Future Directions in the Sociology of Religion

The past 20 years have seen major developments in theoretical and empirical scholarship in the sociological study of religion. Most of the European founders of sociology, of course, engaged religion as an important dimension of understanding social order and transformation. The 20^th century saw the production of many significant works in the sociology of religion in the United States. Yet the mostly taken-for-granted nature of the larger secularization theory that overshadowed a lot of social scientific thinking about religion during much of the past century tended to undermine the taking too seriously of religious institutions, cultures and movements. Old-timers today often report that when they were in graduate school they were actively discouraged by mentors from studying religion. Why invest in studying something that was destined to wither and die? They had to swim against the current to study religion. As a result, in some decades, the sociology of religion languished.

How times have changed. Unexpectedly, socio-political events in recent decades have forced religion back onto the scholarly table for social scientists to reconsider. Beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing thereafter, major world events and movements – liberation theology in Latin America, the Iranian Revolution, the Religious Right in the United States, Catholic Solidarity in Poland, the church-led anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, the strongly religious U.S.-Central America solidarity movement, the spread of Pentecostalism in the Global South, the growing cultural power of American evangelicalism, and, of course, the eruption of militant Islam sometimes violently confronting the West – forced all but the most resistant social scientists to acknowledge that, whatever might be the validity of secularization theory long term, religion was clearly still a present and important force in social, political, and cultural life that needed to be researched, understood, theorized and explained (Berger 1999). In significant part because of the stunting legacy of secularization theory in academia, however – and perhaps due to the field's somewhat narrow focus in the 1970s on "cults" and other new religious movements – many social scientists (as well as journalists and many of the educated public) at first found themselves lacking adequate analytical tools and so made more than a few false starts and misguided efforts trying to make sense of the religious reality they confronted.

Despite these theoretical disadvantages, however, sociologists of religion in the past two decades have – often with the help of research grants from well endowed private foundations with interests in studying religion – made important strides in better understanding the energy, meanings and complexities in and of contemporary religion. Ethnographies of religious conversion and congregational life (e.g., Neitz 1987; Davidman 1991; Ammerman 1997) have, for example, offered helpful inside views of what might otherwise have been alien religious experiences to readers. Multiple research projects on American evangelicalism greatly enhanced our understanding of the worldview, motives and organizational dynamics of that movement (e.g., Wuthnow 1989; Smith et al. 1998; Emerson and Smith 2000; Smith 2000; Gallagher 2003). Helpful historical sociologies of religion improved our longer-term view of religious change (e.g., Wuthnow 1988; Finke and Stark 1992; Stark 1997; Stark 2003). Scholars developed new survey measures of religion that proved much more discriminating and useful than the religion questions they replaced (e.g., Steensland et al. 2000). Statistically oriented scholars have greatly increased the sophistication of quantitative analysis applied to religion (e.g., Sherkat 1999; Sherkat and Ellison 1999). The field witnessed major advances in our understanding of the relationship between religion and life outcomes, particularly deviance (e.g., Stark 1996) and health (e.g., Ferraro and Albrecht-Jensen 1991; Ellison and Levin 1998). A host of solid field studies have enhanced our understanding of the interaction of religion and immigration (Warner and Wittner 1988; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000), religion and politics (Epstein 1991; Demerath and Williams 1992), and the internal transformation of religion (Roof 1999). Both survey and ethnographic methods have deepened our knowledge about the organizational and cultural dimensions of U.S. religious congregations (e.g., Chaves 1997; Becker 1999). The list of notable advances and achievements by scholars including Melissa Wilde, Richard Wood, Omar...