David Martin and the Sociology of Religion

Hans Joas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367589554
• eBook ISBN: 9781351188937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations
• Index: Social Sciences

David Martin is a pioneer of a political sociology of religion that integrates a combined analysis of nationalism and political religions with the history of religion. He was one of the first critics of the so-called secularization thesis, and his historical orientation makes him one of the few outstanding scholars who have continued the work begun by Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. This collection provides the first scholarly overview of his hugely influential work and includes a chapter written by David Martin himself.

Starting with an introduction that contextualises David Martin's theories on the sociology of religion, both currently and historically, this volume aims to cover David Martin's lifework in its entirety. An international panel of contributors sheds new light on his studies of particular geographical areas (Britain, Latin America, Scandinavia) and on certain systematic fields (secularization, violence, music, Pentecostalism, the relation between sociology and theology). David Martin's concluding chapter addresses the critical points raised in response to his theories.

This book addresses one of the key figures in the development of the sociology of religion, and as such it will be of great interest to all scholars of the sociology of religion.

1
Introduction: more Weberian than Weber?

David Martin’s political sociology of religion

Hans Joas

When I was asked, in the year 2011, to contribute a so-called blurb for David Martin’s book The Future of Christianity. Reflections on Violence and Democracy, Religion and Secularization, what I came up with was the characterization of the author’s main achievement as having pioneered a “political sociology of religion”. Fortunately David Martin, while to my knowledge never having used this as a self-characterization, accepted this formula. I did, of course, not mean to say that Martin tended to reduce the authentically religious to the political as if religions were nothing but distorted articulations of political claims and grievances. That would do grave injustice to David Martin’s sophisticated combination of sociological research and theological reasoning. What I tried to refer to, however, was the fact that Martin, more than many other sociologists of religion, does not base his theory of secularization and of the causes for religious revitalization on the assumption that these processes are mostly the result of an aggregation of individual religious experiences, acts of conversion and decision-making. According to him, the crucial dimension in explaining such processes is the attitude of churches and other religious communities or organizations to a number of key issues: the so-called national question, the social question, the democratic question, the rights of the individual and religious pluralism. In this perspective the effects of economic, scientific or cultural developments on religion, like the impulses emanating from religious doubt or experiences of religious certainty, are always mediated by institutional arrangements and the respective fields of tension. It is this that gives them their secularizing or desecularizing force.¹

In Martin’s own words, the sociology of religion and the sociology of politics are “joined at the hip” (Martin 2017: 13). He thinks that we cannot, for example, analyze the history of nationalism or the myths and rituals that are constitutive for secular states if we don’t deal with them in a conceptual framework that integrates religion and politics or, as I would prefer to say, the dynamics of power and the dynamics of sacralization processes. It is worth mentioning that this is not identical with the claim, for example in Eric Voegelin’s work, that nationalism and secularism are political religions or quasi-religions that should be analyzed by means of the sociology of religion. David Martin’s theory is not based on ahistorical assumptions about an anthropological need for religion. Moreover, “power” and “the sacred” are clearly not identical, but in our world nothing can be sacred without any implications of power, and no power-relation can be stabilized without legitimation – for example in the charisma of a leader, the sacred quality of a tradition or in a formal procedure that necessarily at some point is based on a belief in its own legitimacy.

This, one may say, is not a new idea, but crucial in the work of Max Weber, who already combined the sociology of religion with a sociology of domination and developed an important typology of the forms of legitimation. There are good reasons indeed to call Martin a Weberian, and to the one just mentioned one could add his historical and comparative approach in a more general sense. Martin is a Weberian, but not just as a disciple of the great classic of sociology or a member of a school. I find him more Weberian than Weber. This can easily be misunderstood. When we call somebody “more Catholic than the Pope”, for example, this is hardly a compliment. In the same way, the apocryphal quotation from Marx “Moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste”, is mostly used to say that certain Marxist thinkers are more narrow-minded than their great master ever was. When I call Martin more Weberian than Weber, my message is the opposite. Martin does not belong to the rather large group of Weberians who use or misuse Weber’s enormous reputation for propagating their own “approaches” or “paradigms”. My point is that Weber is famous both for his historical-comparative method and for some claims concerning long-term social change, but that there is a tension between method and substantive claims in his work. While some commentators of Weber’s work present his theories of rationalization, bureaucratization and disenchantment as empirical discoveries reached by his method, I dispute this close connection of method and substance in Weber. It is more plausible to see Weber at a certain point in his intellectual development being swamped or drowned in the varieties of his historical reconstructions and, as a consequence of or a remedy to this fragmentation, imposing on his material certain concepts that David Martin would call “dangerous nouns of process” (Martin 2011).

Weber clearly did not start out with an intuitive sense of a “universal historical process involving the rationalization of all spheres of life in all cultures and at all times” (Kaesler 2006: 199–200), but instead subsequently hit on the idea of using this concept to unite his disparate studies on bureaucratization, industrialization, intellectualization, the development of rational enterprise, capitalism, specialization, objectification, methodization, disciplining, disenchantment, secularization and dehumanization. But there is a huge question mark over the plausibility of this retrospective self-systematization, over whether it can be correctly understood as the “unintended product of his many individual pieces of research” (as Dirk Kaesler puts it), or even as a “discovery” (as Weber’s widow Marianne [1926: 349] or Wolfgang Schluchter [1991: 102] suggest), or whether, as I think, we might not make better use of Weber’s work by eschewing the notion that these discrete processes are subprocesses of an overarching rationalization.

There are two main reasons for skepticism about this overarching processual notion of “rationalization”. First, there are clearly radical differences between rationalization in the sense of an increasing orientation toward profit-making principles, and, for example, rationalization in the sense of theologians’ intellectual systematization of religious content. It makes no sense at all, one might say, to use the same term for both processes – unless one assumes that there is some kind of causal relationship between them. But this – and here is the second reason – makes sense only if we assume the existence of a specific process of rationalization within a particular culture over very long periods of time, in other words something like the development of an “Occidental rationalism”. This notion, however, is underpinned by specific assumptions about, on the one hand, the West’s enduring uniqueness and, on the other, culturally induced inabilities of the non-Western world, assumptions that are becoming increasingly implausible today in light of the tremendous economic rise of East and South Asia. One can argue that Weber’s notion of “disenchantment” is also deeply ambiguous.² It makes the demagification of the world by the ancient Hebrew prophets, the detranscendentalization in connection with the rise of the “secular option” and the “immanent frame” – to use Charles Taylor’s (2007) terms – and the desacralization in the sense of a loss of existential meaning encountered in the world seem similar to one another. This conceptual ambiguity is the foundation on which the assumption of a 3000-year process of disenchantment is based; again, if we overcome the conceptual ambiguity, the narrative loses much of its plausibility. Wolfgang Knöbl has come forward with the interesting idea (2011: 288) that these “hard” nouns of process played an important epistemological role in Weber, namely to claim that his own historical reconstructions are not purely subjective and in this sense arbitrary, but follow from historical tendencies that make at the same time all Hegelian “rationalization” of history impossible. Be that as it may; this reference to Weber is intended to make clear that Martin’s political sociology of religion is both a culmination of the Weberian historico-comparative research program and a way out of the impasse of Weber’s diagnosis of modernity and the paths to it.

This tension in Weber’s work and David Martin’s achievements in dissolving it can serve as the guiding thread of an interpretation of Martin’s lifework. This volume offers a collective attempt to follow Martin into many, if not all, of the ramifications of his thinking. In the first part of this introduction, I will restrict myself to two areas, namely first his so-called “General Theory of Secularization”, and second, the wider framework of a historical sociology of religion as it is being developed particularly in Martin’s contributions to the Axial Age debate. In the third part, the contributions to the volume will be briefly characterized.

A general theory of secularization?

As is well known, Martin’s book title has been ridiculed by many, including Kevin Christiano who spoke of “one of the most gloriously mistitled works in our field” (Christiano 2008: 20). David Martin is not happy with these mockeries and feels himself misunderstood. It all depends obviously on what a “general theory” in the social sciences is expected to look like. If we followed nineteenth-century positivism and twentieth-century logical positivism, the expectation would be that the social sciences should aim at ahistorical propositions about the connections between causal variables and their effects. Such propositions can be developed as hypotheses independently from actual empirical research. They have to be applied as the ahistorical propositions they are to the historical empirical material of the researcher, and these tests of application will then lead to their falsification or – necessarily provisional – verification. According to this view, general theory has the same meaning whether we talk of the study of human action and history or not. From the tradition of German hermeneutics and historicism we can derive an alternative view. For thinkers in this tradition there are no such laws in the area of human action; sociology will never become social physics. We can only closely study individual cases and develop out of these studies, by comparing one plausible narrative of a case with an empirically grounded plausible narrative of another case, step by step generalizing statements that are in turn a fruitful preparation for an attempt to explain further cases. If a new case we study does not fall under the description in the way we had expected, this does not falsify our generalization completely. It forces us to modify the pattern of our explanation so that it now can subsume the new case as well. In this way our explanatory theory becomes richer and richer with regard to history, not more ahistorical. This is the logic of historical-comparative research in the classical tradition. This is not the place to discuss the question of whether Max Weber himself in his methodological writings came to the same conclusion, and that one should consider the consequences of the transformation of historicism into the modern social sciences by great scholars like Ernst Troeltsch and Otto Hintze.

David Martin’s book of 1978 clearly aims in that direction, but it seems that he also vacillated between the two competing understandings of general theory there. In his introduction he lists “certain broad tendencies towards secularization in industrial society” that, he claims, “have already been fairly well established” (Martin 1978: 2), for example

that religious institutions are adversely affected to the extent that an area is dominated by heavy industry; that they are the more adversely affected if the area concerned is homogeneously proletarian; that religious practice declines proportionately with the size of an urban concentration.

(Martin 1978: 3)

One might actually find several of these propositions neither convincing nor well established. They are based on assumptions about “industrial society” and functional differentiation, and clearly would not fall under the description of a “political sociology of religion”. It was Martin’s ambition, of course, not simply to repeat the assumptions of the conventional sociological theories of the time and their explanations of secularization as a corollary of modernization. But he accepted these assumptions as being correct “other things being equal”, as he wrote: “But things are not equal – ever”, particularly not “with respect to the particular cultural … complex within which they operate”. Hence, for him, “the general theory is general in that it relates ‘universal processes’ which are empirically quite well established to a typology of cultural contexts and then specifies the type of refraction which the processes then undergo” (Martin 1978: 3).

This formula seems to me not satisfactory. It is neither in conformity with the logical-positivist, nor with what I called the hermeneutical-historicist understanding of general theory, but a mere compromise between the available alternatives. Neither the theory of industrial society to which he refers nor the theory of functional differentiation, which should rather be classified as another “dangerous noun of process”, are the result of a gradual generalization from the study of individual cases, and certainly not from a close investigation of the dynamics of power and of sacralization processes. No wonder, therefore, that those with a strictly positivist understanding did not find Martin’s “general theory” acceptable. Those with a more historicist understanding were able to learn a lot from Martin’s study of individual cases and from his comparisons, but also found these studies and comparisons a little bit distorted by the unexamined framework of assumptions about industrial society and functional differentiation.

There can be no doubt that the patterns Martin describes are extremely valuable. It is obvious that Martin’s starting point was his home country, Britain, and that his diagnosis of religion there is one of “institutional erosion, erosion of religious ethos, maintenance of amorphous religious beliefs” (Martin 1978: 7). His two most important contrast cases, at the beginning at least, were the U.S. and France. The American case differs from the British, mostly because of institutional expansion, while the French is totally different. Like many others, Martin describes the division into two radically different milieus in France: “massive religious beliefs, ethos and institutions confronting massive secularist beliefs, ethos and institutions” (Martin 1978: 7). To these three main patterns, Martin added a “Russian” pattern by which he meant the state-enforced “massive erosion of religious beliefs, ethos and institutions but maintenance of the beliefs and the ethos within the surviving religious institutions”. The French pattern is said to apply in more “Latin European” countries, all other patterns are allegedly “sub-variants within this range” (Martin 1978: 8).

This distinction of patterns is handled very deftly in Martin’s analysis of the individual cases. These analyses sensitize him to many aspects that cannot be subsumed under the concepts of “industrial society” and “cultural refraction”. Under the influence of Edward Shils – with whom he cooperated in matters of higher education policy – the distinction between center and periphery with regard not only to geography, but also to the sacred core of a legitimation system became important for his analyses. As an example of the book’s richness, and because of the timeliness of the topic, one could quote Martin’s claim that “foreign migrants tend to cluster at the cultural centre rather than the periphery, and so may increase the alienation of periphery from centre” (Martin 1978: 142). Among the important conditions for the maintenance of religious identity and practice with respect to migration he mentioned the following:

whether or not the migration is seasonal; whether or not whole families are involved; whether or not the roles available in the host culture allow clustering in given urban sectors; whether or not the religion of the host culture is significantly different from that of the migrants; whether or not there are historic mutual perceptions as between members of the two cultures which are hostile or involve superiority and/or inferiority; whether or not religion has been a major focus of such perceptions; whether or not adequate numbers move to form a supporting environment; whether or not other foci of identity like language have to be dropped; whether or not the group achieves forms of social mobility which break down endogamy; whether or not historic “peculiarities” (like the role of women or wearing of turbans) are defined as jointly crucial for the identity of the religion and of the culture.

(Martin 1978: 143)

Furthermore, José Casanova makes an important point when he writes in a review of Martin’s book The Future of Christianity: “Well before the category of path-dependency became fashionable in comparative social science, Martin had made such analytical practice the core of his comparative historical approach” (Casanova 2011: 436). Martin reconstructs the influence of military defeats or victories on the prestige of states and churches and the role of learning processes in churches. But it is difficult or impossible to see that the book concludes with a theoretical synthesis that really integrates its findings. In that sense the “general theory”, despite its enormous richness, has certainly not reached its aim. Its findings are more sophisticated than the theoretical framework presented at its beginning, and the focus of the book is so exclusively on Europe and North America and, of course, on Christianity that it is not a general theory of secularization and even less of religious revitalization in a wider sense.

These critical remarks should not be misunderstood as if they were intended to deny the epochal importance of Martin’s 1978 study. There was certainly no superior work available then, and nobody had gone farther in the direction of a general theory than Martin. Instead of offering a detailed analysis of the inner tensions in this early masterpiece – this is being done in the contributions by Carroll and Koenig – one should emphasize here that a considerable part of Martin’s later writings, both empirically and theoretically, remedies...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: more Weberian than Weber? David Martin’s political sociology of religion
• 2 David Martin’s theory of secularisation
• 3 Revising secularization theory’s paradigmatic core – David Martin on general processes, basic patterns and causal mechanisms of differentiation between religion and politics
• 4 The one and the many stories: how to reconcile sense-making and fact-checking in the secularization narrative
• 5 Understanding religion in modern Britain: taking the long view
• 6 Parallel reformations in Latin America: a critical review of David Martin’s interpretation of the Pentecostal revolution
• 7 David Martin on Scandinavia and music
• 8 Taking religion back out: on the secular dynamics of armed conflicts and the potentials of religious peace-making
• 9 Converting: a general theory of David Martin
• 10 Thinking with your life
• Complete bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index