Studying Religion, Making It Sociological 21
MISUNDERSTANDINGS ABOUT THEORY
When asked what makes their work distinctively sociological, sociologists sooner or
later resort to the argument that their discipline is guided by theory. They eschew
studies that are not theoretical enough. To be relevant, a work must be theoretical (or
at least have obvious theoretical implications). What does this mean in the study of
religion?
One meaning of theory in sociology is that the discipline is a theory-building en-
terprise. In this interpretation, the goal of sociological inquiry is to create a persuasive
theory of human behavior based on axiomatic laws and scientific generalizations, a
bit like achieving a unified theory of the universe. A generation ago (and periodically
thereafter) sociological thinking about theory-building was preoccupied with the ques-
tion of reductionism; that is, with whether or not a good theory of human behavior
needed to be constructed within the social sciences at all, or whether everything could
just as easily be reduced to biological or chemical explanations. That issue was largely
resolved by arguing that human behaviorcouldbe reduced but that sociological expla-
nations nevertheless remained interesting. It left open the question of what exactly a
theory (let alone a theory of religion) might look like.
The closest candidate for a truly comprehensive theory of religion was the idea of
secularization, which in turn was grounded in assumptions about modernization. Sec-
ularization theory drew on Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, among others, to suggest that
the social influence of religion had diminished between roughly the fifteenth century
and the twentieth century. Secularization was taken to be an instance of institutional
differentiation, the process by which institutions in larger, more complex, economically
developed societies become more autonomous from one another. The idea of secular-
ization, therefore, placed the study of religion in a larger historical context, suggesting
some of the important processes to be observed, and providing a central interpretation
of these processes (Swatos and Christiano 1999; Gorski 2000).
As modernization came increasingly to be questioned during the 1970s and 1980s,
so did secularization theory. Efforts to derive testable hypotheses from this theory often
failed to take into account its emphasis on long-term processes, but these efforts also
suggested its limitations in the short-run. Religious commitment in the United States,
for instance, did not appear to be diminishing, despite the fact that industrialization,
science and technology, and higher education were all increasing. Nor was it easy to
explain the rise of new religious movements or the resurgence of evangelical and fun-
damentalist movements within this framework. If theory-building meant conducting
studies of religion aimed at buttressing the ideas of modernization and secularization,
then fewer and fewer sociologists of religion appeared to be interested in this endeavor.
Currently, a few sociologists of religion continue to search for a unified theory of
human behavior that can make sense of religion. During the 1980s, for instance, there
was a temporary flurry of interest in rational choice theory, an idea borrowed from
economics that aimed to explain behavior in terms of the choices made by rational in-
dividuals trying to maximize their personal gratification (Young 1997). This perspective
failed to have any significant impact on the larger discipline of sociology, other than
to fuel the growth of a new subfield known as economic sociology, largely because it
denied the very social embeddedness of individuals that is central to sociological un-
derstandings of human behavior and, as some critics observed, rested on assumptions