Handbook of the Sociology of Religion (review)

Michele Dillon's recently edited Handbook of the Sociology of Religion is a tour de force of current thinking and recent scholarship in the sociology of religion. The book's 34 contributors cover a wide range of historical, thematic, theoretical, and methodological issues in 28 chapters, each of which was originally written, rather than being reprinted from elsewhere, for inclusion in this volume. Rather than simply reviewing current literature, each chapter represents the authors' engagement with the topic based on their own current and previous research in the area. All of the book's chapters are substantial and engaging, and no review can do justice to the breadth of issues addressed in a volume of this magnitude.

The Handbook opens with a series of chapters by Michele Dillon, Robert Wuthnow, Robert N. Bellah, Peter Beyer, and Grace Davie about religion as an objective of sociological inquiry. Sociologists of religion think of religion as a social fact, Dillon argues, to focus on "understanding religious beliefs and explaining how they relate to worldviews, practices, and identities, the diverse forms of expression religion takes, how religious practices and meanings change over time, and their implications for, and interrelations with, other domains of individual and social action" (7). Grace Davie reviews the development of the sociology of religion from the discipline's founding fathers to the present in "The Evolution of the Sociology of Religion: Theme and Variations," and Robert Wuthnow considers what it means to study religion sociologically by responding to objections and misunderstandings about the discipline, theory, and method in "Studying Religion, Making it Sociological." Robert N. Bellah and Peter Beyer present arguments about the definition, conceptualization, and importance of religion in "The Ritual Roots of Society and Culture" and "Social Forms of Religion and Religions on Contemporary Global Society." Both Bellah and Beyer point to broader questions about the relationship between religions as conceived and practiced locally, nationally, and globally that run throughout the volume as a whole.

The second section considers key theoretical and methodological issues in the sociology of religion. Chapters by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, "The Dynamics of Religious Economies," and Philip S. Gorski, "Historicizing the Secularization Debate: An Agenda for Research," speak to theoretical questions about secularization that have been central to the field for many decades. Finke and Starke contrast the old secularization approach with their new approach centered on religious economies, while Gorski argues that neither of these perspectives is likely correct because of the limited time periods and geographic regions from which evidence has been gathered. Rather, Gorski develops sociopolitical and religiocultural perspectives which he regards as promising alternatives to the secularization paradigm. In the methodological chapters, Michael Hout shows how demographic methods and thinking have and can contribute to knowledge in the sociology of religion in "Demographic Methods for the Sociology of Religion," and Mark Chaves and Laura Stephens explore one topic, church attendance, in "Church Attendance in the United States," in which different methods of data collection have led to different findings over time. The last two chapters in this section by Patricia M.Y. Chang, "Escaping the Procrustean Bed: A Critical Analysis of the Study of Religious Organizations, 1930–2001," and Wade Clark Roof, "Religion and Spirituality: Toward an Integrated Analysis," point to limits in the current analytic schemas for thinking about religion and organizations and spirituality respectively and propose novel approaches.

The remaining chapters in the volume are divided into four thematic sections focused around religion and the life course; religion and social identity; religion, political behavior, and public culture; and religion and socioeconomic equality that each address how religion interacts with broader issues in public life. Chapters by Darren Sherkat, Michele Dillon and Paul Wink, and Michael McCullough and Timothy Smith in the section about religion and the life course respectively examine religious socialization in families, religion and spirituality in late adulthood, and the relationship between religion and health. Penny Edgell looks more specifically at congregations in her chapter in this section, considering...