Why The Sociologists Have It All Wrong

Sunday seemed like a good day to talk about the role of religion in America as it has impacted our economic success. The Democrats and the sociologists want to remove religion from our lives and denigrate our uniquely American blend of religion and the work-ethic.

John Lamont at First Things refers to the large role that religion plays in the American psyche as "the Prophet motive." I like that. It elicits the true feeling that being rich is not evil, and being poor is not a virtue. The issue is, "how did you get there and what are you doing about it?" It also explains why the left is so determined to paint religious people as ignorant savages for misunderstanding the march of history. Society, they say, is the history of untutored farmers with their primitive beliefs advancing to the industrial and technical forms which require great intellect and don't need religion.

I've written in the past about American exceptionalism, and this is one facet of that exceptionalism which disproves the points of the elitists and sociologists. What they have said about the advance from the agrarian society to the industrial and technical society is largely true of Europe. But their analysis completely fails to address the very different state of religion in America and religion in Europe, then and now. The "secularization thesis" was originally formed by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Bryan Wilson. They stated that as nations modernized and gained scientific knowledge, they slowly rejected religion. The ancient farmer prayed to God for rain and healthy crops, the scientific farmer used irrigation and fertilizers. When less advanced society members got an infection, they prayed for healing. The modern human takes antibiotics.

So how come American religion has grown as it reached ever higher levels of education, industrialization and technology, eventually dwarfing the rest of the world? Like the fake evidence produced a few years back to prove that there were far fewer guns per capita in 1776 than in 1996, the secularizers have claimed that America was institutionally religious from its beginnings, and that religion has been in decline in America ever since. Sorry--bad statistics. On the day the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence, less than one-fifth of Americans were members of a church. By the mid-nineteenth century (the industrial revolution), the number had risen to more than a third. Today, church membership encompasses more than half of Americans, and those who say they are "religious" approaches 90 percent.

Since America obviously doesn't fit the theories of the secularists and sociologists, there must be a rational explanation that could account for the gross difference between Europe and America. I'll get to their analysis in a minute. Right now, I'll analyze what I consider to be the real explanation of the difference.

As Europe evolved, it did not become religious. It was already religious. Unlike America, an established religion was there before post-Middle Ages Europe became an entity resembling the current collection of modern states. The one unifying force that held the primitive feudal societies together was the Christian Church (and more specifically, the Catholic Church). Almost alone, monks and scribes recorded history and preserved the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans as Europe descended into chaos. It was almost inevitable that the Church would be a great power as civilization came back to life, and that government would be closely intertwined with religion.

Local kings came and went, primitive kingdoms rose and fell, but there was always the Church and until the time of Luther, the Pope. The Holy Roman Empire (successor to the barbarian empires) derived its authority from Rome. Emperors were brought to their knees if they defied Papal authority. As more than one wag has pointed out, the Holy Roman Empire wasn't holy, Roman, or much of an empire. But it was most definitely Catholic.

Religion wasn't merely an aspect of European life by the time of Charlemagne. It was life, and it applied from the lowest to the highest members of society. No matter what their personal beliefs, those in power relied on the Church universal to legitimate their high offices. And so, the Church became evermore institutionalized, and the state became evermore involved in promoting religion. Great cathedrals were as important as great palaces. In one way or another, all kings claimed they derived their power from God through the Church.

Luther changed the concept, but he didn't change the underpinnings. Luther merely rejected the church universal and replaced it with the church territorial. But nobody was yet claiming that Christianity was not an inherent part of the legitimate exercise of power. All kings, princes, dukes, emperors and the lesser nobility still claimed their power derived from God, and their state its legitimacy from the same source. Protestants were put to the torch in Catholic lands, and Catholics were tortured or exiled in Protestant lands, but in one form or another, there was always the Church. Each proto-nation chose a faith, and it became the official religion of that nation. Even in states where other religions were allowed, all were required to swear fealty to and support of the national Church.

Henry VIII of England wanted a divorce, and the Pope wouldn't give him one. So did Henry eliminate the Church? You all know that answer. He merely changed the form and became the official head of the Church in England, no longer subservient to the Pope. Henry never abandoned his proud title of "Defender of the Faith," he just claimed that the religion of Rome was no longer the right faith to defend. His daughter, Mary ("Bloody Mary") reestablished the Roman Church and lit up the sky with burning heretics. Upon her death, Elizabeth I de-established the Catholic Church, and took on the title of head of the Church of England, firmly established it, but allowed Catholics to practice privately (after she bumped a few of them off).

As the humanist movement advanced, and industrialization and technology came in, most European states became less and less religious, but the official churches remained (even to today in many European nations). The sociologists got it partly right. But they missed how much imposed religion actually weakens genuine belief. When religion becomes nothing but imposed form and required ritual, faith becomes secondary and eventually nonexistent. As Europe advanced technologically and scientifically, religion became about as important as the Sunday bath. And most of all, the established Church became an impediment to free thought. An established Church brooks no opposition, so those who believed the earth revolved around the sun, or that the earth was round and could be circumnavigated were suppressed. When the dissidents were proven right, the established Church lost its intellectual authority, and ultimately, over a long period of time, its religious power.

Americans figured this out early in their development, and took actions to promote belief by eliminating state-imposed religion. Prior to the Revolution, the colonies nearly all had official established religions. But after the time of the Puritans, few unofficial religions were seriously suppressed. Religion grew, even though the established churches seemed to be losing membership at an alarming rate.

And here's where the uniquely American confluence of religion and economic success comes into play. As the established churches began to disestablish, and the Constitution forbade the imposition of a federal Church, religions had to compete with each other. And compete they did. As Lamont describes the rational-choice school's view: "When a religion enjoys a monopoly in a given market, its leaders, lacking the spur of competition, will not try very hard to make religious practice an attractive option. But when a competitive market in religions replaces a monopoly, not only will the spur of competition be present, there also will be a process of natural selection among religions, with the more attractive religions gaining at the expense of the less attractive ones." Now how many of you ever considered a "market approach" to religion? But it actually worked.

"Heresy" lost its sting. Christianity thrived, in many forms, but until the last few decades, every church still held onto basic concepts, not the least of which was the divinity of Christ. And as the mainstream churches lost sight of that, they bled (and continue to bleed) membership while more traditional churches hold their own, and newer more vibrant forms of Christ-centered religion emerge.

Except for a few very clever religion-debasing pastors who exploited religion as a money-making commodity, the vast majority of church attenders and church founders didn't think in terms of religion being a beneficiary of free market economics, but it was, whether they recognized it or not. And that door swung both ways. The success of the churches that form the very vibrant faith of Americans works very nicely with the economic form of free choice. Choice, freedom, creativity, industriousness and deep faith have formed a nation that is both religious and the economic wonder of the world. The churches can suggest a myriad of economic solutions to economic issues, but no church can impose those solutions. The success of freedom of religion has strongly influenced the success of the free economy that has served us so well until government (the new state religion) began to impose its own secular state religion.

The free market approach can't explain everything about religion's steady hold on Americans, however. Canada eliminated state religion at about the same time as America, yet is is a far more secularist and non-religious nation. And most of Western Europe eliminated state-imposed religion over the past century. For multiple reasons, including the Founders insistence on the right to contract as a basic right, Americans have come to view their religion as a private contract, with a sanctity all its own, between themselves and God, without any need to consider the government, family, or community connections anywhere during the process. It has its odd tergiversations, such as Protestant cults which concentrate on handling poisonous serpents and Catholics who believe in abortion. But overall, the concentration is on a common faith. Religion in Canada and Western Europe, on the other hand, is very weak, and those who are from families of a certain belief rarely change their membership.

America was also a beneficiary of the "Puritan work-ethic." The early settlers in America saw enterprise and religion as hard work. Things don't just come to you, and they can only be beneficial if you are diligent in their pursuit. Laziness and acceptance of "things as they are" were among the great sins that the Puritans left England to escape. By the time the Puritans were long gone, the attitude remained. Neither religion nor wealth were easy things to grasp, and required thought and planning. More importantly, if the old way didn't work, and a new one did, Americans were free to change without anybody's permission.

Americans also enthusiastically embraced the Adam Smith doctrine of the "invisible hand" of the market contained in The Wealth of Nations. Already a religious lot, an "invisible hand" didn't seem all that different from a supernatural and invisible God who influenced human activity without making personal appearances. Try as they might, secularists have found it very hard to shake that belief, and religious people are free to think that the massive mistakes of "intellectually-gifted" big government planners are proof that man proposes, God disposes. They've certainly proven it to me, and I pray daily for the government planners to disappear into oblivion.

Naturally, the free market/free religion analysis is imperfect, but contains more truth than falsity. The sociological approach, on the other hand, is riddled with falsities and inconsistencies. The biggest one is that Americans are religious because of social pressure. Some are, most are not. To start with, it's hard to impose uniform social pressure on any but the smallest and most cohesive of communities. You're much more likely to see a Catholic American turn Protestant or vice versa simply because the social pressure said he couldn't do that. Social pressure has not worked out at all well for the mainstream church leadership. The more they abandon church doctrine, impose abnormal "norms," re-write scripture, and deny the importance of the divinity of Christ, the more they lose membership and cause the rise of Christ-centered movements which will read scripture their own way, thank you very much. The mainstream should be able to exert immense social pressure, but instead the mainstream is becoming the fringe.

It is also important to remember that market-based analyses can't fill all the holes. That which is unknowable is unknowable. But there is much to be said for freedom of religion being a parallel development with freedom of enterprise. It even leaves atheists free to believe religiously in free-market economics, and for liberation theology devotees to support economic determinism and Marxism. The ultimate result for all of them rests with fate, or historical progression, or inexplicable circumstances. I lean toward the invisible hand in the celestial realm, aka God. And I'm bloody well free to do so.