2003 presidential address; Creating an agenda in the sociology of religion: common sources/different pathways

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2004 by Grace Davie

This article, and to a considerable extent my idea for the conference from which it emerged, has two points of departure. The first lies in the evolution of my own work since the mid 1980s; the second in a specific invitation to think more about the current agenda in the sociology of religion. Both points need further elaboration.

Since the mid-1980s I have been concerned with the connections between religion and modernity. The canvass on which I have worked, however, has widened steadily. I started my thinking with reference to the urban areas of Britain and, more specifically, with reference to the religious situation in Liverpool in the North West of England (Ahern and Davie 1987). I then worked in more detail on the religious life of modern Britain (Davie 1994), a book that contains an important theoretical chapter concerning the connections between religion and modernity. In 2000, I published Religion in Modern Europe, which placed the British material within the European context where it rightly belongs. In terms of its patterns of religious life, Britain is essentially a North European society. Two years later, I had the opportunity to go further still: this time to look at Europe from the outside rather than from within. Europe: the Exceptional Case (2002a) contains a series of non-European case studies (on the United States, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Philippines and South Korea), asking in every case what was present in the religious situation in these parts of the world (almost all of them Christian), but not present in Europe. The answer lies in forms of religious life characterized by growth rather than decline, notwithstanding the developed indicators of modernity that are found in many of these cases. The book concludes with a discussion of "multiple modernities a notion which implies that modernity is not a uniform idea; it takes different forms in different places. It is only in Europe, moreover, that the connections between modernization and secularization are relatively strong.

The second and more immediate prompt to action reflects a specific request to write a textbook for the sociology of religion, but within this to reflect carefully on the adequacy of the agenda which has emerged given the challenges of the twenty-first century. Faced with this challenge, I first had to decide what that agenda was and how best to set it out for prospective students; I also had to consider its possible deficiencies. One way of doing this was to set the contents page of several textbooks in the sociology of religion against the debates about religion that were taking place in the modern world and to see how far the two were, or were not, in step. In many respects they were not.

Hence, the essential point of the book that I have been invited to write: the debates about and religion in the modern world are in many respects different from those that have dominated the sub-discipline. What, then, has caused this mismatch and how can it be overcome? For overcome it must be if we are to appreciate fully the significance of religion in the modern world order. This article considers one particular aspect of this question in more detail. (1) It asks how the agenda in the sociology of religion has been created in the first place? Where, and by whom? What are the pressures that are brought to bear on sociologists as they go about their daily lives and what is the relationship between these pressures and the work that eventually emerges? The agenda, in other words, should not be taken for granted: we need, from time to time, to examine not only what we do, but why we do it.

Consider, for example, an international conference such as the 2003 meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, where we were able to welcome a significant group of French scholars and to pursue a trans-Atlantic discussion. Notwithstanding the undoubted success of that meeting, it is, I think, unreasonable to assume a natural convergence between a French sociologist of religion--influenced from an early age by Cartesian philosophy, schooled in the classics of French sociology of religion (Hervieu-Leger and Willaime 2001) and preoccupied with essentially French debates about laicite--and his or her American equivalent, who draws from Anglo-Saxon literature and Anglo-Saxon empiricism in order to understand better the implications of American voluntarism in the religious field. Both will have to work hard if an effective dialogue is to take place, quite apart from the linguistic efforts that have to be made--the whole point, of course, of the international conference. How then can we understand these differences better and make constructive efforts to overcome them? That is the aim of this article.

The material is organized as follows: the first section begins by setting out the task or tasks of the sociology of religion--that, if you like, is the theme. The variations on this theme follow, for it becomes immediately clear that not all of us either identify or set about our assignments in the same way. We are constrained by the structures within which we work, by our training or formation (to use a French word), by the questions that emerge from the context in which we are living and by the particular nature of our subject matter (i.e. the churches or equivalent religious organizations). The second section looks at the question in a different way. It is concerned with the evolution of the sociology of religion in different parts of the world and in different language communities. We share common sources in the sociological classics; in later generations, however, distinctive discourses have emerged in different global regions, which relate in turn to the institutional and pedagogical differences already set out. The final section offers a worked example of one particular debate: that which relates to new religious movements in different parts of the world. In the 1960s and 70s the debate was located primarily in the Anglo-Saxon literature--it fitted well with American voluntarism. More recently it has become a major item on the French agenda and in those countries dominated until recently by communism, and for the same reason: the increasing fragmentation of the belief system and the inadequacy of existing systems (legal, political or cultural) to deal with the present reality.