The Churching of America 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. - book reviews

THE CHURCHING OF AMERICA 1776-1990

Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark

Rutgets University Press, $22.95,328 pp.

With its big hypothesis, bold claims, and assured premises The Churching of America is sociology of the kind that used to be written before the ideologically tumultuous 1960s when blacks, women, and others humbled the universalizing theory that conceptually marginalized them. Finke and Stark claim that newly retrieved late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Bureau of Census statistics on religious bodies based on denominational self-reports (and statistically checked by Finke's model for translating pew numbers into membership estimates) allow them to make "major revisions in the history of American religion" and to "challenge the received wisdom" about why churches grow and why they decline.

This book is smartly written, the graphs and statistics are easy to read, and the analyses are enlivened with pungent comments about religion and those who write about it. Commentators, especially those conservatives who use "liberal" as a synonym for selling out, will find it easy to quote. The authors' theoretical framework is a hybrid of church/sect and economic theory (the Chicago style of unregulated competition). Committed secular intellectuals seeking a nonthreatening explanation of why secularization hasn't happened in America and elsewhere might especially find the authors' economic analysis persuasive. My guess is that the reader with some general interest in religion and some specific allegiances will at different times and in different moods find the book insightful, tendentious, and reductive.

Good revisionists, however, must first persuade us that what they revise is what we believe. With fair warrant, Finke and Stark assume we think that Americans were once religious and are now pretty seculat. They assume that most students of religion think that traditional societies with religious "monopolies" were pervasively religious and that secular and pluralistic societies inevitably make religion insignificant and, indeed, that pluralism in religion is itself a primary agent of seculanzation. If there are more than 256 separate religious organizations in America, each considering itself more true than the others, how can any one of them lay claim to binding religious truths worthy of committed allegiance? The data contradict each point of this conventional wisdom and better support their counterargument that religious pluralism, which better than religious monopolies can appeal to diverse religious tastes, increases the aggregate demand for religion, just as unregulated markets are better than state-controlled monopolies in rousing and then satisfying consumer wants.

For example, on the eve of the American Revolution, probably about 17 percent of Americans were churched. "On any given Sunday morning," Finke and Stark drolly note, "there were at least as many people recovering from late Saturday nights in the taverns of these seaport towns as were in church." By 1906, slightly more than 50 percent of Americans were churched; today, about 62 percent claim active church membership. And even nonmembers show a brand loyalty. On no national sample has the percentage answering "none" when asked about religion reached 10 percent. Then why do we hear so much about secularization from both intellectuals and religious leaders? Because intellectuals begin with the wrong question and religious leaders confuse their faith with the market, say Finke and Stark.

The typical social scientist asks, "How can people possibly believe in supernatural beings and forces, and whatever drives them to make such irrational sacrifices in the name of faith?" When the question is posed in this way, "they have been virtually forced to frame answers that postulate personal flaws in those who believe and sacrifice." Thus, with more rationality (presumably like their own), there should be less religion. Finke and Stark adopt a contrary hypothesis which provides the motive power underlying their theory explaining the success and failure of different religious "firms" in a potentially ever expanding religious market: "People seek a religion that is capable of miracles and that imports order and sanity to the human condition. The religious organizations that maximize these aspects of religion, however, demand the highest price in terms of what the individual must do to qualify for these rewards."

But while "magic" and "sacrifice" initially attract believers, in time they and their leaders become more affluent, more comfortable, and more established. Under pressure from their laity, the clergy begin to preach theology rather than faith, support respectability rather than enthusiasm, and soon the group suffers the fate of all complacent monopolies as it loses out to religious entrepreneurs with less to lose and more to gain. Thus, like IBM and General Motors, "the mainline bodies are always headed for the sidelines." Much as Detroit complains about the unfair market techniques of Japan, the corporate leadership of declining religious firms complain about secularization. One graph shows how the Congregationalists and Episcopalians lose out to the Methodists and the Baptists, nicely displays this "capitalist" theory applied to religion (figure 3.1, chapter 1). In the chapter "Methodists Transformed, Baptists Triumphant," the authors offer the troublesome suggestion that "it seems evident that the secularization of religion finds its fullest expression in seminaries whenever they define themselves as centers of scholarship." Product improvement, it seems, doesn't work on religion.

At this point Commonweal readers might be curious about how the authors' economic model applies to American Catholicism. Simply put, when Catholicism grew (till Vatican II) it behaved like a sect, energetically marketing itself to immigrants from native lands characterized by a complacent clergy without much religious competition. Catholicism's entrepreneurship resulted in a distinctive institutional system (schools, colleges, hospitals, etc.) offering the rewards of familiarity and acceptance to American-born Catholics still insecure in a suspicious culture. But Vatican II brought a decrease in product differentiation, an accommodation to secular society, and reduced rewards for buying Catholic. Finke and Stark approvingly cite Will Herberg's mid-1960s caution to those Catholic intellectuals urging the church to "slough off its old ways and bring itself up to date by adjusting itself to the spirit of the age. I say just the opposite: in all that is important, the church must stand firm in its stand against the world, against the age, against the spirit of the age--because the world and the age are always, to an important degree, in rebellion against God." But "with the increasing size and affluence of Catholic universities and the reforms of Vatican II, Catholic higher education became quite secularized."

Finke and Stark think it "unlikely that the American Catholic church will be able to halt its transformation from an energetic sect into a sedate mainline body." The reader who at this point thinks about all those considerable points of actual and potential tension between American Catholicism--contraception, abortion, the social teaching of the church, the pastoral letters, the church's hierarchical structure, the eucharistic miracle, the evangelical vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, etc.--will especially notice a disappointingly ad hoc quality to their argument. The authors do not even mention abortion, the ordination of women, the social teachings of the church, the sacraments. Although an important part of their theory is that religious firms lose membership as they lessen the demands for membership, we notice here that it is not any guiding theory but their own post factum judgment which they use to sort out the inventory of sacrifice. They give high grades to the older discipline of meatless Fridays. Regarding the high demands contained in Humanae vitae, they simply cite the economist Lawrence Iannoccone's remark that "the Catholic church has managed to arrive at a remarkable 'worst of both worlds' position--discarding cherished distinctiveness in the areas of liturgy, theology, and lifestyle, while at the same time maintaining the very demands that its members and clergy are least willing to accept." Regarding the decline in vocations to religious orders, they simply remark "it is no longer a good bargain except for those with a remarkable personal ability to transmute sacrifice into powerful religious fulfillments."

Readers can best evaluate the worth of the book by whether or not they share its authors' primary aspiration: The authors tell us that "the primary value of analyzing American religious history through a market-oriented lens is that in this way some well-established deductions from the principles of supply and demand can illuminate what might otherwise seem a very disorderly landscape."

Faith needs its metaphors and, at least since the 1960s, many sociologists realize they also need them. My own reaction to viewing churches as business firms is "sure." I'm sure we and church leaders often do. We can (and economists do) look at marriages, or anything, the same way. But this is in our less interesting moments. As with economic theory generally, it's not hard to apply these free-market principles backward into history and find that religious behavior conforms to them. I mean, if something declines we can later pronounce that it was because people no longer wanted it or they found what they think is a better way to get what they want. But this is mostly tautological, as the heavy ad hoc and post factum quality of their chapter on Catholicism shows. Furthermore, I'm not convinced that church/sect theory benefits much by being subsumed under a more theoretically pretentious economics. Arguments for the congruence between pluralism and religious vitality have been around for some time (Roger Williams, John Stuart Mill, George Simmel, John Courtney Murray), if not always appreciated. These arguments have the virtue of drawing attention to issues of conscience and religious truth. The chief utility of redescribing them in terms of supply-and- demand principles is to give some added weight to some plausible but highly contestable personal judgments about contemporary American religion and its future.

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