian people” (Boshoff et al. 2010:103). The registration of 90% of voters was “an unprecedented achievement that paved the way for the smooth running of the elections” (Boshoff et al. 2010:104). Thus, the church leaders played a key role in facilitating the smooth running of the elections, which had been delayed for some time. However, despite the agreements signed between the government and the different groups, violence with a tendency to escalate to armed conflict persisted. The peace process was stuck in a stalemate.

Central African Republic (CAR) The Central African Republic (CAR) is “one of the most unstable countries in the world” (The Sentry 2018). For decades, the CAR has endured political instability and violence created by diverse warring groups with varying political and economic interests (Pastoor 2013). Since 2013, the CAR conflict has repeatedly made international headlines, as France and the UN raised alarm over what seemed to be the precursors of genocide in the country. Ethnic purges and other mass atrocities against civilians occurred frequently, even though they were not generally viewed as such. On his visit to Bangui in 2017, Adama Dieng, the UN’s special adviser for the prevention of genocide, observed that while armed groups manipulate and incite ethnic and religious hatred, militias and politicians are complicit. However, religious sentiments are not instrumentalized. Amid a plethora of factors, marginalized and competing religious identities ignite flames of deadly conflicts. Available evidence suggests that though CAR has endured violent conflicts for several decades, “the current crisis is the first time violence is mobilized along religious lines” (Pastoor 2013:20) between Muslims and Christians. This notwithstanding, religious groups play an important role in encouraging trust building. For example, the National Interfaith Peace Platform (NIPP), which included Archbishop 333

Anne Kubai Table 26.2  Burundi. Main peace agreements/initiatives Peace Initiative

Date

Lead/Key players/Representatives

Talks for political reconciliation between UPRONA and CNDD Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi (Arusha Accords/Accords d'Arusha)

September 1996–May 1997

Community of Sant Egidio

August 28, 2000

Transitional government (TG), the CNDD-FDD and FNL factions agreed to a ceasefire, which was violated immediately Deployment of the African Mission in Burundi (AMIB) to support implementation Arusha Accords and the ceasefire protocols Power sharing, defense, and security protocols signed with the CNDD-FDD Ceasefire agreement signed with CNDD-FDD Agreement of Principles towards Lasting Peace, Security and Stability in Burundi Comprehensive Ceasefire Agreement

October–December 2002

Julius Nyerere (Tanzanian) and Nelson Mandela (South Africa) as mediators, UN Representative The government of the Republic of Burundi and 16 different national groups and alliances Transitional government, CNDDFDD, and FNL factions

Bujumbura Declaration on the Burundi Peace Process

December 2008

October 2003

African Union African Mission in Burundi (AMIB)

October 2003

TG and CNDD-FDD Pretoria

October 2003

TG and CNDD-FDD Dar-es-Salaam Government of the Republic of Burundi and PALIPEHUTU, Dar es Salaam

June 2006

September 2006

Government of the Republic of Burundi and PALIPEHUTU – FNL Reginal Initiative – Summit of the Heads of State and Government in the Great Lakes

Source: Table drawn by this author with data from signed peace agreements, reports, and other documents.

Dieudonné Nzapalainga, Pastor Guerekoyame-Gbangou, and a Muslim leader, Imam Oumar Kobine Layama made significant contributions in peacebuilding between Muslims and Christians (Knoope and Buchanan-Clarke 2017). The NIPP used radio to invite people across the country to participate in the process of reconciliation and end cycles of violence. However, the visit by Pope Francis to a mosque under siege from armed Christian militias in Bangui, and his message of peace and reconciliation remains the most notable initiative of the Catholic Church to use its (highest) moral and spiritual authority to facilitate peacebuilding in the CAR. The participants in the 2015 Bangui National Forum (BNF) state that they are 334

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mindful of our duty to act as worthy advocates of the views, expectations, and aspirations of our compatriots in taking part in the work of the Bangui National Forum … reaffirming our deep commitment to the process of dialogue and reconciliation as the best means of restoring a just and lasting peace, the foundation for comprehensive development in the Central African Republic. (Chargé d’affaires, S/2015/344:2) These affirmations bring to the fore the subjectivities underpinning the BNF and previous agreements. This further illustrates the role of the psychological dimension in reducing the chances of realizing both the objective and subjective goals, namely, identifying the ripe moment and the practical implementation of processes and activities to get the parties out of a hurting stalemate. No wonder the 2019 peace accord notwithstanding, disputed elections in December 2020 triggered fresh violence and the emergence of new alliances of armed militia groups. Today, cycles of widespread violent conflicts continue to pose a threat to lives and livelihoods, and the prospects of envisioning a ripe moment to initiate negotiations remain remote. As is the case in South Sudan and Burundi, a common perception of the peace dividends continues to elude the state and non-state armed actors with diverse interests in CAR.

Discussion Based on these three examples of fragile conflict-affected societies, it is evident that, though each conflict is different in important respects, the distinctive characteristics of each case are crucial determinants of the propitious moments for initiating peacebuilding. Implicit in this assumption is the idea that a moment presents itself or is identified as an opportunity for parties in conflict to initiate peacebuilding. However, considering all the agreements and initiatives in these three case studies, the ripe moment is rarely easily recognizable in the interfaces of numerous unsuccessful peace negotiation initiatives. There is a sense in which justified struggles call for greater sacrifices, which have the effect of increasing suffering while strengthening determination for the parties to carry on with the conflict. A mutually harming stalemate depends on the conflict, and often a long period is required before it sinks in (Zartman 1985). Ripeness of the moment can be viewed “in relation to escalation or to critical shifts in the intensity of crisis” (Zartman 1985:7). Dietrich Gunther (2011) considers the concept of ripeness as thinking “out of the box” in the field of conflict resolution. By introducing the “Combined Ripeness Model,” he expanded Zartman’s concept by joining a number of ripeness aspects, which he argues “has led to more predictive capacity for ripeness” (2011:5). According to Gunther, ripeness theories are multiple, rather than one; however, he agrees with Zartman that “there are better times than others to conduct negotiations and the best time is when a conflict is ripe for settlement, that is, timing of negotiations is key” (Gunther 2011:7). Nonetheless, it is not clear from their arguments what aspects one should consider in each case. For instance, in South Sudan, in the context of motley warring groups with varying interests, the parties have made several unsuccessful attempts to build peace. Evidently, a hurting stalemate has not led President Kiir, Vice President Machar, and their supporters out of the impasse, nor have the warring parties identified a ripe moment and seized it. They continue to struggle amid the hostility that has bedeviled the peace negotiations since the civil war broke out. This leads to the conclusion that the causes and nature of the conflict in South Sudan defy Zartman’s suggestion that parties initiate peace negotiations when they are in a hurting stalemate or when they see a ripe moment. Unsurprisingly, in this situation 335

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of fragility, one of the major challenges is bringing together the diverse groups and interests to seek a way out of the civil war. Other scholars have addressed what they consider to be inherent challenges, such as identifying the ripe moment or when a mutually hurting stalemate renders a mediator’s impartiality questionable and, thus, have expanded the concept of ripeness. Relying on Zartman, Christian Scheinpflug clarifies the implications of the objective and subjective elements of ripeness in his suggestion that fortunately, ripeness announces its arrival through objective elements – lack of military gains on both sides, loss in terms of blood and treasure, remarks suggesting to seek a “Way out” – or subjective ones – reserves in terms of money and people, or expressions of agony or having reached a dead end (Zartman 2001:9–10). It is therefore possible to clearly identify when the time for putting down arms has come, even though objective elements do never represent the actual ripe moment. Only the subjective aspects create actual ripeness and only if parties act upon them. (2015:2) Scheinpflug further points out that because of the subjective nature of ripeness, parties to a conflict might either ignore it or fail to recognize it and carry on fighting. Then it is no wonder that in all three case studies, parties seemed to become hardened as every failed peace Table 26.3  Key peace agreements/initiatives in the Central African Republic (CAR) Peace Initiative

Date

Signatories/Key players

Political Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation

June 2, 2019

Agreement on Cessation of Hostilities in the Central African Republic (Accord de Cessation des Hostilites en Republique Centrafricaine) Republican Pact for Peace, National Reconciliation and Reconstruction Commitment Agreement

July 23, 2014

Government of CAR and 14 armed groups referred to as “the Parties” Khartoum Government of CAR and different armed groups. Brazzaville

Ceasefire and Peace Agreement

May 9, 2008

Birao Peace Agreement signed

April 13, 2007

May 5, 2015 April 23, 2015

Transitional government and ten politico-military groups (Representatives of the people) Bangui National Forum Government of CAR and the politico-military groups Bangui Government of CAR and Central African Political and Military Movement – People's Army for the Restoration of Democracy (APRD) Government of the Central African Republic and the Union of Democratic Forces for Unity Birao

Source: Table drawn by the author with data from signed peace agreements, reports, and documents.

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initiative leads to an increased risk of escalation. Apparently, no party is willing to sacrifice its position or lose for the sake of peace.​ In addition, a close examination of why the agreements signed by the various groups shown in Tables 26.1 and 26.2 failed to bring about peace reveals the following:



1. Commitment to ending hostilities is contingent upon a shared vision of the benefits of a peaceful resolution in which power is the prize to be won. And because there cannot be more than one winner in a war, taking an opportunity when a ripe moment appears is often not an attractive option. 2. The nature of the circumstances prior to signing agreements might influence or even determine the sustainability of an agreement signed between/among parties to the conflict. 3. From a psychosocial perspective, research has shown that the impact of conflict is enduring in the memories of the pain and loss inflicted by the other group(s). Peace agreements rarely address the causes and impact of conflict, and this remains a major weakness which undermines agreements and leads to escalation or recurrence of conflicts.

The common trend of failed peace initiatives in these three countries, their differences and the role of the churches in peacebuilding notwithstanding, leads to the conclusion that the often imperceptible impact of experiencing violence at the family and community levels thrives in the interfaces and lurks beneath the peace initiatives, while attention is directed mainly to the leading political rivals in conflict. As illustrated in the peace initiatives above, there is no guarantee that signed agreements resolve the incompatibilities of mutually exclusive goals. Even though the peace agreements reveal the contested issues, when another layer of agreements is superimposed to facilitate the implementation of previous agreements, it makes the process heavily encumbered and the opportunity for a ripe moment quite elusive as the conflict becomes increasingly protracted with each unsuccessful peace initiative.

Conclusion There is no single solution to the challenges of peacebuilding in protracted conflict situations. A plethora of complex factors and competing perceptions of the pathways to peace bring to the fore the challenges of cultural and historical elements of peacebuilding in divided societies. A ripe moment for initiating peace negotiations in a situation fraught with a myriad of challenges and competing interests is unlikely to present itself, even when the parties in conflict are in a hurting stalemate.

References Arusha Accords: Government of Burundi and Other Signatories. 2000. Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi. https://peacemaker​.un​.org​/node​/1207. Ashworth, John, and Maura Ryan. 2013. ““One Nation from Every Tribe, Tongue, and People:” The Church and Strategic Peacebuilding in South Sudan.” Journal of Catholic Social Thought, 10(1):47–67. Boshoff, Henri, and Waldemar Vrey. 2006. “A Technical Analysis of Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration: A Case Study from Burundi.” The African Union Mission in Burundi. Monograph No 125. Institute of Security Studies. Boshoff, Henri et al. 2010. The Burundi Peace Process: From Civil War to Conditional Peace. Monograph 171. Institute for Security Studies. Clancy, Mary, and Brandon Hamber. 2008. “Trauma, Peacebuilding, and Development: An Overview of Key Positions and Critical Questions.” INCORE, University of UIster.

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Anne Kubai Darby, John, and Roger MacGinty. 2021. Guns and Governments: The Management of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gunther, Dietrich. 2011. “The Combined Ripeness Model: Becoming a Ripeness Generalist.” http:// ustpaul​.ca​/upload​-files​/CRC​/WPS​_3​_FINAL​_2_-​_Dietrich​_Gunther. pdf. Hamber, Brandon, and Elizabeth Gallagher, eds. 2014. Psychosocial Perspectives on Peacebuilding. New York: Springer International Publishing. Huyse, Luc, and Mark Salter, eds. 2008. Traditional Justice and Reconciliation after Violent Conflict: Learning from African Experiences. Stockholm: IDEA. Knoope, Peter, and Stephen Buchanan-Clarke. 2017. “Central African Republic: A Conflict Misunderstood.” Occasional Paper 22. Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. Kubai, Anne. 2018. ““No Ugali,” “No Peace,” “No Life:” Nexus of Religion and Human Security in Kenya.” In African Intellectuals and the State of the Continent: Essays in Honour of Professor Sulayman S. Nyang, edited by Olayiwola Abegunrin and Sabella Abidde. New Castle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Kubai, Anne, and Kathleen Angi. 2019. “In the End No Winners, no losers”: Psychosocial Support in Peacebuilding and Reconciliation for Conflict-Affected Societies. Helsinki: FELM. Kubai, Anne. 2022a. “In Search of People-centered Visions of Peace and Security: A Feminist Analysis of Women’s “Everyday” Peacebuilding in Northern Uganda.” In Local Women’s Voices for Peace. Coady Institute, Francis Xavier University. Kubai, Anne. 2022b. “Dealing with Memory, Pain and Loss after Mass Atrocities and Gross Violations of Human Rights in Africa’s Conflict-affected Societies.” Nkwa Project Research Blog Post. McNamara, Robert. 1999. “Reflections on War in the Twenty-First Century.” In Ending War: The Force of Reason, edited by Maxwell Bruce and Tom Milne. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mollica, Richard et al. 2004. “Mental Health in Complex Emergencies.” The Lancet 364:2058–2067. Nantulya, Paul. 2015. “Burundi: Why Arusha Accords are Central.” Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, Washington, DC. https://africa​.org​/sportlight​/burundi​-why​-the -arusha-accords-are-central/ Pastoor, Dennis. 2013. “Vulnerability Assessment of the Christians in the Central African Republic.” https://pla​tfor​mfor​soci​altr​ansf​ormation​.org​/download​/religiousfreedom​/Pastoor​-Central African Reychler, Luc. 2010. “Peacemaking, Peacekeeping, and Peacebuilding”. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/acrefore​/9780190846626​.013​.274. Scheinpflug, Christian. 2015. “Does Successful Diplomacy Rely on ‘Ripe Moments’?” http://www​.bbc​ .co​.uk​/history​/worldwars​/wwtwo​/dday​_beachhead​_01​.shtml The Sentry. 2018. “FEAR, INC.: War Profiteering in the Central African Republic and the Bloody Rise of Abdoulaye Hissène.” https://cdn​.thesentry​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2018​/11​/FearInc​_TheSentry​ _Nov2018​-web​.pdf. Triandis, Harry C. 2001. “Individualism and Collectivism: Past, Present, and Future.” In The Handbook of Culture & Psychology, edited by D. R. Matsumoto. New York: Oxford University Press. UN Chargé d’affaires. 2015. “The Permanent Mission of the Central African Republic to the UN.” S/2015/344, pp. 2–3. https://peacemaker​.un​.org​/sites​/peacemaker​.un​.org​/files​/CF​_150511​_Pac​tfor​ Peac​eRec​onci​liation​.pdf World Council of Churches (WCC).  2020. “New South Sudan Peace Declaration Brokered by Sant’Egidio Comes into Force.” https //www​.oikoumene​.org​/news​/new​-south​-sudan​-peace​-declaration​-brokered​-by​-santegidio​-comes​-into​-force. Zartman, William. l985. Ripe for Resolution: Conflict and Intervention in Africa. New York: Oxford University Press. Zartman, William. 2000. “Ripeness: The Hurting Stalemate and Beyond.” In International Conflict Resolution after the Cold War, edited by Paul Stern and Daniel Druckman. Washington: National Academy Press. Zartman, William. 2001. “The Timing of Peace Initiatives: Hurting Stalemates and Ripe Moments.” In The Global Review of Ethnopolitics 1(1):8–18. https://www​.tandfonline​.com​/doi​/abs​/10​.1080​ /14718800108405087. Zartman, William. 2006. “Negotiating Internal Ethnic and Identity Conflicts in a Globalized World.” https://brill​.com​/view​/journals​/iner​/11​/2​/article​-p253​_3​.xml​?language​=en Zartman, William. 2008. “Ripeness: The Importance of Timing in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution.” E-international Relations, https://www.e-ir.info7pgf/595

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27 THE CONSTRUCTION OF ONLINE CHRISTIAN SACRED SPACE IN INDONESIA Izak Y.M. Lattu Abstract This chapter explores the construction of a “click Christian holy communion” (e-koinonia) in virtual space during the COVID-19 pandemic. Indonesian church members have re-shaped Holy Communion through participation in online Christian rituals. The COVID-19 pandemic encouraged churches to de-construct and re-construct the concept of the ritual and worship sphere from a physical place to a virtual space; the new click-holy communion de-constructs the sacramental sphere from an atomic vicinity to digital space. Previous research has investigated the concept of online ritual, sacred space, the COVID-19 pandemic, and cybertheology. This chapter furthers such research by examining the intersection of the sociology of religion and ritual studies, employing the sociology of space and the sociology of prayer to analyze the practical experience of Christian rituals in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. Data come from online ethnography, focus group discussions with Christian church leaders, in-depth interviews with active church members, and participant observation during Indonesian Christian virtual services in two Calvinist churches in eastern Indonesia. This chapter argues that the concept of Holy Communion in Christian ritual has shifted from atomic place to digital space, creating a click-based Christian ritual (ritual-ick).

Introduction During the COVID-19 pandemic, clicks played an essential role in creating a sense of sacred space for online worship beyond physical sanctuary sites. The pandemic forced Christian churches to construct a “click” sacred space. As of March 2022, Indonesian government data confirmed that COVID-19 had infected 5.9 million and killed 154,000 Indonesians. The high casualty rate forced Indonesians to stay at home, work remotely, and conduct communal religious services digitally. Digital worship saved personal lives and communal verve in a time of crisis. “Click Christian holy communion” (e-koinonia) is an alternative

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-36

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online ritual created in response to pandemic terror, and church members shaped this new form of Holy Communion through their participation in it. The COVID-19 pandemic encouraged the church to de-construct and re-construct the concept of the ritual and worship sphere from a physical place to virtual space. Previous studies have investigated the concept of online ritual, sacred space, and cybertheology (Howard 2010; Duc 2015; Mansour 2022). Nevertheless, those studies explored the construction of online rituals, sacred space, and cyberspace from theological and spiritual perspectives. A sociology of religion view of the bricolage of online and cyberspace during the COVID-19 pandemic crises remains under-studied. Some scholars have explored virtual church service (Foulidi et. al 2020; Bryson et al. 2020; Taylor et al. 2021), but they only investigated Christianity in the Global North while omitting the Global South’s Christian struggles to create new sacred spaces when facing the COVID-19 crises. Therefore, this chapter investigates the re-production of sacred space in Christian virtual worship in Indonesian Reformed churches during the COVID-19 pandemic using the sociological concepts of space, symbol, and ritual. This chapter aims to fill the academic dearth by using an interdisciplinary approach and employing the sociology of space (Berger 1967; Lefebvre 1991; Bourdieu 1989; Low 2016), symbol theory (Durkheim 2001; Turner 1967), and ritual studies (Turner 1969, Bell 1992, Collins 2004). It investigates new click-holy communion needs and re-construction of the sacramental sphere from a physical location to a digital space. Data in this research come from online and in-person participant observation, virtual ethnography, webinars involving media centers of churches, and online interviews with key informants – 50 respondents from churches in eastern Indonesia, queried from September 2020 to December 2022. The research focuses on two mainline churches with a strong Reformed tradition and a firm formality: Minahasa Evangelical Christian Church (GMIM) and the Protestant Church of Maluku (GPM). The findings reveal that online Christian worship during the COVID-19 pandemic, via a sacred code, habitus, material objects, and digital unisonance, created a click-holy communion that transformed sacred and sacramental space from an in-person physical place to an online digital sphere. Christians in Indonesia connected physical place, digital screen, and worship space through virtual means to create a sacramental space and worship. This chapter explores three main themes: 1) pre-pandemic Indonesian Christian ritual, 2) online religious ritual in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 3) ritual-ick (ritual through click) – the Christian e-koinonia created by connecting to digital ritual through live streaming church services.

Pre-pandemic Indonesian Christian Ritual Christianity came to Indonesia in pre-colonial times but became rooted in the Nusantara archipelago throughout the colonial period. Christianity first landed in Indonesia during the pre-colonial Nestorian voyage from Persia to South India in the seventh century. However, this introduction failed to convert Indonesians to Christianity because Nestorian missionaries employed Indonesia as a “rest area” between Persia and India, relaxing from zealous missionary activism (Heuken 2002). The Christian presence in Indonesia became pronounced during colonialism with the advancement of the spice trade from India to the Nusantara archipelago – pre-independence Indonesia (Andaya 1993). Christianity came to the archipelago with three main agendas: merchant, military, and mission. Portuguese 340

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Catholic and Dutch Protestant missionaries were embedded in the spice trade and armed occupation (van Hoevell 1875; Aritonang and Steenbrink 2008) while spreading the “Good News” to the local community and converting Indigenous people. Calvinist missionaries (Zendeling) and the Dutch East Indies Church (Indische Kerk) planted a strong Reformed church bastion in the eastern part of Indonesia. In the nineteenth century, the Dutch missionary organization Nederland Zendeling-Genootschap (NZG) established a Protestant church in the area of Maluku, Central and North Celebes, Timor, and many more islands in the eastern region. Through the Reformed spirit, Protestant missionaries tried to cultivate the Christian Puritan tradition among the churches in the area (Nivens 2011). In the 1930s, Protestant church bodies in eastern Indonesia ruptured into ethnic-based churches such as the Evangelical Christian Church in Minahasa, the Evangelical Christian Church in Timor, and the Protestant Church of Maluku. Despite the break, the Protestant churches maintained the Reformed–Puritan idea of worship despite their independent ethnic character. The exploration here of Christianity and virtual worship focused on two Reformed churches in the eastern part of Indonesia: GMIM and GPM. Two missionaries, Schwarz and Riedel, came to Minahasa in 1930 to introduce Christianity to NZG, a Calvinist mission organization in Rotterdam (Pinontoan 2019). Until 1934, the Christian community in Minahasa belonged to Indische Kerk, the Church of Nederland Indie, after which it became an independent church. Statistics from 2020 show that GMIM has 1,003 congregations and 803,000 church members, making it one of Indonesia’s main churches (Mandagi 2022). In comparison, GPM is the product of Portuguese Catholic mission since 1513 (Andaya 1993), Dutch Protestantism in 1602 (Reid 1988), and NZG work by Joseph Kam, a Dutch Calvinist missionary who came to Maluku in 1814 (Nivens 2011). Synod data from 2018 show the GPM has 760 congregations and 572,405 church members (Saimima 2018). Historical perspectives and doctrinal roots place GMIM and GPM among the traditional churches in Indonesia. Nevertheless, these churches express an open and inclusive theology by which many theologians perceive GMIM and GPM as progressive churches. These two churches are members of the Communion of Churches in Indonesia (PGI), the organization of mainline Protestant churches. Theologically, GMIM and GPM support the idea of pluralism in Indonesia under the national philosophical ideal of “Unity in Plurality” (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika). GPM has changed its central doctrine from Calvinism to Pancasilaism, focusing church teaching on national ideology (Nuban Timo et. al 2021). Similarly, the GMIM church focuses on bringing justice and peace to all Indonesian citizens under the Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Mandagi 2022; GMIM Visio-Mission). GMIM and GPM are open to incorporating local culture into church teachings, even while some other churches remain hostile toward local cultures. Initially, these churches encountered difficulty in altering church services from in-person to online in the first wave of COVID-19. The churches eventually developed teams to establish tools for online worship during the pandemic, such that their media centers now are the most progressive among Indonesian Reformed churches. The magnificence and formality of the Dutch Reformed Church became handicapped during the pandemic, preventing GMIM and GPM from embracing online church services quickly. The magnificence aspect of congregational services requires Indonesian Reformed churches to administer formal and firmed liturgical worship that focuses on the letio continua system or liturgical cycle from liminal to blessings. Reformed liturgical structure reflects Calvin’s central attention on God’s providence and presence in Christian ritual. Therefore, liturgy shows Christian willingness to give life and live for God (Vischer 2003). 341

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Calvin also believed Sunday to be the holiest day. For him and his Geneva congregation, Sunday was the full holiday when people would gather in the church building to show commitment and conviction to God (Vischer 2003; McKim 2004). Magnificent worship requires a valor ritual site because the church building is the epicenter of Indonesian Reformed rites. Indonesian Reformed congregations believe that the church is God’s house where blessing and the Holy Spirit dwell. This understanding leads toward expensive church building development, even in the middle of poverty. Although some congregations live in poverty, a special understanding of religious shrines as the dwelling site of the Holy Spirit inspires the congregation at GMIM and GPM to develop magnificent church buildings. Following Calvin and working for God with the fullness of life, Reformed congregations build magnificent physical sanctuaries because they are the epicenter of Christian vivacity (McKim 2004). Also inspired by Calvin (1559), the Reformed congregation in Indonesia focuses worship on the letio continua in the ecclesiastical structure, doing worship services in fixed liturgical order. These magnificent ritual aspects also show God’s presence in the Sunday service, a holy practice in Reformed worship. And again, because ritual and the presence of God happen in shrines, the church building is the holy place for GMIM and GPM. This inspiration causes GMIM and GPM worship to have structured and magnificent ritual in the physical church building, which has served as a habitual foundation in GMIM and GPM liturgical order and ecclesiastical structure.

COVID-19 and Online Religious Life in Indonesia The COVID-19 pandemic separated Christian congregation members from physical sanctuaries. Fearing Indonesia’s severe fatalities caused by the lethal virus, church members distanced themselves physically from worship places. Nevertheless, Christians accessed church services through online means, where people recognized the Body of Christ in audio or audio-visual devices. The two churches, GMIM and GPM, work in three zones: urban, ruban, and rural. In the rural zone, where the congregation has limited access to technology and internet connection, members distanced themselves from face-to-face fellowship but employed loudspeakers to connect to households. However, fellowship is possible online in urban and ru-ban – a gray area between rural and urban – areas where people can access 4G and 5G internet connection. Indonesia has more internet users than many other countries in the Global South other than China and India – 73.7% of the population as of January 2022 (Datareportal 2022). As of May 2020, because of national information technology development catalyzed by the pandemic, internet connection covered 97% of Indonesia. These data show two aspects: first, internet connectivity contributed to the possibility of online worship in many Christian churches in under-developed regions far from Jakarta, the capital city and advancement center. Second, because of the higher percentage of internet users, most Indonesians got used to the new information technology. Internet digital space became a second life, a new lived space for most Indonesians. Thus, Indonesian life, including Christian religious-spiritual life, became dual: in-person and online. Datareportal (2022) reported that Indonesia’s average internet use time is 8.36 hours/person. During the COVID-19 pandemic, religious life online became normal for many Christians. Research on 719 church members in Indonesia by Amanat Agung Theological Seminary showed that 84.62% reported that online worship had strengthened 342

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their faith in God (Kartika et al. 2021). This research also shows that church members continued to consider the church building as the worship place, emphasizing cognitive, imaginative, and narrative aspects of Christian ritual. Specifically, 85% agreed on the cognitive aspect of the ritual, the imaginative presence of God in the worship, and considered the narrative of Christian worship as the central element in the ritual process (Kartika et al. 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic prompted Indonesian Christians to rethink fellowship or koinonia in the virtual space.

Habitus and Christian Sacred Code Church members created a worship atmosphere at home during online worship through what Bourdieu famously termed “habitus,” the mental or cognitive structures through which people deal with the social world (1990). For example, GPM church members created ritualistic presence through material objects in online ritual, preparing Bible and family offering bowls (piring natzar) to help Christians understand God’s presence and experience a collective sense of being with others. Piring natzar served as habitus, a Moluccan Christian system that maintains characters by connecting past and present awareness, perception, and deed. As habitus, piring natzar is also a sacred space. Employing Bourdieu (1989) and Low (2016) opens an avenue to situate one group in the place of others. As one GPM interviewee said, reclaiming the habitus of GPM Christian ritual, “my family puts a piring natzar on the table during online worship to create the sense of God’s presence. It also reproduces a feeling of communion with other congregation members.” Thus, piring natzar enhances the sacred space in the habitus of social space because, first, the sense of God’s presence and holy communion are subjected to social structural constraint. Second, it reclaims holy sites through  piring natzar  as an object of sacred knowledge. Third,  piring natzar, as  a communal tradition, has a communality or koinonia because it is a community practice. Hence, online Christian worship employed pre-pandemic habitus to reproduce sacred space through a given code that created a sense of deistic image and Christian comradeship amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In Minahasa, where GMIM is located, and in Maluku of the GPM, people have special clothing for going to church worship. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, church members dressed in their best outfits for attending church service. These two reformed churches believe in a King–People relation and in a God–Congregational relationship. Because entering the church building is for them entering a godly sphere, people wear their best clothing as symbolic respect for God the King. Notably, people continued to believe in the King– People relationship when attending online rituals at home because wearing special clothing helps church members focus on worship, even online. As one research subject stated, “I use special outfits because we believe that online service through the screen is similar to faceto-face, offline worship.” This suggests worship’s purity is not defined by physical place but, rather, is tied to a social mental space. As a material object, clothing, in this sense, crafts a sacred mental space for church members when accessing religious services from home. Clothing covers the human body, but it also expresses inner feelings and personal identity; it serves as a container and vehicle of meaning. Using Turner’s (1967) concept of symbol, Christian church clothing is a code, as specific church-related clothing conveys a message of sacredness and purity. “We distinguish clothes to go to church worship with every day and other public cloths,” said another interviewee. Special clothes for church that 343

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congregation members wear even in the online ritual express intimate feelings with God and perform knowledge of God’s presence in material objects. Clothes function as a vehicle of purity and sacredness as collective consciousness transforms the family room as a private place to the ritual platform as holy-blessed space, with the help of online means.

Sacred Digital Altar and Material Objects Online ritual forced families in GMIM and GPM churches to connect digital space with face-to-face worship space and forced Christians to create a holy-blessed area at home. “Normally, I will prepare a laptop in the family room that everybody in my household can connect to and follow the worship through the same laptop,” said one. Computers connected church members who had distanced themselves from in-person worship at the altar in the sanctuary of the church building. We prepare a TV set and put it in the place where everybody can access the device’s screen because we connect ourselves to GPM church’s YouTube channel through the TV. It should be prepared because we understand the TV screen as an altar of the church. (Interview subject) Thus, online worship in the COVID-19 pandemic transformed device screens into the sacred altar. Placing the device in a special place in the home legitimated the presence of holyblessed space in the church members’ domestic-private rooms. Everybody-ness expresses the sense of Christian fellowship as the Body of Christ (koinonia) during online worship. Church members also employed other material objects to facilitate the presence of sacred space in Christian rituals. Congregation members of the GMIM church produced a sacred sphere through crosses and candles. As one said, Before we joined the online service in the GMIM church, my family created our family room as a place of worship. We put a candle and mini cross on the main table assisting us to sense the presence of sacredness. Christian material objects such as candles and crosses served as a vehicle of social imagination to feel God’s presence in online worship. For church members across the globe, including GMIM and GPM, a candle symbolizes Christian calling to be a light to the world (Matthew 5:14–16), and represents ecumenical knowledge of the critical Christian presence in the world. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the pastor in one GMIM church would begin the service by lighting a candle, which became the liminal part of Christian ritual in GMIM. The church followers had internalized the knowledge of candles as liminality, and therefore, a candle in the family living room was a liminal object. The cross in online worship possesses the same narrative as it does for in-person ritual, that of salvation for shared Christian values and beliefs across the globe. “When we put the cross on the worship table, it symbolizes the salvation and love of Christ.” In GMIM and GPM churches, the cross functions as the container of Christian collective knowledge of Christ’s deliverance and mercy. Christians in the GMIM and GPM perceive the device’s screen as the sacred altar in a given sanctuary, and here, the cross helps Christians concentrate and focus on the screen as a click-altar. Employing Durkheim’s (2001) concept of 344

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symbol, thinking, and emotion, the cross connects the Christians of GMIM and GPM to Christ’s salvation and calls for collective emotion within the online ritual. The collective emotion maintains an essential belief in Christianity both in-person and online; salvation and God’s love exist in any ritual, regardless of social spaces. The cross serves as a Christian totem that represents God’s presence in church-related rituals. Taking Durkheim seriously, congregation members at GMIM and GPM are tied to the belief that “without symbols, moreover, social feeling could only have a precarious existence” (2001:176). As a Christian totem, the cross on the table beside the click-altar justifies the online ritual and legitimates the congregational social feeling about the existence of holiness and sacredness beyond device screens. Indeed, according to Turner (1967), a symbol is multi-referential, as it is for the cross, but for Christian congregation members who faithfully believe, the cross is uni-referential: the manifestation of God’s salvation and love in online worship. During the online ritual in GMIM and GPM households, the cross as a Christian totem transmitted objective faith knowledge from generation to generation. Most likely, the shared Christian values and beliefs tied to the cross are the totem in the family heritage: a totem of Christian family.

Forming Sacred Koinonia through a “Click” Shared Christian values and beliefs in online rituals express a sense of faith community amid virtual worship in different places. “Although online ritual takes place in a virtual space, at least we can still have a sense of koinonia through comments at the live streaming of our home church.” In time, the comments at a Christian live streaming ritual mirror a rapport at face-to-face church services at which congregational members relate to other members. Live streaming comments open an avenue for self-presence in holy communion. Through a click-commentary, a physically distanced Christian brings the existence of faith into an e-koinonia. The habitus of fellowship during in-person church services prior to the pandemic influenced the desire to be in Christian collective representation on a digital screen. Connection to fellow church members is needed for Christians in both in-person and online ecclesiastical life. “We join our church online worship through YouTube live streaming to access ecclesiastical information from elder announcements before or after the ritual.” Notes on the YouTube commentary platform enable congregation members to communicate with elders who lead the Christian services and deliver weekly ecclesiastical messages to the rest of the church followers. This communication means filling in the lacuna of koinonia in the online liturgy. In the cases of GMIM and GPM, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Christian hymns united the Christian community through a unisonance of voice: songs, Bible readings, and confessions of faith. In contrast, online Christian services set a mute mode for online participants, preventing voices from outside interfering with the worship. However, participants expressed songs, Bible reading, and confession of faith at home, thinking about the online ritual. In this sense, ritual participants produced implied unisonance: voicing rites while imagining being together with the congregation.

Sacred Imagination and Digital Unisonance Imagination forms a click-holy communion in the unisonance that links Christians involved in online ritual. Benedict Anderson (2006) contributed to the construction of imagined community through unison. Although Anderson focused more on political society, his imag345

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ined community fits the study of a reproduced sense of communion in online ritual. We are thinking about other Christians’ presence when we join confession of faith in online worship. Data from online research supports the production of a click-holy communion. Unisonance when expressing faith confession has placed Christians in an imagined sacred space with other church members in the congregation and beyond. Confession of faith, before the COVID-19 conundrum, had already corded Christians in an imagined community. Yet a pandemic that catalyzed online worship placed imagination as the backbone of click-holy communion. As such, an “e-koinonia” came into being only through an online image, collective consciousness, and shared imagination. Relations between congregation members who maintained a physical distance because of the pandemic remained firmly linked through an imagined space. Based on Lefebvre (1991), the GMIM and GPM members produced a space of representation or lived space in an online ritual platform. Symbols such as crosses, candles, and images of Christ in churchcentered ritual among GMIM and GPM churches have communicated expression and represented knowledge of the Christian community in a digital location. Here, symbols and other Christian images function as pivotal means to produce a sacred space in the virtual platform. Christians imagined a shared mental space through material objects as containers of the holy. Through a candle, the cross, and the image of Christ, a Christian in online worship is located and connected to a local and global web of Christianity.

Ritual-ick: God in Virtual Sacramental Space Christianity perceives God as an Ultimate Being that is present in both the transcendent and immanent realms. In the Christian tradition, faith seeking understanding (St. Augustine 1998) recognizes their relationship via the toolkit of theology, including God’s presence in the transcendental realm, a place where only a faith-full lens could comprehend spiritual reality. In Jesus, Christianity believes in God’s presence materially in the blood and flesh of the human being. Logos becomes a human in Jesus, the Son of Mary, who lives in physical reality. God’s immanence becomes a shared knowledge in Christian doctrine that enables the community of faith to search for God’s presence in the sanctuary or other material places. The symbol of the cross and candle in online ritual helped Christians understand “the cluster of abstract meaning” (Turner 1967:43) of God’s presence that maintained Christian spiritual belief in Logos in the era of the COVID-19 crisis. Searching for God, in Christian understanding, recognizes two realms in which church members have a shared feeling of God’s presence. With the rise of digital information technology, Christians can now perceive God’s presence through a virtualized realm. Yet in Christian teaching, God’s virtual presence exists because of the Lord’s supper, which occurred before the crucifixion event. Ultimate reality’s manifestation in the virtual world is related to the holy imagination of God’s presence. Transubstantiation in Christianity believes that when congregation members partake of bread and wine in holy communion, the bread and wine are transformed, by faith, to be the body and blood of Christ (Shields 2003). Although transubstantiation is rooted in Catholic teaching, Protestant churches such as GMIM and GPM also comprehend the virtual presence of God via bread and wine. In the GPM context, God’s presence in holy communion’s bread and wine is clear in the preparatory process and during the event. The preparatory process of the unleavened bread and pseudo-wine produced from pineapple or other tropical fruits involves a pastoral prayer and gentle touches from church elders. Thus, Christians 346

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in GMIM and GPM have perceived the material object as Durkheim’s (2001) concept of a “collective representation” of the body and blood of Christ. In both GMIM and GPM, during the event of holy communion, congregation members take a moment to pray for the preparation to receive the blood and body of Christ. Consequently, transubstantiation in the virtualization of Christ’s body and blood through collective imagination invoked God’s presence in material objects. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, GMIM and GPM churches apprehended God’s presence and the idea of the holy in physical sites and objects. The sacred-holy site of GMIM in Minahasa is called Pasela (border of the land), and in the Maluku of GPM it is named the holy stone (Batu pamali). Pasela and Batu Pamali become sacred sites and hold the element of holiness because people believe in the mysteriousness and awe of these cultural sites. The communities consider Pasela and Batu Pamali sacred because, as Berger (1967) explained, people believe in objective knowledge attached to physical cultural objects. The cultures of Minahasa and Maluku have constructed the idea of holiness and sacredness in these sites. When missionaries introduced Christianity to the people of Minahasa and Maluku, they reproduced new physical sites where sacredness/holiness was attached: the sanctuary or church building. God’s sacredness and holiness, for GMIM and GPM church members, presents boldly in the sanctuary, especially around the church pulpit. Together with the pastor, church members often conduct special prayers during a hard time around the pulpit within the sanctuary. GMIM and GPM members’ apprehension of the relationship between sacredness and sanctuary is the legacy of the colonial Dutch church. The Dutch Christian community buried dead church members beside and inside the sanctuary because they believed that God’s presence was attached to the building itself. People of Christian faith in GMIM and GPM, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, strongly believed that sacred space was nowhere other than inside the church building. During the COVID-19 pandemic, GMIM and GPM members were among those who struggled with the shift of sacred space from the sanctuary to the screen in the family room at home. When the first wave of COVID-19 hit Indonesia from March to July 2020, only 25% of infected cases could survive COVID-19 treatment (Lattu 2022). Nevertheless, GMIM and GPM church members kept conducting Christian worship in the sanctuary because the site was sacred in pre-pandemic ritual. Objective knowledge in the habitual structure of communal belief located God’s presence in the sanctuary. Christian sanctuaries stand as the most luxurious building in these areas because the idea of holy and sacred (Rumah Tuhan) is attached to the concrete bricks. Therefore, church members stick to the objective knowledge of believing in sacred physical space as a communal facticity. However, early Christian theology, represented by the apostle Paul, located sacred space in human personhood and community (koinonia) not in church buildings (Ephesian 2:19– 22; 1 Corinthians 3:17). In Christian perspective, sacred space lies within a community of prayer beyond physical sites. St. Augustine (1998) emphasized omnipotent God as the ruler and controller of both the material and immaterial worlds. In The City of God, Augustine (1998) accentuated God’s foreknowledge and multi-presence (omniscience and omnipresence) amid human time and space. In the virtual sphere, understanding God’s omniscience and omnipresence shifts the sacred space to the screen and the family room. When GMIM and GPM members connect ritualistic collective consciousness on the screen to the sacred church building (Lefebvre 1991), the online space of representation becomes a sacred realm because material symbols and cognitive imagination create the sense of sacredness that 347

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transforms a profane place into a sacred space. In essence, early Christian theology has situated the holiness and sacredness of God beyond any physical sanctuary. Current theologians and sociologists of religion expand the concepts of the virtual and the imagination into a sacramental space on the internet where everybody can search for God’s presence. Since the early 2000s, a few scholars in religious studies and theology have focused on developing cybertheology. This theology starts from the premise that the human is an atomic, yet digital being. Peter Singh (2009) introduced cybertheology to inspire other religious scholars to think seriously about cyberspace as a place to exercise theological understanding. Echoing Singh, Lynn Baab (2012) argued for a theology, place, and sacredness in the digital internet era. Antonio Spadaro (2014) called for re-thinking theology for Christians who live in a digital society. Cyberspace has become a sacramental space for Christian community to search for God’s presence outside a gravity-bound place. Sacramental spaces in online rituals during the COVID-19 pandemic shifted from physical, atomic places to online, sacred spaces. This transformation echoes the principle of omnipotence and God’s control over human beings, including during the pandemic era. According to Berger’s (1967) sacred canopy, God’s omnipotent power covers the world, including the world of rites where Christians believe that ultimate reality is present beyond place. Christians construct the meaning of online ritual based on shared beliefs, symbols, and narratives (Bell 1992). Although taking place in online platforms, Christian rituals remained a thoughtful action during the pandemic. Therefore, St. Augustine’s (1998) faith seeking understanding  (fides quaerens intellectum)  plays a foundational role in helping Christian congregations make sense of symbolic action through the screen. Through God’s omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence, church members could feel God’s presence in an online form.

Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic forced Christian churches across the globe to shift ritual practice creatively from a physical form to a digital method. High death rates pushed the Indonesian government to lock down all sanctuaries and mandate social distancing to prevent the virus from spreading. Before COVID-19, traditional yet progressive churches such as GMIM and GPM constructed a sacred space around the sanctuary place. This understanding of the sacredness and holiness of the church building is the legacy of the Dutch Protestant church in colonial times. The sacredness of the church building became an impediment to shifting Christian rituals from in-person to online. Severe COVID-19 cases forced GMIM and GPM to shift Christian rituals from the church building to an online forum. This shift created a new concept of Christian communality, an “e-koinonia,” because Christians found new sacramental space in online rituals. GMIM and GPM are rooted in Calvinist-Reformed tradition, but their Indonesian context pushed them to embrace inclusive and nationalistic theology. Their openness served as the social–spiritual key to accommodate changes, including the move of rituals from church buildings to digital screens. The construction of virtual sacred spaces takes place in four social spheres: habitus and the Christian sacred code, the sacred digital altar and material objects, the formation of a sacred Koinonia through “click,” and sacred imagination and digital unisonance. This sacred space construction formed an e-koinonia in which Christians believed in sacramental space through God’s omnipresence. 348

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References Andaya, Leonard. 1993. The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Aritonang, Jan S. and Karel A. Steenbrink, eds. 2008. A History of Christianity in Indonesia. Studies in Christian Mission v. 35. Boston: Brill. Augustine. 1998 [426]. The City of God Against the Pagans. Translated by R.W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baab, Lynn. 2012. “Toward a Theology of the Internet: Place, Relationship and Sin.“ In Digital Religion, Social Media and Culture: Perspectives, Practices and Futures, edited by Pauline Hope Cheong, Peter Fischer-Nielsen, Stefan Gelfgren, and Charles Ess. New York: Peter Lang. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berger, Peter L. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1989. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 7(1):24–25. Bryson, John R, Lauren Andres and Andrew Davies. 2020. “COVID-19, Virtual Church Services and a New Temporary Geography of Home.” Tijdschr Econ Soc Geogr. 111(3):360–372. Calvin, John. 1960 [1559]. Institutes of Christian Religion, edited by John T. McNeill. Louisville: Westminster Press Collins, Randall. 2004. Interpretation of Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press Datareportal. 2022. “Digital 2022: Motivations for Using the Internet“ https://datareportal​.com​/ reports​/digital​-2022​-motivations​-for​-using​-the​-internet Duc, Anthony Le. 2015. “Cyber/Digital Theology: Rethinking Our Relationship with God and Neighbor in Digital Environment.” Religion and Social Communication 13(2):130–58. Durkheim, Emile. 2001 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foulidi, Xanthippi et. al. 2020. “Customary Practices and Symbolisms at Worship Events in a Virtual Religious Community.” International Journal of Multicultural and Multireligious Understanding 7(7):45–56. Heuken, Adolf. 2002. Be My Witness to the Ends of the Earth! The Catholic Church in Indonesia before the 19th Century. Jakarta: Cipta Loka Caraka. Howard, Robert Glenn. 2010. “Enacting a Virtual “Ekklesia:” Online Christian Fundamentalism as Vernacular Religion.” New Media & Society 12(5):729–44. Kartika, Casthelina et. al. 2021. “Pengalaman Ibadah Jemaat Dalam Ibadah Online.” Webinar Hasil Survei. Amanat Agung Theological Seminary. Lattu, Izak Y. M. 2022. Memoar COVID-19: Catatan Autoetnografi Lintas Benua. Semarang: Lawwana. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991[1974]. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Low, Martina. 2016. The Sociology of Space: Materiality, Social Structures and Action. Translated by Donald Goodwin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mandagi, Stefanny, RP. 2022. “Toward an Evangelical Theology of Citizen Solidarity in Minahasa: A Critical Analysis of Indonesia’s Bhinneka Tunggal Ika.” MA Thesis, Yonsei University. Mansour, Nesrine. 2022. “The Holy Light of Cyberspace: Spiritual Experience in a Virtual Church.”Religions 13(2):1–15. McKim, Donald. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nivens, Susan. 2011. “Joseph Kam: Moravian Heart in Reformed Clothing.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 35(3):164–68. Nuban Timo, Ebenhaizer I. et al. 2021. “Protestant Church of Maluku Ecclesiology: From Calvinism to Fuse to Become Pancasilaism.” Toronto Journal of Theology 37(2):188–97. Pinontoan, Denni H. R. 2019. Walian dan Tuang Pandita: Perjumpaan Agama Minahasa dan Agama Kristen pada Abad XIX. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pranala.

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28 THE CULTURAL TURN FROM RELIGION TOWARD SPIRITUALITY IN THE GLOBAL NORTH Dennis Hiebert Abstract As a classic social institution, religion has been of interest to sociology since its origins, but as religion gives way to spirituality, part of what Charles Taylor called “the massive subjective turn of modern culture,” sociology has sought to describe and explain that social change. Though sociology has characterized spirituality and differentiated it from religion, it has struggled to define spirituality, especially considering its presence both within and outside religious traditions. Nevertheless, the turn from religion to spirituality is well documented and frequently attributed to the post-modern turn of Western culture. As they assess its magnitude, meaning, and consequences, some Christian perspectives of cultural change view the turn as regressive, others as progressive, but the resurgent Christian spirituality of the past few decades is more a re-discovery of classic Christian spiritual texts, practices, and lifestyles than a new vision and experience of Christian spirituality. Though the multiple branches and traditions of Christian faith each perceive and promote their own understandings of spirituality, in essence, Christian spirituality is the transformed self in a relationship of desire for the holy, Wholly Other, and is ultimately built on the negative theology of Christian mysticism.

Definitions and Types of Spirituality The editors of A Sociology of Spirituality (Flanagan and Jupp 2007) explicitly stated that their choice of the indefinite article “a” in their title reflected an intentional, self-conscious hesitancy about how to characterize the elusive phenomenon they addressed. How can the preverbal and unfathomable even be theorized, much less be subjected to empirical inquiry? Naturally, such formidable challenges have made the social sciences cautious and, at times, seemingly reluctant to address the topic, until recently. When claims of spirituality became common in Euro–American culture, the sheer prevalence of such claims begged scrutiny and at least some analysis, tentative and tepid as it may be. DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-37

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If that Sociology of Spirituality anthology was authoritative by virtue of combining the views of multiple international scholars on the topic, its joint working definition of spirituality should be a worthy starting point. However, one searches the text in vain for a straightforward definition. In the “Introduction,” Kieran Flanagan offers many eloquent rhetorical flourishes describing what characterizes spirituality, and what spirituality does, but he never explicitly delineates what exactly spirituality is. In the perennial debate between functional and substantive definitions, his is a functional definition of spirituality. Substantively, Flanagan leaves the reader with only the understanding that spirituality is rife with “paradoxes, mysteries, and conundrums” (2007:2) and that “the trouble with spirituality is that its opacity admits too much but precludes too little” (2007:11). Other scholars have been somewhat more definitive and delimiting in conceptualizing spirituality. Donald Swenson (2009) summarized spirituality as the sacred within, in contrast to religion which is the sacred between or among. Equating spirituality with religiousness, he defined and elaborated spirituality under the broader category of individual religious experience. Spirituality “refers to those aspects of religion and religiosity or religiousness that have an internal presence to the individual. It includes such elements as feelings, moods, attitudes, beliefs, attributions, and the like” (2009:43). Spirituality is, thus, internal to the individual, whereas religion is external, the latter residing in social institutions. But even this is a statement more about the location of spirituality than about its essence. Nancy Ammerman notes that all everyday social practices involve embodiment, materiality, emotion, aesthetics, morality, and narrative, but what sets religious practices apart is the additional dimension of spirituality, “the capacity to perceive non-ordinary realities intertwined with the ordinary world” (2021:25). If Flanagan’s introduction to “a” sociology of spirituality was too avoidant of definition, an equally authoritative summative source, venturing the definite article in “The Sociology of Spirituality,” posed the opposite problem of a definition reduced to a single word. Matthew Wood (2010) defined spirituality simply as self-authority. Here again is the problem of characterizing a phenomenon without actually stating what it is. Ignoring the possibility that a higher power beyond the self might be operative authoritatively on or in the self, self-authority may be one aspect of spirituality, but there are surely many other forms of self-authority that have nothing to do with anything spiritual. Furthermore, such a conception of spirituality presents people as autonomous individuals not as social actors and, therefore, fails to address the social practices, social interaction, and social contexts of spirituality. Christian Smith’s sociological description, if not definition of spirituality, serves well as summary. By spirituality I mean that dimension of human life that concerns the most profound, meaningful, and transcendent visions of human existence, feeling, and desires. Spiritual matters ... concern ... the greatest and highest good, truth, rightness, value, vitality, meaning, and beauty ... Things spiritual of this nature have a quality that transcends instrumental means-ends rationality. They sustain and guide people ... in ways that actually pre-rationally and a-rationally govern, rather than are governed by, preferences, rationality, and calculated choices. (2014:2) Across academic disciplines, religion connotes the organized and institutional components of faith traditions, whereas spirituality connotes the more inward and personal side of faith, 352

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whether that be inside or outside any formal religious tradition. Another consistency is their implicit but, at times, explicit unequal valuation. “The most egregious examples are those that place a substantive, static, institutional, objective, belief-based, ‘bad’ religiousness in opposition to a functional, dynamic, personal, subjective, experience-based, ‘good’ spirituality” (Zinnbauer and Pargament 2005:24). However, extreme spiritual practices can lead to self-destructive asceticism, self-absorbed narcissism, and self-aggrandizing arrogance as readily as religious practices. Nevertheless, spirituality is consistently seen as the intrinsic human capacity for self-transcendence not merely self-indulgence. A refining question is whether the self-transcendence of spirituality is vertical or horizontal. Spirituality within a religious tradition usually entails reaching only upward beyond oneself for a higher, usually divine, power and is usually a largely experiential component of religious faith (Zinnbauer et al. 1999). Spirituality outside any religious tradition usually entails reaching both upward and outward, seeking additional connection with other humans, the universe at large, and, ultimately, paradoxically, oneself. Such a spirituality is typically both experiential and cognitive, lacking the linguistic forms, normative constraints, and social supports of a religious tradition. The third type of spirituality, a purely horizontal spirituality, contains no concept of the supernatural and finds expression in getting beyond oneself in this world only. Traditionally, spirituality was presumed to occur within religious parameters, but increasingly, it is as readily pursued and experienced outside religion. This creates a fourfold matrix of self-identification – religious, spiritual, both, or neither. Beyond the categories of religious “nones,” “somes,” and “dones,” likely the most claimed and controversial on the irreligious end of the spectrum are the “spiritual but not religious” (SBNRs), a subcategory of the nones who are increasing more rapidly than the nones. Characterized as cultural progressives driven by frustration with the institutional and hunger for the mystical (Fuller 2001), they have also been criticized as superficial patrons of consumer culture (Martin 2014), disinterested in and probably incapable of the sustained dedication and asceticism of classical mysticism. They have been caricatured as casual dabblers in feel-good practices that do not challenge their self-interested priorities and as narcissists who have descended into spiritual navel-gazing. Yet Linda Mercadante’s (2014) qualitative research into the minds of the SBNRs contests such superficial critique with a more nuanced corrective. She teases out a common, emerging set of beliefs and even latent theologies of SBNRs concerning transcendence, human nature, community, and the afterlife, though they are often unaware of the commonalities they share. Framing it all is a firm rejection of religious exclusivism and a warm acceptance of religious syncretism, reaching toward what Wayne Teasdale (2001) termed the “interspirituality” that could potentially result from inter-faith dialogue. Church historian Diana Butler Bass (2012) asked various focus groups comprised of active church members across North America to “play a word association game” with “spirituality” and “religion.” The lists generated provided some empirical evidence that over the course of the twentieth century, the word “spirituality” gradually came to be associated with the private realm of thought and experience, while the word “religious” came to be connected with the public realm of membership in religious institutions, participation in formal ritual, and adherence to official denominational doctrines. (Fuller 2001:6) 353

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It is imperative that, whatever scholars conclude spirituality is or is not, they first listen to the meanings given to spirituality by those who claim and practice it. Observing actions and practices is an important means of comprehending spirituality, but observation alone is inadequate. Until the meanings of actions are accessed, understanding is shallow, and the only means of accessing meanings is through the words of practitioners themselves. Collective actions and meanings can then, no doubt, be interpreted, assessed, and systematized by scholarship, but the reality of subjective experience dare not be trampled. It is probable that “any scientific operational definition of spirituality is likely to differ from what a believer means when speaking of the spiritual ... This difference of meaning creates an inherent definitional if not a procedural tension in the study of spirituality” (Miller and Thoresen 2003:27).

Sociological Perspectives Perhaps the most significant sociological field study of spirituality was conducted by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead and reported in The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality (2005) in which they offered a “subjectivization thesis” that resonated with what Charles Taylor described as “the massive subjective turn of modern culture” (1991:26). This is “a turn away from life lived in terms of external or ‘objective’ roles, duties, and obligations, and a turn towards life lived by reference to one’s own subjective experiences” (Heelas and Woodhead 2005:2). It was also a turn away from “life-as” in which “people think of themselves first and foremost as belonging to established and ‘given’ orders of things which are transmitted from the past” (Heelas and Woodhead 2005:2). The corresponding turn toward “subjective-life” is toward finding one’s own unique source of significance, meaning, and authority in states of consciousness, states of mind, memories, emotions, passions, sensations, bodily experiences, dreams, feelings, inner conscience, and sentiments—including moral sentiments like compassion … Thus the key value for the mode of “life-as” is conformity to external authority, whilst the key value for the mode of “subjective-life” is authentic connection with the inner depths of one’s unique life-in-relation. (Heelas and Woodhead 2005:3–4) The application to religion and spirituality is obvious and their findings predictable. Religion sacralizes “life-as” and is “in decline,” while spirituality sacralizes “subjective-life” and is “growing.” Not all were convinced by Heelas and Woodhead’s analysis. For example, David Voas and Steve Bruce criticized the conflation of leisure and therapeutic activities with the sacred, disputed the significance of the “holistic milieu,” and concluded that its flourishing confirms rather than challenges secularization. Assessing the “spiritual revolution” as another false dawn for the sacred, they maintained that “unconventional spirituality is a symptom of secularization, not a durable counterforce to it” (2007:43).

Theories of Culture Distinctions between pre-modern, modern, and post-modern eras of human history are plentiful. William Flint (1993) characterized pre-modernity as comprising knowledge that 354

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was predominantly religious and a structure of consciousness that was dualistic in believing in both this-worldly and other-worldly reality. In modernity, knowledge was predominantly rational, and the structure of consciousness denied other-worldly reality and adhered only to logocentrism. In post-modernity, knowledge is predominantly critical, and the structure of consciousness is alternately pessimistic and optimistic. Three aspects of the three eras perhaps most pertinent to the analysis of spirituality are that, first, discrepant realities were deemed to be mysteries in pre-modernity, but were deemed to be contradictions in modernity, and are deemed to be paradoxes in today’s post-modernity. Second, religion and God were deemed to be authoritative in pre-modernity, whereas logic and science were deemed to be authoritative in modernity, and the self or group in post-modernity. Third, the nature of the self was deemed to be embedded and unseen in pre-modernity, autonomous and fixed in modernity, and relational and adaptable in post-modernity. Charles Taylor (2007) described the three distinct historical epochs as, nonetheless, having in common a desire for connection with the transcendent. In the ancien régime (pre-modernity), relation to the transcendent came via a pre-ordained cosmic order. In the age of mobilization (early modernity), that relation came via engagement with the social institutions and practices in which the transcendent had been subsumed. Today in the age of authenticity (1960s–present), expressive individualism and authentic selfhood are given pre-eminence as means of connection with the transcendent, which leads to conflict with traditional, institutional forms of religion. Nevertheless, Taylor argued that the collective dimension of religion that Durkheim emphasized, and the component of collective effervescence in particular, remains important. “Thus, Taylor concludes that while the new frame for religious practice is individualistic, it is not necessarily individuating. People still seek others with whom to pursue their chosen belief in the transcendent” (Ritzer and Stepnisky 2018). Georg Simmel also offered a theory of culture that provides insight into the turn from religion to spirituality. He described “objective culture” as constantly re-created by people, becoming reified, and exerting ever more coercive force on the lives of individual actors, what he termed “subjective culture.” Thus, the growth of collective objective culture threatens the growth of individual subjective culture, and the resultant impoverishment of subjective culture is “the tragedy of culture.” As culture gets thicker, individuals get thinner, leading them to alienation, cynicism, blasé attitudes, impersonal relations, and cultural malaise. Religion is part of objective culture, and spirituality can be understood in part as pushback from subjective culture against objective culture. “In his assessment of modern culture, Simmel points out that there is an overarching struggle between life and form, and says that one ‘can find the same tendency in contemporary religion’” (Varga 2007). He states that “mystical tendencies suggest that life’s longing may be frustrated by objective forms in themselves” (Simmel 1918/1968:23). The more traditional religions are rigidified, Simmel postulated, the greater the emergent need for spirituality to transcend them would become. Robert Wuthnow (1998) brought finer distinctions to the spirituality that arose in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States of America. He identified two dysfunctional extremes: the “spirituality of dwelling” of the conservative 1950s that “inhabited” the sacred places and spaces of established religious institutions, and the “spirituality of seeking” of the radical 1960s that “negotiated” movement beyond religious institutions. As a middle way forward, Wuthnow advocated an alternative “spirituality of practice.” Presumably a spirituality of practice fostered by practice-oriented religious organizations 355

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would be healthiest for all individuals, especially those no longer interested in or even capable of being either spiritual dwellers or spiritual seekers. Indeed, an authentic spirituality can flourish as readily within a religious tradition as it can outside one. In the mammoth American National Study of Youth and Religion, Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton (2005) distilled the de facto creed of what they termed “moralistic therapeutic deism,” which had become the de facto faith of most American youth by the turn of the millennium. It includes a moral dimension traditionally associated with – if not derived from – religion, a therapeutic dimension currently more coupled with spirituality, and a theological dimension inherited from Christianity, the deism of a transcendent divine. Thus, it contains the primary ingredients of the de facto spirituality of many who would not identify as religious.

Christian Cultural Theories The emic perspective of the subjective religious insider sees cultural change pertaining to religion differently than the etic perspective of the objective social scientific outsider. Yet when Christian insiders track the cultural turn from religion to spirituality, the analysis sounds remarkably similar in the dispassionate details, though the tone becomes passionate because the insider’s collective self is at stake. The insider is invested in ways that the outsider is not, which typically colors the analysis with a decidedly evaluative hue, as positive or negative, progressive or regressive. James Herrick (2003) is representative of Christian scholars who view the turn critically, even alarmingly, and, at times, disdainfully. In his polemic against what he termed the “New Religious Synthesis” that displaced the “Revealed Word” tradition, he surveyed an impressive array of disparate movements and advocates that have arisen in the wake of the Enlightenment and, together, conspired against Christianity, colonizing Western religious consciousness. He concluded that the New Religious Synthesis “promises to secure the soul’s triumph over external restraints … especially religious tradition” (2003:279). As such, Herrick denounced all that he took as other than strict historical orthodoxy. In contrast, Phyllis Tickle (2008) is representative of Christian scholars who view the turn approvingly. Her “big theory” is that Christianity renews itself in 500-year cycles: the monasticism of the sixth century, the Schism of the eleventh century, and the Reformation of the sixteenth century. In the twenty-first century, the Great Emergence is forging a way forward as a renewed cultural imagination takes hold. Tickle is effusive in her praise and enthusiasm for a vibrant, reconstituted Christianity. “If … the Great Emergence really does what most of its observers think it will, it will rewrite Christian theology – and thereby North American culture – into something far more Jewish, more paradoxical, more narrative, and more mystical than anything the Church has had for the last seventeen or eighteen hundred years” (2008:162). Pressing questions about the turn include its magnitude and its consequences. If we are, in fact, in the midst of a full-blown spiritual revolution, the magnitude can hardly be overstated. But what the consequences will be cannot yet be fully determined, as most of those effects still lie mostly in the future. What will Christianity look like when the loss of basic biblical literacy, theological acumen, and institutional authority is more acute than what is already evident? More interpretively, what does the turn toward spirituality mean? Is it another stage of religious evolution, another manifestation of secularization, or a counterforce to seculariza356

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tion? Is it a benign religious transformation or a malignant religious decline now in its terminal stage? Steve Bruce (2002), for one, sees the displacement of institutional dogma with individual self-authority as the basis for religious legitimacy as “the last gasp and whimper of concern with the sacred in the West, an inconsequential dabbling that is doomed to disappear almost as quickly as it appeared” (Heelas and Woodhead 2005:2). More evaluatively, is this turn toward spirituality a positive or negative development? For whom? According to whom? And by what criteria and measurements? Whereas “value-free” social scientists writing from an etic perspective aspire to avoid e-value-ation, Christian scholars writing from an emic perspective aspire to no such aversion. Of the latter already reviewed here, Herrick (2003) was thoroughly critical of the turn, as implied by his title: The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition. In contrast, both Tickle (2008) and Bass (2012) were ardently affirming of the turn, as trumpeted in Bass’s title: Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. Bruxy Cavey’s (2007) title, The End of Religion: Encountering the Subversive Spirituality of Jesus, is equally emphatic and blunt. Regardless of its consequences, its meaning, or its evaluation rendered by Christians, the magnitude of the turn away from religion toward spirituality is likely as massive as Taylor’s “subjective turn of modern culture.” According to Harvey Cox, it is the “most momentous transformation since [Christianity’s] transition in the fourth century CE from what had begun as a tiny Jewish sect into the religious ideology of the Roman Empire” (2009:2).

Christian Perspectives Evan Howard defined spirituality in general as “human interaction with the transcendent or divine. Within the Christian tradition, it refers specifically to relationship with God through Jesus Christ” (2008:16). Whereas most other religious mythologies consist of human ascent and divine response, Christianity consists of divine descent and human response (Swenson 2009). Its spirituality remains grounded in the time and place the individual inhabits and the subjective, internal experience of being identified, valued, and connected. It is noncreedal and, therefore, not subject to theological correctness and codified normativities. Furthermore, Christian spirituality paradoxically includes multiple contraries. It is both vertical and horizontal in that it loves both the transcendent divine and the immanent neighbor. It is both subjective and objective in that it is a subjective experience of a putatively objective reality: God. It is both internal and external in that spirituality is internal to the individual, whereas religion is external to the individual. To that extent, Christian spirituality is, by definition, also religious. Christian spirituality flourished most among ordinary Christians in pre-canonical, precreedal, pre-Constantinian Christianity, then flagged under the rationalized strictures of the institutionalized church. Today, “spirituality is back with a vengeance” (Demarest 2012:11), and the resurgent, robust interest in Christian spirituality of the past few decades is more a re-discovery of classic Christian spiritual texts, practices, and lifestyles than a new vision and experience of Christian spirituality. Alister McGrath (1999) summarized the classic texts of many historical spiritual leaders, though characterizing spirituality according to texts written by elites leaves open the question of the actual lived spirituality of the silent majority – its practices of embodiment, materiality, emotion, aesthetics, morality, and narrative (Ammerman 2021). One manifestation of contemporary Christian spiritual practices being mostly a revival of classic spiritu357

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ality is The Ancient Practices Series (McLaren 2010). As for spiritual lifestyles, traditional Catholic monasticism has been reformed and renewed in contemporary evangelicalism’s “new monasticism” (Carter 2012), which retains traditional commitment to a “holistic communitarianism” over against theological individualism. Similarly, the more recent “Benedict option” (Dreher 2017) disengages from society in protest and self-protection, rather than attempting to reform it, seeking countercultural ways to live in spiritual community. Just as Benedictine retreat into monastic life enabled Christianity to survive the collapse of the Roman Empire, so too, it is believed, will it enable Christianity to survive the current crisis of Western culture. Notably, these texts, practices, and lifestyles are all primarily forms of Wuthnow’s dweller spirituality within traditional, institutionalized Christianity. Can there also be a Christian seeker spirituality outside of institutionalized Christianity that, nevertheless, remains authentically, essentially Christian? Do the failings of the spirituality of dwelling (dependence on undependable communities) and the failings of the spirituality of seeking (social instability and spiritual immaturity) mean that some Christians are better off with some alternative spirituality of practice? How can Christianity allow for and foster such an alternative spirituality of practice, without requiring a spirituality of dwelling or condemning a spirituality of seeking? From the perspective of cultural analysis, the contemporary revival of interest in Christian spirituality is also a post-modern return to a pre-modern spirituality. For example, Robert Webber’s Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World was an attempt “to restore and then adapt classical Christianity to the postmodern cultural situation” (1999:24). As Bruce Demarest explained, Of particular relevance for postmodern spirituality is concern for spiritual experience and human connectedness, disillusionment with material possessions, and distrust of the institutional church … Sculpted as imago Dei, humans instinctively search for the transcendent “who” and “why” in a world of the scientific “what” and “how.” (2012:13)

Views and Streams Turning from the etic approach to the emic approach reveals almost as much variance within Christian spirituality as within social scientific descriptions of it. The multiple branches and traditions of Christian faith each perceive and promote their own understandings of spirituality, including further variance within the branches and traditions themselves. Four Views on Christian Spirituality (Demarest 2012) summarized the perspectives of each of the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Progressive Protestant, and Evangelical traditions, each by an adherent. In sum, Eastern Orthodox Christians adhere to a normative tradition, Roman Catholics to a normative community, progressive Protestants to freedom from normativity, and evangelical Protestants to a more private and personal spirituality (Scorgie 2013:293). Yet all four views of spirituality are derived from the Christian commonality of living all of life before God but also from the discrepant theology of the respective Christian traditions. Different individual Christians, therefore, experience a rather differentiated spirituality, “one that is personally authentic and empowering, but also positively located within a larger web” (Scorgie 2013:293). Hence, we are again back to talking about comparative theology instead of the actual consciousness of lived individual experience of 358

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spirituality and are, to that extent, still failing to apprehend generic, defining characteristics of Christian spirituality itself.

Self, Desire, and the Other A fuller illumination of “relationship with God” requires a more detailed understanding of self, connection, and other. Who, more fully, is the self? What, more exactly, is the connection? And who, more precisely, is the other? Beneath its competing theologies, its various practices, and its inexplicable experiences, Christian spirituality is the transformed self in a relationship of desire for the mystical Other. Before Christian spirituality transcends the self, it first transforms the self. David Benner unpacked the profound changes wrought by a “deeper consciousness of being in God” (2012:ix). Yet the self cannot be spiritually awakened apart from an equal and concurrent awakening of awareness of God, or as Thomas Merton put it, “If I find [God] I will find myself, and if I find my true self I will find [God]” (Benner 2012:113). Writing about becoming and being instead of belief and behavior, Benner defined transformation of the self as “1) increased awareness, 2) a broader, more inclusive identity, 3) a larger framework for meaning-making, and 4) a reorganization of personality that results in a changed way of being in the world” (2012:59). However, “being in God” does not yet adequately elucidate the relationship of self with the Other. Spirituality is not a tranquil, affectless state of being. It is rather a “powerful longing of the soul” (Simmel 1918:23), a deep, driving desire for the Other that is only barely comparable in the inter-personal human realm to erotic yearning (McMinn 2004). Ronald Rolheiser defined spirituality as what we do with our desires, how we channel our eros, that “fire” within us, the restlessness that we cannot shake, and “the congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience” (1998:4). Both embodied sexuality and disembodied spirituality represent the human longing for completion in the other (Nelson and Longfellow 1994), sexually in the complementary human other, spiritually in the ultimate divine Other. Humans are “over-charged with desire … driven, forever obsessed, congenitally dis-eased, living lives, as Thoreau once suggested, of quiet desperation” (Rolheiser 1998:3) and mourning their ultimate incompleteness. As Taylor (2007) observed, the historical epochs of pre-modernity, modernity, and postmodernity shared a common desire for connection with the transcendent. Today, metamodernism (Severan 2021) and post-secularity (Beaumont 2019) are characterized by even greater yearning for meaning, trust, and transcendence. However, the transformed self in a relationship of desire for the mystical Other is left to wonder who that transcendent Other might be. Yet Christians throughout history have, for the most part, not been reluctant to specify the theologically correct attributes of God. According to the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1646–1647), “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” But other attributes ascribed to God, such as incomprehensibility, infinity, mystery, and transcendence presumably qualify the other attributes, leaving the list open and incomplete.

Mysticism Like spirituality, mysticism is also clearly resurgent and more so outside traditional religion than within it. Indeed, while Christians committed to theological correctness take the spirituality of “relationship with God” to be an inherent part of their lived faith, many also 359

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consider mysticism to be outside traditional Christianity. Also, like spirituality, mysticism must be understood as an entire way of life, a lived faith that cannot be reduced to particular beliefs, practices, or even types of experiences. Howard defined Christian mysticism as a subset within spirituality, noting that whereas mysticism finds its center in the consciousness of God’s presence, spirituality refers to a broader reality … Mysticism, unlike spirituality, is focally concerned with the human consciousness of the direct presence of God. Spirituality, on the other hand, is concerned with the entirety of the lived experience of an individual or group in relationship with God. (2008:16) As Julia Lamm noted, mysticism is consciousness, not only experience, “a transformative process and sustained way of living that is at once moral, intellectual, and spiritual” (2013:4). Union with God remains a mystical union, just as God remains a mystical Other; specifics about both remain beyond description. Nevertheless, the self in union with God also remains physically embodied and socially embedded. Carol Christ argued that embodied mysticism is felt in the body, for example in eating and drinking or in dancing or making love or in climbing the peach tree … Embedded mysticism seeks to feel the feelings of other individuals in the world ever more deeply. [It] is the sense of being part of a larger whole that is infused with the presence of the divine. (2008:165) As such, mystical consciousness does not require escape from the here and now because it flourishes within it.

Negative Theology The most indeterminate aspect of Christian mysticism, by far, is who or what that holy, Wholly Other may be. As Lamm summarized, “[m]ystical discourse challenges any static, rote, or merely ‘exterior’ understanding of God. Mysticism is iconoclastic, rejecting the impulse to make God into one object (or subject) among many” (2013:10). Most Christian theologies begin with the disclaimer that God is ultimately incomprehensible and undefinable and then proceed to attempt to do so. In contrast, mystical Christian theologies proceed by stating what God is not or not only. Affirmative (kataphatic) theology refers to the path of knowing God by affirmation, namely, through his self-revelation mediated by the intellect and senses. This path affirms that truths about the Almighty are disclosed via biblical teaching, the sacraments, and other symbols of the faith. (Demarest 2012:19) Negative (apophatic) theology represents the path of knowing God by sheer negation. Advocates aver that the divine Reality, dwelling in a realm beyond human comprehension, cannot be known by 360

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ideas, images, and language. Rather, God is known in the darkness by detachment, prayerful silence, and contemplation. (Demarest 2012:18) Together, kataphatic and apophatic theology are complementary not contradictory. They are not separate, conflicting ways of talking about God in which one cancels out the other because the negative presupposes the positive, and both are necessary for meaningful discourse about God. Both are needed simultaneously because God, it is said, is both transcendent and immanent, both hidden and manifest. Negation does not only negate the affirmations of positive theology but negation paradoxically negates itself. This more radical negation embodies the capacity to reject any word, any concept, be it positive or negative, as being fundamentally inappropriate to describe the divine … [and] culminates and ends with the immediate and therefore silent encounter of the human with God … In the end, then, human reason turns into love as it gives way to the affective, passive experience of the transcendent. (Fortin 2013:341–2) For example, McGrath (1999) addressed the spiritual importance of being able to visualize the divine yet began by first confronting the challenge of idolatry. Fearing the idolatrous worship of social constructions, the Reformed tradition, unlike the Orthodox and Catholic traditions, has discouraged any form of religious art, including the depiction of God. But of course, ideas and concepts of God are equally social constructions. McGrath concluded his discussion with the “corrective” of the apophatic tradition, citing early church father John Chrysostom’s treatise On the Incomprehensibility of God. As Karl Rahner put it so succinctly, “This incomprehensibility is not one attribute of God alongside others, but the attribute of his attributes” (1983:94).

Conclusion Given the well-documented, seemingly irreversible decline of religion now occurring in the Global North within the context of the even greater “massive subjective turn of modern culture,” the resurgence of spirituality, both Christian and otherwise, is unsurprising. Like so many other contemporary social institutions, traditional organized Christianity will likely have to re-invent itself or expire. As such, a (re)turn to focusing on spirituality instead of religiosity may be its only salvation not its damnation.

Acknowledgment This chapter is a condensation of “Essay Three” in Dennis Hiebert, Rationality, Humility, and Spirituality in Christian Life. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020.

References Ammerman, Nancy. 2021. Studying Lived Religion: Contexts and Practices. New York: New York University Press.

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Dennis Hiebert Bass, Diana Butler. 2012. Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. San Francisco: HarperOne. Beaumont, Justin, ed. 2019. The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity. New York: Routledge. Benner, David. 2012. Spirituality and the Awakening Self: The Sacred Journey of Transformation. Grand Rapids: Brazos. Bruce, Steve. 2002. God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell. Carter, Erik. 2012. “The New Monasticism: A Literary Introduction.” Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 5:268–84. Cavey, Bruxy. 2007. The End of Religion: Encountering the Subversive Spirituality of Jesus. Colorado Springs: NavPress. Christ, Carol. 2008. “Embodied Embedded Mysticism: Affirming the Self and Others in a Radically Interdependent World.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 24:159–67. Cox, Harvey. 2009. The Future of Faith: The Rise and Fall of Beliefs and the Coming Age of the Spirit. San Francisco: HarperOne. Demarest, Bruce, ed. 2012. Four Views on Christian Spirituality. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. Dreher, Rod. 2017. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. New York: Sentinel. Flanagan, Kieran, and Peter Jupp, eds. 2007. A Sociology of Spirituality. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Flint, William. 1993. “A Critical Sociology of Knowledge Paradigms: Comparing Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Thought.” Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology 21:37–44. Fortin, Jean-Pierre. 2013. “Christian Rationality: Embracing the Divine Mystery.” Toronto Journal of Theology 29:337–50. Fuller, Robert. 2001. Spiritual but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America. New York: Oxford University Press. Heelas, Paul, and Linda Woodhead. 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Malden: Blackwell. Herrick, James. 2003. The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition. Downers Grove: InterVarsity. Howard, Evan. 2008. The Brazos Introduction to Christian Spirituality. Grand Rapids: Brazos. Lamm, Julia. 2013. “A Guide to Christian Mysticism.” Pp. 1–23 in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, edited by Julia Lamm. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Martin, Craig. 2014. Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie. London: Bloomsbury. McGrath, Alister. 1999. Christian Spirituality: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell. McLaren, Brian. 2010. Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices. Nashville: Thomas Nelson. McMinn, Lisa Graham. 2004. Sexuality and Holy Longing: Embracing Intimacy in a Broken World. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Mercandante, Linda. 2014. Belief Without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but Not Religious. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, William., and Carl Thoresen. 2003. “Spirituality, Religion, and Health: An Emerging Research Field.” American Psychologist 58:24–35. Nelson, J. B., and S. P. Longfellow. 1994. Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox. Rahner, Karl. 1983. “The Human Question of Meaning in the Face of the Absolute Mystery of God.” Pp. 89–104 in Theological Investigations, translated by E. Quinn. London: Darton, Longman, & Todd. Ritzer, George, and Jeffrey Stepnisky. 2018. Sociological Theory. 10th ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Rolheiser, Ronald. 1998. The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. New York: Image. Scorgie, Glen. 2013. “Review Essay of Four Views on Christian Spirituality, Edited by Bruce A. Demarest.” Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 6:288–95. Severan, A. 2021. Metamodernism and the Return of Transcendence. Windsor, ON: Palimpsest Simmel, Georg. 1918/1968. “The Conflict in Modern Culture.” Pp. 11–26 in The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, translated and edited by P. Etzkorn. New York: Teachers College. Smith, Christian. 2014. The Sacred Project of American Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

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From Religion Toward Spirituality Smith, Christian, and Melinda Lundquist Denton. 2005. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. New York: Oxford University Press. Swenson, Donald. 2009. Society, Spirituality, and the Sacred: A Social Scientific Introduction 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Belknap. Teasdale, Wayne. 2001. The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions. Novato: New World Library. Tickle, Phyllis. 2008. The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why. Grand Rapids: Baker. Varga, Ivan. 2007. “Georg Simmel: Religion and Spirituality.” Pp. 145–60 in A Sociology of Spirituality, edited by Kieran Flanagan and Peter Jupp. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Voas, David, and Steve Bruce. 2007. “The Spiritual Revolution: Another False Dawn for the Sacred.” Pp. 43–62 in A Sociology of Spirituality, edited by Kieran Flanagan and Peter Jupp. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Webber, Robert. 1999. Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World. Grand Rapids: Baker. Wood, Matthew. 2010. “The Sociology of Spirituality: Reflections on a Problematic Endeavor.” Pp. 267–285 in The Sociology of Religion, edited by Bryan Turner. Malden: Blackwell. Wuthnow, Robert. 1998. After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zinnbauer, Brian, and Kenneth Pargament. 2005. “Religiousness and Spirituality.” Pp. 21–42 in Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, edited by Raymond Paloutzian and Crystal Park. New York: Guilford. Zinnbauer, Brian, et al. 1999. “The Emerging Meanings of Religiousness and Spirituality: Problems and Prospects.” Journal of Personality 67:889–919.

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PART 5

Applied Sociology and Christianity

INTRODUCTION TO PART 5 Applied Sociology and Christianity

Beyond sociology being a science seeking understanding, and Christianity being a faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum), both sociology and Christianity also address and seek to ameliorate social problems. These include social conditions such as poverty or patterns of behavior such as violence that people believe warrant public concern and collective action to bring about social change. Despite sociology’s putative value-freedom, it is hardly possible to comprehend the magnitude and complexities of social inequalities or exploitative power relations as revealed by sociology without sensing its implicit moral imperatives. Likewise, it is hardly possible to be Christian without honoring and enacting its myriad explicit moral imperatives. To identify, describe, and explain social problems is to be called to social activism; to love one’s neighbor as one’s self is to work actively toward their good as much as one’s own. In their engagement with the human social realm, sociology and Christianity are far more alike than unlike each other. Part 5 articulates how Christians can best approach applied sociology, how law intersects with ethics in Christian communities, how Christianity and socialism share common features, and how the Christian ethic of care mobilizes social movements against modern slavery and for human rights, culminating in social justice. Joshua Reichard provides an analysis of historic and contemporary approaches to applied sociology – problem identification and diagnosis – and clinical sociology – the implementation and evaluation of interventions – from a Christian perspective. He first offers a critique of its value-laden and ideological dimensions before articulating a constructive Christian approach grounded in the seminal formulation of “clinical pastoral sociology” by William Swatos and its antecedent social situationism as conceived by W.I. Thomas. Laura Ford engages normative themes of legality, arguing, in dialog with Max Weber, that concepts of law are inextricably entwined with ethics in the historical development of Christian communities and traditions. She elucidates how Weber’s value-oriented mode of analysis emphasizes the tensions that Christian commitments and convictions generate in relation to the “orders of obligation” in contemporary social life and warns of the challenges of ethical discernment as Christian communities choose which god(s) they will serve. Joerg Rieger surveys the historical relationship between various expressions of both Christianity and socialism, offers a brief overview of attempts to bridge socialism and Christianity, and proposes a rapprochement between Christianity and socialism built on DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-39

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a vision of socialism as a platform for economic and political democracy. In doing so, he identifies basic features that Christianity and socialism have in common – sharing, distribution, agency, and production – and promotes a Christian socialism based on the agency of the working majority. Sanja Ivic explores the Christian roots of the contemporary ethic of care that is especially significant for dealing with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic: love, empathy, compassion, solidarity, and mercy. She notes how traditional ethical approaches do not offer a viable response to the pandemic because while ethical solidarity is necessary, especially during times of crisis, it can only be realized completely if it transforms into the Christian approach to the vulnerable. Matthew Clarke examines how aspects of Christian theology mobilize supporters within the anti-slavery social movement, noting that the most widely accepted contribution is the Judeo-Christo-Islamic assertion that all people are created in the image of God. He employs William Sewell’s concept of schema to contrast theological positions which focus primarily on either personal sin or structural sin, and potentially on mimetic theory and restorative justice, to show how they influence the mobilization of support for various slavery intervention strategies. Olga Breskaya and Giuseppe Giordan overcome the historical binary of Christian opposition versus engagement with the modern concept of human rights by following the sociohistorical perspective of Hans Joas in presenting an affirmative genealogy of human rights. Providing examples from Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy, they highlight the sociological importance of distinguishing the Christian genesis of human dignity and rights from their intellectual justification and the inter-connectedness of religious– secular narratives. Dennis Hiebert argues that social justice, best understood as distributive justice, is inherently ideological, moral, and political and overviews the 200-year debate between the Christian conservative right and Christian progressive left about its relative importance. Employing critical theory, he analyzes the debate linguistically by noting translations of the biblical text, theologically by the imago Dei and Christology, ethically by social ethics, and sociologically by the duality of personal agency and social structure.

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29 APPLIED AND CLINICAL SOCIOLOGY A Christian Perspective Joshua D. Reichard Abstract This chapter is a critical-constructive analysis of historic and contemporary approaches to applied and clinical sociology from a Christian perspective. Applied sociology is the application of sociological research to assist with social problem identification and diagnosis. Clinical sociology is the implementation and evaluation of interventions for groups, organizations, and communities using sociological theories and methods. First, the history and development of the field of applied and clinical sociology will be explored. Second, a critique of applied and clinical sociology from a Christian perspective, including an analysis of its value-laden and ideological dimensions, will be articulated. Finally, a constructive Christian approach to applied and clinical sociology will be offered, grounded in the seminal formulation of “clinical pastoral sociology” by William Swatos and its antecedent social situationism as conceived by W.I. Thomas.

Introduction Applied sociology is the application of sociological research to assist with social problem identification and diagnosis; clinical sociology is the implementation and evaluation of interventions for groups, organizations, and communities using sociological theories and methods. In both cases, the aim is to translate sociological theories into practice for nonacademic audiences. Inasmuch as sociology itself may be “facing a crisis of relevance” and perhaps even be “under attack,” engaged and applied approaches to sociology have been offered as a remedy (Graizbord 2019; Weinstein 1997; Milne and Cumming 2021). As burgeoning subfields within sociology, critical analysis of its methods and assumptions considering Christian perspectives is needed. While great strides have been made toward integrating theology and sociological theory, there is less literature specifically addressing applied sociology as such. The integration of Christianity and social work practice has

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-40

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been examined in detail (Scales and Kelly 1994), and groups such as the North American Association of Christians in Social Work (NACSW) publish a journal, Social Work & Christianity, dedicated to the subject. But applied and clinical sociology is not social work; it is a distinct movement and a developing subdiscipline within sociology which warrants examination by Christian sociologists. Christian approaches to the application of sociological research and the design of sociological interventions can be critically and constructively examined considering normative practices within secular applied and clinical sociology. A robust Christian perspective on applied and clinical sociology, and the issues facing sociological practitioners, may encourage more Christian sociologists to consider becoming practitioners and contribute to growing opportunities in the subfields of sociological practice in the future (KalekinFishman 2012).

Applied and Clinical Sociology Defined Arguably, applied sociology has been at the foundation of the discipline since its inception (Wright 2009), but the definition of applied sociology is still essentially contested (Price and Will 2015; Milne and Cumming 2021). A focus on “change” is a distinguishing aspect of applied and clinical sociology (Kallen 1995:2). In fact, it may be argued that the key to succinctly defining clinical sociology is the concept of intervention – that is, the act of facilitating social change (Lehnerer 2003). Lester Frank Ward was perhaps the earliest sociologist to set applied sociology against “pure” sociology: “the problem of pure sociology is to explain the causes of unhappy marriages, while that of applied sociology is to show how they can be removed” (1903:409). The definition of applied sociology was proposed by former American Sociological Association (ASA) presidents Peter H. Rossi and William Foote Whyte (1983). Harry Perlstadt noted that applied sociology uses sociological knowledge and research skills to gain empirically based knowledge to inform decision-makers, clients, and the general public about social problems, issues, processes, and conditions so that they might make informed choices and improve the quality of life. (2006:342) Applied sociologists engage in evaluative research, conduct needs assessments, facilitate market research, analyze demographic data, and support community activist organizations. According to Jan Fritz, co-founder of the Clinical Sociological Association, clinical sociology is a “creative, rights-based and interdisciplinary specialization that seeks to improve life situations for individuals and collectivities. Clinical sociologists work with systems to assess situations and avoid, reduce, or eliminate problems through a combination of analysis and intervention” (2008:7–8). Clinical sociologists may be sociotherapists, group facilitators, teachers/trainers, organizational consultants, community consultants, or mediators. Put simply, “clinical sociology is sociological intervention. It is the application of a sociological perspective to the analysis and design of interventions for positive social change” (Clark and Fritz 1986:174). Furthermore, Marvin Olsen conceptualized applied sociology as “the process of applying sociological knowledge and techniques to understanding and dealing with social 370

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issues and problems” (1987:3) and identified its primary purpose as the process of formulating policies and actions that will “intentionally produce social change to improve social life” (1987:5). Jammie Price and Jeff Will suggest that clinical sociologists then apply a “medical frame” to groups, organizations, or situations in terms of assessing, diagnosing, treating, and reassessing them (2015:859). Clinical sociologists conduct assessments; build collaborative relationships with organizations, individuals, and subgroups; share assessment findings “with a balance of support and confrontation[;] and make recommendations that reflect a combination of the sociologist’s and client’s understanding of the problems and solutions” (Piña 2001:343). Applied and clinical sociology is the “application of a variety of critically applied practices which attempt sociological diagnosis and treatment of groups and group members in the community” (Glassner and Freedman 1979:5). The Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology (AACS) is the leading international organization that sponsors annual conferences and a journal and credentials both certified clinical sociologists (CCS) and certified sociological practitioners (CSP). The Applied Sociology subgroup of the ASA is friendly to both applied and clinical sociologists. In like manner, the Applied Sociology Research Cluster of the Canadian Sociological Association (CSA) supports both applied and clinical approaches to sociology in Canada (Milne and Cumming 2021). The Commission on the Accreditation of Programs in Applied and Clinical Sociology (CAPACS) prefers the term “sociological practice” to refer to “applied, clinical, and engaged public sociology” (Milne and Cumming 2021:2–9). CAPACS defines applied sociology in terms of “the utilization of sociological theory, methods, and skills to collect and analyze data and to communicate the findings to understand and resolve pragmatic problems of clients” (17). While no sociology department in a Christian university in North America is accredited by CAPACS, Omega Graduate School (American Centre for Religion and Society Studies (ACRSS)) in the USA is a nationally accredited graduate research institution dedicated exclusively to advancing the sociological “scholar-practitioner” paradigm from a Christian perspective, including doctoral coursework in applied and clinical sociology, specifically.

A Christian Critique of Applied and Clinical Sociology At the heart of applied and clinical sociology is a humanistic optimism. Unlike the tendency toward grievance and pessimism often associated with critical theory, applied and clinical sociologists have a history of focusing on, formulating, and implementing solutions to social problems. Lester Frank Ward (1925) argued that if antecedent causes of social problems can be uncovered through sociological methodology, and we can, therefore, understand what causes phenomena such as poverty or elitism, we can then also change those phenomena. Inasmuch as applied and clinical sociology may be viewed as a form of social activism, it is the kind of activism that first employs a sociological imagination to conceive of possibilities, and then employs sociological methods to uncover problems and test potential solutions. As such, “research and theory feed activism and application of our knowledge and skills for positive social change” (Mancini Billson 2020:127). The value orientation of applied and clinical sociology is, at heart, “humanistic, holistic, and multi-disciplinary” (Glass 1979:513–514). Not uncharacteristic of the prevailing progressive optimism of the 1920s, Ward (1925) believed: 371

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1 Poverty can be minimized or eliminated through “systematic intervention” in society. 2 We are not helpless. 3 We can use our multiple powers of the mind to take control of the situation and “direct the evolution of society” (telesis). 4 Sociology, as a practice, can be harnessed to direct scientifically the social and economic development of society. 5 Sociology should institute a universal and comprehensive system of education, regulate competition, connect people based on equal opportunities, cooperation – and the end of gender [inequalities] to promote – happiness and freedom (Mancini Billson 2020:128). Ward’s optimism was that “like minds with good intentions can make our world a better place,” an optimism which continues to guide the applied and clinical sociology movement (Mancini Billson 2020:143). Such optimism surely evokes the specter of Walter Rauschenbusch’s A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917), which sought the application of Christian activism to social ills of the era, from economic inequality and racial tensions to alcoholism and violent crime. Like much of the naive optimism of the early twentieth century, Rauschenbusch’s vision was panned by evangelicals as liberal wishful thinking following the disillusionment of the Great Depression and the atrocities of World War II. In some ways, the social gospel may remind Christian sociologists of a rather universal Christian insight: human beings are both made in the image of God and stained by the consequences of sin (both individual and systemic). Thus, the complexity of human nature and the reality of a broken world temper aspirations of social progress. According to Jonathan Freedman, applied and clinical sociology is not “academic, intrapsychic, biochemical, value-free, accepting of the ideological basis of the client’s reality, culture-free, conservative, relying on a single ritualistic set of techniques to discover the key factors important in comprehending the situation under study” (1989:55). Such an apophatic definition likely raises red flags for Christian sociologists, especially those from evangelical and conservative persuasions. Defining the discipline as decidedly not “conservative” and not “accepting of the ideological basis of the client’s reality” seems to be rather narrow in scope. While there surely are practicing sociologists of a conservative persuasion, the intent is to advance well-being and the common good beyond the status quo rather than solely to protect the interests of the privileged in society. The intent of the clinical enterprise is not merely a study of the “case” but the formulation of a program of adjustment or treatment (Wirth 1931). Therefore, the discipline is surely more progressive than conservative. The clinical sociologist is “acting constantly to redefine” social situations, engaging in a “constant state of reinvention” (Saunders 2001:171). Concerning ideological acceptance, clinical sociologists need not ascribe to the ideological persuasions of the clients they serve any more than a Christian physician needs to ascribe to the ideology of a patient before treating their broken bone. In the affirmative, applied and clinical sociology is practice oriented, focuses on case studies, works with individuals, groups, organizations, and communities, diagnostic, change-oriented, humanistic, uses insights derived from immersion in the critical sociological tradition; uses sociological imagination, leads to behavior change and growth, and tends to have a liberal/cynical or radical ideological cast. (Freedman 1989:55; Fritz and Rheaume 2014) 372

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Of course, affirming the “critical sociological tradition” may seem intellectually restrictive to Christian sociologists. Ironically, although the apophatic definition specifically rejects the acceptance of the ideological orientations of clients, the affirmative definition specifically embraces the “liberal/cynical or radical ideological cast” with the important qualifier “tends to.” The loaded terms “liberal,” “cynical,” and “radical’ used back-to-back likely raise the eyebrows of thoughtful Christian sociologists, not because of ideological (or even dogmatic) pre-suppositions, but because they are at once unnecessarily restrictive and loosely applied. Nevertheless, Christian sociologists can also resist any strictly political connotations of the terms “conservative” and “liberal.” A Christian perspective carries the possibility of transcending political persuasions du jour. Rather than adjust people to the “realities” of the “way things are” or “the system” as it is, clinical sociologists are committed to helping people “cope with their sociocultural and historical situations and institutions and situations in the direction of self-determinism, human value and human dignity” (Straus 1979:480). All sociological interventions raise the Humian question of how a moral “ought” derives from an empirical “is.” Notably, Emile Durkheim also raised the question of the nature of moral epistemology within sociology. While the secular applied and clinical sociology movement affirms the advancement of human rights and human dignity, surely ideals to which Christians can assent, precisely what constitutes “positive” or “constructive” social change remains a subjective question in a purportedly value-free enterprise. Though decidedly value-laden and ideological, a Christian worldview offers a transcendent morality and a vision for a society based on a coming Kingdom in which “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4). The Christian vision evokes a future that can judge the present and a spiritual justice deeper than socio-economic, gender, or racial equity alone. A final criticism is more of a caution against heedless attempts to apply sociological interventions, which can arise from unwarranted and naive optimism about the human condition. Clinical sociologists acknowledge that “unending interventions can be iatrogenic and pathological” (Saunders 2001:169). There is a tendency within the applied and clinical tradition to attempt interventions until something works, and yet, mistakes are repeated, and the very clients who are the intended recipients of the intervention become perpetual victims instead. Suspicion of promises that do not materialize is legitimate, and remains a healthy posture toward clinical intervention. In the contemporary milieu, such interventions are often technological in nature, yet not only are technological interventions no panacea for social ills, but they also often introduce iatrogenic problems of their own.

A Constructive Christian Approach to Applied and Clinical Sociology Unsurprisingly, aside from sociology’s tendency toward de-constructing religious institutions and their roles in society, early sociological activism took on a religious aura, a kind of missionary zeal aimed at scientifically uncovering and fixing social problems. HelmsHaynes described early sociology professors as “pioneers” who taught sociology in such a way that it was “religious in inspiration and tone and reformist and applied in nature” (2016:4). Sociology was considered a “scientific discipline that could aid in the fight against social evils” as well as “support social betterment activities” (Helms-Haynes 2016:15). Early sociologists believed it was the churches that could best do “God’s work” by “applying practical, science-based sociological knowledge in the form of ‘social service’ (social work) 373

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to solve social problems” (Milne and Cumming 2021:15). Early sociology courses arguably had a “practical and applied orientation mixed with religious and scientific knowledge” (Milne and Cumming 2021:172). However, insofar as some conservative Christians have continued, repeatedly, to view progressive social justice enterprises critically (Hiebert 2022), sociology, in turn, has not always looked favorably upon religious institutions or motivations. There is an opportunity for mutual critical-constructive dialog across secular public and religious private contexts, a divide sociology can help bridge (Reichard 2015). Applied and clinical sociology, which moves from theory to practice, may be particularly poised to mitigate skepticism and facilitate trust across a secular–sacred divide within the academic discipline of sociology. Symbolic interactionism and systems theory (from a neofunctionalist or Mertonian perspective) tend to align well with Christian approaches to sociological intervention as a practical form of social situationism. Proposed by William Swatos in a seminal collection of essays, Religious Sociology: Interfaces and Boundaries (1987), “Clinical Pastoral Sociology” may be helpful for Christian sociologists interested in clinical practice. Pioneering the convergence of clinical sociology and pastoral care, Swatos envisioned “an alternative nonreductionist approach to religion” (157) that “emphasizes the web of social interaction” (154) and conceives of religion as a “system of interaction” (155). Though Swatos used the term “clinical pastoral sociology,” “clinical sociology from a Christian perspective” may be more inclusive of other applications. The term “pastoral” refers to sociology applied to the “pastor-congregant” relationship, but a broader definition more inclusively encompasses sociological practice within a range of religious organizations and social contexts not just churches. Symbolic interactionism takes social symbols, and their consequences, seriously. The affinity of symbolic interactionism to religious realities in society led Swatos to embrace social situationism (the Thomas theorem: “the definition of the situation”) (Thomas and Thomas 1928) as theoretical groundwork for applying sociology to religious contexts: “a situational approach to religion overcomes all the reductionist tendencies … while at the same time being squarely centered in well-founded and tested sociological theory” (157). Accordingly, religion can be viewed through an alternative lens of non-reductionism and, instead, be conceived as a “system of interaction” (154–157). Religious communities are an “arena of social interaction within which a given set of expectations and rules apply” (Ammerman 2021:31). But, in the situationist milieu of W.I. Thomas, however social groups define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. Therefore, the ascription of experiences and explanations to God as a legitimate social reality, whether empirically verifiable or not, is real in its consequences. Swatos defines his approach as follows: “clinical sociology applied within the specific context of the religious institution … It is sociology applied within a shared structure of religious value and meaning” (1987:153–154). It is "how people relate to what they consider to be supraempircal, supernatural, transcendent realities" (157). Moreover, “regardless of theological or pragmatic valence attached to a given application, the theoretical structure is fundamentally sociological: social variables are given explanatory priority” (154). This point is critical in that although Christians engaging in clinical sociology may employ religious symbols, values, and shared meaning within social groups, such variables are fundamentally social in nature. Swatos also distinguishes clinical sociology practiced from a Christian perspective from alternative sociological approaches to religion: “functionalists see religion as essential to 374

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social stability; Marxists, more like psychologists, see it as obfuscating ‘real’ conditions … the sociological reduction of religion in the Durkheimian and Marxist formulations … constitutes a problem for clinical [religious] sociology” (155). Clinical religious sociology “enables us to take religion seriously as an action system” (158). The theory embraces social situationism (“the definition of the situation”) as theoretical groundwork for applying sociology to religious contexts: “a situational approach to religion overcomes all the reductionist tendencies … while at the same time being squarely centered in well-founded and tested sociological theory” (157). In terms of translating theory into practice, Swatos proposes that clinical sociology from a Christian perspective is a “method that takes the internal logics of religion seriously” (160). It seeks to understand religion “not in terms of abstract principles, but of interactions and situations” (161). When applied to interventions, it acknowledges that “socio-cultural, economic, theological, and psychological considerations interact in a complex web of relationships that do not permit simple solutions” (161). Perhaps the most useful sociological interventions for Christian clinicians involve, as Roger Straus (1979) noted, “redefining the situation” in religious terms, grounded in shared religious values and meaning, for groups, organizations, churches, and communities (63). Thus, sociological interventions often involve re-defining the situation in explicitly religious or theological terms, grounded in shared values and meaning (63). As Howard Rebach (2001) notes, the goal of clinical sociology is to “change clients’ definitions of the situation.” The operational definition of the situation is found in the “patterns of action and interaction of an individual or groups of persons in small or large social systems” (33). Clinical sociological intervention often moves “beyond the clients’ formulation of the problem to consider other factors that affect functioning, especially broad social trends” (Freedman 1989:27). Nancy Ammerman’s (2021) formulation of “lived religion” exposes a trending de-emphasis of the roles of religious institutions and traditions in individualized religious behaviors. For Christians practicing applied and clinical sociology, especially within Christian communities and organizations, the other factors may be social, cultural, and even spiritual influences beyond the myopic scope of a client’s perception. However, Christian Smith’s (2014) modification of social situationism, informed by critical realism, may provide a more robust framework for Christians practicing clinical sociology. Smith argues that modified social situationism can provide a more holistic understanding of the situation, especially regarding how sociologists understand the behavior of religiously motivated actors in specifically religious contexts. The theoretical thrust of clinical sociology from a Christian perspective can thereby be articulated as a form of social situationism tempered by the metatheory of critical realism. Clinical sociology demands “intimate, sharply realistic investigations linked with efforts to diagnose problems and to suggest strategies for coping with these problems” (Lee 1979:489). Critical realism may provide Christian sociologists with a framework to be both critical of the critical orientation of sociology itself and, with a proper dose of humility, critical of their own Christian pre-suppositions. A mutually constructive dialectic of interchange between the discipline of sociology and a Christian worldview can ensue, providing, perhaps, a more holistic perspective on how best to design and implement interventions to address social problems. Nevertheless, academic sociology itself is unlikely to make its way naturally from the pulpit to the pews. It is a mistake to suggest that “the same data and analyses will serve both research and clinical purposes.” The felt needs of clients “are different and they resist prescriptive, top-down attempts to mandate reforms or impose frames of reference and 375

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analytical structures on them.” Clinical sociologists must “do social life” in “as naturalistic way as possible and become sensitive to the kind of information that client organizations can and will use” (Saunders 2001:175). Unlike the caricature of the “social justice warrior” often associated with activism, Saunders contends that clinical sociologists must “work softly” and “be restrained” (Saunders 2001:193). Such restraint calls for a modesty that should appeal to most Christian sociologists. In cultural environments in which “religious life is precarious and contested, the emotional dimension of everyday practice comes to the fore” (Ammerman 2021:129). Furthermore, there is an incarnational dimension to applied and clinical sociology that challenges the ivory tower image of sociology in the academy. Indeed, “the clinical sociologist must go where the action is” (Rebach 2001:34). Clinical sociologists aspire to live missiologically and ethnographically, working side by side “in the trenches,” so to speak, with people living in poverty and among society’s most vulnerable. Laura Atkins and Shelley Grant call for sociologists to “dig deeper into the complex meaning of social justice” and suggest, instead, the less loaded phrase of “social uplift” (2022:328) because a “deficit approach” has driven social justice movements with a focus on “what communities and individuals lack.” Instead, Atkins and Grant propose an “asset-based approach” focusing, instead, on “what communities and community members, contribute to the social justice project” (2022:329; Bauer, Kniffin, and Priest 2015). Sociologists who teach are implicit “clinicians,” as they are agents of change for the attitudes and experiences of students (Fritz 1979:577). In the context of higher education, a sociological imagination focused on such an asset-based approach to applied and clinical sociology may advance “inclusion and empowerment” strategies and “service learning initiatives” as they “converge with social justice aims” (Atkins and Grant 2022:329). The following are practical examples of the kinds of interventions clinical sociologists operating from a Christian perspective can offer clients:

1. Uncover how religious communities view God as a social actor in their situation. 2. Identify which social actions religious communities ascribe to God or the divine in their situation. 3. Facilitate religious communities in thinking through the social consequences of their beliefs. 4. Assist religious leaders in comparing the consequences of beliefs to the professed beliefs of a religious community. For example: • Are the consequences of our beliefs about God’s activity in the lives and communities of racial minorities consistent with what we believe about i) God’s character and ii) the divine value of human lives? • Are the consequences of our presumptions about how the local, state, and national economy function consistent with i) God’s disposition toward persons in poverty and ii) the divine value of human lives? Christians practicing clinical sociology can help religious communities identify how their beliefs about God affect their behavior, how their behavior affects the world and others around them, and together with religious leaders, process the extent to which those consequences are consistent or inconsistent with their professed beliefs. Religious practices include “professing beliefs or claiming a religious identification” (Ammerman 2021:20).

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Often, social situationism in the form of clinical sociology is the guiding theory that helps clinicians consider various factors related to particular interventions, such as:

1. How clients will receive the intervention (can it be framed in religiously familiar terms?). 2. How clients will be involved or affected (what religious objections or interests might they raise?). 3. How outcomes will impact the overall meaning-making process of communities and organizations and their missions. To what extent can mission/purpose statements be expressed in religious terms for the benefit of all stakeholders?

Finally, it is important to note that “knowledge-based interventions” alone are unlikely to facilitate lasting social change (Saunders 2001:176). Christians practicing clinical sociology must find ways to introduce meaningful (albeit modest) change within religious organizations and communities that move beyond talking about the problem toward action. As Ammerman observes, “as popular as it may be to claim to be ‘spiritual but not religious,’ most people who think of themselves as spiritual are also religiously active” (2021:52). Just as “faith without works is dead” (James 2:14), the same may be true of academic research not followed by constructive action or interventions and not followed up further with adequate evaluation. But change is “not likely to occur simply by introducing a specific set of activities” (Rebach 2001:28). The clinical sociological process of studying, diagnosing, intervening, and evaluating is neither merely descriptive nor simply program implementation. It is a complex, interdisciplinary endeavor, and Christian theology, practical or otherwise, may enrich that endeavor more. In essence, the clinical sociological enterprise can be seen as the benevolent act of healing social wounds: a ministry of “healing every kind of disease and affliction among the people” (Matthew 4:23).

Conclusion The future of sociology surely includes the practice of applied and clinical sociology, and Christian sociologists have a role to play in its advancement. While the thrust of applied and clinical sociology has been concentrated in the critical end of the ideological spectrum, a Christian perspective can bring constructive insights and a politically transcendent spiritual vision to bear on social problems. Grounded in social situationism and enriched by critical realism, Swatos’s notion of clinical pastoral sociology may be reframed as “applied and clinical sociology from a Christian perspective” – a theoretical and practical framework for designing and delivering social interventions for Christian practitioners. Religious communities, especially, but not exclusively, can benefit from the practice of applied and clinical sociology.

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30 SEEKING ETHICAL DISCERNMENT IN CHRISTIAN LEGALITY AND COMMUNITY Laura R. Ford Abstract This chapter engages normative themes of law and legality, arguing, in dialog with Max Weber, that concepts of law are inextricably entwined with ethics in the historical development of Christian communities and traditions. Weberian historicist sociology proposes that Christian communities, like all communities, are ultimately constituted by the “orders and powers” (Ordnungen und Mächte) of obligation to which their members submit. Moreover, Weber’s value-oriented mode of sociological analysis emphasizes the tensions that Christian commitments and convictions, informed by biblical legal traditions, generate in relation to the “orders of obligation” in contemporary social life. Famously describing himself as religiously “unmusical,” Weber, nonetheless, offers a somber warning about the challenges of ethical discernment in efforts to pursue Christian convictions by conventional, legal, and political means.

Introduction Concepts and theories of law occupy a central but ambivalent place in Christian theology, ecclesiology, and historical development, beginning with the New Testament canon and extending to the Reformation-era revolutions that paved the way for modern, national societies (Berman 2003; O’Donovan and O’Donovan 2004; Witte, Jr. 2008). As represented in the synoptic gospels, an important component of the debate between Jesus and the Pharisees, together with the scribes and “teachers of the law,” concerned the interpretation of biblical law (e.g., the appropriate parameters of Sabbath observance) (Luke 6:1–16; Mark 2:23–28; Matthew 12:1–8; Johnson 1991; Dunn 2003; Johnson 2008; Klawans 2017). In Pauline Christianity, law-related concepts, including law (nomos) itself, together with justification/righteousness/legitimacy (dikaiosyne) and covenant (diatheke), provide a vital, if subtle and polysemous channel through which to narrate the divine plan of grace, redemption, reconciliation, and salvation history (oikonomia) (Dunn 1988; Nanos 1996; 380

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-41

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Reumann 1959; Sanders 1983; Wright 1992a, 2013). Paul drew quite freely on the legal implications of Roman rule to expound the meaning and ethical implications of a Christian way of life (e.g., Romans 13; 1 Peter 2:11; Reasoner 1993). In his radical moments, Paul seemed to declare that the gospel message of Jesus’s sacrifice, resurrection, and exaltation implied complete abolition of the law for Gentile Christians (e.g., Galatians; Longenecker 1990). At the same time, however, Jesus was clearly remembered as upholding the law, as stating very explicitly that he did not come to abolish the law but, rather, to fully perform (fulfill) it and as offering a gospel message of God’s kingdom that was deeply informed by the Torah (Luke 10:25–42, 18:15–34; Mark 12:28–34; Matthew 5:17–20, 22:34–40). A particularly influential line of New Testament scholarship, one that has invited rich insights from Jewish scholars, emphasizes the extent to which both Jesus and Paul acted as authoritative interpreters of the law, rather than abolitionists, more like subtle rabbis than modern revolutionaries (e.g., Chilton 2002; Levine and Brettler 2017). Moreover, at a practical level, Luke–Acts famously portrays Paul as claiming the legal protections that came with his Roman citizenship, subjecting himself (fatefully) to Roman legal processes (Acts 16:37–39, 22:25–29, 25:7–12, 26:32). While historical questions are periodically raised about whether Paul was truly a Roman citizen, there can be little doubt that the New Testament tradition recognizes both legitimacy and riskiness when Christian communities claim the protective powers of secular (imperial) law. Over the lengthy course of Christian history, these deep ambivalences about the proper relationship of church to political power and law have contributed to a variety of unstable regimes: Christian imperialism, sectarian separationism, warring dualism of church and state, and, in the early modern West, national churches, which laid the foundations for secularizing national states (Ford 2021; Gorski 2021; Mann 2012). Today, in a world of intensely interconnected and conflicted nation-states, Christian nationalism increasingly stands under indictment, chastised, and castigated as an intrinsically poisonous mode of communal belonging (Gorski 2021; Gorski and Perry 2022; cf. Gorski 2017). In light of these ambivalences and indictments, this chapter argues for renewed appreciation of Max Weber’s historical sociology, reiterating Weber’s unsurpassed value in clarifying the implications of a historical trajectory by which Christianity, law, and political consciousness have developed together. The focus is on Weber’s early writings in the compilation known today as Economy and Society, especially the first half of his lengthy essay on Religious Communities (Weber 2013/1968; 2001), seeking to show that Weber is still of great relevance today. Through his clear-eyed attention to inevitable trade-offs in value commitments, Weber offers a secular and tragic echo of the message that Jesus and his prophetic forebears earlier offered to the world in uncompromising terms: we must choose which Lord(s) we will serve (cf. Weber (Whimster) 2004:213–244, 257–287). From a Christian perspective, there is no getting around that ultimate question of faith and fidelity, storied answers to which ultimately constitute belonging and obligation, communities, and legalities, Christian and otherwise (Cary 2019; Smith 2003; Wright 1992b, 1992c).

Law and Religion in Max Weber’s Economic Sociology Max Weber’s economic sociology is distinctive in the extent to which the inter-relationship between law and religion – as normative “orders” (Ordnungen) contributing meaningful motivations and “orientations” for social action, relationships, and patterns – is systematically theorized (Coutu 2018; Swedberg 1988, 2006; Treiber 1985; Treiber 2020). However, 381

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as leading Weberian scholars have repeatedly emphasized, there is a development in Weber’s own thinking about these matters that should be acknowledged (Gephart 2015; Schluchter 1988). Already in his recovery from mental breakdown and in the intellectual shift marked by publication of the Protestant Ethic essays in 1904–1905, Weber was beginning to explore the ways in which Reformation-era Christian teachings and theology contributed to distinctive attitudes toward law and “rights” in Occidental Europe. “Legality,” Weber emphasized, was an important dimension of Protestant asceticism (Ford 2022; Schluchter 1988). Between 1909 and 1914, Weber entered an intensive period of socio-economic scholarship, generating the older, unfinished essays that were intended to constitute his contribution to the Encyclopedia (Grundriß) of Social Economics (Baier et al. 2000). Among the oldest of these essays, closely linked to the set of ideal–typical sociological categories elaborated in his 1913 Categories article, were a series of “communitarian” essays (Weber 2012:273– 301; Weber 2013/1968:339–640; Weber 2001). These are among Weber’s most generalizing explorations of foundational forms of communal activity, focusing, of course, on economic dimensions (Roth 1968). Beginning with his essay on the household, Weber highlighted the normative significance of deferential loyalty and “piety,” cultivated in conjunction with legal frameworks of “legitimate” marriage and inheritance (Weber 2013/1968:359). Weber developed these insights into lengthy treatments of religious communities, legal-historical developments, and forms of rulership/lordship (Herrschaft). With his historically rich explorations in the Economic Ethics of the World Religions, Weber refined some of his earlier arguments. Of particular relevance here are the developments in his thinking about biblical legal traditions, as seen in the essays on Ancient Judaism. Furthermore, arguments that he made about religion in the Economic Ethics essays echo his more “secular” reflections on the vocations of science and politics and on the place of universities in modern life. Weber did not live to complete the work that he had intended with respect to medieval Christianity and Islam. What is eminently clear, however, from the time of the Protestant Ethic essays and onward, is that Weber took the relationship between law and religion very seriously, investigating that relationship through developing, systematic, historical comparisons. Complementing his initial emphasis on legality as a particular type of attitude and ethos characteristic of Protestant asceticism, Weber would gradually develop the concept of legitimacy into a comprehensively theorized, ideal-typical conception of the motivating reasons for adherence to customary, conventional, and legal orders. Communities and voluntary associations, sectarian groups and institutionalized organizations, churches and states – all forms of social action – are motivationally enabled and sustained, in all their empirical, historical variety, through the ideational orientation by social actors to legitimate orders (Weber 2005). Legality, as addressed in Weber’s final set of sociological categories, became an ideal– typical set of reasons for ascribing legitimacy to conceptual orders, which, in turn, give meaning to an institutional framework (Swedberg and Agevall 2016; Weber 2019). When an institutionalized organization such as the state or the church is legitimated through legality, normative orders and rules will be enacted through positive, written rules, which are either voluntarily accepted and affirmed, as in a covenantal/contractual structure, or imposed from within a rulership structure (Herrschaft) whose overall legality and legitimacy are accepted. Weber seems, in these final ideal–typical categories for sociological analysis, to have pulled legality quite far in the direction of positive law and to have drawn a sharp analytical boundary against forms of legitimacy that depend on religious faith. Legality has become a 382

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separate basis of legitimacy from value-rational fidelity, which grants validity to orders on the basis of deduction from absolute principles, and these are both distinguished from an ascription of validity to orders on the basis of emotional faith in revealed truth (affectual validity) or constancy of tradition (traditional validity) (Weber 2019). Not surprisingly, then, Weber has sometimes been interpreted as an apologist for the view that modern, positive law has been shorn of all legitimating supports, apart from an ultimately empty faith in legalism. Without question, Weber did see empty legalism as one likely scenario for modern institutions. But he also highlighted another set of possibilities in the Western natural law tradition and in legal prophecy. The natural law tradition, he argued, had been carried by medieval Christianity, retaining close links to ancient forms of philosophy, particularly stoicism; it was an important source of the revolutionary movements that reshaped early modernity into a world of developing nation-states (Rheinstein 1967). Moreover, in his later reflections on the Christian natural law tradition, Weber increasingly emphasized the role of covenantal law, a kind of law that leaves the divine partner free to change the terms of the covenant. In this “divine positive law,” possibilities for renewed sources of legitimacy in law and legal institutions remain open (Ford 2022). New forms of legal prophecy might appear, Weber hinted, drawing new possibilities for legal meaning from the very religious roots whence law and ethics grew.

The Emergence of Law and Ethics in Religious Communities Law itself emerges as part of a process whereby religious communities become ethical. This is one conclusion that can be drawn from Weber’s wide-ranging, unfinished essay on Religious Communities (Weber 2013/1968; Weber 2001; Eisenstadt 1986; Schluchter 1981, 1988). Emphasizing the uniqueness of biblical Israel at various points throughout his essay, Weber, nonetheless, argued that the basic pattern was more general, identifiable across the religious histories of China, India, the Ancient Near East, and in Greco-Roman Hellenism (Weber 2013/1968). Religion, Weber argued, is understandable for sociologists in terms of particular experiences (Erlebnissen), ideas (Vorstellungen), and purposes/goals (Zwecke), which are fundamentally impacted by shared cultural assumptions about the existence of a trans-human realm of power (Weber 2013/1968; Weber 2001). With the rise of cultural religions, the everyday rationality of magic premised on these shared cultural assumptions was transformed into conceptual symbolism through a process of abstraction and sublimation carried out by vocational groups and strata. This involves, in particular, the development of analogical thinking. The brief argument that Weber makes here about empirical forms of juristic reasoning, reliant on arguments from historically developing precedents as well as the development of what he considered a higher form of legal rationalism, namely deductive inference from abstract legal categories, closely parallels the arguments that he made more fully in The Developmental Conditions of the Law (Gephart 2015; Treiber 2020). The use of analogical thinking with respect to legal actions and semantic categories facilitated an early and decisive trajectory of rationalization, particularly in Roman law and religion (Weber 2013/1968). In this specific development of legal rationalization, precisely defined jurisdictions for the gods were articulated, and cultic formulas for their worship were carefully delineated. This enhanced a trend toward formalism in Roman religion, together with a tendency toward a “conception of impersonalism as having an inner relationship to 383

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the objectively rational” (Weber 2013/1968:408). In Rome, religious questions tended to become legal questions, producing a “ceaseless cultivation of a practical, rational casuistry of sacred law, the development of a sort of cautelary sacred jurisprudence,” and, therefore, a tendency to consider religious questions as “lawyers’ problems” (Weber 2013/1968:409). In this “essentially religious characteristic” of Rome’s distinctive legal culture, “sacred law became the mother of rational juristic thinking” (Weber 2013/1968:409). This argument is important for the way that Weber conceptualizes religious communities, together with legal rationalization, in developmental terms. The casuistry of early Roman religion meant that there could be neither communal action (Gemeinschaftshandeln) nor individual action (individuelles Handeln) without cultic devotion to a “special god” (Spezialgott) (Weber 2013/1968:411; Weber 2001:140). “Whenever an organization or an association is not the personal power base of an individual ruler, but genuinely an association of men, it has need of a god of its own” (Weber 2001:140; Weber 2013/1968:411). Therefore, Weber’s largely implicit definition of religion is closely tied to Roman cultus in the relationships of people to supernatural forces, taking the forms of prayer, sacrifice, and worship. Religious communities are formed, essentially, by the specific gods that they worship and by the legal principles that define the propriety of that worship (Weber 2013/1968). Law emerges as religion, then moves in an ethical direction, a development made possible by the emergence of priests and prophets who give ideas, experiences, and goals new shapes of meaning. The key to their innovation, which is central to the eventual elimination of magical notions altogether, is to conceive of the relationship to divine powers as pleading (Bitte) and service (Dienste), rather than coercive power (Weber 2013/1968). This is the vital step in the direction of ethics, away from magic. Ever the realist, Weber emphasizes the extent to which this serves the interests of priests as dedicated servants of the cultic community. Now events, such as national defeat in war, that might previously have been interpreted as failures of the priests’ own charismatic powers, can be blamed on failures by the people to serve the gods adequately and live up to their divinely appointed standards of behavior. Weber argued that Israelite religion took this in a distinctively political direction in the extraordinary extent to which a traumatic national history was interpreted as God’s justice in retribution or loving-kindness in blessing. In ancient Israel, this movement toward ethical religion, out of which law and legally oriented legitimacy were constituted, involved the creation of a “political cult” and “national religion” (Weber 2013/1968). A political organization (Verband) was constituted through the partial suppression of household religion and local cultic centers. This development can be seen most clearly, Weber would argue, in Ancient Judaism, in the religious centralization of Deuteronomy (Weber 1952, 2005). In that “second” lawgiving tradition, the covenant with Israel’s unique God (YHWH, Adonai, THE LORD) established the temple at Jerusalem, the City of David, as the exclusive site for cultic worship. Conceptions of national existence, obligation, and well-being would, henceforth, be rooted in that center of religious worship. Strikingly, Weber represents ethical conceptions, not only in Abrahamic religions but also in all religions, as the consequence, rather than the foundation, of legal conceptions. Across the ancient world, the ordering activities, especially of priests, helped to concentrate political and legal power, enabling more orderly judicial determinations within larger and more pacified polities, heightening the possibilities for rational understanding of power, both natural and social. In sum, legal and political developments facilitated an ethical attachment of individuals to a cosmos of obligations, which made the understanding of others’ actions 384

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possible. The social world was starting to become calculable/reckonable (berechenbar). As part of this process, boundaries preventing community formation with people previously conceived as irreconcilably “other” could be overcome, a possibility that Weber illustrated in the example of early Christianity, with barriers between Jew and Gentile broken down in table fellowship, commensality. The same process of priestly rationalization within sacred law that Weber posited as the conceptual foundation for developments toward ethics was, moreover, the foundation of new conceptions (Vorstellungen) of the Good, new clarities differentiating goodness from “radical evil” and sin, and a new way of conceiving the goals of human life: salvation (ultimate well-being). This development did not happen to the same degree in all religions, but it did happen particularly in biblical religion, among the “Peoples of the Book” (Lumbard 2015). Goodness was distilled from a “heterogeneous complex of prescriptions and prohibitions,” seen as uniquely exemplified by a unitary source of ultimate power, namely God, and formulated as a pre-eminent, normative goal for human life. Weber’s concept of prophecy was especially important for the way he thought about law, not only in the Religious Communities essay, but also in the concluding sections of his essay on The Developmental Conditions of the Law, which addressed modern developments in revolutionary natural law (Rheinstein 1967). What distinguishes prophets from priests is the fact that they are personally called (they have a highly personal conception of vocation), and they are unremunerated (Weber 2013/1968). They are, we could say, antiprofessionals in their religious and legal vocation. Prophets are “purely personal” bearers of charisma, who, by virtue of a sense of mission, proclaim religious teachings (Lehren) or divine commandments (Befehlen). The meaningful content (Inhalt) of their personal mission and vocation is precisely the “doctrine or commandment” (Lehre oder Gebot) of normative instruction. In the biblical tradition, the great prophets are also lawgivers: Moses, of course, but also Jesus of Nazareth, whom both Matthew and Luke portray as being a “prophet like Moses” (Johnson 1991). The apostles, too, are prophets according to this conception, and therefore, the entire New Testament canon can be seen as a kind of prophetic literature, which builds on the Law, Prophets, and Writings (TNK) of the Hebrew Bible. The Quran is also conceived as a prophetic revelation, which recognizes ethical connections with the other peoples of the biblical book and recognizes Jesus as a prophet (Lumbard 2015). For Weber, prophetic activity is distinctive in the way it contributes to the meaning and values that ultimately orient religious communities and individuals. “Prophetic revelation involves for both the prophet himself and for his followers … a unified view of the world derived from a consciously integrated meaningful attitude toward life” (Weber 2013/1968:450; Weber 2001:193). Both the natural world and the social/political world of human beings “have a certain systematic and coherent meaning,” they are a “cosmos,” a “meaningful, ordered totality,” with eminently practical implications for the way that people live their daily lives (Weber 2013/1968:450–51). This meaningful order has normative and salvific implications in the religious world view. The conduct of a person in his/her everyday life is to be “patterned in an integrally meaningful manner” in accordance with the normative order revealed by the prophet and must be oriented by that order if it is to bring ultimate well-being (salvation). The vital interest in the order is, therefore, not one primarily of logical coherence but, rather, of “practical valuations.” Tensions between the realities of life in the world, judged according to the standard of values provided in the prophetically revealed order, will often be acute, and further pro385

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phetic activity will be needed to address these tensions. And priests will continue to play a significant role, not in articulating and revealing the fundamental values, but in systematizing them conceptually, casuistically, and rationally. Lay intellectuals and popular philosophizers will also seek to resolve the tensions between religious ideals and worldly realities, and this is the “womb” from which all secular philosophies and theories are born, striving to answer “the ultimate question of all metaphysics.” The quest to answer this “ultimate question” constitutes a kind of “inner compulsion,” a decisively non-material human “need,” a “metaphysical” or spiritual need of the human mind “to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take up a [valuational] position toward it” (Weber 2013/1968:499). This is the source of all intellectual rationalization, whether from laity, priests, prophets, or judges (Weber 2013/1968:451, 499; Rheinstein 1967). Law receives its moral meaning, we might say, through the activity of prophets and intellectuals who are responding to spiritual needs and metaphysical questions. It does so in the context of charismatically initiated religious communities that tend to become routinized, institutionalized, and popularized and whose servants would be more than human if they did not seek to protect themselves and their families by enclosing economic resources and positions in the process of development.

Christian Tendencies toward Bourgeois Legality Despite the importance of priests and prophets, and of biblical traditions, it was, ultimately, the forms of involvement by laypeople that made Christianity distinctive as a cultural religious tradition. Weber characterized Christianity in the Religious Communities essay as an “organized congregational religion,” closely tied to cities, both those of the ancient Mediterranean world and those of medieval Europe. Weber argued that the development of Christianity depended on the relative weakening of kinship-related ties, and a set of institutional pre-suppositions about communal organization, which drew conceptual strength from Hellenistic culture and Roman law. It was in the urban context of the Hellenized, Mediterranean world, later to spread north and west across Europe, that “the specific qualities of Christianity as an ethical religion of salvation and as personal piety found their real nurture” (Weber 2013/1968:472). Contributing strongly to its urban diffusion in the Mediterranean world, “ancient Christianity was characteristically a religion of artisans” (Weber 2013/1968:481). Although Weber did not see this social dimension of Christianity as being in any way determinative of its content, he did think it enabled a more intellectual and rational–ethical development relative to religions that tended to appeal to other social strata. Town-based artisans, as “petty-bourgeois” social strata, are much less closely tied to nature relative to peasants, and they lack the economic interests in war and political power that are more likely for warriors and financial magnates. A “rational world view incorporating an ethic of compensation” shorn of magic was, therefore, likely to appeal to them (Weber 2013/1968:483). During the first 1,000 years after the death of Jesus, Christian congregations were primarily carried by the leadership of priests and monks. These were the intellectuals who sustained the scriptural tradition, authoritatively interpreting it in application to concrete challenges of social conflict and institution building. Indeed, Weber’s essay on Religious Communities is especially striking in the way that it recognizes the significance of literature, including biblical and legal literature, for community formation and sustenance. In their rationalizing interpretations of the scriptural tradition, Christian priests tended to heighten 386

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the extent to which their congregations defined themselves through doctrinal teachings derived from biblical literature, and to become communal carriers for a theologically defined ethos. Western Christianity was distinctive in the degree to which priestly authority could be exercised independently from political authority and in the degree to which communal belonging was defined doctrinally. At the same time, however, a certain skepticism toward “pure intellectualism” was retained by the laity, acting as an important check on priestly intellectualism. It was in their roles as preachers and pastors that the priesthood exercised their greatest influence in shaping the doctrinally defined ethos of Western Christianity. Weber emphasized the fact that ethical congregational religion brought something entirely new into the world with the innovation of preaching, namely a continuous (institutionalized) source of collective instruction in religious and ethical matters. With the elimination of the priesthood in radical Protestantism, this emphasis on religious and ethical instruction was, ironically, only heightened. In pastoral care, moreover, this religious and ethical instruction was adapted into a rationalized and systematized framework for personal development, the “religious cultivation of the individual” (Weber 2013/1968:464). Together, preaching and pastoral care enabled a heightened emphasis on the implications of religion and ethics for questions of normative obligation and moral striving. With the emergence of universities in the second millennium of Christian history, lay intellectuals would play an increasingly volatile role, taking the power of preaching and pastoral care in unpredictably pluralizing and secularizing directions. Here are important roots of the theme that Weber would develop much further in his later writings on vocation and the Economic Ethics of the World Religions: the fragmentation of value systems, a set of social conditions experienced acutely in the modern liberal West, necessitating existential human choices about value-commitments (Whimster 2004). The quest for salvation that emerged with particular clarity within Christianity as a congregational ethical religion offered a profoundly ambivalent set of legacies for organized human groups, particularly for the legal governance of political communities. Weber recognized a tendency in ethical congregational religions to critically confront political power to the extent that they might even undermine that power or break away as sectarian groups. This tendency was part of the story about how the West developed its peculiar conceptions of the “rule of law,” a notion articulated by Plato (Schofield 2016) but shaped by the biblically inflected ethics of Christian congregational religion in Western political and legal history. In the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century, “state” and “church,” as legally defined communities, began to be clearly articulated and distinguished. Moreover, with the rise of overtly secular politics in the West, law, religion, and ethics were distinguished from one another so that something like “legal positivism,” in which law is sharply distinguished from religion and morality, became possible. What was distinctive, for Weber, about a particular strand of Christianity taken to its logical extreme in Calvinist Protestantism (Puritanism), was the way in which the most mundane everyday activities, particularly economic activities, come to be seen as a form of divine worship and service (Ford 2022). This is the economic significance of Reformed Christian vocation, and Weber elaborates the distinctiveness of this worldview through a continuous series of comparisons with Judaism, aiming to show that the world-transforming ethical rationalism of Western capitalism should not be attributed to Judaism, as his colleague Werner Sombart had argued, but rather to Reformed Protestantism, as he had earlier argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 2013/1968). 387

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For a Christian, the notion that divine approval could be earned through accumulation of wealth is a grotesquely false distortion. But what Weber points to is a tendency toward corruption in Christian ideals of legality, which, in their “heroic” period, led to the vast accumulations of wealth that made modern capitalism possible, while all-too-easily sliding into bourgeois complacency and ethical nihilism. For Weber, Christians were deluding themselves if they believed it was possible to embrace middle-class comforts and democratic power politics while remaining true to their Christian convictions. His Intermediate Reflections, together with his essays on the modern “vocations” of politics and science, adapting arguments that he had first articulated for the Religious Communities essay, hauntingly present the inevitability and necessity of existential choices in the domain of values (Whimster 2004). Christians, as others, must choose which god(s) they will serve.

Conclusion Legal conceptions rooted in the Jewish scriptures, interpreted prophetically and poetically in the context of Second Temple Judaism, and carried into the Greco-Roman cultural world by early Christian missionaries, contributed something charismatically new to the developing legal conceptions of the Mediterranean world. In conjunction with many other factors, those legal conceptions molded European attitudes toward law, which had been drawn into the Mediterranean cultural world through the imperial power of Rome. The legal conceptions developed in Christian polities then offered something distinctive to the meaning of social relationships: a particular understanding of community as constituted by divine gift and corresponding legal obligation, connected to a fundamental change in legal status and identity. The effort to understand the meaning of this vocation, this divine calling, is characteristic of all the Abrahamic faith traditions, but it took a particular form in the Christian West, one that emphasized clarity and consistency in legality to an extraordinary degree (Ford 2022; Schluchter 1988). As secular modernity hollowed out the spiritual dimensions of this legality, what remained, Weber thought, was a peculiar conception of legitimacy: impersonal legal positivism. This type of legitimacy can mainly appeal to heroic Kantians or profit-driven capitalists, while a yawning legitimacy gap opens that is filled by more emotive appeals to communal feeling. Under such conditions, prophets, priests, and would-be lawgivers appear, beckoning adherents to follow their myriad prescribed pathways for ethical living. From a Weberian perspective, individuals are ultimately responsible for the choices they make about which ethical pathway to follow. From a Christian perspective, this is true, but it is only part of the story. The rest of the story includes the Gospel: very good news for would-be Christian communities, for the nations of the world, and, indeed, for all humanity. But Christians have always struggled to understand what this means for the ways they should live their everyday lives, particularly in the realm of economic provisioning and political engagement. Weber’s sociology offers a sobering warning and reminder that, all too often, in the quest for ethical legality, and in seeking to protect the possibilities for political community, Christians tragically contribute to the corruption of that community in brutalizing power politics. Christians are called to be loyal and law-abiding citizens, even national patriots, but their ultimate loyalty is to the Kingdom of God (Wright 1992a; Dunn 2003). The challenges to Christian ethical discernment, posed by national law and politics, continue unabated, drawing comfort, if not rule-based clarity, in the challenges that were 388

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posed to Jesus of Nazareth during his final days in Jerusalem (e.g., Luke 20). Christians, like their Lord, are summoned to principled action in the ambiguities between the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s.

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Laura R. Ford Reumann, John. 1959. “Oikonomia = “Covenant”; Terms for Heilsgeschichte in Early Christian Usage.” Novum Testamentum 3(4):282–92. Rheinstein, Max, ed. 1967. Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society. Translated by Edward Shils and Max Rheinstein. New York: Simon and Schuster. Roth, Guenther. 1968. “Introduction.” Pp. XLIII-cxx in Economy and Society, edited by Max Weber. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sanders, E.P. 1983. Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Schluchter, Wolfgang. 1981. The Rise of Western Rationalism. Translated by Guenther Roth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schluchter, Wolfgang. 1988. Rationalism, Religion, and Domination: A Weberian Perspective. Translated by Neil Solomon. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Christian. 2003. Moral, Believing Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swedberg, Richard. 1988. Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Swedberg, Richard. 2006. “Max Weber's Contribution to the Economic Sociology of Law.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2:61–81. Swedberg, Richard, and Ola Agevall. 2016. The Max Weber Dictionary, 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Treiber, Hubert. 1985. ““Elective Affinities” between Weber's Sociology of Religion and Sociology of Law.” Theory and Society 14(6):809–861. Treiber, Hubert. 2020. Reading Max Weber's Sociology of Law. Translated by Matthew Philpotts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, Max. 1952. Ancient Judaism, edited by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. Translated by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. New York: The Free Press. Weber, Max. 2001. “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.” In Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Nachlaß. Teilband 1-Gemeinschaften. MWG I/22-1, edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen in cooperation with Michael Meyer. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Weber, Max. 2001. “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.”In Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Nachlaß. Teilband 2-Religiöse Gemeinschaften. MWG I/22-2, edited by Hans G. Kippenberg in cooperation with Petra Schilm and assistance from Jutta Niemeier. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Weber, Max. 2005. Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. Das antike Judentum. Schriften und Reden 1911–1920, edited by Eckart Otto and Julia Offermann. 2 vols. Tuebingen: Mohr Siebeck. Weber, Max. 2005. “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.” In Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Nachlaß. Teilband 4-Herrschaft. MWG I/22-4, edited by Edith Hanke in cooperation with Thomas Kroll. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Weber, Max. 2012. Collected Methodological Writings, edited by Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster. Abingdon: Routledge. Weber, Max. 2013 [1968]. Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Translated by Ephraim Fischoff et al. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, Max. 2019. Economy and Society: A New Translation, edited and translated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whimster, Sam, ed. 2004. The Essential Weber. Abingdon: Routledge. Witte, Jr., John. 2008. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–32 in Christianity and Law: An Introduction, edited by John Witte and Frank S. Alexander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, N.T. 2013. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Wright, N.T.. 1992a. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Wright, N.T.. 1992b. The New Testament and the People of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, Volume 1. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Wright, N.T.. 1992c. Jesus and the Victory of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 2. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

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31 CHRISTIANITIES AND SOCIALISMS Joerg Rieger

Abstract There are many taken-for-granted assumptions about socialism and Christianity respectively that make them an unlikely if not incongruous pairing. Both terms evoke strong reactions, both positive and negative, among many. While placing socialism and Christianity in conversation does not seem to make much sense to some, there is growing interest from others based on new embodiments of socialism and Christianity. This chapter provides an introduction to what Christianity and socialism have to do with each other, offers a brief overview of attempts to bridge socialism and Christianity, and proposes a rapprochement between Christianity and socialism built on a vision of socialism as a platform for economic and political democracy. Parallels of socialism and Christianity are sometimes seen in an ethos of sharing. References in the book of Acts (2:42–47; 4:32–36), in which the early Christian communities are described as holding everything in common, serve as an example. By contrast, this chapter advances a more down-to-earth socialism that understands the question of sharing as related to the question of production, including ownership of the so-called “means of production” – tools, machines, and other assets of corporations – involving not only shareholders but also the workers themselves. Accordingly, the focus on distribution is complemented and informed by a focus on production.

Challenges There are many taken-for-granted assumptions about both socialism and Christianity that make them an unlikely if not incongruous pairing. Both evoke strong reactions among many, both positive and negative. While putting socialism and Christianity in conversation does not seem to make much sense to some, there is growing interest from others. New embodiments of socialism and Christianity are emerging at present, as growing inequality and ecological destruction are markers of the global capitalist economy in the twenty-first century. DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-42

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Neither Christianity nor socialism are uniform phenomena. They come in many forms and shapes, with long and complex histories. In some contexts, Christianity and socialism have been on the opposite sides of the spectrum, in other contexts, there have been parallels and overlaps. Christian socialisms are time-honored traditions in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. In German-speaking Europe, for instance, Christian socialism is closely tied to Protestant theologians such as Leonhard Ragaz (1968–1945) and Hermann Kutter (1863–1931) as well as their Swiss communities, some of which continue to be active today.1 In England, Christian socialism is related to Anglican theologians such as Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872) in the nineteenth century and Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple (1881–1944) in the twentieth century. In Latin America, indigenous Christian socialist traditions emerged in conjunction with political shifts and the rise of popular movements, one of the most famous examples being Christians for Socialism, a group that was founded by 80 Roman Catholic priests in 1971 in Chile. Despite diverse embodiments of Christianity and socialism, there are some points of contention that apply across the board and are often invoked when Christianity and socialism are compared and contrasted. The most prominent one is the question of the divine. Some, though not all, socialist traditions would describe themselves as atheist because they question dominant images of God, envisioned as a feudal overlord or a heavenly CEO. This is especially true in Europe, where churches have often been associated with the political and economic status quo. What tends to be overlooked, however, is that there are Christian communities that also question dominant images of God. In the early days of Christianity, Roman philosophers charged Christians with being atheists. After all, Christian faith in Jesus presented a profound challenge to the theisms of the Roman Empire, which worshiped the gods of dominant powers and of the respective status quos (Rieger 2018:14–15). These theisms resemble the kinds of theisms that socialism also questions. Some of the socialist and some of the Christian traditions are deeply suspicious of anything that is worshiped as ultimate if it is presented in the image of the few who dominate rather than in the image of the many who make up the working majority. Some images of the divine in the Abrahamic traditions present God as the one who gets the divine hands dirty by creating Adam from clay and by planting a garden, and other images of the divine present God as taking the side of the Hebrew slaves in the Egyptian Empire. Another point of contention has to do with diverging views of humanity. Socialisms are often charged with being too optimistic about human nature. This may well be true for some utopian socialist traditions, like the ones that started communities in the United States, convinced of the goodness and perfectibility of human nature. Most of these utopian communities faltered, perhaps due to their optimism about humanity. At the same time, there are also Christian traditions that share optimistic anthropologies, often with similar results. On the other hand, socialism, as such, does not depend on naively optimistic anthropologies, just the opposite: many socialist traditions caution about utopianisms and question the optimism of capitalism, which assumes that people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps or that capitalism necessarily benefits all, just like a rising tide invariably lifts all boats. Rieger (2009) has critiqued capitalism’s optimisms that resemble problematic forms of religion. In many cases, stronger notions of human failure rooted in systemic structures are shared by socialist as well as Christian traditions. Such problematic structures include labor relations under the conditions of capitalism and other distorted relations such as sexism and racism. In Christian theology, this is one of the fundamental differences between liberation theologies, which typically address structural 392

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injustice and liberal theologies, which are optimistic about human virtue and hope for the best. One widespread critique of socialism is its supposed dependence on strong and perhaps centralized governments. This critique is fueled by definitions that equate socialism with government-sponsored welfare programs, which are characteristic of so-called “social market economies” in Europe, such as Germany’s soziale Marktwirtschaft. Yet socialism does not necessarily need to be conceived in this way, especially when its concern for the welfare of people is connected to concerns for the agency of people. The same can be said for certain embodiments of Christianity; although there is a strong focus on welfare or charity, there are also Christian concerns for human agency that are often overlooked. Jesus’s proclamation of “good news to the poor” (Matthew 11:5, Luke 4:18) cannot be limited to handouts to the poor, but, rather, seems to imply the end of poverty and points to the poor and sick becoming agents in their own right: “Stand up, take your mat, and walk” (John 5:18) is Jesus’s appeal to a paralyzed man. Moreover, if the agency of people is at the core of socialism (rather than merely questions of welfare and social security), it contains a fundamental democratic element that is lacking in capitalism, which tends to celebrate and reward the agency of CEOs and stockholders more than the agency of working people. Regarding the question of government, the different roles of government in socialism and capitalism need to be considered. Under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism as it emerged since the 1980s, governments have increasingly understood their role as being in service to corporations, assuming that when corporations are doing well, all are doing well. Consequently, governments provide incentives and tax cuts to businesses, bail out corporations considered “too large to fail” in times of economic emergency, and curtail working people’s ability to unionize. Many of these policies can also be found in the so-called “Washington Consensus” that governed economic policies imposed on Latin America and Africa. In socialism, by contrast, that governments are “by the people and for the people” is often more clearly established, despite historic failures in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Nevertheless, democratic socialism holds to notions of government serving the many rather than just the few by leveling the playing fields through making education available widely and freely, providing incentives for all workers, holding the most powerful players accountable, and establishing basic safety nets for those in need of support. While too much government bureaucracy can impose restrictions on democracy, both under capitalism and socialism, it is often mistakenly assumed that capitalism is inherently more democratic than socialism, which is why the adjective “democratic” seems to be required for socialisms but not for capitalisms. While there have, indeed, been socialist regimes that were less democratic – communism in Stalin’s Russia being the most prominent example – socialist concerns for the welfare and the agency of working people are inherently democratic. By contrast, neoliberal capitalist principles that consider shareholders the sole beneficiaries of profits, subordinating the concerns of working people even when they show concerns for other “stakeholders” such as consumers (Denning 2019), are inherently anti-democratic because the working majority has little voice and input. These undemocratic attitudes are also reflected, for instance, in current political efforts in the United States at gerrymandering and restricting the popular vote in ways that benefit the few rather than the many. And even though religious structures of authority that are organized from the top down are older than capitalism, in the past decades, such authoritarian structures have often been closely backed, encouraged, and even shaped by the interests 393

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of capitalism (Kruse 2015). In contemporary forms of Christianity, it is not uncommon, for instance, for wealthy donors to influence the social relations of religious communities as well as their theologies, determining directly or indirectly what can and cannot be proclaimed and even imagined. As a result, it is not surprising that many Christians, especially in the United States, find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Basic Features of Christianity and Socialism: Sharing and Distribution Despite the different forms of socialism, it can be argued that there are basic markers that most socialisms share in common. The primary marker that seems to be most widely recognized is that socialism cares for the well-being of all people, especially the disadvantaged. Unlike other political and economic traditions that leave people to their own devices – especially in capitalist societies that promote the idea (if not the reality, as the example of so-called “corporate welfare” shows (Mattera 2014)) of individualism – socialist traditions generally are in favor of welfare and social safety nets that provide health care for the sick, support for the unemployed and elderly, affordable education for all, public services and sanitation, and so on. It is often assumed that this would be provided by some form of what has become known as “big government,” but other socialist options include mutual aid, decentralized structures supported by local communities, and social networks of care that are common in many traditional societies. An ethos of care that shares certain family resemblances with a socialist ethos of care can also be found in many Christian communities. In fact, the odd phenomenon that much of conservative Christianity in the United States is downplaying traditional Christian calls to care for the less fortunate, minorities, and women – the proverbial widows, orphans, and strangers of the Hebrew Bible – may be more the exception than the rule in the history of Christianity. A stronger form of the general Christian ethos of care is often linked with two passages in the New Testament book of Acts 2:42–47 and 4:32–37. According to Acts 2:44–45, “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.” This phenomenon, sometimes called “love communism,” has inspired many through two millennia, although such communities of sharing have rarely been sustainable on a larger scale and in the long run. Even in the book of Acts itself there are indications of early failure (Acts 5:1–11). Based on his readings of these biblical texts, Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), one of the leading socialist thinkers in Germany, made the interesting observation that early Christianity promoted “a communism in the distribution” of the “articles of consumption” (Kautsky 1925:345). Examples for such forms of distribution can be given throughout the history of Christianity, starting with the Christian bishops in the third and fourth centuries CE who were called “lovers of the poor” because they were asked to administer the wealth of their municipalities in support of the poor in the Roman Empire, even before Constantine gave further privileges to Christianity (Brown 2012). And while communal living or sharing were never practiced by the majority of Christians, some of these practices can be found throughout the history of Christianity. Examples include medieval monasteries, certain communities of the left wing of the Reformation (some of which survive in Amish and Hutterite communities today), specific embodiments of the Holiness Movement, and Ecclesial Base Communities in Latin America. An understanding of socialism based on distribution and sharing has become so common that it is often seen as the definition of socialism as such, which has led to various 394

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misunderstandings. Frequently misunderstood is the fact that sharing rarely applies to everything and that it hardly rules out personal property altogether. In the Marxist traditions, for instance, the sharing of property applies to the so-called “means of production” only (Engels and Marx 1848) – that is, factories and other assets of corporations and all kinds of tools that benefit the community. While these traditions may seem less radical at first sight than traditions that also share other belongings, they may well be the more radical ones, judging by the pushback they have historically encountered. The dominant powers are rarely worried about small communities that share individual property without making demands on the wider society. Those who challenge the broader structures of wealth and power, by contrast, typically experience pushback and even repression. This is true for both socialist and Christian projects, exemplified, for instance, by the organized attacks of the Reagan administration’s Committee of Santa Fe on what it perceived to be dangers of Christian liberation theology, tied to the popularization of socialism (Berryman 1987:3).

Basic Features of Christianity and Socialism: Agency and Production In addition to misunderstanding socialism as primarily concerned about sharing, another common marker of many socialisms has also commonly been overlooked. This is the concern for the agency of working people as the foundation of their well-being, a connection made by religious socialists, like African American preacher George Washington Woodbey (1854–unknown), for whom the point of socialism was not to “socialize poverty” but “of everyone becoming a producer” (Dorrien 2021:127). Even though less-well known than the concern for sharing and distribution, this concern may well be more central to socialism and even Christianity. In Kautsky’s interpretation of the New Testament, communism of distribution is one thing, communism of production is another. While Kautsky saw Christianity mainly in terms of a concern for distribution, he also observed a concern for production, especially in Christian communities in agricultural contexts. In these contexts, he observes, unlike in the cities, there also existed a “communism in production, in joint organized labor” (Kautsky 1925:345). Contemporary New Testament scholarship has confirmed that the Jesus Movement was indeed concerned about organizing peasants who were exploited by the Roman Empire and their Jewish vassals (Horsley 2011) and, therefore, about production. A key aspect of the formation of resistance and the flourishing of these peasant communities was their agency and productivity. Since inequality is rooted in the exploitation of people’s productive capacities, both in ancient societies and in capitalism, mere concern for sharing and distribution would not have been enough to address the problems and to bring “good news to the poor.” Similar concerns for production can also be found in in some parts of the Pauline literature of the New Testament, which focus on organizing urban communities that are trying to carve out productive spaces in the centers of the Roman Empire (Elliott 1994). It can, therefore, be argued that a concern for production and agency is at the heart of both Christianity and socialism: in Christianity, terms such as sanctification can be interpreted in this way; in socialism, the equivalent might be terms like economic democracy. Note that these are not merely intangible ideas, as religion and labor movements have embodied these concerns since the beginning of capitalism and are picking up steam again today (Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice, 2022). A concern for the agency and production of working people is also central to the thinking of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who in their critiques of various forms of 395

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socialism in the Communist Manifesto point out that this concern is under-developed in many socialist traditions (Engels and Marx 1848). At present, the problem of the underdeveloped agency of working people can perhaps best be seen in certain social democratic traditions, for instance, in Germany’s Sozialdemokratische Partei (SPD), in which concerns for the agency of the working majority had been all but abandoned even before the party increasingly adopted neoliberal principles under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including tax cuts for corporations and cuts to welfare and labor movements. The same is true for Christian socialisms loosely affiliated with what has become known as “Radical Orthodoxy,” in which working people are more likely to be objects of service and welfare rather than agents, if their concerns appear at all (Long 2000). Socialism’s basic appreciation of and concern for the agency and production of working people is, of course, also embodied in the labor movement, particularly in labor unions. Unfortunately, socialism and the labor movement have often been separated, most prominently in the United States, a development which has deprived both unions and socialist traditions of some of their efficacy. Unions without socialism became professional organizations concerned about wages and benefits rather than the agency and voice of workers, and socialism without the labor movement turned to political engagements, forgetting its deep roots in economic empowerment and labor relations. In this context, the distance between Christianity, labor, and socialism further increased, as labor and socialism were now seen by most Christians to be matters of “special interests.” At present, concern for the agency and production of working people is being reclaimed in parts of the labor movement, as it seeks to re-connect with the community and with religion, but this concern is also being re-claimed in the growing development of worker cooperatives. In addition, there is renewed interest by faith communities in both labor and worker cooperatives that, although still in its early stages, is producing some results (Southeast Center for Cooperative Development 2021; Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice 2022). The number of efforts is growing, and it has been argued that labor, both productive and reproductive, is part of the “ultimate concern” of Christianity because nothing would exist without it (Rieger 2022, re-interpreting a term coined by Paul Tillich). Furthermore, it has also been argued that this focus on the agency of working people in cooperative enterprises is re-defining the conversation about socialism and even communism today, as not enough attention to this was paid in real, existing socialisms and communisms in the past. Economist Richard Wolff, for instance, has argued that worker cooperatives are at the heart of communism and socialism. Wolff contends that Soviet-style communism, by contrast, was merely a form of state-run capitalism, as the agency of working people was neglected (Wolff 2012). In sum, the concern for the agency and productivity of working people might be described as a form of “economic democracy,” which is generally missing in neoliberal capitalist societies in which political democracy tends to be limited to the voting booth, with more and more limited access due to increasing restrictions on voting and increased influence of big money on political elections. While political democracy is under attack, the topic of economic democracy is rarely part of the conversation, as democracy rarely exists in most of the workplaces where people spend extended hours and where profit is produced for the benefits of shareholders rather than working people. Such conversations about political and economic democracy can feed back into conversations about religious democracy, bringing together conversations about Christianity and socialism in 396

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new ways (Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt and the Institute for Christian Socialism 2021).

History It may come as a surprise to those who are aware of Christianity’s long history in support of “the powers that be” that there are also significant examples of Christianity supporting progressive social causes. Already, the Jesus Movement and early Christianity posed challenges to the Roman Empire by empowering peasant communities and urban Christians (Horsley 2011; Eliott 1994). The followers of St. Francis in the Middle Ages, and later the so-called “left wing of the Reformation” took the sides of the disenfranchised, and even the Reformer Martin Luther briefly put himself on the side of the peasant uprising, even though he later withdrew his support and adopted the position of the overlords. The history of the United States – a country with a modern constitution in which religion continues to play a substantial role – may serve as an example of the significant contributions of progressive strands of religion that often share common concerns with socialism. The abolition of slavery, suffragism, civil rights, eco-justice, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the labor movement all have found support from Christian communities at some point, despite the fact that large numbers of Christians sided with the respective status quos. While in Europe, and especially in Germany, France, and Italy, religion was so closely linked to the dominant status quo that socialism and many working people felt they had no choice but to emancipate themselves from it, in the United States, religion was more diverse and allowed for different expressions. If, in nineteenth-century Europe, the critique of religion often meant the rejection of religion, in the United States, the critique of religion could mean the rejection of dominant religion and the embrace of alternative religious expressions, even within Christianity itself. Examples include various Anabaptist developments that found new life in the United States, the so-called “Free Methodists” who shared the working-class sensitivities of the British “Primitive Methodists,” and early Pentecostal developments that recruited their supporters primarily from the working class (Dayton 1995). In the United States, even some of the mainline churches supported the labor movement in the past, though this is less the case today. A little more than 100 years ago, under the leadership of the labor movement and with the support of many churches, the eight-hour workday was won, child labor was ended, protection for women introduced, and pension plans and even health care plans were developed. The so-called social creeds of the time focused on the exploitation of labor and demanded a reduction of the working hours and a share for workers in profits and means of production. The first of these, the 1908 Social Creed of the Methodist Episcopal Church (adopted soon after by the Federal Council of Churches), argued, among other things, “for the gradual and reasonable reduction of hours of labor to the lowest practical point, with work for all” and “for the highest wage that each industry can afford, and for the most equitable division of the products of industry” (Social Creed 1908). While the churches’ support for labor is not identical with support for socialism, and there are historical tensions between socialism and the labor movement, there are also significant overlaps. Support of working people is an important marker both for Christianity and socialism that deserves to be explored in greater detail. In the wake of these developments, Christianity and socialism were able to forge deeper connections, some of which are emerging again today, following an earlier period of dialogues and conversations that 397

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had their own values but that rarely translated into movement (for instance, the European dialogues between Christians and Marxists between 1945 and the 1980s (Hebblethwaite 1977)). According to Marx, while the War of Independence in the United States signaled the rise of the middle class, the Civil War against slavery signaled the rise of the working class. Indeed, after the Civil War, a rich history of connections between the American left and the Christian left emerged, and socialisms found religious support. Many of these developments were tied to working people coming together and organizing for a better life rather than for utopian socialism. While utopian socialist communities established all over the United States in the nineteenth century often faded quickly, the budding labor movement began to make history, and attracted the interest and support of two persons not often named in the same breath: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln. Both Marx and Lincoln, in their own ways, understood the primacy of labor over capital, and both were quite clear about the benefits of labor unions (Nichols 2011). Moreover, both Marx and Lincoln celebrated and welcomed the fact that the emerging working class in the US was inter-racial. In an 1864 letter to Lincoln (signed by the Central Committee of the First International) – a statement repeated in Das Kapital – Marx noted that “labor in white skin cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded” (Marx 1967: Chap. 10 Sec. 7). There are many examples of the convergence of Christianity, labor, and socialism, most of which are forgotten today. The record in the United States is particularly instructive of the confluence of all three elements, whereas in Europe, combinations of two of the three were more common. In Europe, religious socialists tended to be more removed from labor,2 socialists deeply involved with labor tended to be removed from religion,3 and Christianity relating to labor was often removed from socialism.4 In the United States, the history of Christianity, labor, and socialism starts with the Knights of Labor founded in 1869, the first mass organization of workers in the United States. Membership was at 2 million by 1896, including men and women of different races and ethnicities. The founders were mostly committed to Christianity and challenged the accumulation of wealth as opposed to the spirit of Christianity. They envisioned Jesus as standing on the side of workers, in solidarity with the working class (Craig 1992). In 1872, the Christian Labor Union (CLU) was founded in Boston, supported by the Roman Catholic judge T. Wharton Collens, who considered communism to be a development of the teachings of Moses and Jesus. The CLU offered a critique of capitalist exploitation and supported the Socialist Labor Party (Cort 1988; Craig 1992). In 1901 the Socialist Party of America was founded, bringing together prominent socialists such as Eugene Debs (1855–1926) and Christian Socialists such as pastor George Herron (1862–1925). The party had 120,000 members and was able to elect 1,200 socialists in various positions across the country. At the time, more than 300 socialist magazines were published, among them The Christian Socialist, which reached 20,000 subscribers, including 2,000 pastors (Cort 1988). In the early 1900s, socialists won elections in 33 states, and almost 200 US cities had socialist mayors (Nichols 2011). Socialism was popular not only in the North of the United States, where the fabled “sewer socialism” in Wisconsin focused on infrastructure, public institutions, and debt release (Nichols 2011). One of the most vibrant socialist movements was located further south in Oklahoma. There, socialism bonded with local culture, including evangelical Christianity (Bisset 1999). The Bible was read as a book belonging to socialist literature, and Jesus was seen as socialist and the leader 398

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of what was called the “legions of democracy” (Bisset 1999:88–89, 94). In the southeastern United States, Vanderbilt University became a training ground for the Social Gospel and socialist interpretations of Christianity, inspired by the work of Alva Taylor (Dunbar 1981). While the Social Gospel Movement has often been disparaged as a movement of privileged white do-gooders, recent historical studies have shown that much more was going on. Part of the Social Gospel were grassroots movements that created socialist visions of Jesus, most of which are totally forgotten today (Burns 2013). Its most prominent proponent, theologian and pastor Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), brought Christianity, socialism, and labor together by arguing that socialism was the result of the labor movement (Cort 1988:247), rather than vice versa. And he saw the need for a close connection of political and economic democracy as well as the need to involve workers in the ownership of the means of production (Estey 2013). While some leaders of the Social Gospel such as Washington Gladden (1836–1918) were less radical than Rauschenbusch, almost all of them were socialists to some degree (Dorrien 2021). The Social Gospel was also deeply embedded in African Christianity (Dorrien 2015). A surprising example of the connections of Christianity and socialism in the United States is the temperance movement. Frances Willard (1839–1898), president of Women’s Christian Temperance Movement (WCTU), expanded the concern for the abuse of alcohol to include the question of women’s suffrage and socialism. She believed that in every Christian is a socialist and contributed to the spread of socialism in the heartland of the US (Cort 1988). Socialist traditions found their own expressions in African American Christianity. African American pastor George Washington Woodbey wrote for The Christian Socialist. He saw Marx as descendant of the Hebrew prophets (Floyd Thomas 2010), although he generally quoted the Bible rather than Marx (Dorrien 2021). Woodbey argued that Africans and women would profit more from socialism than everyone else because they were more exploited than everyone else (Foner 1983), and he mentioned the slavery in the American South and the slavery of capitalism in the same breath (Dorrien 2021). Woodbey realized that socialism could not be successful without millions of workers committed to their churches (Cort 1988), just as the African American bishop Reverdy Ransom (1861–1959) argued that socialism could not be realized without support of Black workers (Cort 1988; Floyd Thomas 2010). During the Great Depression in the 1930s, Black communists often referenced the experiences of the Black church. Unfortunately, many Black churches tended to reject communism because they were worried about what they saw as atheism and lack of patriotism (Floyd Thomas 2010). Also in the 1930s, a growing interest in Marx and the Soviet Union emerged in the United States that was also reflected in Christianity. In 1933, Protestant Churches demanded official recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States. In a 1934 survey of theology students, 50% expressed a preference for socialism, 36% for a reformed capitalism, 2% for capitalism, and 2% for communism (Janz 1998). The work of Christian ethicist Harry Ward (1873–1966), who drafted the 1908 Social Creed, stands out for his synthesis of Marxist analysis and Christianity. It is not surprising, therefore, that Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaigns after World War II were particularly suspicious of churches and persecuted many pastors. These conservative streams were supported by an emerging liberal theological consensus that further opposed Christian-Marxist engagement. Even though the combination of Christianity, socialism, and labor encountered serious pushback in the United States, it was never completely defeated, and its concerns could 399

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never be suppressed completely. Martin Luther King Jr. appreciated Marx’s critique of capitalism, its contribution to the raising of consciousness, and its challenge to the churches. One of the key events of the Civil Rights Movement, the 1963 March on Washington, was the “March for Jobs and Freedom,” organized by A. Philip Randolph, who was influenced by socialist bishop Reverdy Ransom. Black women in civil rights, in particular, often realized the connections of race, gender, and class. The list includes famous names such as Nannie Helen Burroughs, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer (Collier-Thomas 2010). Hamer stands out for her efforts to ground political power in the development of economic power, combined with the power of faith (White 2021).

Conclusions The relation of Christianity and socialism was never just a matter of ideas, but closely linked to practical engagements with labor and the working majority. Perennial themes included the systemic exploitation of workers, the ownership of the means of production, basic questions of economic democracy, and fundamental questions about the nature of religion and the divine. Even a growing emphasis on identity politics never displaced concerns for labor and class completely.5 In the United States, scholars of theology and religion, such as Beverley W. Harrison and Rosemary Radford Ruether, linked feminism and socialism, and Cornel West did the same for Black theology and socialism. Today, new interest in religion, labor, and socialism is emerging in the United States, and a few years ago, a new working group on class, religion, and theology was founded at the American Academy of Religion. A similar group now also exists at the European Academy of Religion. New research is being produced both on religion and labor and on religion and socialism (Rieger and Henkel-Rieger 2016; Dorrien 2021). Other recent organizations that continue conversations between Christianity, socialism, and labor include the Institute for Christian Socialism and the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University Divinity School.

Notes 1 Religiös-Sozialistische Vereinigung der Deutschschweiz, https://www​.kirchgemeinde​.ch​/kg​/resos/. 2 For instance, some of the British traditions linked with the Anglican Church. 3 Strong socialist critiques of religion emerged all over Europe. 4 The most prominent examples of this are the papal encyclicals, starting with Pope Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum 1891. Even representatives of the Catholic Worker Movement were often ambivalent when it came to socialism. 5 Cornel West argues that class contributed more than race to disempowerment in the United States (West 1982).

References Berryman, Phillip. 1987. Liberation Theology: Essential Facts about the Revolutionary Movement in Latin America and Beyond. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bisset, Jim. 1999. Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904–1920. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Brown, Peter. 2012. Through the Eyes of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Burns, David. 2013. The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Christianities and Socialisms Collier-Thomas, Bettye. 2010. Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Cort, John C. 1988. Christian Socialism: An Informal History. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Craig, Robert H. 1992. Religion and Radical Politics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Dayton, Donald W. 1995. ““Good News to the Poor:” The Methodist Experience after Wesley,” in The Portion of the Poor: Good News to the Poor in the Wesleyan Tradition, edited by M. Douglas Meeks. Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books. Denning, Steve. 2019. “Why Maximizing Shareholder Value is Finally Dying.” Forbes Magazine. https://www​.forbes​.com​/sites​/stevedenning​/2019​/08​/19​/why​-maximizing​-shareholder​-value​-is​ -finally​-dying/​?sh​=77df93336746. Dorrien, Gary. 2015. The New Abolition: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dorrien, Gary. 2021. American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dunbar, Anthony P. 1981. Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929–1959. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Elliott, Neil. 1994. Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Engels, Friedrich, and Marx, Karl. 1848. The Manifesto of the Communist Party. https://www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/marx​/works​/1848​/communist​-manifesto/ Estey, Ken. 2013. “Protesting Classes through Protestant Glasses: Class, Labor, and the Social Gospel in the United States.” In Religion, Theology, and Class, edited by Joerg Rieger. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Floyd Thomas, Juan. 2010. “Seeing Red in the Black Church: Marxist Thought and African American Christianity.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 1(12):19. Foner, Philip S. Editor. 1983. Black Socialist Preacher: The Teachings of Reverend George Washington Woodbey and His Disciple, Reverend G.W. Slater, Jr. San Francisco: Synthesis Publications. Hebblethwaite, Peter. 1977. The Christian-Marxist Dialogue: Beginnings, Present Status, and Beyond. New York: Paulist Press. Horsley, Richard. 2011. Jesus and the Powers: Conflict, Covenant, and the Hope of the Poor. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Janz, Denis R. 1998. World Christianity and Marxism. New York: Oxford University Press. Kautsky, Karl. 1925. Foundations of Christianity: A Study in Christian Origins. New York, NY: New York International Publishers. Kruse, Kevin. 2015. One Nation under God: How Corporate American Invented Christian America. New York: Basic Books. Long, D. Stephen. 2000. Divine Economy: Theology and the Market. London: Routledge. Mattera, Philip. 2014. “Subsidizing the Corporate One Percent,” Good Jobs First. https://www​.goodjobsfirst​.org​/sites​/default​/files​/docs​/pdf​/sub​sidi​zing​thec​orpo​rate​onep​ercent​.pdf. Nichols, John. 2011. The “S”Word: A Short History of an American Tradition—Socialism. London: Verso. Rieger, Joerg. 2009. No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Rieger, Joerg. 2018. Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. Rieger, Joerg. 2022. Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Rieger, Joerg, and Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger. 2016. Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities. St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press. Social Creed, Methodist Episcopal Church. 1908. https://www​.religionandjustice​.org​/christianities​ -socialisms​-series. Southeast Center for Cooperative Development. 2021. Faith and Co-ops. https://www​.co​-opsnow​.org​ /tool​-kit. Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. 2022. Religion, Labor, and Cooperatives Webinar Series. https://www​.religionandjustice​.org​/labor​-and​ -religion.

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Joerg Rieger Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and the Institute for Christian Socialism. 2021. Engaging Christianities and Socialisms. https://www​.religionandjustice​.org​/christianities​-socialisms​-series. West, Cornel. 1982. Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. White, Monica M. 2021. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Wolff, Richard D. 2012. Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

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32 THE RELEVANCE OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS TO THE ETHIC OF CARE Sanja Ivic

Abstract This chapter explores the Christian roots of the contemporary ethic of care that is especially significant for dealing with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Love, empathy, compassion, solidarity, and mercy are the central values of Christian ethics, and they are also the bases of the ethic of care. Traditional ethical approaches do not offer a viable ethical response to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and its consequences; thus, the ethic of care represents an alternative option within the global ethics debate. Ethical solidarity is necessary, especially during times of crisis, but it can only be realized completely if it transforms into the Christian approach to the vulnerable.

Introduction Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, and Sara Ruddick established the ethic of care as a feminist ethical theory in the 1980s (Mannering 2020). The feminist ethic of care represents an alternative approach to traditional ethics, as it advocates empathy, care, compassion, accountability, respect, responsiveness, responsibility, and other similar values. “The guiding thought of the ethic of care is that people need each other to lead a good life, and that they can only exist as individuals through and via caring relationships with others” (Sevenhuijsen 2003:183). Although the ethic of care stems from feminist theory, it is applied much more widely. According to Fiona Robinson, the ethic of care “boasts a well-developed literature in the field of feminist moral, political, and legal theory, as well as in sociology and social policy” (2011:24). The ethic of care is based on “the universal experience of caring” (Held 2006:21) and allows for the construction of caring citizenship that bridges the gaps between justice and care, individual and collective, public and private, global and local, and so on (Sevenhuijsen 1998). In times of social, economic, and political crises, the ethic of care provides a theoretical framework for rethinking political and social relations. Gilligan argues that “the ideal of care is ... an activity of relationship, of seeing and respondDOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-43

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ing to need, taking care of the world by sustaining the web of connection so that no one is left alone” (1982:62). This chapter emphasizes the relevance of Christian ethics to the ethic of care. According to Virginia Held, “it may be suggested that the ethics of care bears some resemblance to a Christian ethic of love counseling us to love our neighbors and care for those in need” (2006:21). The social values on ​​ which Christianity is based are freedom, responsibility, helping others, caring for others, honesty, tolerance, calmness, love, solidarity, and respecting and understanding others. Christian ethics are based on the principle that we care about other human beings and that we have a responsibility to help the vulnerable. Jesus Christ’s words of love for God and love for other people are, at the same time, the foundation of Christian ontology, anthropology, and social engagement (Mott 1978). Some authors even argue that the first ideas about social justice, ethnicity, and class equality were made clear in the New Testament. Stephen Mott emphasizes that this does not mean that “inequalities are not present in the pages of Scripture; but where there is conscious attention to justice as a principle and a demand, the conceptual flow is in the direction of equality” (1978:8).

Social and Political Aspects of Care On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic (WHO 2020a). According to statistics at the time of this writing, the death toll related to COVID-19 is around 18 million people (Keown 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic has a wide range of economic, political, social, and psychological consequences, and it does more than only endanger lives (Gurbuz 2020). Individualistic societies struggled to build national unity practices during the COVID-19 pandemic, unlike some societies in which a collective ethos prevailed (Ivic 2020). Vincent Loyd (2020) shows two flaws in the liberal tradition: its reliance on expert counsel to manage uncertainty, and its stress on individual choices in isolation from cultural and social context. Shannon Dunn (2020) argues that the COVID-19 pandemic revealed both inherent and constructed weaknesses in the human condition, amplifying socio-economic inequities. In reaction to COVID-19, Jennifer Herdt (2020) asserts that empathy and vulnerability must be used to build a new community. Health care workers, patients, their families, policymakers, and the public faced ethical challenges because of the COVID-19 pandemic (Jeffrey 2020). According to David Jeffrey (2020), responding to a public health problem of this magnitude necessitates a larger ethical viewpoint than the four principles of traditional medical ethics (justice, beneficence, autonomy, and non-maleficence). The ethic of care provides a theoretical framework for re-thinking the concepts of citizenship, democracy, social justice, and responsibilities, which can help to re-locate care in the long run in both national and global contexts. The ethic of care is relevant for dealing with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and building a society based on care. According to Gilligan, within the ethic of care, the moral problem arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights and requires for its resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of 404

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r­esponsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to understanding of rights and rules. (1982:19) The idea that justice is the only principle of morality was first presented by Lawrence Kohlberg in 1969 (Hiebert 2022:55). On the other hand, Carol Gilligan argued for two gendered foundations, arguing that care was the feminine foundation of morality, while justice can be considered the masculine foundation of morality (Hiebert 2022:55). However, Gilligan rejects the idea that “care” and “justice” can be clearly distinguished from one another, though she does not elaborate on how these two concepts are complementary to each other (Meyers 1998:153). Caring relationships have been brought to the foreground by the ethic of care and the ongoing debate surrounding it, as they exist in a variety of forms and modes: one-on-one and group relations; within regional, national, and transnational frameworks; within the church; and in legal, political, educative, counseling, and representational work (Ryan 2006:86). The ethic of care rejects the autonomous and independent self on which the ethic of justice and other dominant ethical theories are based. The ethic of care criticizes the abstract, independent, and rationalist subjectivity upon which these theories are based, and moves away from Kantian moral theory, neoliberalism, and utilitarianism. It is applied to specific individuals as well as their needs and interests in specific situations and contexts. The ethic of care is a normative ethical philosophy that has evolved from the recognition of the inter-connectedness of all human beings as well as their obligations to each other (Held 2006). It is based on a relational ontology and uses ethical reflection to provide a sharp critique of liberal individualism (Mannering 2020). It also adheres to a particularism that recognizes the significance of addressing moral issues “in the context of lived experience” (Mannering 2020). The ethic of care is based on the following ideas: care is linked to the formation of bonds; relationships are the foundation of care; the public and private domains are closely connected; the self and the other are inextricably linked; attachment and closeness are at the heart of care; the principle of equity and the recognition of varied needs are central to the ethics of care; the ethic of care is based on empathy, which leads to compassion and caring (Ryan 2006:81). Carol Gilligan, Selma Sevenhuijsen, Virginia Held, Nel Noddings, Fiona Williams, Joan Tronto, and many other feminist philosophers have developed social and political elements of care. Jeanne Liedtka (1996) argues that the ethic of care consists of four important components: attention to others in specific contexts and circumstances, a focus on others’ needs and interests, an emphasis on responsiveness, and a commitment to dialogue as a basic tool of moral deliberation. Caring responsibilities are not sufficiently developed in the contemporary societies, and therefore, the ethic of care has potential to transform societies “because it shifts the normative forms towards issues that are often marginalized, makes these issues visible, and in so doing improves lives” (Branicki 2020:873). Tronto (2013) emphasizes that democracy’s first priority should be care, but care has been separated from politics. Care for ourselves and others should be one of the essential ideals of democracy; care, not economics, should be the primary pre-occupation of political life. Rather than focusing solely on social relations in the public domain, the ethic of care advocates for a re-contextualization of the public–private divide, arguing that care should be applied to both sectors and that the distinction between public and private moralities is socially, historically, and politically constructed (Mannering 2020:190). The ethic of care 405

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requires “a politics in which there is, at the center, a public discussion of needs, and an honest appraisal of the intersection of needs and interests” (Tronto 1994:168). At both the national and international levels, the ethic of care necessitates a re-consideration of established institutions of justice. According to Sevenhuijsen (1998), civil society organizations can foster “caring citizenship” based on the idea that care work is an essential part of the experience of being human. It is crucial to our societies and to the economy. It includes looking after children, elderly people, and those with physical and mental illnesses or disabilities, as well as domestic work such as cooking, cleaning, washing, mending, and fetching water and firewood. (Piaget et al. 2020) The notion of caring citizenship has a capacity to overcome the binary oppositions of public/private, individual/collective, global/local, justice/care, and so forth. Daniel Engster (2004) argues there are three types of criticism that can be directed at the ethic of care. First, the ethic of care leads to a type of parochialism, as it is argued that this ethic can only be applied to specific individuals and their needs in specific circumstances (Engster 2004:17). Second, Tronto points out that from the ideas on which the ethic of care is based, it can be concluded that “everyone should cultivate one’s own garden and let others take care of themselves” (1994:171). As a result, the ethic of care can quickly devolve into its opposite – negligence. Contrarily, the ethic of care can also devolve into paternalism (Engster 2004). Third, the ethic of care can be critiqued as relativistic – the argument being that, because the ethic of care is contextual and not founded on clearly defined principles, it cannot serve as the foundation for moral theory (Engster 2004:117). Nevertheless, the ethic of care represents a positive ethical response to global crises, such as a pandemic, as will be shown in the following sections.

Christian Roots of the Ethic of Care Identifying and recognizing the Christian roots of the ethic of care is significant for dealing with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and other global challenges. The Golden Rule – ”So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12) – could be a very effective guiding principle not only in times of crisis but also in national and global governance (Bergmann 2021:427). Mary Ryan points to the Christian roots of the ethic of care, emphasizing that “the Christian God is understood as a caring God, and caring is an aspect of the vision we seek for our world. It is also our duty to care – we are instructed to love our neighbor” (2006:65). Love, empathy, compassion, solidarity, and mercy are the central values of Christian ethics, and they also represent the basis of the ethic of care. Christian ethics emphasize the significance of empathy which is perceived as “emanating from divine empathy” (Ryan 2006:68). According to Ryan (2006), divine pathos and human empathy have a close reciprocal relationship, and this relationship is based on the idea that humans are created in God’s image. The value of loving and caring for others is demonstrated in one of the most important passages in the Gospel: And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he [Jesus] answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most 406

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important of all?” Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:28–31) According to Paul, only life in accordance with love is living in relation to God: “And if I have prophetic knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor 13:2). Wayne Grudem emphasizes that Christian ethics teach us what the whole Bible tells us about which attitudes, behaviors, and personal character qualities gain God’s approval and which do not (2018:37). In general, what distinguishes Christian ethics is the prominence of Jesus Christ’s person and teachings; therefore, the first place to seek guidance on issues of morality and Christian ethics is in the Christian scriptures (Boyd and Thorsen 2018:6). Grudem states that Christian ethics ... also differs from Old Testament ethics and New Testament ethics. These two disciplines emphasize careful study of various ethical themes in the Old Testament or in the New Testament, but place less emphasis on attempting to draw together the teachings of the whole Bible on various topics as they apply to Christians today. (2018:39) Philosophical ethics encompasses a whole set of moral norms (Prois and Prois 2014:75). Christian ethics could also be perceived as a set of norms and principles derived from the Christian faith that guide values and behaviors. When studying the traits that define ethics in general, it is evident that both versions of ethics have similar aspects, such as principles that govern human behavior with respect to others (Proios and Proios 2014:76). The Bible, for example, calls for obedience to the authorities God has established. Christians can identify the ethical route to take in any situation by applying the principles found in scripture (Proios and Proios 2014:76). In the past, it was widely assumed that Christians shared ethical wisdom with the rest of humanity while also holding a specific revealed wisdom contained in the scriptures (Hartin 1991:432). However, the presumption of significant difference in content between Christian ethics (distinguished by revelation and scripture) and any other human ethics is being questioned by several scholars (Hartin 1991:432). According to Ryan (2006), caring, understood as empathy, love, and compassion, is a significant value of Christian ethics. It pervades the Christian vision and knowledge of God, including how God interacts with humans and the rest of creation and how humans are required to react to God, their neighbors, and themselves (Ryan 2006). In addition, the Christian commitment to caring work is essential in a world where human suffering is manifest in so many forms, and on such a large scale. Caring is also central to an understanding of Christian ministry and its associations with servanthood. (Ryan 2006:99) Eugene Anthony argues that the Christian ethic of care is organized around a five-point framework with the following moral and social components: respect, empathy, prayer, compassion, and attention (2019:ix). 407

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Restoring the Christian Foundations of the Ethic of Care in Dealing with the COVID-19 Pandemic In dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, international organizations have promoted a masculinist strategy which emphasizes the need for aggressive action, ignoring the role of caring and solidarity. International organizations and “leaders around the world invoked the language of the battlefield and deployed war-like metaphors to mobilize citizens in the fight against the virus” (Branicki 2020:873). The United Nations Secretary-General Antόnio Guterres said: “We are at war with a virus – and not winning it ... This war needs a wartime plan to fight it” (Musu 2020), adding that “Our world faces a common enemy. We are at war with a virus” (United Nations 2020). The WHO called for “countries to take urgent and aggressive action” (WHO 2020a). Even while appealing for solidarity, the WHO used masculine terms while ignoring the concept of caring. The WHO’s solidarity campaign emphasized the importance of mobilizing people “to be ready to beat COVID-19” (WHO 2020b). UNESCO experts emphasized that “the war on COVID-19” requires collective response (UNESCO 2020a). UNESCO also stated that “the fight against COVID-19 is also a fight against disinformation” (UNESCO 2020b). On the margins of the seventy-fifth UN General Assembly, the UN, WHO, UNESCO, UNICEF, UNAIDS, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), along with the governments of Uruguay, Indonesia, and Thailand, held a webinar to emphasize the importance of combating the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 (WHO 2020c). WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus asserted that, To fight the pandemic, we need trust and solidarity, and when there is mistrust, there is much less solidarity. False information is hindering the response to the pandemic, so we must join forces to fight it and to promote science-based public health advice. The same principles that apply to responding to COVID-19 apply to managing the infodemic. We need to prevent, detect, and respond to it, together and in solidarity. (WHO 2020c) Clearly, Ghebreyesus’s speech represents a masculinist approach to solidarity, while ignoring the need of caring as a component of solidarity. The ethic of care, which emphasizes commitment to the marginalized and vulnerable, is a more positive and effective ethical response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Countries which emphasized the role of care and solidarity in fighting against the pandemic (such as Vietnam) provided a successful social and political response to the COVID-19 outbreak (Ivic 2020). The ethic of care emphasizes solidarity and encompasses a network of relationships driven by a sense of shared humanity (Gilligan 1982). The significance of the virtue of solidarity within Christian ethics also points to the Christian roots of the ethic of care. Beyer emphasizes that “solidarity has become a central concept in Christian ethics” (2014:7); teaching on solidarity within Christian ethics gives a thorough and helpful “understanding of the social obligations of individuals, communities, institutions, and nations” (Beyer 2014:8). The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament do not contain the word “solidarity”; however, “long before becoming a theme of theological reflection, solidarity had been Christian praxis” (Sobrino and Pico 1985:47). In 408

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his encyclical Summi Pontificatus published in 1939, Pope Pius XII argued that “the first page of Scripture” (Gen.1:26–27) underpins the law of “human solidarity and charity,” revealing our common origin and the fact that all humans are formed in the image of God. According to Beyer, “the recognition of the imago Dei in all persons (Gen. 1:27), which connotes equal dignity, enables the apprehension of human interdependence, or de facto solidarity” (Beyer 2014:9). Beyer also points out that Paul, the “Apostle to the Gentiles, emphasized the unity of humanity (Acts 27:26–7; Eph. 4:6; Col. 1:16; 1 Tim. 2:5)” (2014:9). Carmen Bărbat (2015) distinguished three different meanings of the concept of solidarity: the ethical, the sociological, and the Christian. The ethical approach points to the active response to regional and global situations and crises. It does not mean vague empathy for suffering but, rather, a compassionate commitment to the common good. The sociological approach to solidarity references the socialization process, which involves a complex interaction among people, nations, and continents – a process that is amplified by globalization. The Christian approach to solidarity is inextricably linked to the preceding two, providing significant theological depth to the ethical component. In this sense, solidarity as a Christian virtue takes on the specific dimensions of selflessness, forgiveness, and reconciliation in terms of the concrete needs of the poor and vulnerable. More than that, the universal right to use earthly goods indicates here good reasons for considerably reducing or even forgiving some debt burden: it reaffirms the logic of social justice. Human and Christian solidarity are not two different categories, but they complement each other. (Bărbat 2015:136) Ethical solidarity is necessary, especially in times of crisis, but it can be fully realized “only if it becomes Christian radicality” (Bărbat 2015:136). In the context the ethic of care, the necessity to wear masks and practice physical distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic for the benefit of vulnerable populations (older adults, ill, and so on) represents shared social responsibility. Disabled persons, undocumented migrants, the homeless, and other social groups demand special attention (Lewnard and Lo 2020). Afroz Ali (2020) argues that a paradigm shift is needed “from social isolation to social solidarity.” The language of social isolation does not help the vulnerable’s physical and mental health, because they are usually members of marginalized social groups; thus, the language of solidarity is more appropriate in the face of the pandemic crisis. However, this viewpoint is too narrow. Solidarity as an ethical value is “not sufficient to guarantee equal access to health care for the whole population” (Made et al. 2001:231). To make masking and physical distancing successful during the pandemic, solidarity should be enhanced with additional ethical qualities such as care and responsibility, and the ethic of care should be the cornerstone of such social practices. Isolation and physical distancing, duty of care, and equal access to treatment are identified as key ethical concerns for health care workers stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic (Jeffrey 2020). Both the ethic of care and Christian ethics emphasize the significance of the vulnerable. According to Christian ethics, “the greater the vulnerability, the greater the right to protection. The Old Testament prophets preached of a God who very much sides with small, persecuted, and defenseless groups: strangers, orphans and widows, the poor” (Church of Norway Council on Ecumenical and International Relations 2002). The dignity of a person 409

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is inextricably linked to his or her vulnerability. This is also emphasized in the Christian canon’s most important ethical texts. It was the Samaritan, the stranger, who proved himself a true neighbor when he stopped and looked after the injured man (Luke 10:25–37). And even in the final judgment, when everything is at stake, Christ refers us to the care of the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, strangers, the naked, and the imprisoned. Because Jesus identifies completely with precisely such people: “Whenever you did this for one of the least important of these brothers [and sisters] of mine, you did it for me” (Matthew 25:40; Church of Norway Council on Ecumenical and International Relations 2002) The significance of caring for the vulnerable advocated by Christianity and the ethic of care is important for addressing the challenges posed by the pandemic, such as the issue of triage. In the Lombardy region of northern Italy, the regional authorities created a policy advising that fragile elderly adults over 75 with COVID-19 symptoms be cared for in nursing homes, limiting their access to hospitals (Amnesty International 2020). At least one state in the United States is said to have suggested that severely mentally or physically challenged people should not be permitted access to scarce ICU beds (Pickard 2020). There are many other similar examples in other countries. Despite recognizing the need for triage, responses are not the same everywhere, and opinions and practices differ around what guidelines should be used, how they should be implemented, and who should ultimately decide. To some extent, triage issues reflect community values, revealing a given society’s moral standards and ideals. (Orfali 2020:675) The Italian Professional Society of Intensivists published triage guidelines in March 2020 in which it was stated: It might be needed to set an age limit for the admission to intensive care. It is not a mere choice related to values, but to spare resources that might be extremely scarce to those who have in primis the highest chance of survival and then to those who may have more years of life saved, in order to maximize benefits for the largest number of persons. (Cesari and Proietti 2020:576, op. cit.) A Christian ethic that emphasizes the importance of caring for the vulnerable can teach us about making such important decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Pickard emphasizes: Christ came for all – the poor, the crippled, the old, the children, the sick and the outcasts. His mission was focused on those with broken lives. He didn’t ask – is this life useful? If I save Lazarus will he live for long? He did not set arbitrary age limits on access to his saving actions, nor did he deny the disabled or mentally afflicted. Neither should the health professionals when judging who should get their life saving support. Health professionals should only consider the extent to which life support will 410

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be effective in recovery from coronavirus. Age might be an indicator in deciding the prospects of benefit from ventilator support, but it should not be a basis of exclusion in its own right. Disability should never be a criterion for excluding access to care. (Pickard 2020) Each person is accorded a distinct value in the Judeo-Christian and humanist traditions. Men and women were made in God’s image, which means they have inherent value and dignity as well as the responsibility of managing natural and human resources for the benefit of their neighbors and the community (Church of Norway Council on Ecumenical and International Relations 2002). Human rights are a legal and political embodiment of this vision of personhood. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” (UN General Assembly 1948). The necessity for legal protection stems from a person’s inherent vulnerability (World Council of Churches 2006). Their entitlement to such protection is based on a conception of humanity that considers everyone’s right to life and liberty to be fundamental to human nature (Church of Norway Council on Ecumenical and International Relations 2002). And the feasibility of such a right to protection being honored is predicated on an appreciation of each human being’s capacity and responsibility to care for the needs of their neighbors. The Christian God is first and foremost the God of victims: God is one who bends down to release an oppressed people; the God who is proclaimed as good news for the poor; the God who identifies with the downcast and despised right into death; the God who in Christ became the victim of violent assault and suffered a death of torture on the cross. Just how radical the Christian message is on this point can once more be best illustrated with a reference to Christ’s words in Matthew 25, 35: “For I was hungry, ... I was thirsty, ... I was a stranger, ... naked, ... I was sick, ... I was in prison.” In our suffering neighbor it is none other than God whom we meet” (Church of Norway Council on Ecumenical and International Relations 2002) According to Sigurd Bergmann (2021), not just the Ten Commandments but also the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12) and the command of love are essential ethical mandates in Jewish and Christian tradition that can help not only believers but also national and international governments pursue the greater good. The command of love represents in its classical form a triple command where the subjective, the social, and the theological dimensions are intertwined. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself and God. All three are reciprocally dependent on each other and love to the neighbor implies love to oneself as well as love to God. (Bergmann 2021:427) We urgently require ethical and contextual implementations of the triple command of love in the face of a pandemic. These could serve as important ethical signposts for cooperative pandemic management among governments and the international community.

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Conclusion The ethic of care provides a theoretical framework for a positive and effective societal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recognition of the Christian roots of the ethic of care emphasizes the ethical and existential importance of the concept of care, which leads to the idea of caring ​​ citizenship. Although some international organizations stressed the importance of solidarity in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences, they defined the concept of solidarity in masculinist terms, neglecting the significance of care. Advocating for a new understanding of citizenship that overcomes the traditional definition of citizenship as an independent category which suggests that the citizen is neither a giver nor a receiver of care is strongly tied to advocating for the ethic of care (Young 1990). Citizenship is described as caring practice under the new notion of citizenship, which includes a moral imperative to care for the vulnerable. Ethical solidarity is necessary, especially during times of crisis, but it can only be completely realized if it transforms into the Christian approach to the vulnerable.

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33 THEOLOGICAL INFLUENCES ON MOBILIZATION OF OPPOSITION TO MODERN SLAVERY Matthew C. Clarke Abstract During the past two decades, thousands of organizations have addressed the challenges of modern slavery (or human trafficking). Nevertheless, with an estimated 50 million people currently trapped in situations that fall under the umbrella term of modern slavery, it remains a significant social problem. Social movement theory has provided a useful set of tools for understanding the activities of such organizations and their supporters. This chapter examines how aspects of Christian theology mobilize supporters within the anti-slavery social movement. The most widely accepted contribution is the Judeo-Christo-Islamic assertion that all people were created in the image of God and continue to carry that divine image. Beyond that common motivation, extensive theological differences lead to divergent approaches to anti-slavery interventions. In this chapter, William Sewell’s concept of schema is applied primarily to contrasting theological positions which focus on either personal sin or structural sin, and potentially on mimetic theory and restorative justice, to show how they influence the mobilization of support for various intervention strategies.

Introduction According to the most recent estimates (International Labour Organization (ILO), Walk Free, and International Organization for Migration (IOM) 2022), approximately 50 million people are trapped in modern slavery.1 The bounds of modern slavery are not well defined, but the label encompasses diverse forms of extreme labor exploitation, forced marriage, child soldiers, international trafficking of people for sexual exploitation, and a growing online market for the sexual abuse of children. In response to this seemingly intractable global problem, thousands of organizations2 seek to raise awareness about slavery; to rescue and rehabilitate people who have been abused or exploited; to identify, shame,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-44

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and prosecute people who perpetrate those abuses; and to prevent specific forms of slavery through legislation and through the alleviation of associated problems such as poverty. The size and scope of anti-slavery work is such that it cannot be centrally controlled but, instead, operates as an uncoordinated network of activities that includes diverse actors, ideologies, goals, and strategies. That network of activities to end modern slavery has been categorized as a social movement by numerous researchers (Clarke 2022b), allowing a set of theoretical tools to be applied to the movement, in particular, the concepts of grievances, mobilization, outcomes, strategies, targets, collective action frames, and the interactional dynamics between the social movement and its targets. Many anti-slavery organizations operate within a broadly Christian framework (Gee and Smith 2015; Hertzke 2006, 2015), and this chapter examines some of the intersections between theological belief and the framing of anti-slavery intervention strategies, highlighting the importance of collective action framing for the mobilization of support among Christians for those strategies.

Imago Dei Imago Dei is a fundamental belief about human nature, shared by Judaic, Christian, and Islamic theology, that all people were created in the image of God and continue to carry that image even when, as many believe, that image has become corrupted. The doctrine of imago Dei originates in the early chapters of Genesis (e.g., 1:26–27, 5:1) and is echoed in New Testament passages such as James 3:9. A natural consequence is that mutual human dignity ought to be respected in all inter-personal and broader social interactions, following the biblical injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:39). This has been the basis of Christian engagement with human rights (Marshall 2001b), including the application of human rights to modern slavery (Yoon 2022). The abuses that constitute any form of slavery deny people’s value and restrict their freedom, and according to Pope John Paul II, this defacement of God’s image bearers is ultimately an attack against God (O’Connor 2014 loc. 1400). A large body of theologically informed scholarship has sought to clarify the moral motives for opposing slavery, religious justifications for and against the perpetuation of slavery, and the application of religious language and resources to mobilize anti-slavery sentiment (e.g., Smith 1972; Cannon 2004; Brooten and Hazelton 2010; Glancy 2011; Gee and Smith 2015; Reddie 2016; Zimmerman 2019). Theologically informed statements about how to respond to modern slavery have been published by the World Council of Churches (Tveit 2019), the Church of England (The Clewer Initiative 2019), the Roman Catholic Church (Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development 2019; O’Connor 2014), and, undoubtedly, others. But most of what has been written goes no further than noting that, in Christian theology, every person has been formed in the image of God and consequently ought to be treated with deep respect; that modern slavery, in all its forms, violates that image; and that Christians should, therefore, condemn modern slavery and work toward its eradication. Accepting the imago Dei as the foundation for human dignity generates a sense of compassion toward victims and survivors of modern slavery, and that compassion can lead to actions that rescue and restore those people’s threatened dignity. The doctrine of imago Dei, however, applies equally to people who perpetrate the abuses, exploitation, and coercion that constitute modern slavery. If even perpetrators carry the image of God, then the doc416

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trine should generate compassion toward them as well, for their own human dignity is also threatened by their actions. Any intervention strategies directed toward the perpetrators will need to draw on other theological principles, such as understandings of justice, to deal appropriately with the presence of psychological disgust and social monsterization. The doctrine of imago Dei can, thus, be used as an ethical lever to motivate support for the anti-slavery movement, but on its own, it does little to mobilize that support toward any specific action.

Theological Schema and Anti-Slavery Intervention Strategies As Yvonne Zimmerman notes, “while Christians are largely of the one mind that human trafficking is wrong, the strategies that they use and the ends they hope to accomplish are varied and even conflicting” (2011:567). One reason for those variations is the precommitment to alternative theological positions (Gee and Smith 2015:3643). Theological pre-commitments wield significant influence on Christian contributions to the anti-slavery social movement in terms of how to respond actively to modern slavery and, hence, how to mobilize people to support such responses.

Harnessing the Sociological Concept of Schema To assist with framing theological options, this chapter applies the concept of a schema, in particular the use of the term by William Sewell (1992). Schemas are akin to Anthony Giddens’s “rules” in that they are abstract (or virtual) prescriptions, conventions, recipes, or moral codes (1992:8). They encompass both the formal rules encoded in laws, liturgies, creeds, and contracts as well as the informal metaphors and assumptions that undergird those formal rules. Schemas are the “transposable procedures applied in the enactment of social life” (Sewell 1992:17). There is, consequently, a duality between schemas3 and social life; schemas structure the practices of social life, but equally, social life is the sea out of which schemas arise. A schema simultaneously enables and constrains options for social action, implying a border between what is possible (or at least permissible) and what is not. A schema that arises from one social context becomes an abstract entity that can later be applied (enacted) in other, quite varied, social contexts through what Bourdieu refers to as transposition (Sewell 1992:17). This transposability of schemas across multiple practices is the reason they must be understood as virtual. To say that schemas are virtual is to say that they cannot be reduced to their existence in any particular practice or any particular location in space and time: they can be actualized in a potentially broad and unpredetermined range of situations. (Sewell 1992:8) Schemas, thus, provide a basis for describing how theological ideas, formed by the long history of humanity’s engagement with the divine, can be transposed into the context of modern slavery, even when this transposition is unconscious and pre-critical. This chapter describes the two theological schema that dominate current anti-slavery work by Christians and Christian organizations: the personal sin schema and the structural sin schema. Others have documented the influence of these two schemas, especially in the context of public anti-slavery discourse in the USA (Campbell and Zimmerman 2013; 417

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Choi-Fitzpatrick 2014; Zimmerman 2011), but this chapter draws attention to the way these schemas both enable and constrain the options for social movement mobilization. To assist with the way those schemas are framed, formal and informal statements of faith from 16 Christian anti-slavery organizations are examined here. Some of these statements are publicly available on the organizations’ websites, while others were provided in response to email requests in which it was agreed their comments would not be linked to their specific organization. Their comments, therefore, remain anonymous.

The Personal Sin Schema A prevalent theological schema within Christian tradition – perhaps the most prevalent in current Protestant churches – maintains that all evil arises from personal sin. The essence of this schema is as follows. Since Genesis Chapter 3, humanity has rebelled against God and fallen into moral depravity. Although created in the image of God, each person, by virtue of their inherited human nature (labeled by some as “original sin”) as well as by their own decisions, has turned away from the good that God intended and toward evil. All people are equally infected with personal sin, including slaves and their owners. All deserve to be punished, or at least to receive the “wages” of their sin. Those wages include physical and spiritual death, and, according to many, eternal suffering in Hell. One Christian anti-slavery organization stated that: [People] will either exist eternally separated from God by sin or in union with God through forgiveness and salvation. To be eternally separated from God is hell. To be eternally in union with him is eternal life. Heaven and hell are places of eternal existence. In response, God acts in the world self-sacrificially to provide a means by which people can escape sin and its consequences. For many Christians, this rescue is conditional; each individual must admit to their own moral failure and accept God’s rescue plan in order to make it effective. This conditionality is inherent in the Reformed doctrine of sola fide, and expressed, at least stereotypically, as the need to “accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior.” For some Christians, this conscious assent is all that is needed to be “saved” from sin and from God’s just wrath. In one respondent’s words, We believe salvation is a gift from God to man. Man can never make up for his sin by self-improvement or good works – only by trusting in Jesus Christ as God’s offer of forgiveness can man be saved from sin’s penalty. For other Christians, prayers, almsgiving, and other morally laudable acts are also important. This way of telling the human story was labeled by Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick as a salvation schema and is shown to be a common element of American evangelicals’ attitudes toward modern slavery (2014). From this theological schema, three key concepts enable and constrain Christian responses to slavery: personal guilt, punishment, and rescue.

Personal Guilt As with all evil, the root cause of slavery is personal moral depravity. People who abuse or exploit others are sinners, as are those they abuse or exploit. All have sinned against God, 418

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against other people, and against themselves, and all have been sinned against by other people. Nevertheless, some sins are more heinous than others, more abhorrent to God, and more damaging to other people. For some Christians, perhaps the most abhorrent aspect of slavery is the violation of sexual integrity.4 A common assumption is that slaveholders and human traffickers act as they do because of the extremity of their sinfulness: their greed, self-centered arrogance, disregard for the rule of law, lust for pleasure and power, and their lack of compassion or even empathy for their victims.

Punishment From this theological perspective, for a slaveholder or human trafficker to receive justice is synonymous with them being punished. They should suffer in turn for the suffering they have caused so that the scales of justice will be balanced. Although there is little to logically connect a belief in personal sin with a belief in retributive punishment, the two are commonly held together, especially in anti-slavery organizations that subscribe to Reformed theology. In that theological tradition, personal sin, justice, punishment, the wrath of God, and its avoidance through Christ, are inextricably linked (Packer 1973). Reformed theologian W.G.T. Shedd, writes that “Justice necessarily demands that sin be punished, but not necessarily in the person of the sinner. Justice may allow the substitution of one person for another” (1888:373). Note that Shedd is commenting about a person who has sinned, and deducing the requirement for punishment, along with stating that another person, namely Jesus, might, in some cases, be able to stand in for the sinner to receive the punishment. This approach to punishment is neither rehabilitative nor designed as a deterrent. Although it may result in both of those outcomes, the intent of punishment is primarily to harm the person who has perpetrated abuse or exploitation because that is what they deserve. “The heart of the justice which expresses God’s nature is retribution, the rendering to men what they have deserved” (Packer 1973:158). Several principles guide the application of this retributive justice. For instance, the Old Testament principle of lex talionis – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – imposes an upper limit to punishment. Punishment should be prescribed by an authority within a judicial system designed to curtail escalating vigilante retaliation. Because the core of modern slavery, like any sinful behavior, is its affront to God, God retains the ultimate position of judge and punisher.

Rescue From this theological position, all people need rescue, whether they know it or not. For many who hold this theological position, the only important strategy for dealing with slavery is to encourage each person, whether victim or perpetrator, to repent of their personal sinfulness and place themselves in the hands of a merciful God. Anything other than that will leave them outside God’s rescue plan and condemned to eternal punishment. To such people, “rescuing” a slave looks the same as rescuing anyone. To be rescued means to be saved from the future punishment of God not to be saved from the challenges of this life. As one Christian anti-slavery organization declares, “The greatest need for all human kind is forgiveness and salvation through Jesus Christ.” Another commented that “Man can never make up for his sin by self-improvement or good works – only by trusting in Jesus Christ as God’s offer of forgiveness can man be saved from sin’s penalty.” 419

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This also appears to be the view of evangelical theologian Don Carson who is quoted as saying “The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system” (Strobel 1998:168). Carson does not think that modern slavery is unimportant, nor that it should be condoned. Releasing someone from modern slavery may be tactically useful in that it enables the person to hear and respond positively to this other, larger, message of salvation. But the fundamental “rescue” is not from external slavery but from the internal slavery of personal sin. Another anti-slavery organization offered the following statement: Through a holistic approach of rescuing, restoring, and reintegrating survivors of trafficking and preventing sexual slavery, [our organization] seeks to meet survivors’ spiritual, emotional, social, educational, and physical needs. Our intention is that they may come to know their worth and value in Christ, develop a dependence on Him, and develop skills for a sustainable life. Note the centrality of the rescue motif in this quote. This statement also highlights how the desired outcome is not just physical well-being of the survivors but also a re-orientation of their self-image as dependent on Christ. This does not mean that the organization requires survivors to already be or to become Christian but that such an outcome is their explicit intention. Not all Christians operating from a theology of personal sin take such an instrumental approach. Within his study of evangelicals, Choi-Fitzpatrick found that “a belief in spiritual salvation is readily rearticulated as the corporeal salvation of victims” (2014:120; see also Wiss 2013). The salvation schema, derived from a spiritual context, has, thus, been transposed into the physical context of slavery victimization. In this transposed form, guilt, rescue, and punishment still dominate the narrative, but the schema now confers a mandate to rescue slaves from their oppressors and bring slaveholders and traffickers to justice here and now rather than leaving the enactment of justice to God in the afterlife. In summary, assuming a theological schema in which personal sin deserves to be punished, the appropriate Christian response to modern slavery is seen to be 1) encouraging all people to repent and accept God’s eternal rescue plan, 2) rescuing and rehabilitating people here and now who have survived the abuses of modern slavery, and 3) incarcerating the people who have perpetrated those abuses so that they are justly punished.

The Structural Sin Schema While the previous theological schema places maximal emphasis on personal agency, a second schema emphasizes the role of structural failures in human systems. There is some evidence that so-called mainline churches in the USA tend to approach modern slavery via this schema, in contrast to the evangelical reliance on a schema that emphasizes personal sin (Choi-Fitzpatrick 2014). This move from a narrative of personal sin to that of structural societal causes has also been emphasized in the context of sex trafficking, along with the need for them to be countered by grace and compassion (Brock and Thistlewaite 1996). The term “social justice” is often applied to this schema, sometimes embraced positively, for instance by the Sojourners Community,5 at other times denigrated by people who argue from the “personal sin” standpoint that social justice does not faithfully reflect the essence 420

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of the gospel.6 Still others see the two aspects of sin in a more unified fashion. South African theologian Albert Nolan, for instance, writes: All sin is both personal and social at the same time. All sin is personal in the sense that only individuals can commit sin, only individuals can be guilty, only individuals can be sinners. However all sins also have a social dimension because sins have social consequences (they affect other people), sins become institutionalized and systematized in the structures, laws and customs of a society, and sins are committed in a particular society that shapes and influences the sinner. (Nolan 1988:43) To the extent that sin is embedded in social structures, there is a clear mandate in the Bible to expose and oppose those structures. For example, Isaiah’s condemnation of oppressive regimes – “Woe to those who make unjust laws” (Isaiah 10:1–2) – and Jesus’s expulsion of exploitative money changers from the Temple in Jerusalem (Matthew 21:12–13). One Christian anti-slavery organization commented that “We affirm that acting justly involves … being able to name injustice and denounce the powers that cause it.” In the case of modern slavery, many systemic factors contribute to both the vulnerability of victims and the propensity of other actors to victimize the vulnerable. Modern slavery could not exist without global trade, a consumerist mentality that demands cheap goods and services, an economic system that creates an underclass of people vulnerable to exploitation, cultural attitudes that undervalue certain people, information technologies that enable anonymity, and psychological mechanisms that promote widespread sexual abuse. A recent report (LeBaron et al. 2018) analyzing the root causes of modern slavery named four structural components of the current global political economy that “contribute to creating a pool of workers vulnerable to exploitation”: poverty, the systematic denial of the rights and status of full personhood for some people, limited labor protections, and restricted mobility regimes. They also named four structural components that encourage the exploitation of those vulnerable people: concentrated corporate power and ownership, outsourcing, irresponsible sourcing policies, and governance gaps. Reading this diagnosis through the lens of Christian social justice prompts consideration of how Christian communities can expose and oppose the systemic injustices of the global political economy. Advocates of social justice often point to Bible verses that demonstrate God’s bias toward the well-being of the poor and marginalized, such as: He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free, the Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. (Psalm 146:7–9) Based on a theological belief that God abhors any form of injustice and acts in the world to address injustice, Christians throughout history have been inspired to stand on the side of the disempowered and to facilitate social change that promotes human rights. This position is clearly stated in “A Theology of Modern Slavery” (The Clewer Initiative 2019), Tveit (2019), and affirmed by the Church of the Brethren (2010). One Christian anti-slavery organization stated that “It’s kind of absolutely core to Christian doctrine that we’re about 421

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the business of liberation and release of those who are captive and oppressed.” They further noted the importance of understanding that “society, themselves included, are part of the problem in terms of issues like consumerism and other factors that actually can promote trafficking [and] modern slavery,” and drew attention to “the whole Christian narrative about liberation and justice.” The structural sin schema enables Christians to consider far broader forms of anti-slavery intervention than the personal sin schema does. If God is concerned about human flourishing before death just as much as after death, then God’s followers should be actively involved in working toward a society in which there is the potential for all to flourish. In the words of one Christian anti-slavery organization, “We affirm that churches should faithfully respond to the impulse of God’s holy love by working for God’s reign to be ever more visible.” This reflects the words from Jesus’s proto-typical prayer: he did not instruct his followers to pray “May all evils on earth be resolved in heaven” but, rather, “Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). The important theological concept of hope looks much different from these two vantage points. For those who focus on personal sin, the hope of the gospel is an escape from this world to an eternal life in heaven, while for those who focus on social justice issues as a corrective to structural sin, the hope of the gospel is God’s presence with us here and now. In relation to modern slavery, this structural focus encourages Christians to be involved in strategies such as: Applying economic pressures to make modern slavery unprofitable. Lobbying for stronger laws and strengthening the institutions that enforce those laws. Alleviating poverty, disease, military conflict, and ecological disasters in order to reduce people’s vulnerability to exploitation. Challenging the exploitative consequences of economic rationalism and neoliberal globalization. Whereas the personal sin schema tends to support the idea that perpetrators deserve to be punished, the structural sin schema allows a more nuanced attitude toward punishment. All forms of punishment can be re-imagined as deterrents that reduce criminality pre-emptively rather than just punishing it retrospectively. Many forms of punishment can be viewed as opportunities for the rehabilitation of offenders. Incarceration can be seen as a way of protecting society from slaveholders and traffickers by removing them from contexts in which they can abuse others. Furthermore, prisons (and other forms of punishment) can themselves be systems of injustice – ideological puppets that entrench racial biases, corruption, and social power imbalances – and consequently in need of faith-driven reform. In summary, a schema that posits structural sin as the root cause of slavery prompts Christians to call prophetically for social justice, to initiate social changes that promote human rights, and to cooperate with others, regardless of their diverse ideologies, in the construction of a world in which all people can flourish.

Other Relevant Theological Schemas Many other theological concepts and schema could be applied to the context of modern slavery. Understandings of liberation, gender, ecclesiology, mission, suffering, and prayer, among others, can all be mined for relevant insights. It is argued elsewhere that out of the 422

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vast armory of Christian theology, two schemas in particular – mimetic theory and restorative justice – hold significant generativity in the context of options for how to actively respond to modern slavery (Clarke 2022a). These two schemas are rarely applied by Christian anti-slavery organizations but provide insights that could improve their theories of change and enable additional intervention options. Some brief comments on both are relevant to this discussion about social movement mobilization. The mimetic theory of Rene Girard (1989, 2001; Bailie 1997) offers an explanation for the violence inherent in all human civilization. Modern slavery is but one example of the human propensity to treat each other abusively, coercively, and violently, which arises from a foundation of imitated desire and inevitably escalates to a point of communal crisis. Mimetic theory highlights the way society attempts to resolve such internal crises by arbitrarily choosing a scapegoat on whom to lay blame, as symbolically depicted in the purification offerings of the two goats in Leviticus 16. Girard’s analysis helps us to understand the essential innocence of the scapegoat and suggests useful insights into the dynamics of victimization within modern slavery. There is an important sense in which the victims of modern slavery are sacrificed to meet the desires of slaveholders, traffickers, and the consumers of goods and services produced by those victims. But mimetic theory also suggests a deeper process of social dysfunction in which the scapegoats are the slaveholders and traffickers. Girard’s core theological insight is that the Gospel signals an end to any need for sacrificial victims. As long as our desires are fed by mutual imitation of each other, our social existence will be marked by rivalry. But the possibility of basing our desires on the imitation of God in Christ creates a non-rivalrous alternative that avoids the need for scapegoating. Mobilizing action against modern slavery could be inspired by very different motivations if such an alternative were embraced. Further theological insight about effective mobilization to oppose modern slavery can also be gained from the restorative justice schema (Marshall 2001a), which questions the punitive, retributive approaches to justice held by many and replaces it with a concept of justice based on shalom. This Hebrew word for peace encompasses material well-being, prosperity, right relationships, and moral integrity. Shalom is the state of justice, of straightforward wholeness, of goodness and salvation (Yoder 1989). The essential evil of modern slavery is that it violates shalom. Restorative justice moves in the opposite direction to restore true shalom, framed not as a surface level absence of conflict but a deeper establishment of rightness that creates the social context in which all can flourish. Restorative justice focuses on broken relationships not only between victims and offenders but also between them and the community. A theologically informed restorative justice schema that posits all three broken relationships as the root causes of slavery mobilizes Christians to interact with those who have been abused and exploited, with those who abuse and exploit, and with communities of faith to prioritize the values of respect for all, participation, truth-telling, mutual care, reconciliation, healing, and peacemaking.

Conclusion A significant concern of social movement leaders as well as theorists is how to mobilize people to support the goals and strategies of the movement. The collective action framing that most effectively motivates that mobilization will vary depending, among other things, on the pre-existing ideological commitments of the potential supporters. This chapter exam423

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ined a variety of theological schema to understand how they might inform intervention strategies and support mobilization of the anti-slavery movement. The theological schema adopted or assumed by anti-slavery organizations and their potential supporters both enable and constrain the types of interventions that can be considered. Consequently, Christian leaders and organizations will justify their strategies and motivate their supporters with differing messages than those of other faiths or no faith. The doctrine of imago Dei finds broad support not only within Christian circles but also among other religions. Much opposition to modern slavery is based on the idea that abuse, exploitation, and coercion threaten or deny the human dignity that is implied by the belief that all people carry the image of God. Consequently, imago Dei contributes to both the diagnostic and the motivational components of an anti-slavery collective action frame. Although imago Dei may generate generic support for anti-slavery goals, mobilizing supporters to engage in specific actions depends on other more complex theological schema. The choice of schema affects what sort of problem one takes modern slavery to be, and what types of outcomes constitute a solution. This chapter analyzed the influence of the personal sin and structural sin schemas, which dominate the strategies of most current Christian anti-slavery organizations. But other theological schema, such as mimetic theory and restorative justice, also offer valuable alternatives. Practitioners and theorists in the anti-slavery social movement, especially those within the Christian tradition, can increase the effectiveness of both their intervention and mobilization strategies by paying attention to their own theological pre-commitments as well as to those of their potential supporters.

Notes 1 Terminology within the anti-slavery movement has become controversial, and choices must be made that are a compromise between clarity, conciseness, sensitivity, and the pressure of politics. The terms “anti-slavery” and “modern slavery” are used throughout this chapter, recognizing that these labels are problematic, but noting that alternatives such as “human trafficking” have their own problems. As will be clear, the scope of “slavery” here is intended to include all forms of human abuse, coercion, and exploitation that reflect an assumption that one person can, in any sense, “own” another, whether that pretense of ownership be legal, psychological, financial, or otherwise. For a more detailed examination of these terms, see Bravo 2019; 2017. 2 See for instance the 2,616 listed in the Global Modern Slavery Directory at https://www​.globalmodernslavery​.org as of January 2023. 3 Strictly speaking, Sewell sees this duality as occurring between structures and social life, in which a “structure” is a combination of schemas and resources. For the sake of simplicity, however, this chapter does not discuss the role of resources in how schemas become enacted in social practices. The emphasis here is on the conceptual theological frameworks that motivate anti-slavery organizations’ actions rather than the process of co-opting resources for those actions. 4 Yvonne Zimmerman claimed this view was central to the conservative Christian opposition to slavery in the USA (2011:573). She and Leititia Campbell extended that claim several years later to argue that, under the influence of American evangelicalism, the whole “anti-trafficking movement’s dominant rhetorical and conceptual framework” was of “human trafficking as ‘sold sex’” (Campbell and Zimmerman 2013). Perhaps that categorization is less applicable outside the USA, and perhaps the discourse has shifted over the past decade in part because of their earlier challenging work. For example, recent anti-slavery legislation in Australia focuses on supply chains and labor exploitation, as does the recent Australian book by Justine Nolan and Martijn Boersma (2019). The Global Slavery Index considers “situations of exploitation” without regard for whether that exploitation is sexual or otherwise. Although the drawcard of “sexual immorality” is still used to mobilize support, even Western Christian voices such as Gary Haugen and Kevin Bales locate the roots of slavery elsewhere (Bales 2007; Haugen and Boutros 2014).

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Opposition to Modern Slavery Nevertheless, at the International Human Trafficking & Social Justice Conference held in the USA in 2020, more than half the presentations (at least 34 out of 65) still focused primarily on sex trafficking. 5 https://sojo​.net​/about​-us​/who​-we​-are (January 2023) 6 An example of this position is The Gospel Coalition. While recognizing that Christians should promote moral reform in society, they emphasize that, “as progressive social causes became more foundational to the social gospel movement, the good of justice overtook the greater good of evangelism” (Carter 2018).

References Church of the Brethren. 2010. “Biblical Teachings on Slavery.” Bailie, Gil. 1997. Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: Crossroad Publishing. Bales, Kevin. 2007. Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bravo, Karen E. 2017. “Interrogating Everyperson’s Roles in Today’s Slaveries.” Temple International & Comparative Law Journal 31(1):25–43. Bravo, Karen E. 2019. Contemporary State Anti-‘Slavery’ Efforts: Dishonest and Ineffective. SSRN Scholarly Paper. ID 3504027. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Susan B. Thistlewaite. 1996. Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers. Brooten, B. J., and Jacqueline L. Hazelton, eds. 2010. Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Campbell, Letitia M., and Yvonne C. Zimmerman. 2013. “Christian Ethics and Human Trafficking Activism: Progressive Christianity and Social Critique.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 34(1):145–72. doi: 10.1353/sce.2014.0003. Cannon, Katie Geneva. 2004. “Slave Ideology and Biblical Interpretation.” Pp. 413–420 in The Black Studies Reader, edited by J. Bobo, C. Hudley, and C. Michel. New York: Routledge. Carter, Joe. 2018. “The FAQs: What Christians Should Know About Social Justice.” The Gospel Coalition. Retrieved November 23, 2019 (https://www​.thegospelcoalition​.org​/article​/faqs​-christians​-know​-social​-justice/). Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin. 2014. “To Seek and Save the Lost: Human Trafficking and Salvation Schemas among American Evangelicals.” European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 1(2):119–40. Clarke, Matthew C. 2022a. “Four Theological Schemas for Actively Responding to Modern Slavery.” Journal of Sociology and Christianity 12(1):10–32. Clarke, Matthew C. 2022b. “Perpetrator-Centric Strategies for Addressing Modern Slavery.” Journal of Human Rights Practice 13(2):407–425. doi: 10.1093/jhuman/huab036. Gee, Martha Bettis, and Ryan D. Smith. 2015. “Moral Imperatives: Faith-Based Approaches to Human Trafficking.” Pp. 3623–48 in The Changing World Religion Map: Sacred Places, Identities, Practices and Politics, edited by S. D. Brunn. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Girard, René. 1989. The Scapegoat. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Girard, René. 2001. I See Satan Fall like Lightning. Maryknoll, NY; Ottawa; Leominster, Herefordshire: Orbis Books; Novalis; Gracewing. Glancy, Jennifer A. 2011. Slavery as Moral Problem: In the Early Church and Today. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Haugen, Gary A., and Victor Boutros. 2014. The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hertzke, Allen D. 2006. Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hertzke, Allen D. 2015. “Global Christian Networks for Human Dignity.” Pp. 229–36 in Nations under God: The Geopolitics of Faith in the Twenty-First Century, edited by L. M. Herrington, M. Alasdair, and J. Haynes. Bristol, UK: E-international Relations. International Labour Organization (ILO), Walk Free, and International Organization for Migration (IOM). 2022. Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage. Report. Geneva.

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Matthew C. Clarke LeBaron, Genevieve, Neil Howard, Cameron Thibos, and Penelope Kyritsis. 2018. Confronting Root Causes: Forced Labour in Global Supply Chains. OpenDemocracy and the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute. Marshall, Christopher D. 2001a. Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime, and Punishment. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans. Marshall, Christopher D. 2001b. Crowned with Glory & Honor: Human Rights in the Biblical Tradition. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press. Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development. 2019. Pastoral Orientations on Human Trafficking. Nolan, Albert. 1988. God In South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip. Nolan, Justine, and Martijn Boersma. 2019. Addressing Modern Slavery. Sydney: UNSW Press. O’Connor, Melanie. 2014. The Church and Human Trafficking. Kindle. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications. Packer, James I. 1973. Knowing God. 14th impr. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Reddie, Anthony G., ed. 2016. Black Theology, Slavery and Contemporary Christianity: 200 Years and No Apology. New York: Routledge. Sewell, William H. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98(1):1–29. Shedd, William Greenough Thayer. 1888. Dogmatic Theology. Vol. 1. New York: Scribner. Smith, Timothy L. 1972. “Slavery and Theology: The Emergence of Black Christian Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America.” Church History 41(4):497–512. doi: 10.2307/3163880. Strobel, Lee. 1998. The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. The Clewer Initiative. 2019. A Theology of Modern Slavery. London. Tveit, Olav Fykse. 2019. “Ending Slavery Today: Ecumenical Theological Considerations — World Council of Churches.” World Council of Churches. Retrieved November 23, 2019 (https:// www​. oikoumene ​ . org ​ / en ​ / resources ​ / documents ​ / ending ​ - slavery ​ - today ​ - ecumenical ​ - theological​ -considerations). Wiss, Rosemary. 2013. “And Justice for All? International Anti-Trafficking Agendas and Local Consequences in a Philippines Sex Tourism Town.” Australian Journal of Human Rights 19(1):55–82. Yoder, Perry. 1989. Shalom: The Bible’s Word for Salvation, Justice and Peace. Spire. Yoon, I. Sil. 2022. “Imago Dei and Human Rights: A North Korean Case Study.” Theology Today 79(2):166–83. doi: 10.1177/00405736221091918. Zimmerman, Yvonne C. 2011. “Christianity and Human Trafficking.” Religion Compass 5(10):567– 78. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00309.x. Zimmerman, Yvonne C. 2019. “Human Trafficking and Religious Movements.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Oxford University Press.

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34 CHRISTIANITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS Olga Breskaya and Giuseppe Giordan

Abstract The controversial history of encounters of Christianity with the modern concept of human rights has been analyzed by social scientists using two master narratives: opposition and engagement. This chapter follows the socio-historical perspective of Hans Joas in overcoming this binary approach by presenting diverse elements of Christian contributions to an affirmative genealogy of human rights. First, the existing master narratives of relations between Christianity and human rights will be explained. Second, the sociological importance of distinguishing the Christian genesis of human rights from the process of their intellectual justification will be overviewed in comparative perspective, providing examples from the traditions of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Third, by analyzing how the concept of human dignity is the grounding idea of human rights within both secular sociological and Christian perspectives, the inter-connectedness of secular–religious narratives will be shown. Thus, an affirmative genealogy of human rights reveals the degree of modernization of each historical branch of Christianity.

Introduction The story of the relationship between Christianity and human rights, specifically in terms of their practical application, cannot be told with a single continuous narrative. A controversial history of encounters of Christianity with the modern concept of human rights has been considered by social scientists within various theoretical approaches, bringing to the analysis Christian understandings of freedom, human dignity, natural rights, modernity, and democracy (Witte and Alexander 2010). Between the Vatican Council I (1869–1870) condemning liberalism with its individual freedoms and socialism and Vatican Council II (1962–1965) supporting modern understandings of human rights with its prolific Declaration on Religious Freedom lies a complex of inter-weaving historical events, tragic experiences, and their interpretation. The condemnation of the crimes of World War II and the subsequent drafting of the Universal DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-45

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Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and two International Human Rights Covenants (1966) signified the origin of the international human regime (Donnelly 1986), codifying civil–political and socio-economic rights into the principles of international law. These rights became new moral and legal foundations for freedom, equality, and peace, addressing, among other issues, new inquiries for Christian interpretation of natural law, human dignity, and individual freedoms in the context of modernization. Quite recently, social scientists began interdisciplinary research on Christian perspectives on human rights by considering the internal plurality of Christianity (Witte and Alexander 2010; Ferrari et al. 2021; Davie and Leustean 2022) and the external pluralist condition of contemporary societies (Kao 2011; Berger 2014). This scholarship shed light on a variety of meanings which particular freedoms contain in a given historical moment, Christian advocacy of human rights in broader society, and possibilities of using human rights as an instrument of Christian ecumenism (Doe 2021). Social–scientific research addresses the issue of implementing human rights, specifically considering the right of religious freedom, in the internal Church’s policies and regulations and limitations of Church’s and civil laws (Doe 2021). This chapter follows the socio-historical perspective of German sociologist Hans Joas (2013) in overcoming the binary human rights narratives and presenting the fragmented Christian–secular elements of the affirmative genealogy of human rights. In doing so, the existing master narratives of the relations between Christianity and human rights will be explained first. Second, the sociological importance of distinguishing the Christian genesis of human rights from the process of their intellectual justification will be highlighted in comparative perspective, providing examples from the traditions of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Third, by analyzing how the concept of human dignity is the grounding idea of human rights within both the secular sociological and Christian perspectives, the inter-connectedness of secular–religious narratives will be shown. An affirmative genealogy of human rights reveals the degree of modernization of a particular church, which is still a current task for some Christian communities around the world.

Between the Opposition and Engagement Narratives The relations between Christianity and human rights follow two antithetical master narratives which describe the broader context of relationship between religions and human rights (Banchoff and Wuthnow 2011). The first is the dominant narrative of Christian opposition to ideas of human rights, which shows how the “modern conception of human rights triumphed only as traditional religious authorities eroded” (Banchoff and Wuthnow 2011:3). This narrative tells the stories of violence in the name of faith, rejection, or silence toward human rights by Christian churches. The second narrative reveals the Christian contribution to the successful development and endorsement of human rights values. It describes the engagement of Christianity with human rights narrated as a “story of struggles within and across religious and nonreligious communities about how to adapt to the rise of modernity” (Banchoff and Wuthnow 2011:5). The binary narratives of opposition and engagement require considering the diverse relationship between Christian interpretations of religious freedom, gender empowerment, or LGBTQIA+ rights within historical contexts. These interpretations cannot be examined without the understanding of “stronger” or “weaker” Christian foundations of human rights as well (Henkin 1998). By grounding human rights in universal human dignity and/ 428

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or moral worth of the individual – religious and/or this-worldly nature, individual and/or community claims – Christianity provides its justifications for the ideas of modern human rights (Henkin 1998; Witte and Green 2012). However, both narratives leave the sociological inquiry open concerning the Christian inspiration of the historical momentum and the motives for the twentieth century human rights revolution. Hans Joas formulated this inquiry as why a particular element of Christian teaching that for centuries proved compatible with the broadest range of political regimes, none of which were founded on the idea of human rights, should suddenly have become a dynamic force in the institutionalization of such rights. (2013:5) The late eighteenth century Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, the American and French revolutions also of the late eighteenth century, the nineteenth and twentieth century colonial resistance to imperial powers, and the atrocities of World War II together prompted moral Christian responses to injustice and suffering. However, social scientists have only recently begun to examine why twentieth century theologies of the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox Churches finally began “to acknowledge their departures from the cardinal teaching of peace and love that are the heart of their sacred texts and traditions,” in stark contrast to their “checkered human rights records over the centuries” (Witte 2010:13).

The Christian Genesis and Validity of Human Rights Within this historical and theological dynamic, one can question the possibility of a sociological study of the relationship between Christianity and human rights. While interpreting the universality of modern human rights from a Christian perspective, Hans Joas suggests first paying attention to the historical developments of human rights claims within the political, economic, or cultural life of societies. Here one can find legal, political, economic, and religious histories of human rights claiming and implementation, each providing its narratives for human rights origin. Second, he suggests distinguishing the processes of justification of human dignity and human rights as philosophical, moral, and legal concepts (Joas 2013). By careful analysis of historical conditions, developments, and their interpretation, one can capture the complex nature of the relationship between Christianity and human rights and the gaps between human rights practice and its Christian reception. Such differentiation allows also explaining the historical and intellectual irreducibility of human rights ideas and their novelty in human history. Against this backdrop, Joas prefers to talk about the birth of modern human rights norms and values, or their origin in modern societies, instead of their “discovery” or “re-establishment.” Joas’s approach suggests that the encounters of Christianity with human rights can be understood better if the competing interplay of the “genesis and validity” of human rights values are considered complementary. In this way, human rights values present “historical individualities” and, at the same time, allow explanation of “our commitment to these values” (Joas 2013:2–3). Such differentiation leaves space for explaining experiences of Christianity in claiming economic, political, or cultural rights; its commitment to the universal ideal of human dignity; and violations and discontents with them. Joas’s perspective allows addressing the question of why and how Christian perceptions and intellectual con429

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troversies accompany various narratives of implementation of human rights and provide answers explaining the tensions and juxtapositions, but also possibilities, for the successful affirmation of human rights as moral and legal values. Within the long history of encounters of Christianity with human rights, there were controversial experiences which illustrated the “opposition” narrative and suggested some motives for the rejection of principles of equality and liberty. When Pope Pius VI, in his encyclical Quod aliquantum in 1791, condemned the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a document of the National Assembly during the French Revolution which subordinated the church to the state, the position of the Roman Catholic Church was openly hostile toward individual choices in religious matters. In particular, freedom of thought and manifestation of religion was seen as religious errancy opposing principles of natural law and individual freedom. The encyclical stated that: Anyone should not be surprised by the Constitution of the Assembly itself that it aims at nothing else or seeks anything other than the abolition of the Catholic Religion and, with this, also of the obedience due to the Kings. With this design it is established as a principle of natural law that the man living in Society must be fully free, that is to say that in matters of Religion he must not be disturbed by anyone, and can freely think as he pleases, and write and also publish in the press anything related to religion. (Quod aliquantum 1791) The revolutionary events in France in 1789, when the Catholic Church was deprived of its autonomy and property, led to a defensive backlash directed against the ideas of individual human rights. It was a response to the “radical Enlightenment project” but also to the mass killings of priests and Catholic laity in France from the 1780s (Witte 2010:24). Apart from theological arguments, it was fear of losing the monopoly and dominance in economic, political, and ecclesiastical matters which did not leave Pope Pius IX “room for those compromises on which in the first half of the nineteenth century the efforts to recompose Catholicism with human rights had been grafted” (Menozzi 2012:57). Claims of political rights during the French Revolution sharpened the issues of state–religion separation, questioning whether the right to freedom of religion and thought could be considered outside the Church’s domain. In 1864, the Roman Catholic Church issued the Syllabus of Errors (1864) by Pope Pius IX. The document condemned 80 errors that disrupted the Catholic Church with the ideals of liberalism linked to the French Revolution, Enlightenment, and socialism. Article 80 stated that, among other mistaken interpretations of modernity was the following: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” In the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII broadly applied the concepts of rights, capital, labor, and class while addressing the industrial revolution, growth of scientific knowledge, and issues of social development. The document opened as follows: “That the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising.” It then proposed practical Christian moral responses to the class inequality of industrialized societies and highlighted the importance of direct engagement of the Catholic Church in resolving the problems of poverty. “The 430

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Church, moreover, intervenes directly on behalf of the poor, by setting on foot and maintaining many associations which she knows to be efficient for the relief of poverty (Rerum Novarum 1891 Article 29). With this encyclical, Roman Catholicism opened to modernity and its new socio-economic relations by showing that the “Church has to participate in this novelty, entering the mechanisms of new economy” (Mazzone 2011:39). However, considering the process of modernization in terms of moral evil, the church highlighted that in following the Son of God who was also the son of the carpenter, we see the example of moral dignity and worth of the person. We read that: From contemplation of this divine Model, it is more easy to understand that the true worth and nobility of man lies in his moral qualities, that is, in virtue; that virtue is, moreover, the common inheritance of men, equally within the reach of high and low, rich and poor; and that virtue, and virtue alone, wherever found, will be followed by the rewards of everlasting happiness. (Rerum Novarum 1891) It is important to consider the concept of “moral worth” and “virtue” in Rerum Novarum while referring to equality and happiness of humans. The problem of economic inequality was approached by morally justifying existing economic power relations yet providing moral dignity to economically marginalized individuals. The dignity of moral status was later substituted by universal human dignity as a foundation of non-discrimination and individual economic freedoms in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These two examples highlight that the justification of human rights by Christianity (via Catholic encyclicals) and the historical narratives of opposition/engagement did not fully explain the birth of universal human dignity and morality.

Christianity and an Affirmative Genealogy of Human Rights To overcome the dualism of opposition and engagement, Hans Joas argues that human rights claims and ideas are irreducible to a single religious or secular narrative. According to the secular narrative, human rights originated in the French Revolution with its openly antireligious agenda and intellectual tradition of French Enlightenment (Joas 2013). However, the alternative narrative links the origins of human rights with Christian personalism and medieval theology. Joas notes that this alternative narrative “emerged when, in the course of the twentieth century, the Catholic Church repudiated its original condemnation of human rights as a form of liberal individualism and began instead to vigorously defend them” (Joas 2013:4). Another narrative of human rights genesis may be construed as a compromise between these two narratives, distinguishing anti-clerical Enlightenment from the Christian intellectual tradition of personalism but still emphasizing the ambiguous institutional position of Christianity toward human rights. From this perspective, a patchwork of Christian and secular narratives becomes visible, revealing that, at various historical stages, Christianity promoted ideas about human rights, albeit selectively. Considering the interplay of secular and Christian origins of human rights, Joas suggests an alternative perspective in which the history of human rights and the very concept of universal human dignity is a result of the sacralization of the person. International human rights norms and values were birthed by a common morality in a novel socio-historical moment. Following Max Weber, Joas suggests understanding the successful generalization of human 431

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rights morality in the middle of the twentieth century as a process of “charismatization” or sacralization of reason. Within that process, suffering, injustice, and inequality were considered inconsistent with the ideals of rationalization and social progress. This argument did not allow understanding human rights in terms of cultural diffusion. On the contrary, “human rights might have emerged and then disappeared again” (Joas 2013:6) due to the backsliding of common moral reasoning. The human rights revolution in the twentieth century became possible only because common morality was put into practice and codified in the form of international treaties crafted in the immediate context of post-war horror. As Joas states: The key term here is “sacrality” or “sacredness.” I propose that we understand the belief in human rights and universal human dignity as the result of a specific process of sacralization – a process in which every single human being has increasingly, and with ever-increasing motivational and sensitizing effects, been viewed as sacred, and this understanding has been institutionalized in law. (2013:5) Joas suggests that two Christian postulates were crucial for the development of an affirmative genealogy of human rights: the immortality of the human soul and the perception of individual life as a gift from God. These postulates themselves are not considered by Joas as “progenitors” of the modern idea of universal dignity or inalienable rights but as two important elements that assist in explaining the “task of rearticulating a religious tradition in light of dramatic value change” (Joas 2013:7). This socio-historical perspective illustrates “a fragmentary past” (Moyn 2017:3) in which different and contrasting puzzles of “Christian human rights were injected into tradition by pretending they had always been there” (Moyn 2017:3) rather than a linear and sequential genealogy of human rights within a unified Christian perspective. It is a result of “combining Jewish, Greek, and Roman teaching with the radical new teaching of Christ and St. Paul” (Witte and Alexander 2010:xi) which challenged the philosophical, political, and legal vision of the worth of a single individual and the principles of organizing society and the state.

Equality and Moral Worth of the Person In Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, we read that “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3:28). Christian claims and aspirations to equal treatment of all humans regardless of their ethnicity, socio-economic status, and gender were revolutionary compared to “either the Jewish or Greco-Roman cultures of Christ’s day” (Witte 2010:17). The Church Fathers, St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan (339–397), St. Basil of Caesarea (330–379), and St. John Chrysostom (347–407) all called for empathy for the poor and the practice of moral duties, not leaving any in hunger, need, or being deprived of basic goods, considering them as natural rights. In interpreting Jesus’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Chrysostom wrote in his sermons On Wealth and Poverty: The poor man has one plea, his want and his standing in need do not require anything else from him; but even if he is the most wicked of all men and is at a loss for his necessary sustenance, let us free him from hunger. (1981:16–52) 432

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These passages highlight the equal worth of individuals in terms of their spiritual virtues and link the very concept of freedom to exercising moral virtue in feeding the hungry. The rights of the poor and marginalized in society are considered together with Christian duty to provide support for them in practical moral actions. Some elements of natural rights in the text of John Chrysostom and other Church Fathers and references to free choice of the individual in terms of moral acts can be also distinguished: “for I am not bound by nature, but I have been honored with freedom of choice” (Chrysostom 1981:122). However, whether the idea of natural rights was a constituent part of early Christian theological and legal thought or was added later is questioned by theologians and philosophers: A full history of the recognition of natural human rights in the post-biblical Christian tradition would look first at the various natural rights that were taken for granted and implied in the writings of the Church Fathers; it would then look at how the canon lawyers of the twelfth century conceptualized what the Church Fathers took for granted and implied; and from there it would go on to study how the idea of natural rights, including natural human rights, was employed in the eight centuries following. We do not yet have such a history. (Wolterstorff 2010:51) Understanding human rights as innovation through the lens of affirmative genealogy means understanding that their values can draw on the Christian values of human dignity, salvation, spiritual equality, or moral virtue, but at the same time, it demands that the religious perspective of rights is not limited by that tradition. New historical conditions require reinterpretations of religious views of human rights in the same way that religious traditions adapt to the conditions of secularization without losing their uniqueness and doctrinal elements.

Human Dignity as a Moral and a Universal Value The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights highlighted that “individual rights derive from the inherent dignity” (1966), thus, ascribing human dignity the quality of being a conceptual ground for individual rights. A broad range of human rights documents have emphasized a “non-negotiable marker against the denial of human dignity” (Brownsword 2014:3) and a universal need to protect the uniqueness of every human being in their quest for a better life. This affirmative linkage received various receptions in Christian traditions questioning why a secular conception of rights is legitimized by inherent dignity. The historical declarations of rights starting from the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) allotted the rights of humans a divine origin. American humans were “endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable Rights” (1776), and the rights of French citizens were recognized “in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being” (1789), thus, showing monotheistic and deistic references. Less than two centuries later, the concept of human dignity replaced references to the sacred and transcendent nature of rights with claims that individual rights are grounded in the nature of individual beings. The gradual secularization of the Western legal tradition, which Harold Berman explained as a series of legal revolutions (1983), prepared the ground for new references for law outside of religious perspectives. 433

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Primarily seen as linked to the idea of human moral worth, unlimited nature, and possibilities of “free choice” granted by God (Mirandola 1486), the concept of human dignity gradually changed its meaning through the centuries of European Renaissance and Enlightenment. Linking dignity with the anthropological nature of human beings, Martin Luther, the Father of the Protestant Reformation, in his Disputatio de homine (1536) stated that the nature of humans needs to be seen as bestowed with reason, senses, and corporeality. Interpreting Thesis 32 of Luther’s Disputatio de homine, Lutheran theologian Oswald Bayer explained that Luther’s understanding of human dignity, which is equal to humans as the image and likeness of God, is guaranteed only by the “triune God: the creator, redeemer and perfecter of humans and the world around them” (2014:106). As Bayer noted, This means that humankind – any human without exception – is, without any merit or any worth that he could grant himself or expect from other humans as recognition, unconditionally and absolutely recognized and valued by his creator, redeemer, and perfecter. This means that he has an inviolable and indestructible dignity. Since this dignity is not conferred on him by any human person, no human being can deny it to him. (2014:104) Within this theological justification, human dignity means that every individual is considered first as a God creature, second, as one who lost their dignity, and finally, as one who has “been redeemed by Jesus Christ from the corruption of their creation” (Bayer 2014:103). In this conception, a human “lives in contradiction to his destination, yet still, in the eyes of God, has not lost his likeness to God and his dignity as creature, and is recognized by the Law and the Gospel” (Bayer 2014:103). According to this theological view, human beings are created “ex nihilo, from nothing and nothing again – without any dignity in and of themselves. The dignity of human beings and their environment is not intrinsic, but – as unconditionally and absolutely bestowed and maintained – extrinsic” (Bayer 2014:103). Two treatises by Martin Luther, On the Freedom of a Christian (1520) and On the Unfreedom of the Will (1525), became the milestones of early Reformation to “denounce canon laws and ecclesiastical authorities” (Witte 2010:26) and to claim individual freedoms of Christians in civil domain. As Article XVIII “Of Free Will” of the primary document of the Protestant Reformation and the Lutheran Church, The Augsburg Confession stated (1530): Lutherans believe that we, to some extent, have free will in the realm of "civil righteousness" (or "things subject to reason"), but that we do not have free will in "spiritual righteousness." In other words, we have no free choice when it comes to salvation. Faith is not the work of men, but of the Holy Spirit. Thus, dignity, as gifted to a human by God, requires protection, and the body and soul of each human requires protection within a family, church, and state. Each with its own functions, these social institutions are called to guarantee the spiritual and civil freedoms of vulnerable humans. These ideas were “driving ideological forces” which inspired human rights struggles and revolutionaries in England, America, and France (Witte 2010:31). Similarly, in Lutheran interpretation, the modern understanding of dignity as the basis of human rights associates dignity with the universality of human nature, being human and 434

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equal, being autonomous, being protected in one’s privacy, and possessing alternatives of choice. At the same time, the secular nature of individual rights and the absence of a divine aspect of human dignity created new questions, such as when does human dignity begin, how can it be lost or bounded, and what happens to human dignity after death? These questions do not exclude religious responses. However, emerging in the context of international human rights, they integrate Christian answers with secular responses. Moreover, they reveal that answers about the nature of human dignity become contextual depending on the sphere of individual and public life they address – legal, political, social, or religious. In the political context, human dignity became linked to liberal and conservative positions. While the former emphasized the free nature of personal choices, the latter highlighted the limits of such choices (Brownsword 2014:8), as freedom, in conservative perspective, can compromise personal morality. The problem of intersecting rights, such as religious freedom and LGBTQI+ rights, complicates further dialogue between religious and secular views on free choices in private life. These challenges indicate that both concepts – human dignity and human rights – must be considered in terms of values and norms, while attempts to build relationship between them cannot be seen outside of common moral reasoning.

Christian Declarations on Human Dignity Two important Catholic Church encyclicals,  Pacem in terris  (1963) and  Dignitatis Humanae  (1965), announced a new epoch in the understanding of individual freedoms and human dignity. In Pacem in terries, Pope John XXIII asserted decisive Roman Catholic opposition to the previous period of Christian denial of human rights (Menozzi 2012). In  Dignitatis Humanae, Pope Paul VI linked human dignity to the responsibility of the individual to search for truth. Article 2 states that: It is in accordance with their dignity as persons – that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility – that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. Human dignity is seen in the context of individual freedom of religion and conscience, emphasizing the task of every human being to participate in the quest for the meaning of life. While Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions have a long history of controversial debates on human dignity, Eastern Orthodoxy mostly refers to the tradition of Christian patristics and a select number of recent documents/declarations of national churches. John Witte argues that Orthodox churches, which have strong historical linkages with the Byzantine Empire, “ground their human rights theology less in the dignity of the person and more in the integrity of the natural law and the liberty of the canonical Christian community” (Witte 2010:32). Among their influential documents of the twentieth century were discussions on human dignity formed by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) during the first decade of the twentieth century. On one hand, they followed the biblical tradition and interpreted the writings of the Church Fathers, and on the other, they emphasized moral virtues, contrasting it to the secular vision of human dignity. The ROC’s particular vision of human dignity and human rights is explained either by the difference between the specific political context of the ROC and its authoritarian and anti-democratic character (Stoeckl 2014) or by the 435

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specific Christian anthropology of Eastern Orthodoxy (Kyrlezhev 2007). Whether external or internal reasons define their distinct approach to human dignity, the justification of human rights illustrates the ongoing secular–religious debate around the concept of human dignity, indicating possible encounters of Eastern Christianity with modernity (Makrides 2012; Guglielmi 2022). The ROC model appeared as a response to the secular conception of human rights and human dignity. The introduction to Russian Orthodox Church Basic Teaching on Human Dignity, Freedom, and Rights (2008) begins with human dignity because “human rights theory is based on human dignity as its fundamental notion. This is the reason why the need arises to set forth the Church’s view of human dignity” (Article I.1.). In Orthodoxy, the dignity and ultimate worth of every human person are derived from the image of God, while dignified life is related to the notion of God’s likeness achieved through God’s grace by efforts to overcome sin and to seek moral purity and virtue …Therefore, in the Eastern Christian tradition, the notion of “dignity” has, first of all, a moral meaning, while the ideas of what is dignified and what is not are bound up with the moral or amoral actions of a person and with the inner state of his soul. Considering the state of human nature darkened by sin, it is important that things dignified and undignified should be clearly distinguished in the life of a person. (Basic Teaching, Article I.2) The moral dimension of human dignity is repeatedly emphasized in the text of the church document: “[T]he patristic and ascetic thought and the whole liturgical tradition of the Church refer more to human indignity caused by sin than to human dignity” (Basic Teaching I.5.). This is due to the need for “restoring human life in the fullness of its original perfection” (Basic Teaching I.1.). Immoral behavior results in a loss of dignity; however, the possibility of its recovery remains. During the Pan-Orthodox Council in 2016, ten of 16 Orthodox Churches gathered on Crete to discuss and prepare a shared Eastern Orthodox position on the justification of human rights based on the idea of human dignity. The Mission of the Orthodox Church in Today’s World (2016), a Conciliar document, formulated principal characteristics of human dignity. It was said to stem first from “being created in the image and likeness of God” and then the “role in God’s plan for humanity and the world.” Consequently, the human person is a worshipper of composite nature, contemplator of visible creation, and initiate of intelligible creation, a king over all that is on earth … a living being, prepared here and transported elsewhere and (which is the culmination of the mystery)  deified through attraction towards God. (Article 1) In addition to references to the biblical text and the patristics, the Conciliar document considers human dignity a connecting point for inter-religious dialogue and peace, thus, linking the grounding idea of Christian human rights with the core principles of the post-war Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), in which the preamble claimed that “the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is

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the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” The Pan-Orthodox document repeated in Article 2 of the section “The Dignity of the Human Person” affirms that On this basis, it is essential to develop inter-Christian cooperation in every direction for the protection of human dignity and of course for the good of peace, so that the peace-keeping efforts of all Christians without exception may acquire greater weight and significance. (The Mission of the Orthodox Church, Article 2) These ideas were particularly pertinent during the 2022 Russian-Ukrainian war and remain linked to escalations of geopolitical and economic crises concerning ongoing global pandemics and drastic climate changes. Their momentum questions how various Christian traditions, with their varying understating of human rights and human dignity, reflect the historical and contemporary challenges within national societies and respond to the current issues of war, crises, and need for peace.

Conclusions A variety of historical narratives and grounding ideas in interpreting human rights within Christian traditions go beyond the opposition and engagement narratives. The relationship between Christianity and human rights discourse and practice is much more complex, showing that shortcomings in Christian justification of human rights were and still are historically conditioned either by the transformations occurring within the very tradition (its legal, theological, economic, or church–state system of relations) or by turbulences and extreme violence in societies. As Samuel Moyn noted, “radical departures nonetheless occurred very late in Christian history, even if they were unfailingly represented as consistent with what came before: this is how ‘the invention of tradition’ most frequently works” (2017:3). Along with developments in Christian social teaching and works of Christian historians, canon lawyers, sociologists, and political thinkers on basic elements of human rights and dignity of the person, the reception of individual rights claims and the sacredness of the individual by a particular church is determined by the degree of modernization of societies and their commitment to democratic values (Makrides 2012). The sacredness of the individual and his/her inalienable rights can be linked to the moral virtues and worth of the person, the Christian idea of the vulnerability of the spiritual life of a person, and the universal search for truth. However, Christianity is increasingly facing the need to respond to the challenges of conflict, violence, post-war reconciliation and dialogue, economic crisis and climate change, limitations of religious freedom, and increasing discrimination in matters of religion. These conditions require the application of an  affirmative genealogy of human rights, allowing us to distinguish historical struggles behind human rights, the universal value of every person, and the novelty of the situation in which human rights protection is required.

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35 THE RECURRING CHRISTIAN DEBATE ABOUT SOCIAL JUSTICE Dennis Hiebert

Abstract Social justice is best understood as distributive justice, distinct from other forms of justice. It is inherently ideological in both the neutral and negative sense, inherently moral in its dedication to fairness and to care for others, and inherently political in its structural embodiment of values in a society. Christian conceptions of and commitments to social justice have vacillated the past 200 years as its importance relative to personal salvation and sanctification has constantly been contested. Debate between the Christian conservative right and Christian progressive left has intensified again recently, as ever more theologically conservative Christians champion social justice, however guardedly, triggering ever more alarm from socially conservative Christians. The debate is elucidated here from the perspective of critical theory, first linguistically by noting alternative translations of the biblical text, then theologically by the imago Dei and Christology, then ethically by contrasting Christian views of social ethics, and finally sociologically by the duality of personal agency and social structure.

Introduction The debate between Christian proponents and opponents of social justice has intensified in recent years. In Christian Faith and Social Justice: Five Views (McCraken 2014), scholars take different approaches to social justice, but all take it to be a biblical imperative. Recently, a sixth Christian view has re-emerged, again arguing that social justice is not biblical justice (Allen 2020). Others even contend that social justice has now become a new religion unto itself, with as much zealous fervor and unforgiving furor as any cult or creed (Murray 2019). Critical theorist Jürgen Habermas (1971) delineated three different knowledge systems and their corresponding interests: analytic science, humanistic knowledge, and critical knowledge – the latter critiqued as moralistic and political. Though never explicitly addressing 440

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277743-46

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social justice specifically, critical theorists have waged “an unrelenting assault on the exploitation, repression, and alienation embedded within Western civilization” (Bronner 2017:1). Notably, Max Horkheimer and Habermas “both [saw] religion and specifically Christianity as playing an important role in the contemporary world … [as] a means of hope” (Scimecca 2019:173). While empirical observations about the various types and extents of social (in) justice are pre-requisite, and comprehension of the various Christian interpretive positions taken on (in)justice is imperative, the following analysis is built on critical theory and is, in essence, the use of critical theory to critique the conservative evangelical critique of critical theory. Defining social justice, apprehending its social correlates, tracing the recent history of Christian engagement, and scrutinizing the character of the debate as follows facilitates greater discernment of the challenge Christianity faces on this front.

Definitions Social Justice Comprehending social justice must begin by differentiating four kinds of justice: retributive justice, restorative justice, procedural justice, and distributive justice (Sabbagh and Schmitt 2016). Social justice is usually equated with distributive justice, which is concerned with all members of society receiving a “fair share” of benefits and resources available. Social justice is the pursuit of fairness in the distribution of social goods (empowerment, wealth, rights, privilege) and social “bads” (disempowerment, poverty, disprivilege) within a social system. Coined in the 1840s by the Jesuit priest Luigi Taparelli based on the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, the most referenced definition of social justice is from John Rawls (1971). Employing the social contract tradition to counter John Stuart Mill’s classic utilitarianism and Robert Nozick’s contemporary libertarian alternative (Lebacqz 1987), Rawls basically equated social justice with fairness, which then begs the question of what is fair. Competing notions include a) equality, in which rewards are distributed equally, regardless of one’s contribution; b) equity, in which rewards are distributed in proportion to one’s contribution; and c) relative needs, in which rewards are distributed according to individual needs of members, regardless of their contribution (Maiese 2003). Iris Marion Young (2018) contests the reduction of social justice to distributive justice, conceptualizing social injustice as five forms of oppression: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. From a Christian practitioner perspective, Gary Haugen of the International Justice Mission concurs with the focus on oppression and defines injustice as “when power is misused to take from others what God has given them, namely, their life, dignity, liberty, or the fruits of their love and labor” (2009:72). He then defines justice as “when power and authority between people is exercised in conformity with God’s standards of moral excellence” (Haugen 2009:72). Definitions of social justice have three social correlates which illuminate further its character: ideology, morality, and politics.

Ideology The term ideology first appeared in English in 1796 as a translation of a new, post-French Revolution, non-judgmental “science of ideas” – literally idea-ology. As a purely neutral, descriptive term, it denoted a systematic body of concepts about human life and culture, the sum of someone’s values, beliefs, assumptions, and expectations. Ideology was, there441

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fore, unavoidable, and anyone with any coherence in their thought was an ideologue. However, ideology is an idea system that is “held for reasons that are not purely epistemic” (Honderich 1995:392) but, rather, is driven by certain social interests and is related to cultural hegemony. As Terry Eagleton put it, [i]deology is a system of concepts and views which serves to make sense of the world while obscuring the social interests that are expressed therein, and by its completeness and relative internal consistency tends to form a closed system and maintain itself in the face of contradictory or inconsistent experience. (Eagleton 2007, emphasis in original) It is “a more or less coherent set of ideas that provides the basis for organized political action, whether intended to preserve, modify, or overthrow the existing system of power” (Heywood 2017:10). Concerning social justice, the original, neutral notion of ideology can be summarized as a coherent set of inter-related ideas (about what is) and ideals (about what ought to be) that explain and justify (legitimate) the prevailing or proposed distribution of power, wealth, and privilege. Therefore, all views of social justice are inherently ideological. Conspicuously, all ideologies, whether conscious or subconscious, are action-oriented systems of thought at once both descriptive and normative, both moral and political. “Ideologies are thus ‘secular religions;’ they possess a totalizing character and serve as instruments of social control” (Heywood 2017:9). Conversely, all religion is, by its character, ideology. All theology functions as ideology, both in the neutral sense of moral worldview, but also in the negative sense of vested interests.

Morality A critical theory approach to social justice may well be moralistic and political, but it is difficult to conceive of social justice as anything other or less than an ethical imperative. Indeed, according to Aristotle, justice is “not a part of virtue, but the whole of virtue” (2011:93). It is “the foundational religious virtue and the prime ethical value” (Maguire 2014:27). Aquinas asserted that human equality before God requires obedience to natural principles of morality to satisfy duty owed to God, social justice thereby being driven by the tenets of morality embedded in Christianity. Lawrence Kohlberg (1969) was the first modern moral psychologist to argue that justice was the single foundation of morality. Carol Gilligan (1982) then argued for dual, gendered foundations, positing that justice may be the male foundation of morality, but care was the female foundation of morality. The foremost social psychological theory of morality today has added three more foundations to justice and care. Moral foundations theory (Haidt 2012) identifies five foundations underlying all moral virtues: care (versus harm), fairness (versus cheating), loyalty (versus betrayal), authority (versus subversion), and sanctity/purity (versus degradation). Notably, moral foundations theory has been criticized for adding loyalty, authority, and purity to the more established foundations of care and fairness. While care and justice are unqualified goods – there is no sense in which they are not virtues – the other three foundations are conditional, penultimate virtues contingent on what or who one is loyal to, what or who is accepted as authoritative, and what is defined as purity (and why). After all, the Nazis built on all three: loyalty to the Third Reich, the authority of Hitler, and the purity of 442

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the Aryan race. Fairness or justice, and the care manifested by pursuing it, remain the pure heart of morality.

Politics As the structural embodiment of values in a society, politics inevitably enacts one ideology and morality or another. The underlying question of the left–right political spectrum is whether the present social order should be preserved or changed. The conservative right wants to conserve long-standing social structures and preserve traditional values, while the liberal left, also known as progressives, wants to progress beyond long-standing social structures and traditional values. By its moralistic and political character expressed in its dedication to social change, the critical theory employed here is inherently antithetical to conservative commitments. An illustration of ideology embedded in politics is the political right’s belief in meritocracy, which is the assumption that ability and effort are the sole determinants of personal success and that equality of opportunity is, therefore, the only requisite social arrangement, regardless of inequality of social conditions. Morality is embedded in politics in that leftist liberals tend to rely almost exclusively on the first two moral foundations of care and fairness, whereas rightist conservatives tend to rely equally on the additional three foundations of in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity or purity (Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009). For example, Matthew Kugler et al. found that liberal-conservative differences in moral intuitions are statistically mediated by authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, so that conservatives’ greater valuation of in-group, authority, and purity concerns is attributable to higher levels of authoritarianism, whereas liberals’ greater valuation of fairness and harm avoidance is attributable to lower levels of social dominance. (2014:413) Kugler et al. go on to question the wisdom of treating preferences based on authoritarianism and social dominance as moral rather than amoral or even immoral and, thereby, incorporating conservative ideology into the study of moral psychology. Consequently, perception of truth then has more to do with blind in-group loyalty than with verifiable facts. The ideology, morality, and politics of social justice have played out recurrently throughout recent Christian history and are again being vigorously debated today. As always, examining the past is instructive for contextualizing and understanding the present debate on the issue.

History The Handbook of Social Justice Theory and Research states on its opening page that “[t] he origins of the old-time notion of justice in Western civilization can be traced to the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition” (Sabbagh and Schmitt 2016:1). Yet Christian commitment to social justice has repeatedly waxed and waned over the past 200 years. In the nineteenth century, Christians were actively engaged on multiple fronts as slave abolitionists, women’s suffragists, and trade unionists. Methodism was thriving as it focused equally on 443

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evangelism and social justice, fighting against slavery, inhumane prisons, and child labor. Catholic social teaching focused on the life and dignity of the human person and the preferential option for the poor and vulnerable. Thus, “when in the late 19th century Otto von Bismarck determined to pioneer the first national health care plan in the world, he labeled his Sickness Insurance Law ‘Applied Christianity’” (Maguire 2014:35). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Social Gospel Movement was peaking, applying Christian ethics to additional social problems such as poverty, alcoholism, crime, racial tensions, slums, unclean environments, lack of unionization, poor schools, and the dangers of war. Taking its mandate from the Lord’s Prayer, “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10), the movement maintained that, while an individualistic gospel may make individual sinfulness clear, it does not shed light on institutionalized sinfulness. In the 1930s, the Social Gospel facilitated US President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in America and the formation of the New Democratic Party in Canada. Yet by the second quarter of the twentieth century, evangelical engagement with social problems had all but disappeared in “the Great Reversal” (Moberg 1977), as an individualistic social ethic displaced most evangelicals’ commitment to the “worldly” concern of progressive social reform. Pitting personal transformation against social reform, evangelicals looked only inward and upward not outward. Instead of giving “proper attention to both evangelism and social concern” (Moberg 1977:26) as Methodists and Catholics had long done, evangelicals embraced the former and abandoned the latter, turning toward salvation and sanctification, and turning away from the “poor, dispossessed, outcast, strangers, and minorities in society” (Moberg 1977:134). By mid-century, Carl Henry (1947) attempted to call evangelicals out of their apolitical quietism, but they remained mostly politically moribund through the 1950s. The radical 1960s brought the emergence of “progressive evangelicals.” This “moral minority” was conservative in theology but liberal in politics and aspired to be a “third way” to social change, transcending “categories of right and left by establishing microcommunities of authenticity, peace, and justice directed by Jesus” (Swartz 2014:87). As such, they were “politically homeless” (Gasaway 2014:155). Nevertheless, they articulated a more vigorous theological grounding than the Social Gospel had and a “public theology of community” that did not merely sacralize social institutions. “Unlike most white evangelicals, they defined sin as institutional injustice as well as personal failure and they insisted that private charity was not an adequate substitute for government efforts to alleviate disabling economic inequalities” (Miller 2015:98). The 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern provided the benchmark for progressive evangelicals and gave rise to its three leading organizations, The Other Side magazine, Sojourners, and Evangelicals for Social Action (Gasaway 2014). They addressed six primary issues – racism, feminism, abortion, gay rights, poverty, and anti-militarism – but there were significant differences among the organizations on each issue. For example, they took varying stances on abortion and gay rights but also promoted women’s rights, thus, angering both pro-choice and pro-life factions as well as confusing and frustrating secular feminists. The movement eventually fragmented by the end of the century due to the polarizing below-the-belt issues of abortion and sexual orientation. Different organizations took different positions on different issues, including which was most important, and these cleavages proved debilitating to the movement. Hence, the left was soon left behind. 444

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The high public profile of the New Christian Right and its role in fueling the rise of neoliberalism and the Reagan revolution of the 1980s is well documented. After campaigning across America explicitly against the decay of the nation’s morality and implicitly against the separation of church and state, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority primarily to uphold “traditional family values” considered under attack in American culture. Yet by the end of the decade, critics of the Moral Majority were asserting that it was neither moral nor the majority. Thus, its younger sibling, the Christian Coalition, carried on conserving the “conservative family tradition” for another decade. But then, come the new century, conservative Christian commitment to social justice resurfaced once again. In 2004, the National Association of Evangelicals unanimously adopted For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility. However, what Steensland and Goff termed The New Evangelical Social Engagement (2014) was only the newest expression of looking inward, upward, and outward, unhesitantly coupling personal salvation with social justice, having recovered a “thicker Jesus” (Stassen 2014:298). Far beyond myopic conservative focus on abortion and sexuality, it tackled war, disease, racism, patriarchy, homelessness, hunger, corruption, poverty, illiteracy, environment, urban renewal, economic development, human trafficking, HIV/AIDS, religious repression, and more. Evangelicals also became more ecumenical, enjoying warming relationship with the Catholic church and welcoming contributions from the emergent church movement (e.g., McLaren, Padilla, and Seeber 2009) and Anabaptists (e.g., McCartney and McCartney 2020). Their Prayers for the New Social Awakening Inspired by the New Social Creed (Iosso and Hinson-Hasty 2008) were tied explicitly to the Social Gospel Creed of 1908. More practically, they developed theologies of, and manuals for direct, non-partisan social justice advocacy. Seeking societal transformation, they recognized social justice as a structural issue and the importance of informed engagement at the systemic level, not just the individual level (Offutt et al. 2016). Historically, evangelicals had long provided social services, such as schools and hospitals, as an expression of their charitable care and compassion, but had not pursued the structural, systemic transformation that would mitigate the need for their services in the first place. Now they better understood the most effective level of engagement. They also developed handbooks and models for social justice activism (e.g., Cannon 2009, 2020; Ver Beek and Wolterstorff 2019). Nevertheless, like the progressive evangelicals of the 1970s, when the ecumenical World Council of Churches in 2013 embarked on a “Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace,” they, too, found that champions of one issue would oppose another. For example, activists focused on economic and ecological injustice could be blind to racial and gender injustice (Phiri 2020). Yet there is no denying the evolution and maturation of Christian social justice activism from the era when the Salvation Army began rescuing individual victims of injustice in 1865 to when the International Justice Mission began confronting systems of injustice in 1994. Nonetheless, most recently, conservative Christians have marshaled yet another concerted critique of social justice, marked by their 2018 Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel. Initiated by John MacArthur, who described social justice as “the most subtle and dangerous threat” to the gospel he had encountered in his lifetime (2018), the statement consisted of 14 affirmations and denials, including an affirmation of gender hierarchy, a denial of “gay Christian as a legitimate biblical category,” a denial that racialized groups were “victims of oppression,” and a denial “that political or social activism should be viewed as integral components of the gospel or primary to the mission of the church.” In short, anything other than personal salvation was deemed “not a definitional component of 445

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the gospel.” Overall, the statement was a bifurcation of orthodoxy and orthopraxy which functioned well to preserve and protect the privileged. The few years following have seen a flurry of books published and videos posted severely critical of social justice often in alarmist tones. Characteristic title phrases include How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel (Strachan 2021), A Corruption of Consequence (Rogers 2021), and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe (Baucham 2021). The latter pronounced that “catastrophe is unavoidable … we have only begun to see the devastation that is coming … we are at war … and yes, I do mean to call these ideologies demonic” (2021:138, 205, 206, 230). As another critic railed, social justice is pursued by “aberrant, arrogant, asinine, and apostate ‘Evangelicals’ who don’t know or believe the true Gospel and babble incoherently about a discredited, deviate (sic), and deadly social gospel” (Boys 2008). At times, their conceptual confusion is incapacitating. For example, after quoting John Stonestreet’s quip that “It’s no good having the same vocabulary if we’re using different dictionaries” (2018), Scott Allen defines distributive justice as “impartially rendering judgment, righting wrongs, and meting out punishment for lawbreaking” (2020:24). This is demonstrably unlike any scholarly definition of distributive justice and, indeed, closer to retributive or procedural justice. For Ronnie Rogers, biblical justice is spiritually retributive and potentially restorative, whereas social justice “is accomplished by favoring one group (the oppressed/minority/non-sinners) and punishing the other group (the oppressors/majority/sinners) by redistribution of wealth, power, and privilege” (2021:147). Others avoid precise definition altogether. Despite deploring “lack of clarity … (in) definition of justice” and promising to “differentiate between the concept of biblical justice and that of social justice in later chapters” (2021:5, 132), Baucham never does explicitly. The most common theme of contemporary Christian social justice critics is a seemingly categorical rejection of critical theory in general and two subtypes in particular: critical race theory and intersectionality theory. But it is never explained why these theories are faulty, much less “unChristian.” Instead, Christian social justice critics use their own variations and applications based on the original antecedents, current contexts, and perceived consequences of these theories. Furthermore, these theories are then typically subsumed under the umbrella of what is termed cultural Marxism, a far-right conspiracy theory which claims that Western Marxism, despite its rejection of Soviet communism, is intent on “the destruction of Western culture and the Christian religion” (Lind 2018:12). While conservative Christians view it as a sinister “revolutionary reality,” secular scholars mostly view it as a benign “imaginary conspiracy” (Smith 2019) and conclude that critical theory’s “critique of culture was never a springboard to a totalitarian regime,” and cultural Marxism “mixes wild conspiracy theorizing with self-righteous moralism” (Blackford 2015). Cultural Marxism is also accused of being post-modernist, despite post-modernism’s hostility toward Marxism, including the grand narratives typically supported by critical theory. Yet seemingly any perspective conservative Christians wish to condemn can be demonized by parroting a cultural anti-Marxism that fails to understand Marx adequately or all the ways in which he was right (Eagleton 2011). Presumably, all forms of even Western neo-Marxism would have long evaporated if they lacked any merit. In all, conservative denunciation of social justice has surfaced three times in the past 100 years, first in the fundamentalism of mid-twentieth century, then in the Moral Majority at the end of the twentieth century, and again today. The first two times it was met with a new 446

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form of evangelical engagement shaped by very different social and cultural conditions. What the outcome of current condemnation will be remains to be seen.

Analysis The recurring Christian debate about social justice is clearly not purely hermeneutical but, rather, steeped in ideology, morality, and politics – hermeneutics as always. Nonetheless, the sheer volume of literature on exegetical and theological readings of the biblical text mandating social justice apart from personal justification is vast. Moreover, the justice demanded in the Hebrew and Greek testaments is profoundly relational and distributive. Concise analysis must begin with the words of the biblical text as translated into English. The language of the Hebrew Bible separates mishpat (justice), which occurs 419 times, from tsedaqah (righteousness), which occurs 157 times, but they are paired in the same verse 44 times. Yahweh is a “God of mishpat” (Isa. 30:18) who cries out to “let mishpat roll down like waters, and tsedaqah like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5.24). In contrast, the New Testament Greek utilizes the single word dikaiosune, which can be translated with equal validity as either “righteousness” or “justice”; etymologically, righteousness and justice are virtually interchangeable. Yet in the context of Western pietistic individualism, of the approximately 300 times dik-stem words appear in the New Testament, only once is it regularly translated into English as justice (Col 4:1), while in Plato’s Republic, it is routinely translated as justice. Theologically, social justice is built on the belief that humans were made in the imago Dei of a social (trinitarian) God but descended into self-interest and had to be commanded to love their neighbor as themselves (Kovalishyn 2019). But perhaps even more foundationally, a public theology must be grounded in classical Christology. Among all the gospels, Matthew’s stands out about justice. After a microscopically detailed examination of the original language of Matthew’s gospel, Amy Allen concludes that “social justice is biblical justice … God’s justice as portrayed in Matthew’s gospel is social justice” (2019:8, emphasis in original). Ethically, Christian conceptions of social justice are multi-form not uniform, as Vic McCracken’s compilation of Five Views (2014) elaborates. The first theory of social justice presented as Christian social ethics is libertarianism, which basically equates every form of political control with violence. The second theory is political liberalism, in which just societies arrange themselves to ensure that natural and economic inequalities will not hinder opportunities for those on the margins. Third is liberation theology, which rejects nearly the entirety of the Western philosophical canon as justifying the status quo and as being irredeemably racist and imperialist. Fourth is feminism, in which social context and epistemological starting points matter greatly because they call into question abstract, ahistorical approaches to justice, and the complex web of power, privilege, and patriarchy. Finally, virtue ethics calls for faith, hope, and love, and a vision of the common good. These five theories of social ethics unintentionally bookend more structural views in the middle (political liberalism, liberation theology, and feminism) with more individualistic views on the outside (libertarianism and virtue ethics). Sociologically, conservative Christian cultures are comfortably rooted in individualistic orientations to religious commitment, along with skepticism of structural analyses of social inequalities and injustice. They, therefore, default to charity-based personal volunteering and direct service approaches to social issues that all but preclude social justice activism, 447

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which they code as communist or simply political rather than religious (Delehanty 2016). For the privatized religion of many Christians, “social charity belongs to the core of their identity, social justice to its periphery” (Hughson 2013:57). While all value justice, some feel social justice is too political for the church, as if the church could be apolitical. Theological individualism emerges from a framework of “self-reflective (and somewhat self-righteous) individual, voluntary choice” (Madsen 2009:1281). Though it is more common among Protestants than Catholics, proponents of Catholic social teaching can be equally as conservative as evangelicals. For example, Michael Novak and Paul Adams maintain that social justice “is an attribute of citizens, not states” (2015:51). From the perspective of sociological theory, both theological individualism and collectivism are a failure to grasp the duality of agency and structure which are in dialectical relationship (Giddens 1984); neither can exist without the other. Consequently, though conservative Christians may imagine otherwise, it is impossible for the individual to exist without the social structures of social (in)justice. However, though domination is structural, progress can be realized through concerted political and social action precisely because the bridge between structure and agency is dialectical (Agger 2013). Nevertheless, some Christians can evidently ignore social structures. For example, Jonathan Leeman and Andrew David Naselli of the Gospel Coalition “define justice according to the Bible as making a judgment according to God’s righteousness” (2020:15, emphasis in original). They then propose a distinction between straight-line issues versus jagged-line issues, the former having “a straight line between biblical text and its policy application,” and the latter having “a multi-step process from a biblical or theological principle to a political position” (2020:20). Straight-line issues contain the Christian position, whereas jagged-line issues such as social justice are political issues which have freedom of Christian conscience. Characteristic of conservativism, they “do not believe in moral equivalency … some injustices are worse than others” (2020:19). Abortion, they assert, trumps the sum of all other issues. Other evangelical Christians, such as Thaddeus Williams (2020), are simply wary of social justice and, therefore, cautious and measured in pursuing it. Likewise, Timothy Keller (2020a) defines God’s justice as primarily restorative and retributive and characterizes it as radical generosity, universal equality, advocacy for the needy, and asymmetrical responsibility. Elaborating the latter, and reflecting the agency–structure duality, he argues that we have both a corporate responsibility for injustices that we ourselves have not committed, as well as an individual responsibility that remains stronger. “[I]ndividuals actually committing … wrongs always bear the greatest responsibility.” Regarding social justice in particular, Keller (2020b) critiques four secular justice theories, including the post-modern perspective, which he equates with critical theory. He then critiques it as deeply incoherent by reciting the conventional self-referential fallacy as its “fatal flaw”: “[y]ou cannot insist that all morality is culturally constructed and relative and then claim that your moral claims are not.” Furthermore, he contends that critical theory is far too simplistic – it undermines our common humanity; it denies our common sinfulness; it makes forgiveness, peace, and reconciliation between groups impossible; it offers a highly “performative” identity; and is itself prone to domination. These criticisms may be true in extreme manifestations, but that does not mean that the theory is entirely false, and Keller acknowledges that its truths should not be dismissed entirely. But he argues that biblical justice, in contrast, is more well-grounded on God’s character; has a more penetrating, com-

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plex understanding of the human condition; has built-in safeguards against domination; and offers a radically subversive understanding of power. Unfortunately, Keller does not recognize the many social conditions in which structural injustice is so overwhelming that the individual has no realistic recourse, resulting in the asymmetry of responsibility being weighted toward the structural. Nor does he acknowledge that his own Christian position, like critical theory itself, is a “standpoint,” or that religious doctrine itself can, at times, “at bottom, [be] a way for people to get or maintain social status, wealth, and therefore power over others.” But he does conclude by insisting that Christians “take up their birthright and do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God” (Micah 6:8).

Faith, Hope, and Love Will yet another “new social gospel” and distinctive “Christian humanism” be achieved in our time to “redeem Christianity” (Heinz 2020)? Will Christians yet “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent [them] into [post-Christendom] exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare [they] will find [their] welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7)? There may be no more trenchant analysis of the present and inspiring manifesto for the future than Donald Heinz’s implicitly critical theoretical but hopeful After Trump: Achieving a New Social Gospel (2020). Citing numerous theologians and Christian ethicists, James McCarty made the simple claim that “hope must not be abandoned if marginalized and oppressed people, especially those who are Christian, want to transform society into one that is more just … Perpetual hopelessness is despair. And despair does not motivate action but creates inertia” (2020:53– 54). Indeed, “subversive hope is the necessary core of Christianity” (Espin 2014:xv). In I Corinthians 13:13, the apostle Paul famously listed the three virtues that remain after all else fades: faith, hope, and love. The greatest undoubtedly is love, but as Christian public intellectual Cornel West has repeatedly explained, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

Acknowledgment This chapter is a condensation of Dennis Hiebert. 2022. “The Recurring Christian Debate about Social Justice: A Critical Theoretical Overview.” Journal of Sociology and Christianity 12(1):49–76.

References Agger, Ben. 2013. Critical Social Theories 3 ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Allen, Amy Lindeman. 2019. “What the Bible Has to Do with It: God’s Justice and Social Justice in Matthew’s Gospel Account.” Currents in Theology and Mission 46(4):4–8. Allen, Scott David. 2020. Why Social Justice is Not Biblical Justice: An Urgent Appeal to Fellow Christians in a Time of Social Crisis. Grand Rapids, MI: Credo House Publishers. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. 2011. Translated by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baucham Voddie T., Jr. 2021. Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe. Washington: Salem Books. Blackford, Russell. 2015. “Cultural Marxism and Our Current Culture Wars: Part 1 & 2.” The Conversation, July 27. Cultural Marxism and our current culture wars: Part 1 (theconversation​.c​om) Boys, Don. 2008. “Top Agenda of the Emergent Church: Social Gospel!” Common Sense for Today News, October 10. Top Agenda of the Emergent Church: Social Gospel! (CSTNews) rd

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451

AUTHOR INDEX

Addams, Jane 297 Adorno, Theodor 248–249 Alexander, Frank S. 427–428, 432 Allen, Scott 440, 446 Ammerman, Nancy 3, 352, 357, 375–377 Anderson, Benedict 345 Anderson, Ray 210, 212, 216 Aquinas, Thomas 145, 442 Aristotle 159 Arnason, Johann 36–42 Augustine 110, 160, 347 Bacon, Francis 1 Balswick, Jack 212 Balswick, Judith 212 Banchoff, Thomas 428 Bărbat, Carmen 409 Barth, Karl 211–212, 217 Baucham, Voddie T. 446 Bebbington, David 280 Benner, David 359 Berger, Peter 4–5, 73, 75–76, 231–232, 348 Bhambra, Gurminder 156–157 Bhaskar, Roy 142–145 Bourdieu, Pierre 124, 134–135, 343 Bulgakov, Sergius 49–50 Burawoy, Michael 10–11 Buss, Andreas 42, 109–110 Butler Bass, Diana 6, 353 de Certeau, Michel 119, 122–127 Chalmers, Thomas 281–282 Chen, Kuan-Hsing 154 Chrysostom, John 432–433 Comte, Auguste 59–68, 207, 213 Cone, James 320–321 Connell, Raewyn 155–156



Davie, Grace 6, 119 Deddo, Gary 211–212 Du Bois, W. E. B. 314, 319 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 9, 35–39, 42–43 Enfantin, Prosper 64–65 Entwistle, David 4 Eusebius of Caesarea 26–32 Feuerbach, Ludwig 72–73 Fishman, Joshua 232 Flanagan, Kieran 351–352 Flint, William 354–355 Friedman, Thomas 167 Gill, Anthony 98 Gilligan, Carol 403–405, 408, 442 Girard, Rene 423 Gladden, Solomon Washington 293, 297 Gorski, Philip 97 Goudzwaard, Bob 168 Grudem, Wayne 407 Gunton, Colin 111–112 Gutiérrez, Gustavo 303–305 Habermas, Jürgen 4, 440–441 Heath, Maureen 110–112 Heelas, Paul 354 Heidegger, Martin 120, 138 Heim, Karl 77–78 Herrick, James 356–357 Howard, Evan 357, 360 James, Letter of 30 Joas, Hans 77, 428–432 John, Gospel of 31 John Paul II 3, 81, 84, 86–87, 257, 303, 307, 416

453

Author Index Kant, Immanuel 110–112 Kautsky, Karl 394–395 Keller, Timothy 448–449 Knott, Kim 120–127 Kohlberg, Lawrence 442 Korten, David 168 Kugler, Matthew 443 Kung, Hans 172

Rancière, Jacques 134–137, 157 Rauschenbusch, Walter 294–298, 372, 399 Rawls, John 441 Raworth, Kate 174 Ritzer, George 6, 168 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 62 Ryan, Mary Bernadette 406–407

Latour, Bruno 130–131, 133, 137–138 Lefebvre, Henri 121, 123–126 Levine, Daniel 303, 306 Luke 27–29, 381, 410

Sachs, Jeffrey 165, 167, 172, 174 Said, Edward 154 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri 59–61, 63–67, 213 Sampson, Edward 108 Sassen, Saskia 166–167 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 73 Sewell, William 417, 424 Simmel, Georg 24, 26, 28, 32, 355, 359 Small, Christopher 250 Smith, Christian 6, 11, 96, 147, 149–150, 245, 317, 352, 356, 375 Sölle, Dorothy 93–96 Stead, William Thomas 296 Steger, Manfred 166–167, 171, 173 Stiglitz, Joseph 167, 171 Strong, Josiah 291–292, 297 Swatos, William 374–375 Swenson, Donald 352

MacArthur, John 445 Mahoney, Annette 208–209 Manuel, Frank 65 Margolis, Michele 97 Mark, Gospel of 25–27 Matthew, Gospel of 26–28, 153, 410, 447 McGrath, Alister 5, 357, 361 McGuckin, John Anthony 49 Mercadante, Linda 353 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 122–124 Merton, Robert 1–2 Meyendorff, John 49–50 Milbank, John 5, 158, 160 Mills, C. Wright 1 Moltmann, Jurgen 111–114 Montesquieu 62 Nederveen Pieterse, Jan 168–169 Nelson, Benjamin 34–36, 41 Nietzsche, Friedrich 179–188 Oliver, Simon 158–160

Taylor, Charles 1, 11, 60, 72, 77, 123, 159, 245, 354–355, 359 Thomas, W. I. 367, 374 Tickle, Phyllis 356–357 Triandis, Harry 105–109 Troeltsch, Ernst 74–75 Voltaire 62–63

Pauline letters 24–31, 138, 157, 215, 380–381, 395, 407, 409, 432, 449 Paul the Apostle 29, 157, 381 Peabody, Francis Greenwood 296 Perry, Samuel 5, 97, 198 Polanyi, Michael 131–132

Ward, Graham 119, 160–161 Ward, Lester Frank 370–372 White, James 208–209, 213, 216 Whitehead, Andrew 81, 97, 203 Witte, John 427–430, 432, 434–435 Woodhead, Linda 202, 354 Wuthnow, Robert 61, 355–356, 358, 428

Rahner, Karl 361

Zartman, William 327, 330, 335–336

454

SUBJECT INDEX

Abrahamic faiths 70, 384, 388, 392 Acts of the Apostles 27–31, 394 affirmative genealogy 428, 431–433 agency 37, 84–85, 195, 197, 200–202, 236, 316, 393, 395–396, 448 agents, pastoral 302, 304–305, 307 agents of change 376, 393 agents of socialization 195–196, 201 altar 180, 184, 273, 280, 344–345, 348 American Dream 234 anthropology: philosophical anthropology 2; social trinitarian anthropology 113–114; theological anthropology 114, 210–212, 404, 436 asceticism 2, 30, 38, 42, 74, 180, 182–188, 353, 382, 436 Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) 259–260 atheism 42, 60, 130, 200, 392, 399; see also methodological atheism authoritarianism 30, 93, 97–99, 270, 393, 435, 443; authoritarian populism 94 Axial Age 7, 36–38, 110 base ecclesial communities 302, 304–306 Birmingham School 249–250 Black Church 237, 314–321, 399; Black liturgy 236; Black theology 158, 318, 321, 400 Black Lives Matter 156, 237, 317–318 body 123–124, 179, 181–182, 211, 434 Bretton-Woods Agreement 166, 169, 171, 270 bridegroom price 221–225; see also dowry British Empire 154–155, 170 Brotherhood of the Kingdom 294 Burundi 328, 332–334



candles 344, 346 capitalism 42, 94, 171, 248, 258, 260, 270, 287, 291–292, 302, 305, 387–388, 398–399; consumer capitalism 242, 249; global capitalism 155, 157, 166, 224, 263, 391–396; welfare capitalism 261 care 173–174, 394, 403–412, 442–444; health care 394, 397; pastoral care 387 caste 221–227 Catholic Worker Movement 261, 400 Central Africa Republic 328, 333–336 charisma 24, 26, 55, 75, 243, 245, 385–386, 432 Chicago Commons 296 Christendom 7, 35–37, 39–40, 48, 95; see also post-Christendom Christian Coalition 425, 445 Christianities 9–10, 391–400 Christian nationalism 6, 81, 93, 96–99, 322, 381 Christian Sociological Association (CSA) 2–3 Christian sociology 2–4, 131 Christology 211, 447 Church of Scotland 271, 281, 285–286 Civil Rights Movement 99, 297, 316–367, 400 clergy 62–64, 227, 255, 258, 262, 271–272, 280, 294, 303–305, 317, 430 clothing 343–344 collective effervescence 236, 248, 250, 355 collective identity 82, 85–88 collectivism 42, 105–114, 255, 448 colonialism 5, 97, 132, 153–162, 167, 169–170, 226, 268–269, 271–273, 340; see also imperialism Columban Houses 287 communion, holy 339–340, 343, 345–347 communism 43, 51, 184, 258, 260–262, 285– 286, 303, 307, 394–396, 398–399, 446

455

Subject Index communitarianism 111, 358, 382; imagined community 345–346 communities, religious 73, 220, 226–226, 320, 374, 376, 394, 428; Religious Communities 381, 383, 385–386, 388 Community House 286 conservative 30, 50–51, 94, 97, 161, 243–244, 250, 290, 293, 296, 304–307, 319, 372–374, 394, 399, 424, 435, 441, 443–448; neoconservative 81–83, 85; see also progressive co-sanctified lexicon 230–240 covenant 380–384, 433 COVID-19 pandemic 339–348, 404–406, 408–412 critical theory 130–139, 249, 371, 440–443, 446, 448–449 cross 320, 344–346 crypto-Protestantism 69–70 culture industry 242, 246, 248–249 Culture of Life 81, 85–89 cybertheology 348 democracy 83, 93, 95, 157, 167, 170–171, 256, 260–262, 266–273, 336, 393, 396, 399–400, 405; see also authoritarianism de-privatization 8, 81–86; see also postsecularity dialogue 5–8, 13, 60, 63, 66, 99, 155, 335, 353, 397, 405, 435–436 dignity, human 62, 112, 237, 257, 262, 373, 409–411, 416–417, 424, 428–437, 441, 444 discourse analysis 231–232 distributive justice 441, 446; see also social justice divinity 1, 7, 39, 60, 63, 70, 72, 74–75, 113, 178–180, 209, 211, 245, 283, 356–357, 359–361, 383, 388, 392, 406, 417 Doughnut Economics 174 dowry 220–227; see also bridegroom price early Christianity 23, 25, 38, 49, 56, 385, 394, 397 Earth Charter 173 Eastern Orthodoxy 41, 47–56, 113, 358, 435–436 education 134–136, 158–159, 161, 198–199, 201–202, 221–222, 226, 260, 283, 329, 372; higher education 2, 196, 199, 203, 224–225, 376 emancipation 9, 82, 127, 131–133, 135–136, 139, 256, 316, 397–398 emic 12, 356–358; see also etic endogamy 220–226

engagement narrative 428–429; see also opposition narrative Enlightenment 2, 7, 43, 50, 61–62, 95, 110–112, 131–132, 156, 160, 214, 280, 356, 430–431, 434 epistemology 2, 5, 8, 121, 131, 138, 144, 146–147, 156, 178, 207–208, 373, 442; epistemic perspectivalism 143, 148–149 equality 81, 134–136, 138, 167, 174, 185–186, 404, 430–433, 441–443, 448; see also inequality ethical naturalism 144, 149, 150 ethnicity 24–25, 28, 54–55, 109, 112, 226, 266–271, 292, 316, 328, 331, 333, 341, 404, 432 etic 12, 243, 356–357; see also emic evangelicals 10, 53, 62, 86, 96–98, 138, 157–158, 199, 235, 238, 242–251, 259, 271, 281, 290–291, 293, 295, 340–348, 358, 372, 398, 418, 420, 424, 441, 444–448; Evangelical Revival 277, 279–281, 286 evil 75, 126, 138, 160, 178–181, 183–184, 237, 255, 296–297, 373, 385, 418, 422–423, 431 externalization 73, 231, 239 fairness 257, 260–261, 405, 441–443 falangism 97 falsifiability 177–178 families 134, 196–199, 203, 205–217, 219–228, 230, 260, 281, 344 fascism 93–99, 261–262, 285 feminism 132, 147, 297, 308, 400, 403, 405, 444, 447; womanist theology 321 frame analysis 86 French Revolution 43, 66, 95, 156–157, 429–431, 441 genre rules 244, 246 George MacLeod 284 George Whitefield 279–280 Gilded Age 291 globalization 51, 89, 155–157, 165–175, 263, 409, 422 Global North 7–8, 127, 154–158, 160, 167, 169–172, 195–196, 202, 209, 231, 262, 340, 361 Global South 7, 9, 153, 155–158, 162, 170–172, 257, 263, 271, 340, 342 Golden Rule 174, 406, 411 Gorbals Group 286 Great Emergence 356 Gustavo Gutiérrez 157, 303–336

456

Subject Index habitus 343–345 Hebrews, Letter to the 25 hedonism 179–186, 248; see also pleasure Helder Câmara 303–304 Hillsong network 245, 248 Hindu 220–221, 224–227 Holy Tradition 48–49, 51, 55 horizontal 107–108, 261, 353, 357; see also vertical Hull House 297 humanism, Christian 61–63, 83, 86–88, 449 human rights 171, 173–174, 239, 373, 411, 416, 427–437 hypergamy 222–223

Law of Divine Selection 178–185, 188 left hand 126–127; see also right hand legitimation 40, 70, 75, 87, 94–95, 97–98, 224, 257, 268, 344–345, 357, 382–384, 388, 442 liberation theology 98, 157, 260, 301–308, 320–321, 395, 447 life-as 354; see also subjective-life life-course theory 97, 195–196, 198 Lord’s Prayer 26, 137, 444 low commitment–high security belonging 239

koinonia 339–348

Madras 221–223 magic 76, 248, 383–384, 386 Mainz Guidelines 258 Maluku 340–348 Mars Hill Bible Church 233, 237–239 Martin Luther King Jr. 156, 158, 173, 297, 400 Marxism 157, 292, 305–306; cultural Marxism 87, 446 materialism 67, 146, 178, 180, 187, 261 McDonaldization 6, 168 Medellín conference 304–305 megachurches 230–240, 246, 248–250 Methodism 255, 262, 295, 397, 443–444 methodological atheism 4, 70, 71, 76, 177–178; methodological agnosticism 5 metropole-periphery 71, 104, 155–156 mimetic theory 423 Minahasa 340–348 minorities, religious 22, 48, 54, 120, 220, 304 models of disciplinary relationship 4 modernities 8–9, 43, 82 moral foundations theory 442–443 moralistic therapeutic deism 354 morality 1, 8, 94–95, 112, 179, 247, 373, 404–405, 431–432, 435, 442–443, 445, 448; moral obligation 71–72, 435; moral philosophy 2, 61–67, 149; moral politics 81–83, 85–88; moral realism 144, 148–150 Moral Majority 445–446 music 236–237, 242–251, 317 mysticism 40, 42, 50, 74, 120, 127, 280, 353, 355–356, 359–360

labor 24, 168, 171–172, 292–293, 392, 395– 400, 415, 421; labor unions 254–263 Labour Church movement 255–256 Lakewood Church 233–235, 237, 239 language 53, 87, 120, 125–127, 138, 231–239, 408–409, 447; language translation 5, 24–26, 28, 447 law 28, 32, 37, 41–42, 96, 380–389, 433; natural law 150, 383, 385, 430, 435

National Council of Churches 295–296 neoconservativism 81–83, 85 neoliberalism 8, 134–135, 162, 170–171, 184, 263, 393, 396, 422, 445 neo-tribal theory 250 The New Christianity 60–67 Nietzscheism 179–188 Nobel Laureates 187–188 nones 7, 200, 202, 230, 237, 322, 353

ideal type 75, 178, 183, 213 ideology 5, 11, 40, 67, 96, 108–109, 160, 171, 213, 234, 245, 269, 319, 321, 372–373, 377, 434, 441–443, 446 imago Dei 110, 113, 211, 358, 409, 416–417, 424, 447 immanence 7, 70, 73–75, 77, 131–132, 283, 291, 346, 361; see also transcendence immigrants 48, 52–55, 98–99, 290–292, 297 imperialism 5, 39, 154, 156, 447; see also colonialism individualism 105–114, 223, 234, 281, 294, 355, 404–405, 431, 444, 447–448; see also collectivism inequality 28, 30, 96, 106–107, 133–136, 156, 171, 186, 202, 302, 317–319, 391, 395, 431, 443; see also equality internalization 73, 134, 232, 239 International Monetary Fund 166, 169–170 intramundane concepts 77 Iona Community 284–287 is versus ought 148, 172, 442 Jesus movement 23, 243, 245, 395, 397 Jim Crow segregation 315–317 John Wesley 280 Journal of Sociology and Christianity 3 judgmental rationality 143, 148

457

Subject Index normativity 5, 49–50, 144, 148–149, 208, 217, 239, 357–358, 370, 381–382, 385, 405,442 obedience 95–96, 107, 156, 248, 407, 430, 442 objectivation 73, 231–232, 235 omnibenevolence 178–179, 184 ontology 36–38, 73, 77, 111, 136, 142–149, 239, 404–405 opposition narrative 428–429; see also engagement narrative oppression 157, 161, 235–237, 260, 267–268, 302, 306, 313–316, 319–322, 411, 421–422, 441, 445, 449 orthodoxy 6, 31–32, 238, 248, 356, 446; see also Radical Orthodoxy orthopraxy 6, 238, 248, 446 Osteen, Joel 233–235 other-worldly 4, 38, 291, 302, 319, 355; see also this-worldly pastoral sociology 374 Pauline letters 24–25, 28, 31–32, 380, 395 peers 196–201, 204 Pentecostal 26, 97, 233, 236, 242, 245–248, 397 People-to-People Peace Process 332 Philip Clayton 283–284 Philosophes 60–62, 67 pilgrimage 118, 121 place (lieu) 125–127; see also space (espace) pleasure 179–184, 214; see also hedonism Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 256–258 Pope 3, 256–257, 302–303, 308, 334, 400, 409, 416, 430, 435 populism 6, 10, 31, 88, 94, 131, 292–293 positivism 2, 59–61, 65–67, 132–133, 137, 177, 193, 207–209, 211, 213, 387–388 post-Christendom 7–8, 449; see also Christendom post-Christian 8, 71, 158, 230 post-secularity 7–8, 11, 119, 359 post-structuralism 131–132, 146 post-truth 130 preferential option for the poor 174, 302–306, 308, 444 priests 10, 63, 66, 220, 259–260, 302–305, 307, 384–388, 392, 430; see also prophets private sphere 8, 81–82; see also public sphere pro-choice 86, 88, 444 progressive 51, 147–148, 161, 255, 293, 295–297, 303–306, 308, 341, 353, 356, 358, 371–372, 374, 397, 443–444; see also conservative prophets 10, 75–76, 131, 272, 302, 381, 384– 388, 399, 407, 409; see also priests The Protestant Ethic 74, 77, 382, 387

public religion 11, 80, 82–83, 88 public sphere 8, 80–83, 85, 88, 97, 159; see also private sphere punishment 178–180, 182, 215, 316, 418–420, 422, 446 Putin, Vladimir 98 Q 27–28 Quran 385 Radical Orthodoxy 158–160, 396 rational choice theory 213–215 rationalization 6, 35–36, 40–43, 72, 74, 76, 178, 181, 357, 383–387, 432 Reformation, Protestant 9, 41, 43, 49, 95, 110–111, 188, 243, 356, 394, 397, 434 Reformed Church 111, 154, 161, 280, 340–343, 348, 361, 387, 418–419 rehabilitation 281, 415, 419–420, 422 Religion of Humanity 59–61, 64–67 religious-political nexus 36–39, 273 Rerum Novarum 256–258, 262, 430–431 rescue 238, 314, 415–420 restorative justice 272, 423–424, 441, 446, 448; see also retributive justice retributive justice 272, 384, 419, 423, 441, 446, 448; see also restorative justice right hand 126–127; see also left hand ripeness 327, 332, 335–336 ritual 24, 55, 66, 120, 223, 226–227, 247–248, 332, 353; online rituals 339–348 Roman Empire 25, 28–29, 39, 95, 157, 357– 358, 392, 394–395, 397 Rome 2, 25–28, 31, 36, 48, 384, 388 Russia 9, 40, 98–99, 165, 167–168, 393; Russian Orthodox Church 42–43, 52–53, 98, 435–436 sacrifice 107, 179–184, 287, 335, 337, 384, 418, 423 salvation 25, 38, 42, 74–76, 113, 138, 233, 235–236, 279–281, 291, 302, 319, 344–345, 361, 385–387, 418–420, 423, 434, 444–445 scapegoat 423 scenes perspective 250 schema 417–424 Schism, Great 9, 37, 48, 356 schools 134–136, 154, 161, 196–199, 203, 259–260, 283, 444 Scientific Revolution 2, 41, 187 secularization 2–3, 42, 60, 66–67, 80–88, 119, 121, 124, 158–160, 178–179, 286, 354–356, 433; secularities 9, 82; see also post-secularity

458

Subject Index self 5, 77, 87, 107, 110–113, 120, 126, 352, 355–356, 359–360, 405 sexuality 25, 64, 81, 85–88, 148, 318, 321, 359, 415, 419–421, 424, 444–445 shalom 423 sin 30, 62, 208, 293, 296, 372, 436, 444; personal sin 418–420, 422; structural sin 296, 319–320, 420–422 slavery 5, 25, 235–237, 314–316, 398–399, 415–425; Slavery Abolition Movement 315–316 social activism 11, 88, 145, 148, 159, 233, 250, 259–261, 271–272, 292, 297, 302–305, 319, 340, 370–373, 376, 445, 447 social change 4, 137, 267, 303, 370–371, 373, 377, 421–422, 443–444 social construction 122, 142, 145, 146, 231, 361 social creed 295, 397, 399, 445 Social Gospel 2–3, 261, 290–298, 319–320, 372, 399, 425, 444–446, 449 social imaginary 1–2, 11–12, 123 socialism 43, 108, 254–256, 261–262, 291–293, 305, 391–400, 427, 430 socialization 25, 107, 195–204, 409 social justice 161–162, 236, 239, 258–259, 266, 272, 280, 291, 294, 303, 321, 374, 376, 409, 420–422, 440–449 social movements 87–88, 93, 137, 279–287, 290–298, 306, 317, 416–418, 423–444 social structure 1, 36, 72, 106, 120, 124, 143, 263, 296, 314, 317, 329, 421, 443, 448 sociological imagination 1, 3–4, 8, 139, 371–372, 376 solidarity 24, 30, 77, 159, 169, 256–257, 261–262, 287, 291, 308, 398, 404, 406, 408–409, 412 South Sudan 326, 328, 330–332, 335 space (espace) 125–127; digital space 340, 342, 344; sacred space 118, 121, 339–340, 343–344, 346–348; virtual space 340, 343, 345; see also place (lieu) spirituality 208, 211, 257, 302, 316, 351–361 Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel 445 story 238, 244, 387–388, 418, 427 subculture 6, 109, 243, 249–250 subjective-life 354; see also life-as survival, human 174, 179–183, 188, 257, 314–315, 327, 332, 347, 410, 416, 420 Syllabus of Errors 430 symbols 7, 24, 40, 51, 55, 72, 88, 95, 123, 125, 127, 162, 220, 227, 232, 240, 332, 340, 343–348, 360, 374, 423 Talbot House 283–284 teleology 112, 144, 179 temperance 261, 292, 297, 399

theodicy 70, 74–76, 180 theology: affirmative theology 360–361; negative theology 360–361; theology of relations 210–212, 214–215; see also cybertheology; Trinitarian theology 113, 210, 212–213, 215 this-worldly 4, 37–39, 43, 177, 291, 294, 302, 319, 321, 355, 429; see also otherworldly totem 72, 345 tragedy of culture 355 transcendence 7, 37–38, 50, 63, 67, 69–78, 111–112, 121–122, 132, 177, 184, 248, 346, 352–353, 355, 357–359, 361, 374, 433; see also immanence translations, language 5, 24–26, 28, 447 triage 410 Trump, Donald 93–94, 97, 449 Tutsi and Hutu 332–333 two books, God’s 1 Unisonance 340, 345–346 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 411, 431, 436 University Settlement Movement 282–283 value-neutrality 11, 144, 210, 357, 373 Vatican II 83–84 vertical 107–108, 261, 268, 353, 357; see also horizontal victims 203, 318, 373, 411, 416, 419–421, 423, 445 virtue 149, 178–180, 183–184, 215, 281, 393, 409, 431, 433, 435–437, 442, 447, 449 Visegrád Group 98 voter apathy 267, 272 walking 118–119, 127, 393, 449; walking away 200–201, 230 websites 230–240, 418 West Angeles Church of God 233, 235–237, 239 Westminster Confession of Faith 158, 161 Womanist Theology 321 working class 255–256, 258–259, 262, 279, 281, 283, 285–287, 292, 397–398 World Bank 166, 169–170 World Confederation of Labour 262 World Health Organization 166, 404 World Trade Organization 166, 169–171 worldview 5, 35–36, 41, 60, 66–67, 84, 87, 112, 149, 159–160, 177–188, 198, 220, 226, 230–240, 315, 373, 375, 387, 442 worship 48, 67, 72, 97, 120, 210, 220, 235–236, 242–251, 287, 317, 339–347, 383–384, 387, 392, 436

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