94 Mark Chaves and Laura Stephens
practice and belief – misses something crucial about religion’s social significance. Con-
sider, for example, the difference between two charismatic worship services, complete
with speaking in tongues, one occurring in an urban Pentecostal church on a Sunday
morning in the contemporary United States, the other occurring outside a village in
colonial central Africa at a time early in the twentieth century when, as Karen Fields
(1985) has described, charismatic religion – simply by encouraging baptizing and speak-
ing in tongues – challenged the traditional religious authority on which colonial rule
was based. Or consider, to offer another example, the difference between two “new
age” religious groups, both of which encourage certain kinds of physical exercise in
order to achieve spiritual peace and growth, one meeting in a YMCA somewhere in
New York City, the other meeting in a park somewhere in Beijing. In each example,
the exact same religious action takes on a dramatically different meaning and can lead
to very different consequences depending on the institutional and political context in
which it occurs. In some times and places speaking in tongues, or seeking health by
stretching one’s limbs, or some other religious practice, shakes social institutions and
provokes hostile reactions. In other times and places, such displays shake nothing at all
beyond the bodies of the faithful, and they provoke little hostility or, indeed, any reac-
tion at all. The social significance of religious practice – its capacity to mean something
beyond itself – depends on the institutional and political arrangements in which it
occurs.
From this perspective, it is reasonable to wonder about the relevance of contin-
uing high levels of religious belief and practice to larger questions about religion’s
social significance in the United States. High levels of interest in things spiritual and
supernatural probably means that both old religions and new religious movements
continually will try to mobilize that interest, and some of them probably will achieve
great success in bringing people into the fold, increasing their religious beliefs and ac-
tivities, and gathering resources sufficient to build impressive religious organizations.
Less clear, however, is the extent to which even a wildly successful religious move-
ment should be taken to indicate much of a gain in religion’s social significance if
its success mainly means influencing what people do with some of their leisure time
each week in a society where such activity only occasionally reverberates beyond the
walls of a religious meeting place. Numerical increases within the United States in
specific religious traditions or in specific types of religious practice are interesting to
chart in their own right. But such increases within a society where religious insti-
tutions are not, in general, directly connected to other important social institutions
lack the social consequences they would have in a society in which this or that reli-
gious tradition or practice constitutes a challenge to the authority of political leaders
or social elites. Religion’s place in the institutional system of most advanced industrial
societies limits the capacity for religious belief and activity to be socially consequen-
tial. It limits a religious movement’s capacity to be world-changing, even if it converts
millions.
The social significance of religious belief and participation, however common they
remain, depends fundamentally on the institutional settings in which they occur. This
is why the religious movements of our day with the greatest potential for increasing
religion’s social significance may not be those movements that simply seek new con-
verts or influence individuals’ religious belief and practice, however successful they
might be. The movements with the greatest potential for increasing religion’s social