The Role of Religious Ideas: Christian Interpretations of Social Inequalities

Introduction

What makes religion interesting for many people today, even the secularly minded, is its potential to take positions that run counter to mainstream culture. In view of the deepening, yet widely accepted, social inequalities encountered in the liberal democracies of the West, many thinkers have once again pinned hopes on religious interpretative resources. Jürgen Habermas, for example, regards religion as a possible corrective to the risk of an ‘uncontrolled process of modernization’ – a risk that is arising because of the erosion of civic solidarity accompanying the ever-increasing control of the social spheres by market-based logics of action (Habermas, 2008: 107). According to Habermas, religious communities have the potential to act as socially critical forces and oppose the apathetic acceptance of the effects that market mechanisms have on inequality. With respect to the predominant movements within Christianity today, though, a degree of scepticism is certainly in order here, and we should be careful not to confuse the normative potential of churches with their empirical reality.

For now this essay will put aside the question of how Christian churches currently view social inequalities. It will first attempt to show that the normative and practical positions they adopt essentially depend on the social use of specific religious ideas. By ‘religious ideas’ I mean the semantic contents of religious traditions that find their way into cognitive interpretations of reality – or, in this case, into interpretations of social inequalities.

The first section is devoted to the obvious question of why one should start with religious ideas when analysing how Christian communities position themselves toward social inequalities. The next two sections introduce various Christian groups and movements from the past and present that have either sharply criticized extreme forms of social marginalization and structural discrimination or that have affirmed unequal distributions of goods and life opportunities. The examples range from active alliances with the disenfranchised and socio-economically deprived segments of the population to the empowerment of individuals for success-oriented market action. In the discussion of these contrasting cases, the respective religious semantics will be outlined in order to demonstrate that these semantics can indeed be derived from very different Christian-rooted ideas. Finally, the essay highlights the potential of religious traditions to contribute to ‘justification orders’ and develops the thesis that for internal reasons the Christian churches currently have limited capacity to act as institutions of societal self-reflection that are sensitive to the issue of social inequality.

Why ‘Religious Ideas’?

Talcott Parsons can be drawn on to help answer the question of why, in a study of the stance Christian communities take on social inequalities, it is essential to reconstruct religious ideas. In his essay ‘The Role of Ideas in Social Action’ (1938), Parsons describes the action-theoretical significance of ideas, particularly those from the religious sphere. As he explains, their function is mainly to provide something akin to a ‘definition of the situation’. ¹ In other words, they convey a cognitive interpretation of reality, against whose backdrop we first begin to see which actions have a religious significance – whether for a person’s own salvation, a life pleasing to God, or responsible participation in the divine plan of creation. For example, Calvinism, as Parsons (1938: 659–60) introduces it on the basis of Max Weber’s work, defines which types of inner-worldly action can provide religious individuals with the subjective certainty of their own salvation.

Here the propositional content of religious ideas is a critical factor in determining the direction of Christian action. In his cross-cultural studies, Max Weber describes the ‘world images’ produced by religious ideas as phenomena that often ‘have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest’ (Weber, 1946: 280). In every idea about the legitimate goals of action and in the rules governing the pursuit of such goals, we find a cognitive element that provides the foundation for Weber and Parsons to speak of ‘ideas’ and ‘religious ideas’ in connection with social action (Parsons, 1938: 661). It is, for example, quite easy to see that different views on whether and how God intervenes in history are of key importance for the direction of religious action – and also that the answer given to the question of whether each person occupies the place God has reserved for him or whether the given structures of inequality are attributable to glaring manmade injustices is by no means irrelevant to the social practice of religious groups.

Often such cognitive ideas are linked to a normative element that can serve as a powerful source of motivation for religiously based action. ² This becomes particularly clear when religious individuals define themselves as ‘instruments of God’ (Weber, 1978: 541; Parsons, 1968: 427–8). However, the motivational effect of religious ideas does not seem to result solely from their propositional content. Rather, it also seems to be related to the performative character of the genres in which they are expressed and handed down. Religious ideas are typically embedded in richly metaphorical narratives. On the one hand, as Robert Wuthnow (2007: 349–50) shows, these narratives – which are often linked to canonical texts – are able to structure the socio-moral experience of individuals; on the other, they can be linked to emotions that strongly motivate actions. Supporting this idea, Robert N. Bellah emphasizes that religious stories can have the effect of ‘arrows’. Using a phrase from the Western Apache language, Bellah argues that in such cases traditional narratives ‘strike’ listeners by revealing certain modes of behaviour or habits to be profoundly wrong and showing that it is imperative to realign action (Bellah, 2001: 97–8).

If all that has been said is true, then religious ideas ³ not only determine the direction of social action by religious individuals and church communities, but can also provide a particularly strong motivational basis for individual lifestyles and social activities. They function not only as compasses but also as the driving force behind religiously motivated action. The case studies cited in the next section illustrate this point.

Christian-Motivated Criticism of Social Inequality and Its Semantics

The Judeo-Christian heritage has a long tradition of resistance against social and political conditions that are experienced as unjust and immoral. A biblical approach can be found in the Book of Exodus: ‘Yahweh then said, I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying for help on account of their taskmasters. Yes, I am well aware of their sufferings. And I have come down to rescue them from the clutches of the Egyptians.’ This passage is followed by the mission Yahweh assigns to Moses, described in the canonical narrative as follows: ‘So now I am sending you to Pharaoh, for you to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt’ (Ex 3: 7–8, 10). The Jewish prophets were not the only ones to interpret the story of the deliverance from Egyptian slavery as a call to resist oppression and to fight the unjust privileges of the ruling classes (Walzer, 1987: 84–5). The same view has been adopted by various religious and political movements in the recent past, most notably the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s (Walzer, 1985; cf. Kim, 1996; Reed, 2013).

An earlier historical example of the social effectiveness of an exodus and liberation discourse can be found in the evangelical movements of the United States, which became important supporters of the struggle against slavery long before it was abolished nationwide in the course of the American Civil War (1861–5). Particularly in the 1830s, reformed Protestant ministers mobilized against slavery and enjoyed great success because they were able to connect individual repentance to social reform. According to the analysis by Michael P. Young (2006), the abolitionist movement owes its origins to a special combination of factors – namely, the emphasis placed on the confession of guilt in the populist Methodist and Baptist denominations, and the elaborate doctrine of sin formulated by orthodox Presbyterians and Congregationalists. These factors gave birth to the evangelical idea that not only slavery as such, but also its toleration and even the most indirect benefit from it, represent a personal sin that requires confession, instant repentance and inward renewal (Young, 2006: 146–53). As Young vividly writes, this idea provided a foundation for the public confession rituals that spread within the milieu of the zealous, passionate Methodists and Baptists – rituals in which believers admitted their guilt en masse and promised immediate repentance. The ministers also called on other denominations and their charity organizations to purge their ranks of slaveholders and supporters of slavery. A revolution of souls spawned a nationwide movement that regarded slavery as one of the recognized ‘national sins’ such as alcoholism and prostitution. Activism for the abolition of slavery and the fight against its associated structures and ways of life were now regarded as ‘bearing witness against sin’ and pleasing to the ‘God of freedom’ (Young, 2006: 152). ⁴

Certainly, a grand narrative such as the exodus story from the Bible can be linked to many different issues because it contains not only the story of deliverance but also the idea of a chosen people whom Yahweh promises the land of milk and honey inhabited by the Canaanites and other nations. As Sharon Erickson Nepstad and Rhys H. Williams (2007: 430–3) show, it was from this perspective that the Calvinist Dutch Boers frequently interpreted their own emigration to the Cape of Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries, portraying it as a journey of a chosen people to the promised land. The Boers’ Dutch Reformed Church (Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk) helped substantially to establish and legitimize the apartheid regime in South Africa. Later, with the support of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sendingskerk) – a church for ‘coloured people’ that was separated from the Dutch Reformed Church in 1881 – played a central role in overcoming racial segregation. After remaining quiescent well into the 1970s, the Dutch Reformed Mission Church began speaking out and declared that apartheid – a state-organized, legally sanctioned order of inequality – was ‘sinful’ and its legitimation ‘heresy’. This conception of sin and false doctrine ultimately led to the adoption of the anti-racist ‘Belhar Confession’ at the General Synod of the Mission Church in Cape Town in 1986. ⁵ Additional relevant theological writings and manifestos made reference to the exodus story, but now as a counter-narrative to the Boers’ white mother church: they emphasized the covenant between God and his defenceless people in South Africa, who were awaiting deliverance from the tyranny of the whites (Nepstad and Williams, 2007: 432; Smit, 1998, 1999).

Latin American liberation theology, which aimed to establish a ‘preferential option for the poor’ within the Catholic Church (Gutiérrez, 1972; Sobrino, 1982; Boff, 1985), is another prominent example from the recent past of a religious critique of deep-rooted forms of social inequality. Throughout Latin America it fought on the side of the landless rural population and the slum residents of the large cities, interpreting biblical writings in direct relation to the experiences of the impoverished and socially marginalized sections of the population. Accusing the Catholic Church and its clergymen of complicity with the ruling class and a pact with dictatorships, the liberation theologians formed alliances with the land reform movement, exerted influence on associations of indigenous peoples, and supported social reform parties. Their stated goal was to help the marginalized and disenfranchised members of society to cast off the chains of economic deprivation and political oppression. Several of the aforementioned motifs were of enormous importance in these processes: from the start, the exodus narrative served as a central salvation-historical metaphor in liberation theology and was interpreted as a call to engage in a political struggle against poverty, exploitation and alienation (Gutiérrez, 1972: 203–11). Drawing on dependency theories, Gustavo Gutiérrez described the crippling reliance of the countries in the southern hemisphere on the wealthy nations of the north as a ‘sinful situation’ (Gutiérrez, 1972: 150, 236). The idea of people ‘crucified’ by structural injustice (Sobrino, 1982: 235–61) is yet another metaphor frequently cited in liberation theology. The majority of its closely related base communities, which emerged in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) and the Second General Assembly of the Latin American Bishops in Medellin (1968), developed a strong political consciousness. Furthermore, in several Latin American countries these communities played an important role in both improving the social situation of large groups excluded from material participation in society and combating the economic exploitation of the indigenous population’s resources. ⁶

Today we find a social situation in most areas of Western countries that differs markedly from that in the world’s slums, apartheid-ruled South Africa and slavery-era America. However, examples of socially critical activities by church groups also exist there, if on a smaller scale. One such example is the church congregations in Germany that protest the deportation practices of state authorities by granting sanctuary to refugees and providing the refugees with all the necessities of life, sometimes for long periods of time (Just and Sträter, 2003; Dethloff and Mittermaier, 2011). The advocates and supporters of church sanctuary denounce the inhumane effects of an anonymous state bureaucracy and do not shy from breaking the law. For sanctuary activists, the unjust treatment of asylum seekers, rooted in their residence status, and the suffering these asylum seekers must endure, both have the character of a personal call for action. In these circles the sentence attributed to Jesus by one of his disciples (Matt 25: 40) – ‘In truth I tell you, in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me’ – provides a religious justification for fighting for the marginalized and disenfranchised (Flor, 1988: 126; Crüsemann, 2009: 61).

The Sant’Egidio lay movement operates on a similar basis. It emerged in 1968 from a group of Catholic school and university students gathered around Andrea Riccardi in the port neighbourhood of Trastevere in Rome and is now active throughout the world. This communitarian movement actively fights for street children, the homeless, refugees and people with AIDS. ⁷ Ursula Kalb, a co-founder of the German Sant’Egidio community, cites the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25–37) in order to explain the effort made at the community’s Freedom School (Schule des Friedens) in Würzburg to support neglected children whom the regular school system has failed: ‘Jesus himself places today’s “poor” on our doorstep’, she writes. ‘God is constantly speaking to us through the poor who ask for our help’ (Kalb, 2008: 44, 47). However, the Sant’Egidio movement – which, because of such positions, has been called a ‘network of social mystics’ (Oschwald, 1998: 55) – relies to a greater extent on its own practices to end exclusion and poverty than on a publicly articulated social critique calling for institutional changes. ⁸ At the same time, a central aspect of the movement’s charter myth is that its founders, who come from upper-middle-class backgrounds, were shocked at the ‘Third World’ conditions they found on the outskirts of Rome and aimed to reveal the ‘deception of the bourgeois city’, which lay in the fact that ‘the poor remained hidden’ (Riccardi, 1996: 10).

If we now consider the previously discussed groups and movements that are critical of society and social injustice, we find not only clearly delineated religious ideas but also similar motifs that recur in different variations. On the one hand, the interventions by these communities are based on an idea of ‘liberation’ that they take primarily from the biblical exodus story. On the other, within these interventions one repeatedly sees an interpretive framework that makes it possible to define specific unjust social situations as ‘sin’. In the case of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church and the Belhar Confession, both elements figure: South African apartheid is regarded as sin, and God’s covenant with his oppressed people, affirmed in the Book of Exodus, is applied to the non-white population. For the British and American abolitionists from reformed Protestantism, a decisive role was played by the principle that slavery was to be seen as a national sin and individual participation in such a system as a personal sin. Finally, in the case of Latin American liberation theology – which is based on both the exodus as a salvation-historical metaphor and the idea of sin resulting from unjust structures ⁹ – the guiding principle can best be summed up as follows: God desires justice in historical reality from a church that is devoted primarily to the poor and that addresses the ever-unsettled question of justice (Metz, 2010).

The narratives that conveyed such ideas did indeed have the impact of ‘arrows’ on the faithful. Consistent with this observation, Bellah (2001: 98) emphasizes that even in the biblical account, Moses’ story of the return to the land of the fathers was the driving force behind the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. The exodus narratives outlined above, regarded by church groups as the foundation of their ‘liberating’ fight against slavery, racism and oppression, demonstrate the extent to which the content of religious narratives can motivate action. In addition, they show the enduring effects that these narratives have had on prevailing ‘orders of justification’ for social inequality in particular historical conditions (Forst and Günther, 2011).

The ‘sin’ motif can apparently also have a powerful mobilizing effect, upon which Rudolf Otto has offered a few interesting observations. The holy or the numinous, which in Otto’s phenomenology arouses fascination and awe among the pious and also creates a sense of inner obligation, is not a moral category in itself. Religious emotion must therefore be separated from the moral content that guides behaviour (Otto, 1926: 5–7). According to Otto, the holy only becomes morally significant when the opposite of the numinous value – namely, the numinous non-value – is transferred to concepts such as ‘sin’ or ‘sacrilege’ on the behavioural level (1926: 54–60). For people who believe in God, this type of transgression is much different than the one perceived by non-religious individuals when they violate a law or a moral standard. The reformed Protestant abolitionists provide clear evidence of this, but additional examples also demonstrate that if extreme inequalities can be plausibly characterized as a ‘structural sin’, they can also have a mobilizing effect on religious actors.

In addition to the sin and exodus motifs, a third, slightly oblique cognitive operation plays an important role in several of the above-mentioned cases – namely, the identification of the poor and the disenfranchised with Jesus as the founder of Christianity. This is a ‘situational definition’ that for some religious individuals can serve as a direct appeal to perform acts of kindness. Members of the Sant’Egidio movement, as well as church sanctuary activists, regard the poor and the homeless as embodying the Son of Man himself, or at least as individuals through whom God speaks to them. As ‘social mystics’ who regard themselves as ‘following in the footsteps of Jesus’, they derive a dictate for daily action from this view.

However, it would be mistaken to think that religious ideas are always of importance for practical action. With some justification, it has been charged that religio-sociological studies often commit a ‘religious congruence fallacy’ (Chaves, 2010) in that they at times assume an empirically unverifiable causality between the internalized beliefs and actions of pious individuals. As noted by Herbert Blumer (1955), attitudes are not necessarily followed by the corresponding actions. Key variables that must be taken into account include above all the situational context as well as actions by third parties. Nevertheless, a number of the aforementioned examples show that a certain congruence between religious ideas and social action cannot be ruled out in principle.

Christian Justifications of Social Inequality and Their Semantics

Obviously, Christian religiosity has not always been a critical social force inspiring reflection and action. In fact, history is replete with examples in which Christianity has encouraged resignation, apathy and fatalism or directly contributed to legitimizing existing hegemonic structures and inequality. The Christian conception of reality has often relativized secular orders such that experiences of injustice and inequality in the here and now are made to seem insignificant. Such positions are anchored in the Gospels and one relevant passage that is often interpreted eschatologically reads: ‘Many who are first will be last, and the last, first’ (Mark 10: 31). Similarly, a belief in the relativity of social inequalities can result from the prospect of eternal life, and a person inclined to such views can find legitimacy for secular power relations in one of Paul’s letters: ‘Everyone is to obey the governing authorities, because there is no authority except from God and so whatever authorities exist have been appointed by God’ (Rom 13: 1).

Martin Luther’s infamous comments about the relationship between Christians and secular authorities (Luther, 1961a, 1961b) are entirely in keeping with Paul’s justification of the social status quo. According to one of Luther’s teachings – polemically labelled the ‘two-reigns doctrine’ in Germany during the interwar period and particularly after 1945 – the world of the faithful is divided into two spheres: a spiritual realm in which the faithful are beholden only to God, and a physical realm in which they must submit to secular power. The varied history of Lutheran Protestantism certainly contains many unflattering and even ignominious examples of the enduring consequences of this doctrine (Denzler and Fabricius, 1993: 37–56; Anselm et al., 2004). As Hans-Georg Soeffner (1992) writes, Lutheran Protestantism predisposes its followers to a submissive acceptance of social conditions and generates inwardly directed attitudes concerned only with the purity of one’s own personal convictions. According to Soeffner, this disposition has acquired immense cultural significance for modern patterns of subjectivity and continues to have an effect on Protestantism today (Soeffner, 1992: 57–75). ¹⁰ The spiritual doctrinal movement of neo-scholasticism, which emerged in the 19th century and with the Pope’s support remained the dominant trend in the Roman Church until the mid-20th century, had similar consequences for the history of mentalities in Catholicism. Strictly distinguishing between the natural realm and a supernatural order of grace, neo-scholasticism paved the way for the restorative, often undemocratic and particularistic political consciousness of Catholics (Baum, 2005: 35–40; Böckenförde, 1961–2; Denzler and Fabricius, 1993: 56–69; Walter, 1998).

A more contemporary movement that is less focused on the political sphere and more on the economic one is the so-called gospel of prosperity, which is enormously important for the Protestant Charismatic churches throughout the world. As leading experts point out, this ideology of success, also known as the ‘health and wealth gospel’, not only began spreading at the same time that liberal capitalism was unleashed across the world but is also internally linked to it (Coleman, 1995: 161; Hunt, 2000: 344; Martin, 2002: 15; Meyer, 2007: 21). Prosperity theology is of North American origin and should be seen in connection with the Faith Movement of conservative Protestantism, from which a wave of evangelization went out to the entire world (Coleman, 2000; Hunt, 2000). Whereas the older Pentecostal movement initially had a different, non-economic focus, it was ultimately eclipsed by the triumphs of the prosperity gospel in the Pentecostal evangelical world. ¹¹ The movements and communities associated with this theology emphasize the material blessings bestowed upon believers with the proper faith. As Kenneth Copeland, one of its pioneers, teaches (Copeland, 1979: 22), these individuals are the heirs to the covenant between God and Abraham. One important element in prosperity-theological practice is the ‘positive confession’. Here members formulate their often material wishes and trust to the idea that these wishes will be fulfilled with God’s support. Observers have coined slogans such as ‘name it and claim it’ as well as ‘blab it and grab it’ to caricature this practice (Coleman, 1995: 167). In this intellectual world, material wealth is regarded as an expression of the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit and as the reward for proper faith, which is viewed as a guarantee of success. Prosperity theology is informed by an ethic of professional efficiency and uses idioms from the business world. For instance, at a meeting of Christian students, a Swedish lawyer in the Scandinavian Faith Movement said: ‘God loves people who have success. God wants you to have success, wants you to have a career’ (Coleman, 1995: 170). Such Christians – who often refer to themselves as ‘born again’ – convert, as it were, to a faith based on the conventional goals of success and feel authorized to move up in society with God’s blessing. This theology offers no direct apology for social inequalities, but amounts to a performative affirmation of it, especially since the implicit, barely concealed message is: ‘God is with the successful’.

The Congress of Christian Leadership (Kongress christlicher Führungskräfte) is based on related ideas. With its motto of ‘Taking the Lead with Values’ (‘Mit Werten in Führung gehen’), it has been held in different German cities at two-year intervals since 1999 and aims to help the over three thousand mainly evangelical participants to ‘be successful in the market with God’s help’, as one journalist puts it (Geinitz, 2007). One of the congress’s figureheads, Professor Jörg Knoblauch, who touts himself on his website as ‘the leading management pioneer for small and medium-sized enterprises’, acts on the following principle: ‘You can never pay A-grade employees too much, while C-grade employees, whatever they earn, are too expensive.’ The watered-down Catholic version of this is: ‘He who observes Christian principles competes more successfully in the marketplace’ (Jünemann, 2008: 316).

Sociology’s founding fathers were themselves aware of religion’s role in legitimizing social inequalities. Emile Durkheim (1951) saw religion – specifically, within the Christian context – as a force that had long helped to prevent anomic conditions in society because it was able to limit human desires. He argued that the adaptation of human needs and aspirations to prevailing circumstances was an important function of religious faith, one that was already greatly attenuated in his day. Workers and the poor were ‘consoled’ by religion, which ‘taught them contentment with their lot by informing them of the providential nature of the social order, that the share of each class was assigned by God himself, and by holding out the hope for just compensation in a world to come in return for the inequalities of this world’. But the ‘masters’ and the ‘rich’ were also governed by religion and constantly reminded ‘that worldly interests are not man’s entire lot, that they must be subordinate to other and higher interests, and that they should therefore not be pursued without rule or measure’ (Durkheim, 1951: 254–5).

Max Weber pointed out that the religious ideas that promoted the belief in being chosen were particularly effective at offering privileged social strata an assurance of their own superiority and lending their well-being an enhanced sense of subjective legitimacy. Weber fittingly described such justifications of the distribution of worldly goods as a ‘theodicy of good fortune’ (Weber, 1946: 271–7). According to him, such ideas were at times also embraced by the oppressed and socially weak members of society; however, these disadvantaged groups more typically became followers of a religiosity of redemption that offered a ‘theodicy of suffering’, i.e. an explanation, if not an ethical revaluation, of an existence marked by suffering and privation. In these two forms of theodicy Weber saw the tendency to invest existing structures of social inequality with the aura of a higher legitimacy (Weber, 1958: 176, 1978: 518). Examples of this tendency can be found throughout the history of Christianity, which has repeatedly generated a habitual or even doctrinally armed ‘effect of consecration’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 14) and characterized unequal life opportunities as manifestations of a sacred order.

In the Christian movements that legitimize social inequalities or accept them as givens, we find interpretations of reality that are entirely different, though no less recognizable, than those encountered in the communities described in the second section of this essay. Numerous historical examples can be cited where churches and clergymen portray earthly conditions with radically differing life opportunities as vain and negligible compared to the possibility of future glories – or where they even go so far as to extol personal suffering as an expression of ‘servitude to God’ or a Jesuanic ‘cross-bearing’. Many current arguments, targeting mainly privileged individuals and those eager to rise up in society, refer to ‘spiritual gifts’ and ‘talents’ and claim that making the most of these gifts is the Creator’s true intention (Matt 25: 14–30; Osteen, 2007: 3–32). In this way the various prosperity gospels and Christian management philosophies emphasize that faith and God’s commandments help people fulfil their ambitions of upward mobility and life optimization.

In the case of forms of Christian religiosity that affirm inequalities, the correspondence between religious beliefs and the resulting social action is hardly in need of explanation because it largely follows mainstream culture. The ‘prosperity gospel’ is meant to assist religious individuals in succeeding in both the marketplace and professional life with the help of faith. The adherents of this doctrine, which is widespread in the evangelical Pentecostal churches, do not raise the claim that they are agents of social change who wish to exert, through their normative ideas, a transformative influence on society and its legitimizing foundations. Here religious ideas merely provide an additional justification for culturally established goals of success and the blueprints for collective practices designed to encourage the faithful on their earthly climb to the top of society.

At the same time, the previous discussion shows that a rich justificatory vocabulary exists in Christianity for positions that are critical of social inequalities. As the above-described examples demonstrate, Christian churches, groups and movements have repeatedly served as the purveyors of narratives and ideas that not only criticize the actual order of social inequality, but also challenge well-rehearsed justifications. At the very least, the cited cases ¹² should serve to provide a more precise understanding of the relevance of religious ideas to a sociology of social inequality. Their relevance is based on two conditions. First, the position that the actors adopt on social inequalities and their secular justifications is heavily dependent on the cognitive content of religious beliefs. Second, not only does this cognitive content give direction to the actions of the faithful with respect to inequality issues, but also, based on normative implications, it provides powerful sources of motivation to drive these actions.

To avoid misunderstandings, allow me to make a few remarks to clarify. Religious ideas are of course not created or activated within a vacuum, independent of material living conditions or societal situations. One cannot derive ideas purely on a structurally deterministic basis – as Weber’s theodicies of ‘good fortune’ and ‘suffering’ could be misunderstood as suggesting; nor do they exist independently of real history (Weber, 1958: 47–9, 183). A classic example of a study that avoids both this materialistic determinism and the idealism often found in the history of ideas is Michael Walzer’s analysis (1965) of English Puritanism in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. In Walzer’s view, the Puritan movement represented a response to massive population growth and a process of urbanization marked by immense social insecurity. In an effort to cope with this situation, Puritanism availed itself of a pre-existent Calvinist vocabulary. As Walzer argues (1965: 200–4), a city like London appeared threatening and rife with dangers, particularly to new arrivals from the countryside. They found an answer to these problems in the Puritans’ bleak view of the world, which brusquely rejected the lifestyle of the ‘worldlings’ and waged an all-out battle ‘against Satan and his worldly allies’ (Walzer, 1963: 63–4).

Nevertheless, the specific historical circumstances responsible for the use of religious semantics to interpret social situations and inequalities are not the focus of this essay, nor are the conditions under which the corresponding religious interpretations achieve broader acceptance and relevance for all of society. This type of analysis would require in-depth comparative studies that go far beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, my aim thus far has been to demonstrate that the specific religious semantics and narratives that selectively refer back to canonical texts are the ones that have provided crucial impetus for the social positioning of Christian groups that are either critical or affirmative of inequality. As has been shown, the availability of specific semantics and Christian narratives represents a necessary, though certainly not sufficient, condition for their inequality-related attitudes and actions.

In the final section of this essay, which is more programmatic in nature, I would like to describe more precisely what conditions religious ideas must fulfil in order to be effectively linked to social inequalities. Against this backdrop I will then provide a few answers to the questions: How do things stand, grosso modo, with Christianity today? Are Christian churches or movements indeed ‘communities of interpretation’ (Fiorenza, 1992) that generate their own adaptable, action-relevant distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate inequalities? But in order to address these questions in the proper way, we must first shed light on the justificatory needs that are associated with social inequalities in Western democracies today.

Churches as Socially Relevant Interpretive Communities?

All stable power relations are dependent on justification. This point was clearly recognized by Max Weber (1969), who emphasized that it was not possible to base permanent power structures solely on the ‘motives of obedience’ that result from the instrumental calculations of expediency or from mere custom. According to Weber (1969: 6), authority cannot get by without the ‘grounds’ (i.e. reasons) of its legitimacy. In other words, authority is on a shaky footing if it is not seen as legitimate by both the rulers and the ruled. ‘Beliefs in legitimacy’, whose importance in maintaining power relations was shown by Weber, have more recently been taken up by the concept of an ‘order of justification’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006).

Rainer Forst and Klaus Günther (2011) define ‘order of justification’ as a complex of norms that provide legitimacy for the basic structures of a society, including in particular the exercise of political authority and the distribution of goods and life opportunities. According to these two researchers, such normative orders are embedded in ‘justification narratives’ that ‘crystallize in unique historical constellations and are handed down, modified and institutionalized over long periods of time’ (2011: 11). These contextually, locally and historically sedimented narratives have a dual nature: on the one hand, they contain institutionalized norms ¹³ valid for specific spheres that are repeatedly reproduced in stories and narrative patterns; on the other hand, they go beyond the mere factuality of society by offering ‘a node for criticism, repudiation and resistance’ (Forst and Günther, 2011: 12; Forst, 2013). They can be drawn on to critique the existing institutionalization of rule and the distribution of privileges and burdens, or they can provide impetus to modify existing normative orders or develop new ones. Of course, justification narratives exist in large numbers in modern societies and can have either a complementary or antagonistic relationship to each other. This is even truer of religious and secular justification narratives.

Along with art, literature, law and the social sciences, religion is a sphere of societal self-reflection. As such it serves as a medium for creating the semantics and attitudes of legitimization. Religious patterns of justification that often exhibit an internal narrative structure (Wuthnow, 2007: 349–50) can conform to secular justification vocabularies. On the other hand, they can also serve as counter-narratives and compete with them by, for example, challenging the established social distribution of privileges and burdens. The fact that religion is one of the media for societal self-reflection does not of course mean that modern societies of the West require religious sources of legitimacy in order to survive or, conversely, that social change always starts in the religious sphere. Nevertheless, these societies – especially regarding the social inequalities they create – have a tremendous need for legitimization and justification (Nunner-Winkler, 1997: 364), which can be met with the help of Christian religious communities. With their traditions, these communities are among the potential repositories of the justification narratives that make their own special contribution to resolving the legitimacy problem of social systems of rule and distribution. This analytical perspective takes us back to the issue of ‘religious ideas’.

From the cases presented in the second section of this essay, ranging from evangelical abolitionism to Catholic liberation theology, we can conclude that the only religious communities capable of a rigorous engagement with existing conditions of social inequality are those whose religious beliefs meet two criteria. First – and this is almost a self-evident truth – they must have a conception of faith that emphasizes the believer’s responsibility in the here and now and is not confined to otherworldly salvation or individual well-being. Second, the only ideas capable of supporting socially critical activism by Christian communities are those that are able to lend a strongly religious dimension to the social experience of their members. In other words, the ideas must be able to mobilize something more than just vague religious interpretive resources if they are to produce subjectively binding interpretations of social reality that motivate people to take action in this world. ¹⁴

Within Christianity, at least in the West, there are many trends that do not fulfil the first criterion. Sociologists of religion have repeatedly observed a new interest in religion in the recent past, though this is often confined to aesthetic qualities of church rites, which often provide a festive framework for family events and create the air of a cross-generational tradition (Ebertz, 1998: 290–3). In addition to this aestheticizing, primarily cult-centred religiosity, other forms of religious practice have emerged in churches, but these are limited to the episodic experience of religious festivals, such as church congresses or World Youth Days, and do not claim to permeate everyday actions (Hitzler, 2011: 23–44). Furthermore, both within and outside the churches, there has long been a boom in psychological and therapeutic-based conceptions of faith (Wuthnow, 1998: 142–67; Höhn, 2007: 41–50; Bochinger et al., 2009: 35–82). As Danièle Hervieu-Léger writes (perhaps exaggerating slightly), a ‘minimum credo’ has become increasingly popular in the Christian world that is best summed up as ‘God loves you, Jesus will save you, you can be healed’ (Hervieu-Léger, 2006: 8). It should be obvious that such an individualistic credo does not aim for or make possible an engagement with secular orders of justification. Here social inequalities hardly play any role at all and do not become the subject of religious experience or reflection.

However, the fastest growing communities within Christianity, which include the practitioners of the ‘prosperity gospel’ with their ‘megachurches’, clearly meet the first criterion of a this-worldly, social orientation of faith. In addition, these denominations provide their members with the symbolic resources to invest social experience and action with religiously-coloured perceptions and motives. As a result, they also fulfil one aspect of the second criterion. However, they do not maintain a critical distance or oppose capitalist orders of justification. Rather, they duplicate or re-signify market-based habits of thought and dispositions of action (Dawson, 2011; Maddox, 2012, 2013). The prosperous churches of ‘health and wealth’ Christianity address social inequalities only insofar as they assign their members the task of growing through wealth, achieving a ‘fullness of life’ and ‘taking domination’ in every sphere of life (Maddox, 2012: 149, 152).

If the abovementioned trends toward family-based, psychological and aestheticizing forms of Christian religiosity are juxtaposed with the astounding expansion of health and wealth gospels, it becomes evident that there is some justification to speak of two dominant ecclesiastical camps, even if this view is slightly schematic. In the first camp we observe a mental exodus of church religiosity from society. Here Christian faith may have its individual techniques for coping with the contingencies, uncertainties and unexciting routines of modern life, but these do not reach into the realm of social experience or political awareness. In the other camp, religious language represents little more than an appropriation of the ubiquitous semantics of economic growth and success. The market-based diction, given a slightly religious makeover, is far from any kind of Christian perspective that would add new interpretations and options for action to a social reality characterized by deepening inequalities.

Apart from small groups and religious virtuosi, the mainstream branches of contemporary churches are therefore barely able to fulfil the role at times attributed to them as institutions of societal self-reflection and social criticism. Anyone who, like Habermas (2008: 110–11, 142), views religious language as containing the ‘semantic potentials’ to criticize social ills and the societal pathologies of declining solidarity will have difficulty finding the corresponding actors in the contemporary world of Christianity. The actors that do exist are not focused on religious ideas and interpretive patterns that would enable them to engage with prevailing orders of justification and the secular legitimization of inequalities.