70 Grace Davie
legacy of the European past. With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that Europeans
bring to their religious organizations an entirely different repertoire of responses from
their American counterparts. Most Europeans, it is clear, look at their churches with
benign benevolence – they are useful social institutions, which the great majority in
the population are likely to need at one time or another in their lives (not least at
the time of a death). It simply does not occur to most of them that the churches will
or might cease to exist but for their active participation. It is this attitude of mind
that is both central to the understanding of European religion and extremely difficult
to eradicate. It, rather than the presence or absence of a market, accounts for a great
deal of the data on the European side of the Atlantic. It is not that the market isn’t
there (it quite obviously is in most parts of Europe, if not quite in all); it is simply
that the market doesn’t work, given the prevailing attitudes of large numbers in the
population.
What I am trying to say, using a geographical rather than sociological metaphor, is
that a map of the Rockies (i.e., more rigorous versions of rational choice theory) has to
be adapted for use in Europe – just like the map of the Alps (secularization theory) for
those who venture in the reverse direction. The map of the Rockies can, however, open
up new and pertinent questions if used judiciously and not only to test the significance
of religious pluralism strictly speaking (see Hamberg and Pettersson 1994). Interesting
possibilities emerge, for example, in the cultural as well as organizational applications
of rational choice theory (RCT) – not least with respect to televangelism. Why is it that
the European market fails to operate with respect to this particular form of religion? Or
to put the point even more directly, why has it not been possible tocreatea market for
this particular product? Is it simply the lack of a suitable audience or is something more
subtle at stake?^5 It might, in addition, be useful to examine in more depth, and over
a longish historical period, the relationship between capital and religion in Europe.
In different historical periods, this has been extremely strong (hence, for example,
the wealth of religious art and architecture, particularly in Southern Europe – Tuscan
examples come particularly to mind). Currently, however, the relationship is weak, or
at least much weaker, although it is interesting to discover how much Europeans are
willing to invest in their religious buildings at the turn of the millennium, even among
Nordic populations where churchgoing is notoriously low (Backstr ̈ ̈om and Bromander
1995). Used imaginatively, RCT can open up new and interesting areas of enquiry on
both sides of the Atlantic.
All too easily, however, the debate turns into a sociological fight to the death in
which one paradigm has to emerge the winner. One form of this “fight” can be found
in repeated attempts to identify the real “exceptionalism.” Is this to be the United States,
that is, a vibrant religious market in a highly developed country, but clearly without
parallel in the modern (developed) world? Or is this to be Europe, the only part of the
world in which secularization can be convincingly linked to modernization, but no
longer – as was assumed for so long – a global prototype with universal applicability?
Casanova (2001) is one author anxious to escape from this repetitious and circular
argument; we need, he argues, to think increasingly in global terms.
(^5) There is plenty of evidence that Europeans feared that televangelism would penetrate European
culture given the increasing deregulation of the media; in Britain, for example, it became a
major preoccupation in parliamentary debate (Quicke and Quicke 1992).