18 Robert Wuthnow
sociology of religion may be taught infrequently or in another department. Graduate
students may express fears about diminishing job prospects if they write a dissertation
about religion, and faculty specializing in sociology of religion sometimes argue that
their work receives no respect in their departments or among the discipline’s leaders.
But several pieces of evidence run counter to the idea that it is hard to study religion
sociologically (and get away with it) because sociologists think religion is stupid. For
one, the historical argument can fairly easily be turned on its head. If Weber thought
himself to be religiously unmusical, he nevertheless devoted a large chunk of his life
to studying it (writing major treatises on the Protestant ethic, ancient Judaism, the
religions of China and India, as well as important comparative essays). Durkheim’s
last great work, to which he devoted some fifteen years of his life, was hisElementary
Forms of the Religious Life(1912/1976). Even Marx wrote more extensively (and more
sympathetically) about religion than the casual reader typically recognizes. Indeed,
political scientists (who may lament the paucity of reflection about religion in their
classical texts) typically argue that sociology has been the natural place in which to
take seriously the study of religion because it figured so prominently in the writings of
all the discipline’s founders.
A survey of the field at present also gives the lie to assertions about sociologists
being disinterested in religion. More than five hundred sociologists hold membership
in the Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association, putting it
squarely in the middle in size among the nearly forty sections of which the Association
is currently composed. Most of these members also belong to such organizations as
the Association for the Sociology of Religion and the Society for the Scientific Study of
Religion. At least two journals (Sociology of ReligionandJournal for the Scientific Study of
Religion) are devoted almost entirely to social scientific studies of religion, and scarcely
a year goes by without articles about religion appearing in such nonspecialized jour-
nals as theAmerican Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces,and
Sociological Forum. These articles, moreover, are not simply the work of a few specialists
who focus entirely on religion, but are authored by sociologists working in such areas
as stratification, family, demography, migration, and race relations.
One might object that sociologists of religion are a die-hard breed, stubbornly study-
ing religion even though most of their peers believe it to be increasingly irrelevant to
an enlightened world. This view appears to have been more prevalent a generation ago
than it is today. By the early 1960s, the legacies of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim had
been recast to form what was widely known as modernization theory. In its various ver-
sions, modernization theory suggested that industrialization, science and technology,
education, and expanding economic markets were gradually forging a culture in which
religion would no longer play much of a role. By the end of the 1970s, it was signifi-
cantly harder to take such arguments seriously. The 1979 Iranian revolution, in which
followers of Shi’ite Muslim Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (many of whom were college
educated professionals and business owners) overthrew the government of Moham-
mad Reza Shah Pahlavi (which had prided itself on its modernizing efforts), provided
a wake-up call to Western social scientists: Religion was still a force to be reckoned
with in world affairs. The 1978 mass suicide of some nine hundred followers (most
of whom were Americans) of cult leader Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana, prompted
questions about the lingering power of religion in affairs of the heart. Among sociol-
ogists themselves, the turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s surrounding the civil