Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

(WallPaper) #1

26 Robert Wuthnow


MISUNDERSTANDINGS ABOUT NORMATIVE CONCERNS


Besides theoretical and methodological questions, concerns about normative issues
persistently emerge in the relationships between religion and sociology. My student
who is interested in sibling differences is likely to think it strange that sociology requires
bracketing her interests in healing conflicts between siblings or finding ways to combat
authoritarian parenting styles that may be rooted in religious beliefs. To be told that
she must approach her topic “scientifically” will seem odd when she knows that she
selected it because of some deep concern from her personal experience. Adopting a
“value-neutral” perspective will seem strained if she recognizes that much of what she
reads in sociology is hardly free of normative concerns.
These concerns can be illustrated by a graduate student who, when asked by another
member of a seminar if her work was going to include a normative focus, vehemently
denied that she had any normative intentions. Her study – an interesting analysis of
Jewishkitsch(Nike yarmulkes, Mickey Mouse dreidls, plastic Torahs) – was to focus
purely on a description of the phenomenon under investigation and an explanation
of why some people were attracted to it more than others. But why, I wondered, was
she interested in the topic in the first place? And what difference would it make if she
succeeded in producing a brilliant study of it?
This example suggests the difficulty of drawing a hard-and-fast line between norma-
tive concerns and empirical concerns (and of associating sociology exclusively with the
latter). The student came to her topic because of an interest in material culture, which
has recently attracted attention as a dimension of religious expression that may have
deeper meaning and more staying power than theological arguments do, especially in
a religiously diverse context (McDannell 1995; Joselit 1994; Wuthnow 1999). Yet the
student also recognized that goods produced for mass consumption can trivialize the
sacred, leaving it somehow inauthentic. In addition, one person’s definition ofkitsch
may be another person’s definition of fine art (often because of social class differences).
In short, the project was thoroughly laced with normative issues, and to ignore them
would be to diminish the importance of doing it. What the student meant to say was
that she was not going to take a standat the startas to whetherkitschwas good or bad.
Hopefully, by the end of her study, she would be in a position to make some evaluative
claims.
To be sure, one of the fears on the part of scholars in the discipline at large that
sometimes influences their perceptions of work in sociology of religion is that its au-
thors are themselves so wedded to a particular religious orientation that their study (if
not their entire career trajectory) will be guided by that commitment. This fear, how-
ever, fades in comparison to the greater concern that scholarship (in whatever field)
is pursued simply as a kind of game, perhaps to promote one’s career or because an
oddity occurred to them that nobody else had examined. The intellectual challenge
is identifying problems of sufficient gravity to make some difference to an audience
beyond that of a few like-minded peers. If this challenge is not met, then adopting a
“sociological” stance toward religion will seem peculiar indeed.
Concerns about normative issues require us to return briefly to the subject of theory.
The works of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and other classic figures remain of interest to
contemporary sociologists of religion, not so much for specific testable hypotheses that
may have been neglected by previous generations of scholars, but as a kind of common
moral discourse. In part, this discourse is the glue that holds the field together, just as

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