This seems germane:
theatlantic.com
Here is one section.
<<The Religious Marketplace
he sociologist Rodney Stark is one of the few people who have been willing to develop specific ideas about what makes new religious movements
succeed. This is inherently speculative territory (as with stocks, past performance is no guarantee of future returns), but it also has the potential to be
one of the most interesting areas of NRM scholarship, in that such ideas can be applied to all religious movements.
Stark, a professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington, is blunt, amiable, and a classically American maverick. He
does scholarship with an often irreverent swagger. Knowing that he had written specifically on how and why religious movements succeed, I called him
and asked him to summarize his thoughts on the subject. "The main thing you've got to recognize," he told me, "is that success is really about
relationships and not about faith. What happens is that people form relationships and only then come to embrace a religion. It doesn't happen the other
way around. That's really critical, and it's something that you can only learn by going out and watching people convert to new movements. We would
never, ever, have figured that out in the library. You can never find that sort of thing out after the fact—because after the fact people do think it's about
faith. And they're not lying, by the way. They're just projecting backwards.
"Something else: give people things to do. The folks in the Vineyard are geniuses at that. It's quite an adventure to go off somewhere and set up a new
church for them. The Mormons are great at giving people things to do too. You know, they not only tithe money but they also tithe time. They do an
enormous amount of social services for one another, all of which builds community bonds. It also gives you this incredible sense of security—I'm going
to be okay when I'm in a position of need; there are going to be people to look out for me. That makes a difference. And if you want to build
commitment, send your kids out on missions when they're nineteen! Go out and you save the world for two years! Even if you don't get a single
convert, it's worth it in terms of the bonds you develop.
"You've also got to have a serious conception of God and the supernatural to succeed. Just having some 'essence of goodness,' like the Tao, isn't going
to do it. It just isn't. It doesn't even do it in Asian countries, you know. They hang a whole collection of supernatural beings around these essences. So
to succeed you do best by starting with a very active God who's virtuous and makes demands, because people have a tendency to value religions on
the basis of cost."
The essence of the idea is this: People act rationally in choosing their religion. If they are believers, they make a constant cost-benefit analysis,
consciously or unconsciously, about what form of religion to practice. Religious beliefs and practices make up the product that is on sale in the market,
and current and potential followers are the consumers. In a free-market religious economy there is a healthy abundance of choice (religious pluralism),
which leads naturally to vigorous competition and efficient supply (new and old religious movements). The more competition there is, the higher the level
of consumption. This would explain the often remarked paradox that the United States is one of the most religious countries in the world but also one of
the strongest enforcers of a separation between Church and State.
I asked Stark if he could give me an example of what's happening in the contemporary American religious marketplace. "Sure," he said. "I happen to
have grown up in Jamestown, North Dakota. When I left, if you had asked me what the religious situation was going to be like a couple of generations
later, I would have told you that it would have stayed pretty much the same: the Catholics would be the largest single group, but overall there would be
more Protestants than Catholics, with the Methodists and the Presbyterians being the two largest. But that's not what happened at all. Today the
Assemblies of God and the Nazarenes are the two biggest religious bodies in Jamestown. These are new religious movements. There were no
Mormons in Jamestown when I was a kid, by the way, and now there's a ward hall. There were two families of Jehovah's Witnesses, and now there's a
Kingdom Hall. Evangelical Protestants of all kinds have grown a lot. What's happened is that people have changed brands. They've changed suppliers.
Writ small, this is what has happened to the country as a whole. There are new religious movements everywhere—and what this tells me is that in a
religious free market institutions often go to pot but religion doesn't. Look at the Methodists! They were nothing in 1776, they were everything in 1876,
and they were receding in 1976."
Stark has applied his ideas to the study of the history of Christianity. He suggests, in The Rise of Christianity (1996), that early Christianity was a
rational choice for converts because its emphasis on helping the needy "prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and
organizations." People initially became Christians for a number of rational, nontheological reasons, he argues, and not, he told me, because "two
thousand people on a Tuesday afternoon went and heard Saint Paul." People converted because Christianity worked. The Christian community put an
emphasis on caring for its members, for example; that emphasis allowed it to survive onslaughts of disease better than other communities. People also
converted, he writes, because, contrary to the standard version of events, Christianity's initial membership was not drawn predominantly from among
the poor. Stark argues that in Roman society Christianity's early members, like members of most other new religious movements, were relatively affluent
and highly placed, and thus weren't treated as a social problem to be repressed. In this view, although Christians were subjected to their share of
anti-cult persecution, they were largely ignored by the Romans as a political threat and therefore were able quietly to build their membership. Early
growth, Stark writes, involved the conversion of many more members of the Jewish community than has traditionally been acknowledged; Christianity
offered disaffected Jews a sort of higher-tension new religion that nevertheless maintained continuity with some established Jewish orthodoxies. Why
else—rationally speaking—would the Christians have held on to the Old Testament, a sacred text that in so many ways is at theological odds with the
New Testament?
Stark has no shortage of critics. Bryan Wilson, a venerable scholar of NRMs based at Oxford, told me that the rational-choice theory of religious
economics is "really rather ludicrous" and said that "most European sociologists of religion would quarrel with it." Steve Bruce, a sociologist based at
the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, has complained about the creeping prevalence of the theory, which he attributes (clearly with Stark in mind) to
"the malign influence of a small clique of U.S. sociologists."
It does seem dangerously easy to approach any subject—love? music?—with a grand rational-choice framework in mind and then suddenly to see
everything in terms of a marketplace of "products" subject to the laws of supply and demand. What does such an approach really say about specific
situations? And what constitutes "choice" or "supply" anyway? How does being born into a religion, which is what happens to most people, affect the
idea of a "free market"? These are questions that will be debated for years. In the meantime, one can safely say that, misguided or not, rational-choice
theory is a serious attempt to grapple with the reality of continual and unpredictable religious change. >> |
