Courtney Bender,Wendy Cadge,Peggy Levitt and David Smilde,Religion on the Edge: De-Centering and Re-Centering the Sociology of Religion

Reviewed by Andrew McKinnon, University of Aberdeen, UK

Shaping an edited collection into a coherent whole is an almost impossible task. For a reviewer the challenge is smaller but not dissimilar—how does one give a feel for both the individual contributions and also a sense of the whole, and this within the allowable word length? This book is a whole that is very much more than the sum of its parts (for which I congratulate the editors); I shall follow suit, and use this as an excuse not to attempt summaries of individual chapters.

The editors have assembled a group of essays that will de-parochialize (my term) the sociology of religion. They want to shift the sociology of religion: (i) beyond US-centric assumptions and topics of inquiry; (ii) beyond the parish as the site of research; (iii) beyond Christianity and its assumptions; and (iv) here my own metaphor reaches its limit—to make it a more “critical” enterprise. All of these are laudable moves, and more than merely programmatic; they are also reflective of a direction in which there is observable movement. It is difficult to produce an explicitly programmatic volume of this nature without it appearing like a special pleading for our own areas of research expertise and theoretical proclivities; for the most part, they pull it off.

It is not especially surprising that US sociologists as a whole tend to spend most of their time studying US society, and the editors clearly wish they spent more time coming to terms with other places, but such disciplinary parochialism has consequences even for the study of American religion. Scholars have long recognized the distortions of methodological nationalism, and several of the contributions here show the transnational flows of religious beliefs, practices, and persons that cannot be adequately addressed within the national frame (Levitt, Hagan). Even more problematic are the assumptions about the “essence” of religion in a denominational society: religion is essentially a voluntaristic enterprise, truest to itself insofar as it is disentangled from the state, the economy, culture, and so forth. Engagement with religion abroad (Zubrzycki, Chong, Smilde), where these assumptions do not hold, makes one look at religion at home differently; the US is exceptional insofar as the old assumptions hold, but it begins to highlight the limitations of these assumptions in the US as well. There is something somewhat ironic about this complaint coming in a volume where all of the authors are without exception US based or US trained. The sociology of religion is not the same everywhere else; other communities of scholars certainly have their own parochialisms, but they are not necessarily the same as in the US.

This is undoubtedly true of the focus on congregations, which have long been seen as the primary locus of religion in a denominational society (which is, of course, not everywhere). One can certainly applaud such a move, if this author wonders if this has ever been the dominant tendency outside of the world of American qualitative research on religion (even in the US, I would guess that survey analyses would account for more output to do with religion, and most of this is by necessity individual, rather than congregationally focused, analysis). The recent shift to examining religion in other settings (Lichterman, Bender, Moon, Cadge), and dealing with questions that are more often the preserve of scholars who do not specialize in the sociology of religion (Altinordu, Zubrzycki), is nevertheless a very welcome development. These developments (along with Pagis and Smilde) make “religion” something rather more everyday—less distinctive from, and intertwined with, other aspects of social life—which can only be a good thing from the point of view of the sociological enterprise.

It probably goes along with the focus on the US and congregations, but the editors of the volume also suggest that the discipline needs to move beyond Christo-centrism. I find this term problematic, in part because the only thing that separates this term from a specifically Christian theological term is a hyphen. I will not challenge the claims of the authors about the US in this respect, but things are not necessarily the same elsewhere: in the UK I would contend that that Christian religiosity (especially of the more “mainstream” variety) is under-studied, particularly relative to much smaller religious groups that have the appeal of the exotic, or the interest of the state in funding research on them. Chong’s and Smilde’s study of Christianity in other parts of the world might have once been the preserve of anthropologists, who were usually more interested in exotic local religiosity, to the neglect of Christianity as an inauthentic import.

I am not convinced by Vásquez’s claims that sociology as the self-understanding of modernity required classical sociology to distinguish itself from a “religious” Other. Here he is conflating the sociology of religion as sociology with religious studies, which has had theology as the Other that needed to be displaced in order to make space for itself. Religion was of undoubted interest, but it was not the dominant concern for classical sociology; political economy, biology and psychology were, and remain, more salient Others. I am nevertheless convinced by the associated concern that some Protestant emphases have an unhealthy grip on the whole enterprise, notably the obsession with “belief” and “meaning” as central to religion.

Finally, the editors want to encourage a more “critical” approach to the sociology of religion. Readers of this journal will know the extent of the debate on that particular term. Here the claim seems to be that religion should be treated as both a dependent and an independent variable, and that as the latter it ought to explain more than just socially positive outcomes. That seems to this writer a reasonable, though also a rather thin, conception of what a “critical” sociology of religion might mean.

Minor misgivings aside, this is an outstanding volume; I recommend it enthusiastically both for its contributions and the direction it maps for us, even if I have some reservations about where its description of we are now and the conditions of the road ahead.