Method for an historical political sociology of religion

Abstract

The work of Shailer Mathews (1863-1941) offers an important, though neglected, sociological theory of the evolution of religion. A theologian and long-time dean of the divinity school at the University of Chicago, Mathews develops his sociological understanding as a foundation for articulating a theology adequate to the needs of the modern age. Influenced by evolutionary currents of thought, interpreted along pragmatist lines, Mathews sees religion as part of the will to life, a vital means of adapting, and adapting to, the cosmos, understood in personal terms. By entreating the cosmos in personal terms, Mathews illuminates the intertwined development of religion and the state, with attendant changes to the predominant understanding of the gods.

Shailer Mathews (1863–1941) was a widely respected early advocate of, and active contributor to, the new discipline of sociology in America. Over his career he published 13 articles in the American Journal of Sociology (AJS), one in The Journal of Social Forces (precursor to Social Forces), as well as many books and articles in other outlets that display the hallmarks of an active and creative sociological imagination. But Mathews was a sociologist neither by training nor by institutional position; rather, he was a long-serving professor of historical theology in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago from 1894, serving as Dean from 1908 until his retirement in 1933. Given the scope, novelty and independent contribution of his sociological writings on religion, however, it is still surprising that his work has been completely ignored by sociologists, especially those who take an interest in the study of religion.

Mathews was a keen campaigner for the ‘Social Gospel’ for which he was at one time among the movement’s best-known representatives, and a proponent of modernist theology. His articles in the AJS, on ‘Christian Sociology’ (1895a, 1895b, 1895c, 1896a, 1896b, 1896c, 1896d, 1896e) are more contributions to a theology of the social gospel than sociology as we understand it today. They attempt to articulate the starting point for a Christian social ethic in terms that would demonstrate the relevance – real and potential – of the churches to the movements of social amelioration of his day. The better sociology, as sociology, is primarily found elsewhere in Mathews’ very extensive list of publications (Lindsey, 1985). Here I consider Mathews’ historical-sociological method and argue that the time is ripe for a recovery of, and critical dialogue with, his sociological work, especially given that his historical sociology of religious evolution anticipates important recent currents in the discipline.

Mathews’ work is an hitherto unrecognised precursor to Bellah’s (2011) important argument for understanding religion in the context of biological and socio-cultural evolution, while also differing from it in some key assumptions, thereby contributing to the ongoing conversation and debate about religion in human evolution. This conversation seems to itself be largely waiting to be taken up within sociology itself, and is still dominated instead by evolutionary psychology (but see McCaffree and Abrutyn, 2020), even as Bellah’s opening-up that conversation for sociologists of religion has been widely recognised as constituting its own axial revolution (Joas, 2014; Turner, 2016). This is undoubtedly in part a result of sociology’s ‘retreat into the present’ (Elias, 1987), and the tendency of sociologists of religion to view evolutionary thinking with some scepticism (Guhin, 2013). However, if Roger O’Toole (1984) is right that one of the functions of classic thinkers within a knowledge community is – paradoxically – that they enable new conversations, a further reason why this is still largely a conversation waiting to happen within the sociology of religion may itself be that there has been a lack of recognised ancestors who could be engaged in dialogue with Bellah’s masterpiece. This paper suggests that Shailer Mathews work provides a meaningful classic for stimulating and orienting such discussions.

In this paper, I am concerned with Mathews’ sociology, even when it is found in his more explicitly theological writings, leaving the re-assessment of his theological arguments to those better placed to do so than I am. As a sociologist, I inevitably approach the corpus of his work with different questions, concerns, and highlight different aspects of his work than will scholars interested in either the history of theology (Dorrien, 2003) or in constructive Christian theology (Jesse, 2004; Lindsey, 1997; Schüssler Fiorenza and Kauffman, 1998).

A brief biographical sketch

Shailer Mathews was almost as much an accidental theologian as he was an inadvertent sociologist. Raised in a pious New England Baptist family, he studied at Colby College, and, upon graduation seems to have somewhat reluctantly followed his parents’ expectations and the available options and pursued ministerial studies at Andover Seminary. He decided against ordination during his studies at Andover, though later recalled having briefly considered becoming a missionary to Madras (Mathews, 1936: 38). His academic course was set when Albion W. Small put him to work at Colby College teaching elocution and rhetoric (Lindsey, 1997: 43). When Small was elected to the presidency of Colby College, Small had Mathews transferred to cover his teaching complement in the department of History and Political Economy (44). In preparation for his new career teaching history and political economy, Mathews was sent to Berlin, where he studied with historians Ignaz Jastrow and Hans Delbrück, and political economist Adolf Wagner (Dorrien, 2003: 183). Adolph Harnack, a popular lecturer who was beginning to make a name for himself as one of the great liberal protestant theologians of his day was teaching at the University of Berlin. So far removed was Mathews from the theological conversations at the university, that he later could not recall having even heard Harnack lecture (Mathews, 1936: 42; Dorrien, 2003: 183).

In 1892 Small was recruited to the new Rockefeller University being built on the south side of Chicago, adjacent to the construction site where the Columbian World’s Fair was to be held the following year. Small had a mandate from William Rainey Harper, Rockefeller’s choice for President of the new University, to build the first department of sociology at the University of Chicago – a new discipline well suited to a modern research university with strong social commitments. As he left Colby, Small indicated to Mathews that he should start swotting-up on his sociology, and that Small would send for him as soon as practicable. Before Small had the chance to recruit Mathews as a junior member of the sociology department, Ernest DeWitt Burton offered Mathews a chair in New Testament at the same university. This was somewhat surprising, as Mathews did not feel well qualified to hold a position in New Testament studies and was ambivalent about teaching in a divinity school (having already declined a permanent position at Andover seminary (Mathews, 1936: 50)). However, it was a secure offer and Mathews accepted, having caught Burton’s enthusiasm for the exciting prospect of this new research university with a strong public outreach programme. Burton had evidently convinced Mathews that his formation as an empiricist historian could be readily repurposed for teaching New Testament history. Further he would have the freedom to approach New Testament studies sociologically, in line with his new passion for the emerging discipline (Dorrien, 2003). Mathews’ administrative as well as intellectual talents were quickly recognised soon after he began in 1894, and he was appointed as an Associate Dean of the Divinity School from 1899, after which he served as Dean for 25 years, from 1908 to his retirement in 1933 (Lindsey, 1997: 50). Though he maintained a commitment to Bible education, disseminating the results of recent scholarship in ‘Higher Criticism’ to audiences beyond the university, Mathews never did grow into the New Testament position and managed to switch his chair to one in Historical Theology in 1906 (51).

Mathews’ interest in sociology, however, apparently instigated by Albion Small’s promise of a job, seemed to have stuck, becoming a life-long intellectual passion. The two men maintained a friendship, until Small’s death in 1926, and Mathews was also close with Ellsworth Faris, a scholar 10 years his junior, who contributed to Mathews’ volume on the contribution of science to religion (Mathews, 1924). Both Small and Faris shared much intellectual and political common ground with Mathews, as well as having a common liberal protestant faith and commitment to social reform.

It was at Small’s invitation that Mathews (1895a, 1895b, 1895c, 1896a, 1896b, 1896c, 1896d, 1896e) contributed a series of articles entitled ‘Christian Sociology’ to the AJS, and these have often been taken as evidence of the Christian roots of American sociology (LoConto, 2020; Reed, 1981; Swatos, 1983). Small and Mathews shared a common commitment to the ‘Social Gospel’ and an affinity for ‘Christian Sociology”, though both were concerned that the term was being over-used – and used over-loosely. The term was often deployed in a way that made it difficult to give full and proper consideration to the ‘Christian’ or to the ‘Sociology’. Rather, sociology was often being used to baptise a social ethic as often as not borne of a literal reading of selected ‘proof-texts’. This literalism was as common among socially radical (socialist, or anarchist) Christians as among those who would soon be called ‘fundamentalists’, though they drew different conclusions from their literal readings (Lindsey, 1997: 82). Both Small and Mathews were gradualists who saw social reform as the necessary means address injustice and promote democracy and equality – but also to prevent ‘cataclysmic’ revolutionary change. Most importantly they were concerned that Christian socialists, while emphasising the social content of religion, did not encourage what both saw as the most important aspect of sociology (and modernist theology, for that matter): the capacity to examine both new and received ideas about the world in light of empirical evidence, and to revise their understandings accordingly (Lindsey, 1997: 75–78).

I take Mathews’ AJS series on Christian sociology as a primarily theological intervention, as important as these articles may have been for making space for both ‘scientific’ (or empirical) sociology as Mathews and Small understood it, as well as ‘Christian Sociology’ as an independent theological enterprise. The articles address fundamentally theological questions, including how a social ethic can be derived from a corpus of ancient texts and made relevant in a context very different from the one that produced them. Thus, I take these articles to lie beyond the purview of the present paper. To reconstruct Mathews’ sociology of religion we need to look to other work, much of which might be intended as contributions to Christian theology. Indeed, much of Mathews sociological thinking seems to be developed as foundation for understanding the social context in which he develops his constructive theology.

While Mathews’ relationship with both sociology and the Chicago sociologists is clear, his relationship with the philosophy department is much less so, whatever the evident affinities of his thinking with that of the pragmatist movement in Chicago. I have found little evidence so far of direct extensive personal relations with the leading lights of the philosophy department. At the turn of the century these included George Herbert Mead, John Dewey ¹ and James Rowland Angell. Like his pragmatist colleagues, however, Mathews is consistently critical of ‘metaphysical’ and ‘scholastic’ philosophy. This is particularly the case with reference to religion; he considered the role of philosophy in questions of religion and theology as primarily conservative – philosophy provides apologetic tools but, in the process, risks ossifying theological concepts. In tandem with the power of the state for enforcing orthodoxy, philosophy provides a bulwark against challengers at every stage of Christian history, though Mathews is most concerned about how philosophy insulates Christian theology from a fruitful (and in his view, necessary) engagement with modern experience. Even if reference to pragmatism is seldom explicit (but see e.g. Mathews, 1916: 49), it is very often implicit and his writings show a clear affinity for Chicago School pragmatism and its social psychology (Lindsey, 1999).

Mathews only began to describe himself as a ‘liberal’ later in his life (cf. Mathews, 1938), even if he was often castigated in these terms by conservatives. Rather, he tended to describe his position as ‘evangelical’, stretching the term, and goading the guardians of evangelical orthodoxy (Jesse, 2004). For many years Mathews’ name was synonymous with the ‘social gospel’ movement, but Mathews’ preferred to refer to his theology as ‘modernist’. Though critics tended to treat modernism as synonymous with ‘liberalism’, Mathews took it not as a confessional or creedal term. Rather he sees it as above all a methodological commitment to learning from modern science, including for the lessons these have for Christian belief and practice, and modern democratic experience (Jesse, 2004: 26; Dorrien, 2003: 204). For Mathews, a modern scientific approach meant above all learning from history, sociology, and evolutionary biology, and he clearly thought of these approaches as inter-related, rather than siloed sciences.

Evolution, Sociology and Religion

Mathews takes a highly positive view of scientific advances in the understanding of biological evolution long before the Scopes trial of 1925, and evolution forms the starting point for his historical sociology of religion. As we will see, and he also sees evolutionary understandings as a key component of the modern experience. This seems to have begun whilst still an undergraduate student at Colby College, with an interaction with William Elder, his biology professor that formed the kernel of his approach to evolution in relation to Christian faith. Mathews asked the biologist for recommended readings on evolution, as Mathews felt that the conflict between Christian belief and evolution (as he saw it at the time) meant that evolutionary theory would have to be refuted. To the young Mathews’ surprise, Elder responded that if science disproved any aspect of Christianity, it would be Christianity that would have to change accordingly. This came as a huge shock to an evangelical Baptist studying at an evangelical Baptist college (Lindsey, 1997: 41), but the lesson seemed to have been learned, and Mathews’ interest in evolutionary biology only grew by way of (somewhat delayed) response.

Mathews approach to evolution in biological and, by implication, social processes, shows the spirit and mode of pragmatism (Pearce, 2020), as exemplified by the work of his Chicago colleagues John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, in opposition to the terms set forth by Herbert Spencer, of whose work he tended to be critical. Mathews understands religion itself in broadly evolutionary terms, grounded in biological needs, and developing in the process of socio-cultural evolution. These arguments are first articulated in print in an article published in the American Journal of Theology (1911), and continued in later publications (1930, 1931). Much more than his earlier contributions on ‘Christian Sociology’ in The American Journal of Sociology (AJS), here Mathews begins to outline a sociology of religion that is more readily recognisable as such to a contemporary sociologist.

Mathews advocates a nuanced approach to studying religion that attends to religion as a concrete phenomenon. Here his sociological sensibilities, which he sets against the ‘metaphysical’ and ‘scholastic’ abstractions of philosophy come to the fore. For Mathews, the driving force of religious change grows out of concrete experience, from the challenges experienced both by individuals and societies. Setting out his approach for the study of religion in clearly sociological terms, Mathews (1911) writes:

Generic religion never existed apart from religions, and religions never existed except as interests and institutions of people. There is imperative need for all students of the subject, and especially theologians, should emancipate themselves from scholastic abstractions, and frankly recognize that religion is not a thing in itself, possessed of independent, abstract, or metaphysical existence, but is a name for one phase of concrete human activity. It is only from a strictly social point of view that either religion or religions will in any measure be properly understood. We know only people who worship in various ways and with various conceptions of what or whom they worship (pp. 58–59).

Mathews turns our attention to what he calls concrete religion – actions, institutions, and the social organisation of human experience. Such a consideration of empirical religion calls for sociological and historical analysis. Rather than pursuing the chimerical essence of religion (McKinnon, 2002), Mathews advocates the study of the ‘concrete human activity’ that we call religion, studying who (or what) and how people worship ‘from a strictly social point of view’.

Mathews’ use of evolutionary terminology, here as elsewhere, is two-fold: he discusses evolution as a biological process, and also as a socio-cultural process. These two senses are clearly related to one another, not least because biological evolution provides analogies which help us to understand social processes. Like Durkheim, Mathews finds value in understanding religion by looking first at ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ religion. Unlike Durkheim, however, Mathews thinks this is really only helpful as a starting point. Rather, if we are to understand religion:

. . .we must study comparatively both the highly developed religious systems and the simplest type of religion as it exists among primitive people. That is to say, while not overlooking the more complex systems as a means, so to speak, of determining the direction taken by evolution and thus better fitting ourselves, to appreciate religion as never absolutely static, we must study the simplest religious organisms in order to understand the more complicated (Mathews, 1911: 59).

Religion has not always taken ‘gods’ – much less ‘a God’ – as its object of piety; human beings have treated all manner of things and forces with religious devotion (60). He nevertheless sees the religious impulse as the attempt to relate to the environment on which we are dependent in personal terms. Religion is a ‘functional expression of life itself’ (58) because it addresses the problem of human adaptation in a context of natural selection, one of the primary means (along with ‘science’, a correlate which treats the environment in impersonal terms). One of the ways human beings adapt to their environments and adapt their environments to themselves, religion is ‘functional’ not in the sense that would later be developed by Parsons (1935), but in an evolutionary sense, as a function of human adaptiveness:

We can see clearly that the functional significance of religion is an elemental expression of the [impulse] to protect and propagate itself. Religion is life functioning in the interest of self-protection. It differs from similar functional expressions of life [like science] in that (1) it treats certain elements of its environment personally (though not necessarily as a person), and (2) it seeks to make these friendly and helpful (60).

Mathews takes issue with Schleiermacher ([1799] 1988), the founder of liberal Christian theology, who argued religion stems from a sense of dependence. Mathews thinks Schleiermacher’s account is not so much wrong as partial: over-emphasising the sense of dependence underplays the ways in which religion is both actively adaptive and works to adapt the environment to itself. Indeed, for Mathews, as for his fellow Chicago pragmatists (Joas, 1996), creative action is as vital in biological as in social evolution. Religion enables adaptation to the environment, but it is also a means by which humans attempt to adapt their environment to themselves. The ‘essential thing’, Mathews argues, ‘is that, in his passion to protect his life as a person, he attempted consciously to enjoy or win the favour of the extra-human environment with which he found himself involved’ (61). This attempt, for Mathews, is – ‘as far as we know’ – a distinctly human trait of the humans among all the other animals. The human being who finds their environment deaf to, or at least unmoved by, their supplications will become resigned to passivity. Translated into conceptual terms, this is fatalism. For Mathews, fatalism is the opposite of religion (62).

Co-evolution of religion and the State

To study religion is to study religion in the process of evolution, as religion at any moment is only ever a phase in its own development. This development can be studied comparatively across traditions, places or times, or else studied ‘genealogically’. Mathews’ primary interest lies in the genealogical. This is, at least in part because of his reflective focus on the growth and development of his own tradition, from the Hebrew Bible through present day Christianity. Whether one approaches the study of religion comparatively or historically, the key is to understand it in the context of the social adjustment of humans to their environment and their attempts to adjust their environment to address their needs. In other words, religious change is about addressing the changing challenges human beings face, and their changing resources with which to face them.

Mathews finds the religious impulse in its ‘cellular’ form in the tendency to treat the non-human environment, from which humans hope to derive benefit and avoid harm, in the terms of personal relationships. This itself derives from the extension of human experience into the environment in which humans find themselves. The extension of the personal develops with the increasing complexity and range of human social experience. Thus, as societies develop, they draw upon analogies from social experience, particularly experience of social superiors from whom humans seek favour. In approaching the superhuman, they draw on the patterns established for relations with social superiors. These forces, that can also be treated by the scientific mind as impersonal, ‘natural forces’; in a religious context are instead ‘treated as persons’, in particular as persons occupying roles from whom one might seek help.

The earliest forms of human ‘religiosity’, Smith argues, of which we find only a trace in the written records of civilisation, are the least personal. These become more personal with the evolution of religion. Thus, pre-animist traditions, he suggests have tended to deal directly with the forces of nature, entreating the river, the sea, fire, the forest, or animals in personal terms. This is different from later the ‘animist’ conceptions of the elements of the natural world, which are treated as the abode of particular gods or spirits.

Tribal religion marks a further development and increasingly complex social arrangements adapting for social complexity, resulting in distinctively tribal gods. These gods become increasingly personal and more human; tribal gods become less alien and more ‘one of us’ (though a great one of us):

Without exception. . .tribal gods are regarded as normally in a state of reconciliation with the tribe. Generally they are regarded as the fathers of their tribes. In other words, they are believed to partake of the same elemental quality as primitive civilization itself. They are, however, subject to paroxysms of anger evidenced by the defeat of the tribe in battle, by the outbreak of disease, and by various other misfortunes. In such cases, they must be placated by gifts. . .But the most essential element in the tribal religion is the conception of the god as the supreme member of the tribe (Mathews, 1911: 66).

Mathews’ descriptions often seem to manifest his thinking about his own religious tradition. This is not surprising given that, as a Christian theologian, he is trying to think reflexively about Christian belief and practice through history with a view to constructing an adequate theology for the modern world. Here his description anticipates his later discussion of the growth and development of Yahweh, from a jealous tribal god of the Israelite confederacy to a universal God understood in monotheistic terms (Mathews, 1931).

The gods are increasingly socialised as society becomes more complex. They become less forces outside of society that must be appeased becoming divine leaders of the society, and as such, part of the society. The gods become increasingly thought of as, and related to on the analogy of, tribal leaders. As tribal leaders, they are understood to be on the side of the group, though like human tribal leaders, they can be capricious, prone to meeting out punishment for the group’s (or its members’) transgressions. Like human leaders of the tribe, however, they can often be appeased by gifts and celebrations in their honour, and soothed with praise. This is the origin of sacrificial practices found in many tribal religions (Mathews, 1931: 34).

Anticipating – though in many respects going much further than – Marcel Gauchet’s Disenchantment of the World (1997), Mathews argues that to understand the development of ideas of the gods and how people relate to them, we need to comprehend them in relation to the development of political relations and state forms. Nowhere is this clearer, he thinks, than in the development of monarchical religion, which accompanies the centralising force of the primitive state. As tribes are conquered by larger, more developed political entities (monarchies or empires), the tribal gods typically become absorbed into a pantheon of subordinate gods; alternately the remnants of the tribe may strive to hold onto their god, maintaining them as a source of hope for the conquered tribe that they and their god might ultimately prevail.

Gauchet shows how the gods become increasingly socialised, become agents for the legitimation of the state. Their fate becomes bound to the legitimacy of political associations, but Mathews is much more sensitive than Gauchet to the way the gods are imagined. In particular, he shows how these god images are metaphors (more often he calls them ‘analogies’) derived from affairs of state. Humans relate to their gods on the terms of the human social relationships they know, particularly in the terms of relations with those powerful human beings from whom they seek to derive benefit and avoid harm.

Political development tends to produce more developed conceptions of the gods. The transformation of a nomadic tribe into a settled agricultural society has new needs that it hopes will be met by its gods. Thus, the relationship of the community to its god becomes less the family looking to its father, than subjects looking to its king; the scope of the god, its power, and distance all change accordingly. Relations of the group and its god become more political, and more ‘forensic’, by which Mathews means that they relate to their subjects on terms that are legally codified. Law defines the roles, rights and obligations both of the people and of the god, whose relationship is understood in terms of a covenant.

Gods conceived in terms of relations between monarchs and their subjects are more likely than those developed from other political analogies to become not just supreme rulers of human groups, but the rulers of creation. Mathews rightly notes, however, that conceptions of the creator god are not inherently monotheistic, though they may nurture the fragile growth of monotheism. The creator may preside over a pantheon, lesser gods may be reduced to semi-gods, as angels and demons; supreme creators may also be usurped by their heirs or their rivals. Nevertheless, the law-giver god, the sovereign monarch god is more readily thought of as also the lawgiver to all nature.

The monarchical gives rise to the possibility of conceiving the deity in transcendent and ethical terms, which is a departure from those conceived out of less complex social forms exemplified by the ‘father’ of the tribe. In this, Mathews discerns the outline of the revolution that Karl Jaspers will later call ‘the axial age’ (Jaspers, 2014). Like Bellah (2011) Mathews sees this development as set against a necessary background of monarchies and empires, but also as the product of prophetic intervention responding to these power relations. The prophets constitute a new kind of religious figure that pushes the monarchical absolutism’s ethics in a transcendent and universal direction. While Mathews is keen to emphasise the importance of the Hebrew prophets in this direction, his examples show that he is aware of the parallel development in the encounter of philosophy with Greek gods as well as an increasing sense of transcendence within Buddhism.

The king, no less than the chief or the warlord, functions as a living metaphor for the gods, and from the trunk of these master metaphors, branches inevitably grow (Tracy, 1979). Using the monarchical social formation to make his point, Mathews (1911) writes

The monarchical conception has given rise to the most precise theologies. It is easy to see why. Political experience is so universal, political institutions are so subject to legal adjustment, and legal analogies are so intelligible, that it has been comparatively easy to systematize religious relations under the general rubrics of statecraft (p. 69).

If this seems an overly general description of how political rubrics have framed the way societies have thought of their relations with their gods, Mathews (1911) proceeds to make it much more concrete:

Thus, righteousness has been thought of as the observance of the laws of the god. . .and punishment has been attached to the violation of such laws in precisely the same way as to the violation of laws of the king. The pardoning of sins has been a royal prerogative, although sometimes needing justification in the way of vicarious suffering by some competent sacrificial animal or person, while the rewards of the righteous have been pictured by figures drawn from the triumphs of earthly kings, just as in primitive societies the future was regarded as ‘the happy hunting ground’ (pp. 69–70).

Much of Mathews implicit preoccupation here is with the biblical tradition which develops its idea of God in monarchical terms. Here Mathews’ properly theological agenda comes to the fore, even as his analysis is rich with sociological insight. He contends that ‘historical orthodoxy’ is ‘built on divine sovereignty’ and, this has become anachronistic in a world characterised by democratic political forms and the cultural predominance of the scientific method. This makes the understanding of the gods in terms of older analogies ‘totally inadequate to express cosmic relations’ (70). Mathews modernist theology hopes to move the church beyond its captivity to increasingly unfamiliar analogies. But he remains a true reformer in the Protestant tradition: Mathews argues that Jesus himself had, at least in key respects, moved beyond, or introduced ambivalence about sovereignty and monarchical thinking by reintroducing familial metaphors, as exemplified by the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven. . .’ (Mathew 6:9). So ‘reformation’ still means, in an important sense, a return to the Christ event and its earliest interpreters.

Anticipating Jaspers conception of the Axial Age and its significance for our present world, Mathews argues that ‘the controlling theological ideas of practically all religions were shaped in the great creative period in which local gods became national and national religion passed on to monotheism’ (76). While he is primarily referring to Christianity, Judaism and Islam and religion of the Hebrews out of which they grow, his examples (which include Buddhism and Platonism) suggest that he sees the broader movement that Jaspers writes and clearly is treats monotheism as a stand-in for a broader discovery or invention (depending on one’s prior assumptions) of transcendence.

While many advocates of the Axial age see the developments of that period as not only of decisive historical significance, they tend also to cast the developments of that period in overwhelmingly positive terms (Bellah, 2011; Eisenstadt, 1982; Jaspers, 2014; Joas, 2014). Mathews’ protestant modernist commitments mean that he is somewhat more ambivalent about the place of the past within the religious imagination of the present. Mathews uses two evolutionary metaphors to think about the relation of the present to the traditions of the past: ‘survivals’ and ‘survival of the fittest’. The first of these is of greater interest for Mathews modernist inclinations, but the second refers to a threat that he seems to feel is always looking over his shoulder.

Religion can only survives and influence the world by institutionalising itself: ‘[r]eligion without institutions is of small significance. Religion apart from an institution has not succeeded, any more than a state has succeeded without political institutions’ (Mathews, 1911: 77). Institutions are necessary and beneficial, but they are inevitably conservative in a double sense. Institutions support religious ideas and allow them to survive, even thrive and flourish. But they also tend to defend whatever views have come to be taken as ‘orthodox’, and they do so with considerable power, including the use of force and state power, if this is at their disposal. This contributes to the misfit between the social mind of the day and the current cast of the prevailing orthodoxy, which has become anachronistic, even as it may continue to maintain its dominant position by means of coercion (Mathews, 1930: 16).

Mathews is clear that religious beliefs, practices, and institutions are all formed in certain periods in response to the problems of the time and the prevailing ‘social mind’ of the era. The problems that they address, disappear only to be replaced by new challenges. The social mind changes with increasing social complexity, new social patterns and power configurations. This does not mean, however that the beliefs, practices, and institutions formed in that context will inevitably melt away, instead we find religions littered with the ‘survivals’ of solutions to past problems. In part they remain because beliefs and practices sometimes acquire a patina over time, acquiring the authority of tradition. Religious institutions often find it difficult to let go of ideas that have long lost their use in addressing contemporary problems, and sometimes they even turn anachronistic beliefs into a litmus test for orthodoxy.

Mathews is particularly concerned that the church has not yet learned to speak in terms that articulate with the ‘modern social mind’, characterised by science and democracy. Even if a religion is sustained by durable institutions, the inability to articulate a faith that addresses the challenges faced by modern people in terms that make sense to them, risks extinction. This is why Mathews is so concerned by many in the church clinging to analogies of the divine that no longer resonate with contemporary democratic experience, like God as King, Lord, or Emperor. To survive and flourish, the church needs to find new ways of expressing its commitment to Jesus Christ, to show that it offers something that is relevant to modern problems and tensions.

Religion articulates (with) the social mind

Given its key role in thinking both historically and about the present, Mathews’s conception of the ‘social mind’ it stands in need of further clarification. Dorrien (2003: 197), one of the few contemporary writers who have sought to elucidate what Mathews means by the concept suggests that Mathews ‘probably borrowed’ the idea from Ward’s (1897) Dynamic Sociology, a book that Mathews, like Albion Small, did indeed admire. However, the term ‘social mind’ does not appear in Dynamic Sociology. In that book, Ward (1897) sometimes uses the term ‘the human mind’, and on at least one occasion ‘the public mind’ (pp. 333, 457, 587, 598) Mathews’ use is somewhat closer to Ward’s discussion of ‘mind’ discussed under the heading of psychogenesis of mind (chapter V), but none of these terms correspond very well to Mathews’ use of the term ‘social mind’.

There may be limited value in the attempt to pinpoint the source of Mathews’ particular usage. It was an idea very much ‘in the air’ in early 20th century American social thought, deployed by thinkers as different from one another (and from Mathews) as Franklin Giddings (Chriss, 2006) and Baldwin (1901), or those with whom his thought appears to have more sympathy, like Cooley (1909), Mead (1930), or to kindred spirits further afield, like Durkheim ([1893] 1971). The term indicates a broad semantic region, rather than pointing to a precise location; it suggests that thought is shared collectively, rather than confined to the grey matter of individual brains. Mathews’ use of ‘social mind’ is somewhat looser than the way it is deployed by any of the thinkers listed, something he himself readily admits. A good place to start is with Mathews’ own explanation of the term. In an article on ‘Theology and the Social Mind’, Mathews’ (1915) writes

I use the term ‘social mind’ as one of those convenient generalizations which make it possible to refer to something we cannot exactly define. I mean by it a more or less general community of conscious states, processes, ideas, interests, and ambitions which to a greater or less degree repeats itself in the experience of individuals belonging to the group characterized by this community of consciousness (p. 204).

Mathews’ (1915) own definition is still of limited use, however, as his actual usage is even broader than he indicates here. In practice he doesn’t limit the term to strictly conscious states (cf. 226); rather, he often argues that the social mind of a time and place is easier to understand historically than it is for contemporaries to understand the social mind of their own time, precisely because mind it is never fully self-conscious. Historical study of the development of Christian belief and practice provides much needed leverage to prise open the unconscious and emerging social mind of the present (1916). The social mind of the moment is nonetheless only ever half understood, though it is the job of sociologists and theologians alike to comprehend it as best they can.

Mathews’ conception of the social mind is looser than he admits, but at the same time his own use is also much more much more specific than he thinks it is. In Mathews’ writings, the political organisation of social forms plays a leading, practical role in constituting the social mind. Thus, while he does sometimes talk of the social mind in broad cultural terms, such as when he refers to the Hebrew social mind or Greek social mind, much more frequently writes of the social minds that are characteristic of different forms of socio-political organisation, such as tribal society, monarchy, empire, feudalism, or democracy. The organisation of power and authority within the society seems to most characterise a particular society furnishing the dominant images of the divine for people sharing that common social mind.

Mathews’ usage of the conception of ‘social mind’ is probably most helpfully considered not in reference to his contemporaries, but rather in terms of its affinity with a much later concept: Taylor’s (2007) notion of the social imaginary. Taylor conceives of the social imaginary as a network of ideas and practices; this imaginary may be articulated in theoretical terms (and new configurations are often born thus), the social mind/imaginary is not exclusive to the thinking of an elite. Rather, the network of ideas and practices are ‘carried in images, stories, legends, etc’. (Taylor, 2007: 172) in the everyday life of a people. The social imaginary has both a factual dimension and a normative one, providing a ‘common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’ (Taylor, 2007). This is how a group ‘imagin[es] their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations’ (171). In such a conception, human practices in relation to social superiors forms a template for relations with the gods, though they all participation in a common network of meanings and practices, gods and humans together.

A preliminary assessment

Mathews’ sociology of religion has been overlooked and left out of the conversation of sociology of religion for so long that a comprehensive evaluation of his contribution, relative to all that has transpired since is not possible here. In the more modest hope of a starting point for such a fuller evaluation and inclusion of Mathews’ ideas in that broader discussion, I offer here preliminary assessment of Mathews methodological positions for the historical sociology of religion.

Framing his approach to religion with reference to evolution pushes Mathews to look at religion in the very long run, but when he does so, he looks at human evolution with the Chicago pragmatist approach to culture as problem solving in mind. This does result in blond spots. Ritual is largely absent from his account of the historical evolution of religion. This is a striking given the importance of liturgy in the history and present experience of so many of the world’s Christians (Smith, 2007; Stringer, 2005), and the stories they tell about God and about themselves (McKinnon, 2014). This may be one sense in which Mathews’ Baptist Modernism has created a blind spot in his narration of the basic dimensions of the biblical and Christian traditions. But if so many of the entreaties to the superhuman in personal term through history have been conducted ritually, an absence of any account of how these entreaties function to promote human adaptiveness seems like a significant lacuna.

Here we see a key difference with the late Bellah’s magnum opus. Bellah’s (2011) narrative emphasises religious ritual (which is much more fundamental than belief), understanding it as analogous with play, no matter how seriously ritual is taken (p. 74ff). For Bellah, the consequences of ritual are largely unintentional, even where they are monumental, like playing a role in the development of language and the evolution of the modern – in the biological-evolutionary sense – human. Influenced as he was by the currents of pragmatist thought that surrounded him, Mathews takes religion as a means of problem solving – seeking benefit (and, one assumes, avoiding harm (Riesebrodt, 2010)) from all those forces larger and more powerful than humans. This pragmatist-inspired conception of religion as problem-solving needs further consideration. Even if there are clear gaps in Mathews’ account of the socio-cultural evolution of religion in this respect, a question for further research and theoretical consideration is the whether Bellah’s (2011) and Mathews’s accounts of religion in human evolution complement one another, or are offering alternative accounts which may or may not be reconcilable.

Despite Mathews’ emphasis on religion as a means of addressing concrete and practical problems, he not only has little to say about the rituals by which humans make their entreaties to the superhuman, but he is also much less than fulsome in his account of how religion confers adaptive benefit, or what the benefit conferred even is. On occasion, Mathews (1931: 35) ^{seems to suggest} that entreating the superhuman in the terms of relations with social superiors offers humans confidence and reassurance, and keeping resignation at bay. Unfortunately, even his comments along these lines are typically both overly brief and overly generic. While Mathews does conceive of some evolutionary ‘survivals’ as serving no particular purpose in addressing human needs, one does sometimes wonder if he hasn’t taken the evolutionary advantage of human religiosity for granted, combining the logic of evolutionary theory, and the general presumption, common in early 20th century America (and particularly among social gospellers) that religion contributes to the social good.

Anticipating Gauchet’s (1999) celebrated political history of religion, Mathews’ account shows how the evolution of religion is imbricated with evolving political forms. For Gauchet, as religion lends its authority to power relations, this ultimately leads to a crisis of legitimacy for religion. Mathews’ agenda is different, and in some respects his analysis goes further and dives deeper than Gauchet’s. Mathews begins with the contention that religion ‘in cellular form’ consists of treating that which is superhuman in personal terms. From there he shows in detail how key religious ideas, such as God (1931) and the atonement (1930), are conceived and understood by analogy with the dominant actors in evolving political forms. This adds much needed texture, depth and colour to the portrait of religion and power sketched out by Gauchet.

Sociologists of religion have very often deployed analytic metaphors, though we have been surprisingly tone-deaf to the deployment of metaphors in religious belief and practice (McKinnon, 2012, 2018). This is a striking omission, given the prevalence of metaphor in human conceptions of the transcendent and how humans relate to the beyond. Even though metaphors grow in abundance in the fields of religion, most of our sociological theories of religion have little to offer by way of tools for analysing them. Mathews theoretical methodology gives a much needed, even if now much belated, leg up. His work orients us to the way that the religious imagination has developed much of its imagery from other spheres of social life, and the role of state formation and evolution for understanding its metaphorical frame.

While Mathews’ attends carefully to the way that religious actors have sought to make sense of the divine in the terms of their experience with social superiors in different socio-historical contexts, he is much less sensitive to an aspect central to Gauchet’s history. That is, how do religious ideas lend legitimacy to political institutions, and power relations? By treating metaphor (or ‘analogy’, his more usual term) unidirectional, he pays far less attention than one might have expected to the way that the relations with the gods become reciprocally a template for how one understands and behaves in relation to ones’ social superiors. The worship due to ‘The LORD [who] thunders from heaven’ (Psalm 18:3 AV) also provides a model for the often-grudging obligations and deference due to the Lord barking from his Motte and Bailey castle. As theorists of metaphor have consistently argued, a metaphor is always a two-way street; the semantic traffic flows in both directions (McKinnon, 2012).

While Mathews’ sociology of religion has its gaps, omissions, and unarticulated assumptions, it is also a largely untapped reservoir of provocative thoughts and questions. This is particularly the case when set in dialogue with important recent work, like Bellah’s evolutionary and historical political sociology of religion. Given the recent revival of pragmatist sociology (Gross et al., 2022), Mathews’ work also provides a rare but important exemplar of scholarship in the sociology of religion sustained by a dialogue with pragmatist thought. But perhaps above all, the scope of Mathews’ genealogical consideration of religion pushes sociology of religion to consider the institutions, beliefs and practices that make up contemporary religion in the context of the very longue durée.