A British Perspective on the Critical Sociology of Religion
Steve Bruce
University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Introduction 1
In a 2013 edition of Critical Research on Religion , Mary Jo Neitz presents some interesting comments on the relationship between the personal religious commitments of researchers, the status of the religion they study, and the results of their research (2013: 129-40). In brief, she argues that: ‘Researchers’ own locations — as an insider, an outsider, an apostate or an advocate — have consequences for the questions they ask, and to whom they address them, as well as how they interpret the data they collect’ (2013: 131).
Perfectly reasonably as she is an American writing for a largely American audience, her argument is mostly concerned with the sociology of religion in a country where a large part of the population is religious, where there still is a dominant religious tradition, and where many academics are religious. Matters look rather different in Britain. That few British people are religious has a number of consequences that will be explored en route to a defence of the possibility of objective and value-neutral research. A complete defence of a realist attitude to research would be too long for a journal article and is probably unnecessary because the pros and cons will be all too familiar to most readers but I will argue that the work of British sociologists of religion suggests that motives other than those produced by
‘location’ in Neitz’s sense may produce reasonably impartial research. In another place I would want to write a lengthy defence of the ability of such American colleagues as Mark
Chaves, Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler and Nancy Ammerman to transcend their personal preferences but here I will confine myself to what we can infer from the UK example. In a largely secular society there are few standpoint obstacles to value-neutrality.
Locations And Interests
The key feature of the Neitz article is her Locations Matrix. In classic sociological mode, she offers a four box typology based on these two considerations: is the religion being studied dominant or marginal and is the researcher an insider/adherent or an outsider.
1 The number of British sociologists of religion is so small that some would be identified by remarks that were too precise. I have discussed the faith of those who are dead or who have outed themselves in print.
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Table 1 Locations Matrix
Location of Researcher
Insider/adherent
Outsider/not an adherent
Location of researched
Dominant culture
A
C
Marginal culture
B
D
Source: Neitz 2013: 131
Cell A: Neitz argues that ‘most work conducted by sociologists of religion in the United
States belongs in this cell’ (2013: 133) and she may well be right. The consequent problems are that ‘minority traditions may not show up in sufficient numbers to be included in the analysis’ (2013: 134) and that such researchers will produce an inaccurately positive view of the benefits of the sort of religion they share.
Cell C: Neitz believes this box to be small because those people who were not raised in, or do not still belong to, some version of the dominant religious tradition ‘may be busy studying things they think are more important’. Nonetheless those in this box are still likely to produce positive evaluations of the dominant religion because ‘disciplinary practices, including the methodological and rhetorical ones discussed below provide a set of taken for granted assumptions about the utility of the dominant religion’ (2013: 134).
Cell B: This cell consists of adherents studying the marginal religions to which they adhere and the problems she mentions include the professional reception of works written by insiders.
Cell D: Finally we have marginal religions studied by non-adherents or outsiders. Her focus here is new religious movements. She notes that sociologists have often been defenders of
NRMs (especially in arguments about brainwashing and de-programming). Although probably true, this does not sit easily with the claims made about Cell A. My knowledge is limited but those US scholars with whom I am personally acquainted who studied NRMs were members of mainstream Protestant churches and do not seem particularly different to those in Cell A, except that circumstance provided them with an exotic group to study.
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British Sociology of Religion
Neitz recognises that, like all such models, her Location Matrix may not easily fit the reality:
Researchers have complex identities and may find themselves ‘inside’ on some dimensions and ‘outside’ on others. Similarly the line between ‘mainstream’ religions and marginal ones … is also one that can shift over time: there are many examples of sects that become mainstream denominations (2013: 131).
A degree of such difficulty of application is to be expected of any model. However, too much stretching and one has to wonder if the model has identified the main variables. In the British context both axes of the Location Matrix are difficult to operationalise for reasons additional to those (denominationalism, for example) given by Neitz. I will take the religious commitments of sociologists first and then consider the division of religion into mainstream and marginal.
The Standpoints of British Students of Religion
An important British distinction, which figures only peripherally in Neitz’s paper, is the separation of the professional from the amateur sociologist. Quite why the sociology of religion should be relatively unpopular amongst British sociologists is not obvious. It may be, as Neitz says in explaining a lack of US outsiders studying religion, that ‘People who have no emotional connection (positive, negative or even ambivalent) to religion may also be less likely to have an intellectual connection’ (2013: 134). In the UK context, it is more likely a function of secularization. Emotional connections aside, people who think religion is of little importance as an independent variable for whatever they wish to explain are unlikely to study it and in the UK religion has become so unpopular that such a response is not obviously unreasonable. From a US perspective this may seem odd but I will illustrate from the field of community studies. In the 1950s there were a large number of community studies in the UK and they all gave significant space to religion. When Marilyn Strathern (arguably one of the
UK’s leading anthropologists) led a detailed study of a north Essex village in the late 1960s, she chose not to include religion in its purview (Strathern 1981). And other scholars followed her lead (for example Rapport 1993). Community Studies straddles a borderline between anthropology and sociology but one sees the same neglect from sociologists. Between 1949 and 1952 Margaret Stacey conducted a detailed study of the town of Banbury which in its published form devoted a long chapter to detailing the religious attachments of its residents and considering in particular the local political associations of various forms of religious identification (Stacey 1960). In 1966 Stacey led a re-study which was not published until ten
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years later (Stacey et al 1976). The second book gave only ten pages to religion and two of those were taken up with a diagram. The second volume brought forward some of the religion data from the first so that comparisons could be presented but there were a number of significant mistakes and unexplained changes in the transcription of the original religion data and one has the very strong impression that the 1966 re-study team were simply not interested in the religious life of Banbury.
Whatever the explanation for sociology’s neglect of religion, the result is that the bulk of apparently and putatively sociological research on religion in the UK is now done by people who were not trained as sociologists and who do not work in sociology departments.
A brief analysis of those attending and presenting papers at the 2014 annual British
Sociological Association Sociology of Religion study group conference will make the point.
Of 81 UK-based participants, only 26 per cent were sociologists (defined here as having at least one sociology degree). They were far out-numbered by theologians and graduates in religious studies: 40 per cent. The only other discipline with more than a handful of representatives was anthropology (at 13 per cent). Between 2007 and 2012 the Arts and
Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Science Research council jointly spent £12 million on the ‘Religion and Society Programme’, which supported 75 separate projects. A number of these formed the basis for the Linda Woodhead and Rebecca Catto edited collection Religion and Change in Modern Britain (2012). Of 34 contributors, by far the largest group (47 per cent) were theologians and scholars trained in religious studies.
Educationalists came next at 12 per cent. Only 9 per cent of the contributors were sociologists. The rest — with no more than two from each — came from a variety of such backgrounds as law, architecture, philosophy, history, demography and geography.
Among professional sociologists who study religion insiders are rare. David Martin is an ordained Anglican. Grace Davie describes herself as ‘a moderately active member of the
Church of England’ ( 2013: 122). Bryan Wilson, Roy Wallis, James Beckford, Eileen Barker, and I are outsiders. What is significant about our lack of personal religious commitments is that it shows the possibility of something which is absent from Neitz’s typology and which has consequences for her scepticism about value-neutral research: the importance of sociological problems as a motive for studying the sociology of religion. Most of the UK’s professional sociologists of religion in recent years were attracted first to sociology as a discipline and then to the sociology of religion as a field of research; attractive for sociological reasons. The reasons for both attractions are many. Roy Wallis was attracted to sociology because it offered a way of understanding his own social background (a working
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class lad who was the first of his family to go to university), because the people who taught it were people like him, and because its concerns were intellectually stimulating. He pursued the sociology of religion because he was interested in the role of charisma in leadership and persuasion and because he was impressed by Bryan Wilson’s scholarship. Barker’s route in was similarly both intellectual and personal: ‘When we had to choose our options … the sociology of religion, which was taught by David Martin, seemed more interesting than anything else on offer’ (2013: 41). My interest in the sociology of religion was sparked by reading Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (which was also mentioned by Barker) and by being interested in the sociological problem of how any minority, religious or secular, maintains a distinctive worldview (Bruce 2013: 41). That such a productive cohort of professional sociologists were outsiders has one important feature to which I will return below: with regard to their subject matter, they were professionally disinterested. Other interests may have distorted their research — for instance, they may simply have been bad at their jobs — but it was not, as the conventional view of interests requires, distorted by their attitude to the apparently defining characteristic of what they studied.
As we will see shortly, the British group that possibly fits Neitz’s cell A are not sociologists interested in religion but scholars in Theology, Divinity, and Religious Studies departments who have become interested in the sociology of religion (but not normally in sociology per se) as a source of ways of understanding the changing nature and position of religion. Arguably this is itself a function of secularization: Religious Studies, Theology and
Divinity departments have complemented their previous roles as exponents and immanent critics of religion with an interest in the social causes and consequences of religious change.
That is, they have shifted from teaching religion to teaching about religion.
Dominant and Marginal Religions in Britain
The second major difference between the USA and UK concerns Neitz’s second axis: the distinction between dominant and marginal hardly works when the most popular religion among people aged 18 to 34 is ‘None’ and when the proportion of the population that is involved in organized religious activities in a typical week is about 7 per cent (Brierley
2014). All religions in the UK are marginal. The two state churches — the Church of England and the Church of Scotland — retain some flummery (blessing royal weddings, for example) but it almost a century since they ceased to be funded by taxation and they no longer have the power to stigmatize alternatives. The then-highly-deviant nineteenth century sects are now
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entirely assimilated. BBC Radio Aberdeen’s road traffic reporter produced a significant
(because unconsidered) sign of respectability having been achieved when she referred to a particular junction on Aberdeen’s notoriously crowded ring road as ‘the Latter Day Saints junction’. The Mormons are now just the owners of a conveniently prominent junction marker. The Pentecostal sects of the 1920s and 1930s are now as mainstream as any denomination. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that came to power in 2011 offered full state funding to a wide variety of new schools under its ‘Free Schools’ programme. Its success probably owed a lot to the accidental need for the government to show it supported religious diversity but a school in Skelmersdale run by Transcendental
Meditation was admitted to the programme. Yoga and meditation are part of mainstream culture and Mindfulness is now presented within the National Health Service as a cure for a variety of mental illnesses. Paganism is accepted by the armed forces as a legitimate religion and the once-resolutely-Presbyterian Aberdeen Press and Journal happily publicises the annual visits of Kevin Carlyon (self-styled High Priest of British White Witches) to cast protective spells for the Loch Ness Monster. Bruce and Voas (2007) argue that the respectable/deviant distinction which informs the classic divide between a church and a sect and a denomination and a cult is due for revision and, with the exception of the recently imported religions of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, the same case can be made against most of what is implied in any dominant and marginal distinction.
Primary Research Topics
The third major difference between the USA and UK concerns what it is that sociologists are arguing about. Neitz’s main example of researcher location distorting research concerns whether religion is good or not. Arguably this is a theological rather than a sociological question but even if we cast it in some Durkheimian form as concerning the role of a shared religion in social cohesion, it is hard to see it as a major concern of British sociologists who study religion. A better candidate would be secularization, which has exercised Wilson,
Martin, Davie, and Wallis among others. Given that Martin and Wilson were respectively the major critics and proponents of the secularization thesis, it has always been something of a mystery that they never directly argued with each other in print. In his autobiography, Martin explains: ‘I feared the sociology of religion might become as fractious as other subdisciplines … There was an unspoken compact between me and Bryan never openly to criticise the other, and that meant we rarely referred to each other’s published work’ (Martin
2014: 140-141).
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Secularization has certainly been a major theme for the theologians and religious studies scholars who have borrowed from the sociology of religion: if there is a common thrust to the AHRC/ESRC research programme it is that religion has not declined; it has only changed.
The one religion that is obviously ‘marginal’ (and that has attracted relatively more research interest in the UK than in the USA) is Islam but it has not been much studied by professional sociologists of religion. There are many reasons for this (including obstacles of language and restrictive gender roles) but one is that the subject has been treated under the rubric of ethnic relations and diaspora studies. This is speculation but I suspect this may have a lot to do with a wish (supported by British Muslims) to separate the religious core of Islam from its cultural appurtenances.
Critical Sociology and Value-Neutrality in Research
The above observations about the sociology of religion in a largely secular society are intended as background to my major disagreement with the epistemological and methodological implications of Neitz’s Location Matrix. Neitz, like the participants in a recent roundtable published by this journal, accepts ‘the demise of the once–hoped-for goals of objectivity and neutrality’ (Martin et al 2014: 302). However, she presents a series of putatively testable claims about causal relationships between the standpoints of researchers and the status of the researched. Hence I feel justified in responding as an empirical social scientist.
But first it is necessary to consider what is meant by ‘critical sociology’. As someone who still hopes for objectivity and neutrality, I reject the shared view of the roundtable participants that a critical approach means shifting attention (I assume this is a baseball metaphor) from the ball to the pitcher (Martin et al 2014: 307) and I will return to that in a moment. For the realist, critical sociology used to mean a toned-down version of conventional Marxist epistemology. The robust application of ‘scientific’ Marxist thought would deny objectivity to any research that was not itself the robust application of Marxist thought. The softer agenda promoted by Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School does not deny the possibility of truth outside of Marxist assumptions but it does suppose that power distorts: in any field there are hegemonic interests that cloud the work of scholars and these have to be exposed and repudiated. This is what Neitz means when she says that we should attend to the standpoints of researchers and their relationship to those they research. Hence critical sociology of religion requires that there be some dominant or hegemonic religion (a)
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to which sociologists belong and (b) which they study. To fill out the imagined occupant of her cell A location: a sociologist who is also an elder of a Southern Baptist Church who does research funded by the Pew Foundation on mainstream Christian denominations will improperly conclude that mainstream Christianity is socially beneficial. The ‘improperly’ in that construction is essential: we would have no grounds for objection if we could believe
(because, for example, every other sort of researcher concurred) that the conclusion of our
Baptist elder’s research was reasonable.
To make the standpoint case we would have to find research which (a) led to unreasonable conclusions that (b) suited the insider’s personal religious interests. Research on religion by professional British sociologists offers very few examples. Grace Davie – an insider — has gone to greater lengths than anyone else to promote alternatives to the secularization view. First she argued that the decline in the churches should be seen primarily as a loss of faith in joining organizations rather than a loss of faith: hence the British were
‘believing but not belonging’. Then she argued that while conventional religion might have declined, ‘vicarious religion’ was alive and well. By this she meant that an apparent willingness of the British to have the churches and church officials do religion on their behalf showed that religious sentiment persisted (Davie 2013). Both arguments have been taken up enthusiastically by Christian church officials and Davie is a popular speaker in church circles.
But neither argument is so obviously wrong that it must be explained by personal religious sentiment clouding professional judgement.
David Martin, perhaps the most prolific and influential insider, made a series of trenchant criticisms of the secularization thesis long before Rodney Stark discovered it was mistaken (Martin 1965). But, in an important challenge to the expected line-up of interests and arguments, he also produced one of the most sophisticated and historically nuanced accounts of secularization: a book entitled A General Theory of Secularization hardly belongs on the lists of the ‘secularization deniers’ (Martin 1978).
Is there a coincidence of interests among the non-religious sociologists who work within the secularization paradigm? Few have committed themselves to print on this point but
Wilson offers a good example of a man who could describe and explain changes which he personally found unwelcome. Although he is routinely cited as the fons et origo of the modern secularization paradigm, he authored one of the most dismal projections of society without religion. He expected that, just as the exoskeleton can replace the internal skeleton, the maintenance of social order in the absence of shared moral values would require external
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supervision: the all-seeing eye of God being replaced by the all-seeing eye of the CCTV camera (Wilson 1985).
Where one may find better support for Neitz’s proposition is among the theologians and religious studies scholars who have borrowed from the sociology of religion. An
Anglican clergyman and Director of Ministerial Practice at Durham University entitled a collection of essays he edited Church Growth in Britain 1980 to the Present although only two contributions actually claimed growth and one of those was concerned with West African
Pentecostal immigrants (Goodhew 2012). His own research on the size and number of
Christian congregations in York was presented as evidence of growth but it failed to do two things that an well-trained social scientist would have done. He did nothing to test the possibility that the growth of ‘magnet’ congregations may have been a consequence of decline in the greater York area and a willingness of churchgoers to travel greater distances.
Nor did he set net figures against changes in total population figures. As the adult population of York had actually grown faster than the churchgoing population, his work showed decline, not growth.
One major social survey produced by theologians posted the questionnaire on-line and invited students at a variety of universities to complete it (Guest et al 2103). With no thought to the certainty that those who so volunteered might be unrepresentative precisely in their interest in religion, the results were initially presented as a description of British students in general who, remarkably, appeared to be vastly more religious than the population at large.
Later reports corrected the glaring mistake but not before a number of Christian journals and web-sites had latched on to what appeared like evidence of a religious revival.
Other examples could be added to suggest that theologians straying into sociology may be insufficiently critical of research findings that apparently fit their personal wishes.
However, before we suppose that personal preferences create self-serving credulity, it is worth adding an alternative (or at least complementary) explanation. Perhaps research findings at odds with what the researcher wished should have caused second thoughts but the problem may simply be professional competence. Social scientists used to presenting descriptive statistics as a proportion of the total population available would not have seen decline as growth and people trained in survey design and administration would not have generalized from a patently unrepresentative sample. That is, disciplinary expertise may be as or more important than standpoint.
Two qualifications are immediately required. First, we should recognise that some theologians (Robin Gill is an example) have been every bit as rigorous and professional in
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their social research as most sociologists. Second, we should admit that professional theologians probably have as much reason to be critical of sociologists’ intruding on the territory of theology and religious studies. The issue of professional training and competence pertains to all boundary crossing. I am sure church historians, for example, are entitled to be horrified by the damage done to the factual record by sociologists forcing complex histories into simple sweeping generalizations.
To summarise my argument thus far, I can find British examples of Neitz’s cell A — insiders producing almost-certainly-misleading social research findings which they accept because they suit them — but these concern scholars straying outside their primary area of expertise and the explanation may well be lack of competence rather than standpoint. I can find no evidence that religiously indifferent British sociologists require an injection of critical perspective to improve their research.
Which brings me to another important point in Neitz’s presentation. The use of the term ‘standpoint’, pioneered in feminist sociology, rather cheats the argument because, as it is a locational metaphor, it implies that everyone must have one and only one. As we are not
Schrödinger’s cat, we cannot be in two places at once and we must be in a place. The implication is that all of us have a standpoint whether we admit it or not, so we had better admit it. My knowledge of British sociologists suggests that the vast majority have no standpoint other than a commitment to their discipline and an interest in religion and are disinterested because, like the bulk of the British population, they are religiously indifferent.
The Neitzian could here respond that the lack of a religion or religious indifference is itself a religious standpoint. One can certainly present religious and non-religious (or secular and religious) as antonyms but the attitudes or commitments implied by each term in such pairings clearly differ in ways that have important consequences for reading off standpoints.
Exactly what is meant by religious varies with user, of course, but for the sake of argument let us take religion to be that body of beliefs and behaviour predicated on the existence of a supernatural agent with the power of moral judgement. That seems pretty much what most lay people and sociologists of religion mean by religion (and hence the adjective religious) and it is something quite narrow. In contrast non-religious generally just means everything else and that everything else is a very broad category which includes the blankly religious indifferent, the self-consciously atheistic, the procedurally sensitive agnostic, and the politically active secularist. That is, while we might treat religious and non-religious as matching categories for purposes such as survey analysis, they are better seen as the
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equivalent of ‘red’ and ‘not red’. Beyond establishing lack of redness, ‘not red’ tells us nothing about colour because there are so many remaining alternatives.
At this point the sceptic may shift to the second case that Neitz makes, which is that the dominance of certain research methods (surveys and statistics are singled out) leads to distortion: ‘quantitative studies with large samples are more likely [than ethnographic work] to reflect dominant values’ (2013: 137). Such work is almost entirely absent from British sociology of religion. This may be a consequence of sociology having often originally been placed in anthropology departments. It may be, as Beckford says, that even sociology doctoral students are attracted to the idea of having their own ‘tribe’ (Beckford 1975: preface). It is certainly the case that British sociology generally has been weak on quantitative methods. I can think of only three scholars who currently publish statistical research on religion and all three became interested in religion post-doctorate. But popular or unpopular, it is hard to see a causal connection between stats and an especial likelihood to reflect dominant values, unless it is that large-scale surveys require large-scale funding and the funders may be reluctant to see certain lines of enquiry pursued. I cannot speak for the
USA but the UK offers little evidence for that fear. It is true that ‘cheap and cheerful’ surveys run by Christian organizations primarily to get some press attention suspiciously often manage to find something to be cheerful about but the larger commercial polling organizations have been quite happy to ask questions which produce such findings as that most Britons think religion is harmful (YouGov 2007). And recurrent social science polls have asked questions that allow us to show that most Britons do not want religious leaders to have more influence and that most Britons prefer ‘non-religious’ to ‘deeply religious’ people
(Bruce and Glendinning 2011; Clements 2012).
The sceptic can then shift ground to argue (as Thomas Kuhn famously did in his notion of paradigms in scientific research) that, while professional sociologists of religion may have no personal interest in religion, they will have a professional interest in defending previous positions. But, given that such famous sociologists as Peter Berger and Rodney
Stark have done their careers no harm at all by recanting their early support for the secularization thesis, it seems improper to assert that professional inertia is a necessary source of bias.
Finally I come to a neglected ground for a defence of the still-hoped-for goals of objectivity and neutrality: the absence of any feature of the research subject likely to elicit systematic and collective distortion. Clearly with a topic such as the role of the Catholic
Church in Africa, for example, one can see the obvious power-challenging role of a critical
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sociology but for much of what concerns the sociology of religion in a largely secular country there is no subject that will be seen consistently differently from different standpoints. The following are topics that have been covered in my sociology of religion course: the role of the
Reformation in modernization, the extent and causes of secularization, the social functions of religion in cultural defence and cultural transition, the relationship between types of religious beliefs and types of religious organization, social mobility and religious change, the nature of charisma, the appeal of new religious movements, the nature and appeal of holistic spirituality, difficulties of identifying and measuring religious commitment, explanations of conversion, and the gender gaps in religion and spirituality. One can see that a particular scholarly standpoint might produce a consistent view on a few of them but others seem either so technical or so broad that one cannot reason a standard line. For example, that one believes that the individualism, egalitarianism and literacy encouraged by the Reformation played some part in modernization gives no clue as to how one would view competing explanations of religious conversion. And whether the Bromley and Shupe role theory of conversion offers a more convincing explanation than the Lofland and Stark value-added seven stages model seems impossible to shoehorn into any conventional model of standpoints or interests. The point is that value-neutrality in research need not rest on the saintly indifference of the scholar, though, unlike Neitz, I happen to believe that such value-neutrality is actually quite common among my colleagues. It can be an accidental consequence of the research subject matter being so multi-faceted that even if we shared a common standpoint we need not see most matters in any particular way.
Conclusion
The argument of this paper may seem like a long way round the houses. I could have defended the possibility of objective and value-neutral research by pointing to the large number of sociologists whose work seems at odds with their faith (or lack of one). The young
Peter Berger arguing for secularization; the mature Rodney Stark arguing against it; Bryan
Wilson mourning the decline of a shared value system: there are many examples of scholars whose research seems at odds with their personal preferences. However that sort of argument very quickly degenerates into a potentially endless game of name-swapping. Instead I have used the difficulty of fitting contemporary British sociology of religion into Neitz’s Location
Matrix to make the rather obvious point that when few sociologists have any faith we have no reason to doubt their lack of a religiously-interested standpoint. Furthermore, when religion has little power and influence there is no obvious ‘critical sociology’ to be done. To put it in
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the most general terms, a critical sociology of religion may not be necessary because the researchers are motivated only by professional scholarly interests and a critical sociology of religion may not be possible because the subject matter does not lend itself to a critical (in the
Gramscian sense) approach.
A final thought. In making the case that Neitz’s approach does not work for sociologists of religion in the UK, it may seem that I am abandoning my US colleagues but I see a rather different implication. If we can accept that in one Anglophone country sociologists of religion are motivated primarily by a combination of idiosyncratic interests and disciplinary problems, why can we not extend the same pattern of motivation to sociologists in another?
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