American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination: Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion (review)

This volume presents not a narrative but an argument. Michael P. Carroll, known for his series of studies of Catholic practice published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, has a case to make about the way Catholicism is handled by sociologists, psychologists, and historians. He thinks that the starting point of many academic colleagues is a taken-for-granted set of assumptions about the nature of true and mature religion and the sort of relationship one should have with God. With these unquestioned assumptions in place, the scholar goes to work on the empirical evidence in his or her field and constructs an answer to the problem at hand that originates in assumptions rather than explaining the data. Consequently the scholar notices some data and does not notice others. He or she formulates theory and reaches conclusions deducible from the assumptions rather than acts of genuine understanding arising from encounters with the data. Questions are skewed and so distortion ensues. Why are the assumptions not criticized and eliminated in the normal course of research and review? Because the assumptions are so widespread and deeply set in the mind and culture of the scholars that they constitute a group bias. Such a formal analysis is not uncommon in the literature of scholarly debate.

The book is clear in its aims and organization. From the introduction to the epilogue and in the individual chapters, Carroll again and again tells the reader his methods and approach. He spends two chapters telling the reader how some Irish became Protestants in America and how others became good Catholics, correcting the "standard story." He follows with three more chapters, each devoted to a common scholarly perception or story of an ethnic enclave of Catholics, and then shows how the evidence does not support the common story and suggests a revision. In chapter 6 he follows the trail of the invidious assumptions of historians, sociologists, and psychologists (that is, "the Academic Study of American Religion") back to their origins in certain (liberal) Protestant doctrines that function as markers, resources, and lenses for the interpretation of religion in general and Catholicism in particular.

Carroll, on the theoretic side of his case, follows in the line of David Tracy and Andrew Greeley (among others) who have, over the last thirty years and with precious little effect on the academic interpreters of religion apart from Catholics, engaged upon an ambitious program of hermeneutics crucial to which is the contrast between the analogical (Catholic) and the dialectical (Protestant) imagination. Their work is grounded in the cognitional theory of Bernard Lonergan, S. J., whom Carroll does not mention. The point of all this theory is to explain why scholars miss the mark on Catholicism and how they can then correct themselves or be corrected.

The book has many virtues, among which are brevity, clarity, conciseness, deft use of illustrative material from American religious history, and a prose style that is engaging and not at all complicated by the deep thinking it conveys. It is a fine book that deserves a wide readership in the profession.