and well-documented history of effectiveness, and it can be credited with many notable
successes. In America, for example, it is a founding principle of the state that ‘‘Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof ’’ (the First Amendment): the Founding Fathers, schooled by the
Reformation and Enlightenment experiences of violent sectarianism, believed that
religion had the potential to destabilize the political order; so they established the
doctrine of ‘‘the separation of church and state.’’ History has repeatedly proved their
fears. The American colonies themselves were founded as a result of religious conflict.
During the American Civil War the abolitionist movement was promoted to a large
degree through religious organizations; the same phenomenon can be observed in
the 1960s civil rights movement. In worship the poor have traditionally found
and continue to find an outlet for hostility toward the wealthy; religion and class
warfare go hand in hand. The ‘‘Liberation Theology’’ professed by some Catholic
priests expedited class conflict in Central America and elsewhere. Religious activism
played an important part in the demise of east European communist regimes and in the
bloody conflicts in the Near East and central Europe over the past twenty years.
The theory of religious and social coherence further presumes that society itself is
coherent. The structural integrity of society is not self-evident; indeed, at first glance
such a monolithic perspective appears to be a grotesque over-simplification. Given the
patent complexity of even individual social status might we not better imagine
individuals as members of many conflicting groups, including religious groups, rather
than as smoothly meshing cogs in some well-lubricated social machine? For socio-
logists, society is by definition coherent; if it is not, it is not a (single) society.
Individuals are circumscribed by society, in the singular; apparent contradictions in
their status need to be reconciled. Incoherence is unintelligible, and its recognition in
a society would be tantamount to an admission of disciplinary inadequacy.
The objection is obvious, and sociologists have traditionally countered that social
incoherence is only apparent; conflicts embody dynamic oppositions that are intrinsic
to the social order, and even work to maintain its stability. So, for example, racial
tensions in America today might work to channel the energy of the poor along
(relatively) harmless ethnic lines: poor Anglos may hate poor Hispanics and Blacks
and vice versa, rather than uniting to direct their hostilities more dangerously, against
the wealthy. Or again, allowing a person of low economic status (say a janitor) to hold
a position of importance (say the deaconship of a church) provides an outlet for
thwarted aspirations and helps reconcile the poor to their subordination.
Religion, however, provides only one kind of access to knowledge of the tran-
scendent; it has competitors. By the third quarter of the fifth century BC Greek
philosophy clearly offered itself as an alternative to religious knowledge; since the
time of Galileo, philosophy’s descendant, empirical science, has offered another. The
competition of religion with philosophy, and later with science, illustrates that not
only the content of knowledge matters, but also the character of the knowing. The
‘‘scientific method’’ has proved corrosive of religious faith and arguably even of the
moral values traditionally promoted by religion. However that may be, it seems
reasonable that an order of knowledge based on tradition and authority will be
compatible with comparable social orders, while an order of knowledge based on
debate and consensus will be compatible with those in which power is managed
through group discussions and resolutions. For those who believe in the ultimate
284 Charles W. Hedrick Jr.