Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies

1. Class Matters: Resurrecting and Redescribing a Neglected Variable

1 Class Matters Resurrecting and Redescribing a Neglected Variable Class matters in the study of American religion, but not in the ways past scholars have asserted. In recent years, sociological debate has raged over whether class remains an important variable. Articles with titles such as “The Promising Future of Class Analysis” conflict with others such as “The Reshaping and Dissolution of Class.”¹ Andrew Milner, a defender of the concept, titled the first chapter of his recent book on the subject “The Strange Death of Class.”² In some areas of research, works proclaiming the demise of class seem to be winning the debate. This trend is visible in religion scholarship. In disciplines such as American religious history, class has always been, and remains, relatively derelict. But even the field of sociology of religion has witnessed a retreat from class-focused research. The authors of a recent textbook on the sociology of religion, for example, note that “in recent decades . . . the class factor has increasingly yielded the front stage to research devoted to race and ethnicity on the one hand and gender on the other.”³ I begin this chapter by examining works that argue for and against the salience of class. The most recent studies suggest its continuing importance in American religion. At the same time, I agree with critics who note that the past conceptions of class used to study religion were at best simplistic, always insufficient, and often inaccurate. Given this, I propose a three-part conception of class for use in religious studies broadly and American religion in particular .The chapter concludes by discussing both the promises and the caveats entailed in putting some class back into religion. The Death and Resurrection of Class in American Religion There are at least two good reasons why class is often ignored in contemporary studies of American religion. First, past scholarship on class and religion was often simplistically reductionistic and, from a contemporary perspec- 10 Class Matters tive, historically inaccurate and politically suspect. As part 1 of this book will demonstrate, studies utilizing class tersely connected certain religious groups with everything from biological inferiority to social and economic deprivations . Throughout the twentieth century, religions attracting minorities and the poor garnered special attention from eugenicists, deprivation theorists, and cultural crisis proponents. The idea that the beliefs and practices of sects and new religions attracted society’s most disadvantaged was so sweeping that scholars often held this view even when demographics suggested otherwise. As noted in the fourth chapter, Horton Davies’s Challenge of the Sects (1961) suggested that sects should be conceived of and explained as “churches of the disinherited.”⁴ But Davies included chapters on Christian Scientists and Theosophists , both of which had mostly middle- and upper-middle-class Cold War memberships.⁵ A second reason that class is often absent in contemporary religious studies is because it lacks a clear, single definition. Class connotes a range of associations , from Marxist analysis to quantitative examinations of education, income, occupation, and wealth. Anyone who samples the growing volume of literature debating the importance or irrelevance of class quickly finds that scholars don’t disagree about the data so much as they hold differing conceptions of what class is.⁶ In the studyof American religion, as in other fields, class has frequently and problematically been tied to the notion of “class consciousness ,” which assumes that people actively think of and mobilize themselves as members of a group unified by material conditions and attitudes. This concept , grounded as it is in politically oriented Marxist analysis, has contributed to moralistic discussions of the emancipatory and/or oppressive aspects of religion. As discussed in part 1, scholars studying Native new religions, minority spirituality, and the religions of the poor and dispossessed continually returned to questions of whether religion acted as a consciousness-veiling opium or a revolutionary tool of liberation. Their problematic answers often revealed more about their own assumptions, social locations, and historical contexts than it did about the religions under examination. In making such arguments, scholars engaged in a process of classification and distinction that make them subjects for our analysis rather than secondary sources for our research. That’s because class is—and always has been—more than a status grounded in material conditions but also an identity rhetorically and symbolically made and unmade through representation. Given the current confusion over what it is and the problematic scholarship that has come before, it is not surprising that class is a neglected...