Holland, Germany, the United States) had advanced earlier and further than Catholic
countries such as Italy, Portugal, Spain, and France.
Perhaps the Protestant Reformation had freed individuals from constraints and
enabled each individual to develop his or her relationship to God directly, without
priests or churches as intermediaries. The Protestant Church was simply the gather-
ing together of equal individuals, each man being “his own church.” In its most
extreme forms, such as Puritanism or Quakerism, there were no priests at all but sim-
ply the gathering of congregants.
The Protestant image of God was also more abstract and distant, less personal
and intimately involved in the day-to-day life of believers. But while Catholicism
offered certainty—believers were certain they were going to heaven if they fulfilled
the sacraments—Protestantism offered only insecurity; one could never know God’s
plan. This insecurity led Protestants, especially Calvinists, to begin to work excep-
tionally hard in this life to reduce the insecurity about where they might be going when
they die (because that could not be known). Thus, Weber argued, individuals began
to work harder and longer, to approach economic life rationally, through careful cal-
culation of costs and benefits, and to resist the temptation to enjoy the fruits of their
labor—which led to rapid and dramatic accumulation of capital for investment. And
this accumulation eventually enabled capitalism in the West to become self-sustaining.
Weber was pessimistic about the future of this economic activity. Without the orig-
inal ethical and religious foundation, Weber predicted, we would become trapped in
an “iron cage” of routine, senseless economic acquisition. The very activities that we
believed would give meaning to our lives would turn out to eventually leave us empty.
All three of these classical theorists shared several sociological insights. First, although
we may experience our religious beliefs as individuals, religion is a profoundly social
phenomenon. And they all believed that religiosity,the extent of one’s reli-
gious belief, typically measured by attendance at religious observances or
maintaining religious practices, would decline in modern societies. None
would have predicted that religion would be as important to Americans
as it is today.
Religious Groups
Because religion is so profoundly social, there are many forms of religious
organizations. Some are small scale, with immediate and very personal
contact; others are larger institutions with administrative bureaucracies
that rival those of complex countries. These differ not only in size and
scale but also in their relationship to other social institutions, the level of
training for specific roles within the religion, and the levels of adminis-
tration (Table 15.1).
Cults
The simplest form of religious organization, a cult,forms around a spe-
cific person or idea drawn from an established religion. It is often formed
by splitting off from the main branch of the religion. Cults are distin-
guished by the measure of loyalty they extract from members. Typically
small, they are also composed of deeply fervent believers. Some cults
prophesize the end of the world and are called “doomsday cults.”
RELIGIOUS GROUPS 491Most religions are pretty serious business.
When you’re discussing the big questions,
there’s not much room for jokes. But one
religion, the Church of the Reformed Druid,
got its start as a joke. Back in 1963, at
Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota,
all students were required to attend
Lutheran religious services—unless they
belonged to another church. Isaac Bonewitz
and his friends didn’t belong to any church,
so they invented one, the Church of the
Reformed Druid, with the most bizarre
beliefs and rituals that they could think of,
and held regular, crazy meetings. It worked—
the requirement to attend religious services
was repealed.
Then something remarkable happened.
Members didn’t want to disband. They had
found spiritual meaning in the invented
beliefs and practices. The church still exists
today (Adler, 1997).Didyouknow