Analysis of the Study of Religious Organizations 135
How has the religious sector resisted pressures to centralize, standardize, and become
more culturally comprehensible? What does this imply about the conditions of sectoral
evolution? These kinds of questions depend on the collection of comparable empiri-
cal data, and a stronger historical understanding of the institutional development of
religious organizations. The lack of standardization in the religious field makes the
collection of this archival data enormously complex, but ways around these difficulties
must be found.
Undertaking this enterprise will force scholars to move out of a parochial focus on
religious organizations alone and underline the necessity of broadening their focus to
other organizational populations. How are patterns of religious development different
from the development of new industries? New political movements? The development
of the arts sector? The development of the nonprofit sector? The computer industry? We
can only gain an understanding of how the religious sector has developed by comparing
it to the experiences of other institutional sectors.
Proposition 5:Attempts to classify static organizational types are problematic because
the religious sector is inherently dynamic. New organizational forms are continually
being formed through schism, merger, and the syncretic merger of ideas and organi-
zation. Traditional organizations also regenerate themselves constantly, adopting new
organizational forms and structures from the social behaviors around them. Religious
scholars need to reimagine the American religious landscape to include not only the
mainline denominations that have been the focus of the majority of religious research,
but the new religious movements, spiritual groups, and grassroots ideological move-
ments as well.
Rather than focus on identifying typologies of organizations, sociologists need to
focus on the kinds of social processes that delineate new social forms, what organiza-
tional scholars refer to as boundary setting and boundary spanning processes (Scott
1987). They need to focus not on organizations themselves but on the social processes
that are likely to create new social and organizational forms that may in turn create
new religious identities.
Focusing on social processes compels us to take a serious look at the forces that
divide the religious landscape, as well as those that create common ground. Views
on the tension between evangelicalism and progressive social justice, millennialism,
political participation, homosexuality, and the ordination of women are examples of
some of the social processes that have segregated people within their faith tradition.
How have these cleavages affected religious organizations? Have they led to new forms
of worship? New special interest groups? Schisms within churches?
By contrast, globalization, the Internet, ethnic assimilation, and missionary pro-
grams may act as boundary spanning processes that have helped to spur the merging
of different communities of faith in new ways. Internal strife over biblical interpretation
that has divided some denominations has created common cause among conservative
groups across denominations. Issues such as abortion have caused the Southern Baptists
and the Catholic hierarchy to come together in dialogue over other possible shared be-
liefs (Dillon 1995). Religion scholars need to find new ways to attend to the extra- and
interinstitutional conversations that are occurring between new partners in the reli-
gious sector as a way of understanding where new capacities for religious development
are occurring.