- Exploring the Religious Life
Professor Rodney Stark is a brick thrower. That might seem an inapt Irish label for someone whose background is German American, but it is appropriate. Professor Stark, now of Baylor University, has been throwing elegant, polished bricks at the dogmas of sociology for many years. He has stirred up a lot of trouble, made a lot of people angry, and caused at least some sociologists of religion to change their minds.
Exploring the Religious Life is a whole bag of bricks, a collection of his recent essays about religion (not the Religious life of the Catholic orders, I hasten to add). His thesis is quite simple: Religion is important in human life. Those sociologists who deny or ignore this fact are dogmatists, not scientists. Religion, he contends in this volume, is not the same as magic, and it is not idealistic humbug; religion is not just the opiate of the poor; religion is not limited to the formal denominations; the moral order weakens without God. For each of these assertions he adduces convincing empirical data. Professor Stark not only makes outlandish statements, he backs them up with hard evidence, which makes him [End Page 729] even more of an outcast in his profession. It is not so much that the sociological emperors have no clothes. Rather, Professor Stark has the data and they don't.
He is not going to win his war, no matter how many victories he may achieve in individual battles. Mainstream social science has no need of the God hypothesis. However, as someone who is on Professor Stark's side though perhaps more quietly, it is fun to watch him. It is also consoling that he is right.
This book of essays belongs in every college and university library so that students can be directed to it for a contrarian view of the dilapidated secularization theory.
The University of Arizona