Studying Religion, Making It Sociological 19
rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War stimulated rethinking of
the modernization paradigm along lines ranging from greater awareness of upheaval
and social conflict, to interest in “postmodernist” literary perspectives and new think-
ing from feminist theory and women’s studies, to recognition of the roles that religion
often plays in countercultural movements and ethical behavior. The nation also had a
self-proclaimed “born again” president in the person of Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter
and would soon see fundamentalist leaders such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the
television preacher Pat Robertson gaining a platform in partisan politics. Sociologists
might still be mildly puzzled (or even put off) by many of these manifestations of
religious vigor, but religion had clearly become difficult to ignore.
None of this resurgence of religious vitality necessarily ran counter to the assump-
tion that religion was stupid (or at least retrograde). Indeed, surveys of faculty and
graduate students conducted in the late 1970s demonstrated relatively high rates of
religious unbelief among social scientists, compared to the public and even compared
to faculty and graduate students in the natural and applied sciences (Wuthnow 1989:
142–57). But sympathy for one’s subject matter has seldom been a prerequisite for re-
search and teaching: Sociologists routinely study homicide without being sympathetic
to murders; racial discrimination, without sympathy for racists; revolutions, without
being revolutionaries; and so on. Just as Weber had done, sociologists at the end of the
twentieth century included prominent figures who studied religion from the perspec-
tive of atheism or agnosticism, no less than ones drawn to it because of personal faith.
To suggest, then, that the tensions between religion and sociology can be under-
stood in terms of sociologists taking a dim view of religion does not get us very far.
To be sure, a sociologist specializing in formal organizations or criminology may not
immediately express enthusiasm for the latest work in sociology of religion. But that
response reveals more about the high degree of specialization within subfields that now
characterizes the discipline than it does something peculiar to the study of religion.
OBJECTION #2: SOCIOLOGY HAS A QUIRKY VIEW OF THE WORLD
If the tensions between religion and sociology cannot be understood in terms of sociol-
ogists having a jaundiced view of religion, they also cannot be explained by ascribing
a quirky view of the world in general to sociologists. Let us return momentarily to my
student who wonders how to make her study of religion “sociological.” Part of her dif-
ficulty may be that she thinks sociologists view the world through different eyes than
everyone else. Why would she possibly think that? Perhaps because sociology is a lan-
guage she has acquired later in her intellectual development than virtually every other
subject: like most college students, her secondary education exposed her to history,
literature, biology, chemistry, and physics, but not to sociology; she came to it only in
college. Or perhaps her sociology professors have bent over backward to disabuse her
of the suspicion that sociology is basically common sense: telling her that it requires
special thinking, that it is difficult, and that she must learn a new vocabulary. Now that
she has a big project ahead that must be “sociological,” she realizes there must be an
alien culture into which she must translate her interests to make them acceptable.
This concern may be particularly worrisome for a student tackling a topic about
religion. Faith systems (not uniquely) have a way of resisting encroachment. This is
how they survive (and why some critics call them closed systems). If, as our student