The function of ‘Church’ in the sociology of religion in America

Abstract

In large part, Max Weber’s essay ‘Church and sect in America’ was intended as a contrast between European and American societies at the turn of the 20th century. This could be pushed so far as to say that in fact the essay was not about religions at all but rather about the relationship between an old-order class system and a new-order class system in which sectarian religion provided a conduit to validate worldly success (i.e. the Protestant ethic), which directly contrasted with the institutional ‘style’ of the established churches of Europe, into whose membership one was born and through whose structures (e.g. church schools, including the universities) one’s social position was established. ‘Church,’ then, is in some respects a residual category for Weber, more of a background that would enable him to foreground what he saw as a new basis for ordering class/status within the new world. Over time, denominationalism in America hybridized churchly and sectarian elements to create a new socio-religious dynamic by which a central core of ‘nonsectarian’ religious affirmations created a variant mode of religious participation in which multiple religious options served functions historically associated with national churches in Europe. Postmodern globalization, however, has created new opportunities and challenges as institutionalized religions reach beyond historic geopolitical borders.

Twentieth-century sociology of religious organizational life was steeped in ‘Church–sect theory,’ an approach to organized religion that issued from two scholars who were themselves certainly friends, if not collaborators: Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber. In the latter quarter of the century, Weber scholars in particular were at pains to point out the differences between the two men’s approaches, which certainly were there. Nevertheless, from the vantage point of the present, what is perhaps more significant is the fact that the typology in either man’s version was able to grasp so much attention in the sociology of religion. In important ways this can be accounted for by the fact that while both men were Germans writing in German for a preeminently German audience, the impact of their work was most strongly felt in the United States; indeed, comparatively speaking, sociology as a whole had a particular goodness-of-fit with the lifeworld of what Seymour Martin Lipset would call The First New Nation. Church–sect encapsulated, even if it did not fully explain, the nature of class relations in the United States and the peculiar role of religion in America in contrast to the history of religions not only in Europe, but on a world scale as well – leading, for example, to the tongue-in-cheek adage, often ascribed to GK Chesterton, that ‘In America even the Catholics are Protestant.’

In this way, ‘Church’ came to symbolize the Old Order. With a capital C, Church was synonymous with the establishment of a religion (or a religious establishment), implicitly Christian by the choice of the term. Those bodies that Church–sect theory would eventually identify in the United States as Church-like were precisely those that were derivatives of European established Churches: Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Reformed, Lutheran, and to a lesser extent Orthodox. Each of these Churches was formally structured, had a relatively weaker or stronger hierarchy, used some form of differentiation among its members by social class (the last vestige of which was pew rents, but which also once included slave galleries), and was at the same time relatively accepting of a lifestyle that was ‘comfortable’ with the ways of the surrounding ‘world.’ This was expressed not only in a relative theological ‘ease’ that to a large extent endorsed the mores of the larger society, but also in physical accoutrements. Symbolizing the old order, however, did not devalue these institutions. They rather served as connecting tissue between the old world and the new. They brought a level of ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ to what was to a significant extent an otherwise primitive world – albeit, however, an already inhabited world.

It is nevertheless also the case that when the First New Nation was actually institutionalized as the United States of America, following the War of Independence, concerns about the role of religion, which were themselves shaped in reaction to previous European experience, led the founding fathers to take steps to ensure that the country would not be divided by religion, hence that the Church would be depoliticized and a generalized ‘public Protestantism,’ as Catherine Albanese has termed it, came to be taken as the norm. As she writes:

[E]ven as we immersed ourselves in the religious pluralism, from time to time we could not fail to notice the ways in which different traditions and movements seemed to take on some of the characteristics of the Protestant mainstream. Reform Jews of the late nineteenth century moved their Sabbath services to Sunday morning and imitated the style of Protestant worship. Catholics after Vatican II adopted a leaner and simpler version of the Mass, closer to the demands of the Protestant Reformation. Mormons and Adventists, who affirmed the good life in this world, resembled liberal Protestants in their optimism, while Japanese Buddhists in America spoke of churches, acknowledged bishops, and initiated Sunday services. Meanwhile, blacks who became middle class often gravitated toward congregations that were integrated or that resembled in their style the churches of white mainline Protestantism. (1992: 391)

Not for nothing, however, is it also the case that the very first clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is the one that not only allows freedom of religion but also prevents the establishment of any religion: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …’ (These are now known generally as the ‘no establishment’ and ‘free exercise’ clauses.) Significantly, these clauses also led to what became one of the first adjudications of the Constitution as a whole, in the 19th century, when challenges against established churches in some of the states of the United States were upheld by the Supreme Court; that is, these decisions established the principle that what was prohibited by the Constitution to Congress could not be enacted or enforced at any lower level of government in the country. Ironically, whether by coincidence or intent, it was the most ‘protestant’ of the state establishments that clung the longest and hardest to the concept of establishment – largely in the form of taxes to maintain church buildings.

Today, by contrast, the most significant acknowledgment in the United States of a religious group’s status as a religion is its achievement of tax-exempt status – which also will lead to specific tax privileges for its clergy and the right of its laity to deduct their contributions to religious organizations from their incomes when paying income taxes. Although this approach in a sense reverses the signs (i.e. from positive to negative, in the sense that rather than taxing on behalf of the religions and religious, the state exempts the religions and religious from a whole variety of taxes), the effect is still to differentiate and give favorable status to ‘religion’ among the various activities in which human beings participate. This is, of course, not at all what ‘Church’ meant in the work of either Weber or Troeltsch, but I would argue that it is a continuation of the societal privileges of ‘Church’ as Weber and Troeltsch both understood them. Although the United States does not impose any religion on anyone, it does reward both religions and the religious in this way. Another example is that many states within the United States provide different marriage license certificates for religious ceremonies and secular ceremonies – though all marriages must be recorded in a governmental courthouse to be legal. Similarly, when the United States had a military draft, it was much easier to get conscientious objector status if one had the papers filed with one’s draft board by one’s religious group than if one filed on the basis of a purely secular claim that ‘killing another human being is wrong.’

This formal matter of legal status aside, however, the distinctions among religious groups to which both Weber and Troeltsch pointed came gradually to be significant across broad contours within American society, in the sense that membership in a Church-like denomination generally signaled greater wealth, wider social acceptance and higher social status, while membership in a sectarian body signaled less wealth, more restricted social movement and lower social status. Social scientists, however, also perceived a ‘movement’ among some religious bodies from sect-like to Church-like characteristics across time. This was most dramatically evidenced among Methodists and Baptists, who, particularly in the geographic regions of their largest proportional population shares, seemed to ‘move’ over time into displaying more and more Church-like characteristics. Large and powerful Methodist and Baptist churches appeared especially in the Midwest and South, as these two groups appeared to be the bell-weathers of what Weber would call the ‘rising parvenus’ of American society. Outward accoutrements of Church-like religion such as vested, seminary-trained clergy, robed choirs, and stained-glass windows, as well as national and/or regional administrative bureaucracies of significant size also were consistent with the Churches of European establishment. It was also not unknown that leaders of these bodies should, more likely implicitly but sometimes explicitly, indicate how they felt their constituents should vote in the political arena – a tendency complemented by politicians’ attempts to align themselves with those leaders in the religious bodies where their causes were mutually attractive. Major political fundraising dinners, for example, would seek to find the ‘right’ clergyman to pronounce an invocation and/or benediction.

Population shifts were more likely to affect the denominations from which clergy were invited to perform these functions than the custom of the invitation itself. As Roman Catholics poured into northern East Coast cities, with them came their clergy, and before long it was the local bishop, later Archbishop or Cardinal, who might be similarly courted. While Republican Protestants may often have invoked the specter of the heavy hand of the Pope lurking behind every prayer, the politics of urban life made clear the shifts in ethnicities among constituencies and the leverage that might be applied by the appearance of the local hierarch on the platform with the Democratic candidate. If this association has become more subdued in recent years, it probably has more to do with the abortion question and related ‘family’ issues than it does with any shifts in political values, inasmuch as the Roman Catholic Church remains the largest single religious body in the United States – more than three times as large as the second-largest, the Southern Baptist Convention (itself twice as large as the Southern and Northern Baptist Conventions combined) – and there is no question that the Catholic Church sees having a ‘moral influence’ on its parishioners as part of its mandate among its adherents. Among rank-and-file Catholics themselves, however, there are wide differences of both social class and cultural milieu. In particular, the place and role of Hispanic Catholics in both the Church and wider society remains problematized, even as this is the fastest growing segment of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and the one that has the largest differential in the ratio of numbers of parishioners to numbers of priests originating from the ethnic group. ¹

Two contrasts may be offered to the American situation: first the Church of England, then the role of Islamic hierarchies in parts of the Middle East.

Her Majesty’s Church

Because both Americans and the British speak English, it is not surprising that many official events in the United Kingdom are televised in whole or in part in the United States. Royal weddings, funerals, coronations and celebrations, even opening ceremonies of the Houses of Parliament, have become a part of the American television scene. For many Americans, the Church of England is symbolic of what a State Church looks and acts like. There is great pageantry and decorum, spectacular music, dignified speech, and a sense of orderliness. These events are also always attended by large crowds, both in the church or cathedral and along the route that dignitaries take in their coming and going. Nothing is rushed. Everyone has his or her proper place. Structure is the order of the day.

What most Americans do not realize is that most Church of England parish churches are more empty than full on an average Sunday, that many Church of England clergy serve more than one cure on a salary that is likely half that of his or her average American denominational counterpart, that a growing number of churches are being declared ‘redundant’ (meaning eligible to be sold for any purpose at all, including destruction), yet at the same time, there may be two or three Church of England churches within a stone’s throw of each other. While it is still the case that a plurality of the British will call themselves ‘C of E,’ the Roman Catholic church is likely to have much larger Sunday congregations, and the Roman Catholic numbers would be followed by evangelicals, especially Afro-British evangelicals, and Muslims. In fact, the only churches that are probably more empty today than Church of England churches in the UK are those of historical mainline Protestant ‘dissenters’ – Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians.

Yet, indeed, the Church of England at the same time functions like a Church in the Church–sect typological sense that there are many royal chaplaincies and rounds of daily services in their chapels as well as in most cathedrals, often with paid choirs and musicians. In these respects the Church of England does, in fact, symbolize what might best be called today ‘the myth of a Christian England’ – not a lie, but a kind of recreated imagined past of what it always wanted to be. To enter into that imagined past is at one level to encounter what ‘the Church’ was meant to be – an encompassing of all that was good on earth and glorious in heaven for the building of a common society – which the British would in fact extend explicitly and materially in the concept of the Commonwealth of Nations. The Queen is the Supreme Governor of the Church. Above her is Christ; beneath her are her subjects. Chief among her subjects are Ministers – both of the State and of religion. Still today, for example, bishops of over 20 dioceses within the Church of England also have seats in the House of Lords by virtue of their being those dioceses’ bishops, and while it may be deprecatingly said that all the House of Lords does is rubber stamp the House of Commons, the fact that the Commons must send a bill to the House of Lords to get that rubber stamping says something about how a society where Church and State are joined thinks about itself.

The United Kingdom is not alone in this respect, but by history and language it is closest to the majority of Americans, regardless of their ancestry; hence the choice of broadcasters to include some of its major events among their programming. The Swedish Church, for example, has many of the same characteristics, as do some of the other Scandinavian state Churches. Although the Roman Catholic Church is similar to the state Churches in some respects, precisely because it claims to be a universal Church – and is, certainly, a world-wide Church – its particular identification with a specific ‘people’ (which is in many respects a specific language group) is more characteristic of the ideal-typical Church in the sense that ‘everyone speaks the same language’ and that this distinguishes them from everyone else. For example, only rarely are Roman Catholic liturgies originating from the Vatican shown in their entirety on American television, unlike services from the Church of England. There is certainly Roman Catholic television programming in America, but it originates from within the United States, often sponsored by religious orders, whose chapels are quite small. Hence the grandeur of ‘the Church’ that is communicated by the various State services in the majestic buildings of the Church of England is muted by the ‘intimacy’ of these chapel settings.

Islam and America

There is no question that the attacks of 11 September 2001 were a startling wake-up call to Americans with regard to the growth of Islam. In some respects they should not have been, inasmuch as the Iranian hostage-takings of 1979 had already signaled a new era in relations between the United States and the Islamic world. The hostage-takings did occur in Iran, however, not in downtown Manhattan. In that respect, 9/11 was and is comparable to Pearl Harbor, except that it left a somewhat undefined enemy – at least at the outset. Only last year was Osama bin-Laden finally located and eliminated. Setting aside the obvious doctrinal differences between Islam and Christianity, it is nevertheless the case that Islam is much more Church-like in the Weberian sense than most Christian religious expressions, other than Roman Catholicism, with which not only Americans but also most Westerners are familiar.

Orthodoxy and Islam have a bit more in common, but most Westerners are also unfamiliar with Orthodoxy as it is expressed in its native lands. Because of the role of the Soviet Union as the major Orthodox nation in the world, on the one hand, but also the United States’ major adversary for almost half of the 20th century, the operation of Orthodoxy as a ecclesiastical ‘system’ is not at all familiar in the West generally – just as Islam was not until 1979. One might well substantiate the hypothesis that most American-born Orthodox do not themselves understand the working of Orthodoxy outside the American context. In addition, Orthodoxy in the United States is fractured by ethnicism, which can make it appear more sectarian than churchly, especially to outsiders, and it is Greek Orthodoxy that is the largest ethnic Church and most evenly spread across the United States. Different ethnicities in the coal fields of Western Pennsylvania, for example, from those in Detroit make their two respective orthodoxies essentially denominations, whose separate identities are based more on ethnicity than other aspects of lifestyle. More than one American wishing to convert to Greek Orthodoxy, for example, has been asked the question, ‘Why would you want to be Orthodox? You’re not Greek.’ ²

Islam, however, is essentially Church-like in Weber’s terms. Shi’ite is more caesaropapalist than Sunni, but each form in its own geographic spheres of influence is clearly a ‘Church’ in the Weberian sense. The ironic effect of this is also to create a sectarian Islam in situations where its membership constitutes only a small share of the population, but also a divided Islam when its constituents come from essentially different Islamic systems from different parts of the world. This is a place where sociology of religion, through Church–sect theory, can make a greater potential contribution than it has thus far, not merely in an analytic sense but also in application and possibly thereby toward conflict resolution. These observations, though written with the American context in mind, are not by any means restricted to American society.

Because of the extent to which the United States is steeped in denominationalism, Americans have little practical experience of dealing with religion as a zero-sum game. In particular, Americans find the notion of lose–lose an unattractive way to view the world. Ordinary, everyday conversation in the United States is punctuated by references to creating ‘win–win’ situations. In practice, however, lose–lose underlies much religious discord and violence on the global stage today, and in some respects we can use the history of the West to place this into a meaningful analytic framework not existentially desirable to the majority of Westerners. The nature of denominationalism in America is built on a win–win model; that is, Christian denominations perceive themselves, relatively speaking, joined in a common cause toward a single goal. The majority of Christian congregations each Sunday repeat some creedal statement that refers to Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. People do this routinely even though they realize that the formal multiplicity of different denominations at one level and their own informal experience of denominational divisions at another are quite distinct. This is explained by some form of reference to the differences between the earthly and heavenly Churches. On the other hand, we know it was not always so. There were wars of religion that persisted across centuries in Europe, but these are now largely behind us as the contemporary Church seeks to be inclusive, while transcending those differences that remain by appeals to ‘the heavenly Jerusalem,’ where the limitations of this world are overcome.

Segments of the Muslim world, by contrast, hark back to the time of the Crusades, but they see a different world order from that of the days of the Crusades. In particular, oil from both North Africa and the Middle East has played a dramatic economic role in restructuring the political economics of Muslim societies, and the African nations that emerged from colonial regulation at the end of the 20th century are fertile grounds for recruitment, but also for conflicts, among Muslim sectors. Although at least some form of quasi-liberal democracy exists in those societies with colonial pasts, these are not immune to influence by oil wealth. A diverse pattern of competing claims to Islamic representation obscures but does not eliminate an underlying drive for political suzerainty, the outcome of which would be a Church-like structuring of the religious field. These kinds of clashes have also been seen in more localized conflicts between competing Muslim exegetes among diaspora populations in the West. As a whole, these may be analogized to the Wars of Religion that persisted in the West into the 19th century and continued to flare up into the 21st century in places like Northern Ireland.

Civil religion, implicit religion, and Church

The introduction of the concept of ‘civil religion’ into American sociology of religion by Robert Bellah in 1967 (drawing upon both Rousseau and Tocqueville) provides insight into a particularly American ‘take’ on both religion and Church. The notion of civil religion suggests in this use a relatively diffuse ‘religion of America,’ but historically its base has always been in Judeo-Christianity, and in that sense one could say that there has from the time of the United States’ founding been a generalized sense of what the religious attitude of its population as a corporate body should be. One could also turn this around and say what the ‘Church of America’ is. This is in a sense analogous to the ‘public Protestantism’ of which Albanese writes, but operating at a slightly more diffuse level in the sense that it extends beyond both the religious and para-religious into a generalized national consciousness to include a measure of the worship of the United States itself as a kind of ‘holy commonwealth.’ This particularly religious ‘take’ on the nation manifests itself in the very use of the term ‘America’ as synonymous with the United States, leaving both Canada and Mexico out explicitly but keeping them in implicitly, through things like the Monroe Doctrine, which basically asserts that the United States has the right to defend its interests anywhere, and that Canada and Mexico are certainly part of its interests. In effect, then, the United States is saying that it will move militarily into either Canada or Mexico (as it has in the past) to protect its interests, which in some respects are also taken to be God’s interests.

Particularly visible evidence of the Religion of America in a religion of American origin is Mormonism (Latter-day Saints). Although Mormonism is normally treated as a ‘new religion’ and largely stands officially separated from the American Christian Churches, nevertheless the religion has not only a global presence but also a specifically American epicenter in Salt Lake City. The Mormon Church structure is patently hierarchical, the Church President having basically infallible authority, but at the same time, the Church eschews the trappings of hierarchy, and it makes a strong advance of its program through the Mormon Tabernacle choir, whose concerts often feature heavy doses of religio-patriotic music (e.g. God Bless America and America the Beautiful). Thus there is a sense in which Mormonism as a new religion is also a quasi ‘Religion of America,’ in that it uses its American base and the resources of civil religion in America to paint a picture of itself as what God is calling America and the world to be. The message it takes out to the world from Salt Lake and through its graduates of Brigham Young University is twofold: one side is the acceptance of the Christian faith in its Mormon articulation, but the other is a faith in the American way of life and the rewards of the Gospel of Success. As I write this, a man of Mormon heritage is the Republican party’s candidate for President in 2012. Can the parousia be far behind?

As Mormonism becomes a world religion, it also reinforces itself as a Universal Church. Mormons, for example, refer to themselves as being ‘in the Church,’ a phrase that was once far more common in the UK (as in the question, ‘Church or chapel?’ when one was queried about one’s membership) or among Roman Catholics in America (as in, ‘Is s/he in the Church?’). This self-characterization is sharply different from such groups as Jehovah’s Witnesses or Baha’i, both of which remain highly sectarian and separatist in style of presentation. Although it is true that there are now Mormon temples in other parts of the world in addition to Salt Lake City, pilgrimage to Salt Lake City remains a high priority for all Mormons. In addition, the outreach of Mormons through the expectation that all Mormons will devote a period of extended service to the Church at some point in their lives means that as the movement becomes more and more extended globally it takes on the characteristics of a global actor beyond the narrowly ‘religious’ sphere. So, for example, Mormons have representatives in Geneva working with the United Nations Human Rights Council as part of their dedicated service to the Church. This positions them along with other ‘official’ religion-based (e.g. Roman Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist) representations accredited to, hence derivatively by, the UN. Again, this enhances Mormonism’s Church-like status. As Mormon representatives are accredited to the UNHRC, the Mormon Church is also implicitly accredited by the UNHRC as a ‘legitimate’ religious body – a credential that has global significance. As all national societies ‘go global,’ the standing of the Mormon Church in the eyes of ordinary American citizens becomes less of a priority for the Church than global membership gains, e.g. in South America, parts of the former Soviet Union, and the Pacific rim. The fact that the United States does not have a state Church can actually serve Mormon global evangelization in the sense that Mormonism has no explicit loyalty to any worldly power, hence it can be characterized as a religion originating in North America but intended for the whole world and acting on that intention by reaching out to the whole world. What the consequences of this will be both for Mormonism and for worldwide Christianity remain to be observed across the 21st century.