Analysis of the Study of Religious Organizations 127
Religious Organizations as Bureaucracies
After having abandoned the church-sect typology, religious scholars began to turn to
the field of organizational studies for explanatory strategies. Research on the behavior
of nonreligious organizations seemed to offer promising avenues of inquiry and these
approaches were avidly pursued by religion scholars.
Inspired by the trends in organizational research, several studies in the 1960s
and 1970s focused on the effects of bureaucratization in Protestant denominations
(Harrison 1959; Winter 1967; Primer 1979; Takayama 1979). These studies suggested
that Protestant denominations had grown in size, function, and administrative com-
plexity over the past number of years. Scholars assumed that this growth in bureaucracy
could also be associated with a concentration of decision-making authority (Harrison
1959; Winter 1967; Takayama 1974) and also a growing similarity or isomorphism in
the organizational structures of religious institutions, which they ultimately argued
was a sign of increasing secularization. Their arguments suggested that as denomina-
tions became more bureaucratic, decision makers would become more professional and
their decisions would be more strongly influenced by the values of their professional
functions, rather than their religious beliefs (Winter 1967). This, scholars argued, would
produce bureaucratic structures that were oriented to their functional, as opposed to
their theological purposes, and would in turn, erode the theological distinctiveness
of each denomination. Peter Berger argued that “Internally, the religious institutions
are not only administered bureaucratically, but their day to day operations are dom-
inated by the typical problems and ‘logic’ of bureaucracy” (Berger 1967: 140). For
Berger, this homogenization of structure contributed to the overall secularization of
society.
Despite the relative absence of actual empirical evidence, the inevitability of secular-
ization via bureaucratization was often taken for granted among social scientists during
this time. The inherent assumption in this attitude is that bureaucratic rationales are
inconsistent with religious idealism and that religion and rationality are antithetical to
one another. This perspective is so pervasive in the literature and also so contrary to
the historical record that it needs to be critically examined. This view makes a crucial
assumption about what it means to be religious. It assumes that religious values are
necessarily secularized if they involve decision makers who are concerned with making
both moral choices and organizationally efficient choices. It implies that the influence
of professional managers, rather than clergy or laypersons, undermines the operation
of religious decision-making structures. It assumes that decisions made by experienced
administrators are less “religious” than those made by clergy or laity.
Reflection on this topic still seems overshadowed by the implicit assumptions of the
church-sect typology, that is, that the worldly church is inevitably corrupt, and the sect
is invariably pure and idealistic. Yet neither of these scenarios is supported in the United
States, where churches tend to pursue religious idealism with a shamelessly pragmatic
worldliness as their God-given right. For Weber (1925/1978), the church was inevitably
corrupted by its goal of world dominion because the strategies by which the Catholic
Church pursued this imperative required it to ally with states that practiced secular
abuse and tyranny. In the United States, no such alliance exists and world dominion
is pursued through strategies of voluntary conversion thus avoiding the kind of polit-
ical pollution that Weber envisioned. Consequently, religious groups have developed