Social Theory and Religion

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2004 by James V. Spickard

Social Theory and Religion, by JAMES A. BECKFORD. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 252 pp., $45 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Some books transform our understanding of their topics. Fewer books transform their disciplines. And a very few transform those who read them, such that they can never again approach their own subject matters in their accustomed ways. Jim Beckford's long-awaited "summa" may do all three.

Beckford's Religion and Advanced Industrial Society (1989) was a masterful, yet incomplete account of sociologists' various understandings of religion's place in the late-modern world. That book traced religion's gradual marginalization as a topic of sociological theorizing--a marginalization that Beckford thought misguided. The present volume takes up this topic again, but in a different key. Concentrating on the potential insights that social theory and the sociology of religion might gain from one another, it both reformulates the sociology of religion's core concepts and shows how those concepts speak to wider social issues. The author concludes that religion is, indeed, good to think with--but not exactly in the ways that we have been accustomed to thinking until now.

Beckford takes an explicitly, though not a radically, social-constructionist approach. He begins with the fact that religion is the source of considerable social conflict, much of which involves how "religion" is to be defined in different social milieux. The Church of Scientology, for example, enlists the U.S. State Department in its effort to be recognized as a religion in Germany; it simultaneously sues North American scholars who question its practices. Baptists fight each other over the Bible, and Episcopalians fight each other over marriage. Catholics fight each other over who is "the Church," as opposed to who merely runs it. We all know this, but Beckford puts such conflicts to two uses. First, he sees conflict as central, not peripheral, to the religious enterprise. Religion is defined in the process of fighting over it; the point is not to settle these fights by fiat, but to produce carefully nuanced studies showing how "religion" is used in various social situations--and what the consequences of such uses are. (One hopes that this will drive a stake through the heart of tired scholarly debates about whether one should define religion "functionally" or "substantively.") Second, he asks what such conflicts tell us, not just about "religion" but also about the advanced industrial society in which the conflicts take place.

The bulk of the volume is devoted to this second task, presented as a theoretical conversation with more scholars than many of us knew existed. U.S.-based readers will be particularly thankful for an exposition of European theory and research, most of which has been ignored on our side of the pond. (This has been our loss; Beckford shows us whom to read and what we will find there.) He organizes these conversations around four topics: secularization, religious pluralism, globalization, and religious movements. For each, he explains the approaches that have been taken, what those approaches contribute and what they lack, and how social theory and the sociology of religion might best take each other seriously. No brief summary can do these sections justice, in part because Beckford's goal is to encourage nuance and complexity, not a hegemonic vision. His overall approach is constructionist--this time focusing on the scholarly constructs involved. Here is a taste.

On secularization, Beckford shows the incongruities at the heart of current and past theories and recommends a good dose of conceptual sorting to separate the gold from the dross. Rather than a simplistic "Secularization, R.I.P.," he shows how one might use current musings to generate valuable insights into the changing uses of religion in the coming century. He similarly takes sociologists to task for their sloppy use of the term "pluralism". He carefully weighs the ways that particular theorists use this concept, noting how certain uses obscure as much as they reveal. Pithy, sensitive observations, never wrapped in malice, help readers distinguish (for example) between pluralists who emphasize a diversity of religious collectivities, those who draw attention to increased opportunity for individual religious choice, and those who stress a (supposedly) new capacity for individuals to combine elements from different religious traditions into a personally meaningful whole.

The section on globalization does not, as one might have expected, focus on those sociologists of religion who have made that field their metier. Instead, he directs his remarks at globalization theorists who have ignored religion. He criticizes their tendency to see religion as merely a response to global processes--especially to see various "fundamentalisms" as the only game in town. In contrast, he suggests that they examine changes in the ways that people use religious resources as a way of bringing content to an over-broad theorizing. Examples from Brazil and West Africa join those from Europe, South Asia, and (yes) North America as possible ways forward.