Why Christianity works: an emotions-focused phenomenological account

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2007 by Christian Smith

It has been three centuries since Voltaire launched his attacks on the Christian Church, 160 years since Marx reduced religion to a narcotic of the oppressed, 125 years since Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, and nearly 80 years since Freud exposed the illusion of faith as erroneous wish fulfillment in projecting a father figure. The Enlightenment and modernity brought with them profoundly anti-Christian voices and forces, and generations of these same intellectuals have debunked Christianity, deconstructed the church, and foretold the demise of the Christian faith. Today, more than a few heirs of this secular and secularizing tradition carry on this skeptical cause, inhabiting, in particular, knowledge class enclaves in higher education, the media, and various highly credentialed professions.

Remarkably, however, Christianity has survived and in places thrived, despite these challenges and sometimes onslaughts (Casanova 1994; Smith 1998; Jenkins 2002). For instance, the majority of most Western Europeans appear to have become secularized, but a committed Christian minority still survives and sometimes flourishes in many parts of Europe. Meanwhile, Christian churches, both Orthodox and otherwise, are reviving and growing in many nations of the former Soviet Union. Further south, in many African and Asian countries, Christianity is growing faster than the populations of their countries. In Latin America, the vast majority of people adhere to their traditional Roman Catholic faith, the primary religious challenge to which turns out to be not secularism but an animated Pentecostal Christianity. In the United States, about one-third of Americans regularly attend religious services, mostly in Christian churches. Committed secularists in the U.S. look out from their enclaves over a vast nation that seems, astonishingly, to be awash in a sea of popular faith--including a great deal of evangelical Christianity, which represents about one in every four Americans. The current President of the United States is himself openly an evangelical Christian, and conservative Protestants are an indispensable constituency for and exercise significant influence in the Republican Party. Certain fast-food chains operated by Christians, like Chick-fil-A, do not open for business on Sundays in honor of the Sabbath. Christian colleges and universities around the U.S. are growing in size and quality. Christian pop musicians are producing CDs of quality comparable to the best that secular labels produce. And the hottest selling book nationally for weeks on end, about the Christian God's purpose for our lives, was authored by the head pastor of an evangelical mega-church (Warren 2002). Far from having shriveled up and blown away, Christianity in very many places is enduring and sometimes vibrant. No wonder an amazed Jeffrey Rosen (2002) asked with consternation in a recent New York Times Magazine column, "Is Nothing Secular?"

Sociologists are prone to look for broad social and cultural forces to explain major religious trends, revivals, and movements (Thomas 1989; Finke & Stark 2005). The moral and emotional uncertainties of the transition from communist order to now-emerging market societies, for example, might be thought to explain the growth of Christianity in China and Russia. The social dislocation resulting from the mass migration of Latin Americans from rural to urban areas is believed to explain the powerful appeal of Pentecostal faith in that region. The competition and "product" richness of America's de-regulated religious economy are theorized as explaining its high rates of theism and churchgoing. Such sociological accounts are valid as far as they go. They often can illuminate the social processes influencing the extent and shape of religious practices. But in the end, such sociological accounts possess limited abilities to explain the persistence over millennia and into the modern world of religion generally and--for my purposes here--Christianity in particular. Finally, it is difficult to explain the persistence of a major religious tradition over thousands of years in many parts of the world by pointing to various changing social structural forces. Something more fundamental must also be at work.

Sociologists of a more quantitative bent analyze variables that significantly associate with variance on measures of religion such as affiliation, retention, and participation--a worthy task. But much of that work does not explain the "basic" causes of the phenomenon per se, but simply shows factors related to variance within or across it (Lieberson 1985:185-195). Knowing, for instance, whether sex or education predict higher levels of church attendance does little or nothing to explain the continued existence of churches and their belief systems and practices in the first place. The latter is the focus of this article.

I therefore wish to consider here another kind of explanation--one focused on the internal power of religious traditions to compel the assent and commitment of billions of people. The approach here combines (1) the philosophical framework of critical realism (Archer 1995; Danermark, et al. 2002); (2) sociological phenomenology (Schutz 1999; Moustakas 1994); and (3) recent work on the crucial importance of emotions in social life (Goodwin, et al. 2001; Turner and Stets 2005) to suggest an approach and style of explanation that is not typical in the sociology of religion. My basic argument, which will focus on Christianity, is that the belief content of the Christian faith gives rise to certain practices and experiences--particularly emotional ones--that many people find highly engaging, compelling, persuasive, and convincing. That is, I will suggest that the very internal logic of doing Christianity persistently produces events, interactions, and feelings in and among people compelling enough to keep the tradition flourishing despite many countervailing forces. In academic terms, the account I offer here is one focused on social-psychological causal mechanisms (Hedstrom and Swedberg 1998). My account may complement social structural explanations, but it is not reducible to them. My account here is also entirely compatible with the perspectives of Christian believers and unbelievers alike. What follows is explanatory both if God exists and Christianity is true and if God does not exist and Christianity is not true. In other words, the following argument itself--although it presents experience from a Christian point of view--does not take a side about the actual validity of Christian truth claims.