Religion, Deviance, and Social Control
eBook - ePub

Religion, Deviance, and Social Control

Rodney Stark, William Sims Bainbridge

Share book
  1. 220 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Religion, Deviance, and Social Control

Rodney Stark, William Sims Bainbridge

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Does religion have the power to regulate human behavior? If so, under what conditions can it prevent crime, delinquency, suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, or joining cults? Despite the fact that ordinary citizens assume religion deters deviant behavior, there has been little systematic scientific research on these crucial questions. This book is the first comprehensive analysis, drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary data, and written in a style that will appeal to readers from many intellectual backgrounds.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Religion, Deviance, and Social Control an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Religion, Deviance, and Social Control by Rodney Stark, William Sims Bainbridge in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Sociology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781135771591
Subtopic
Sociology
Edition
1
1
Religion and the Moral Order: An Introduction
As the social sciences emerged from philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century, their founders were unanimous in their assertion that religion reinforced the moral order. Despite this, many of these same founders eagerly awaited the collapse of religion, some because they were equally eager for an end to the prevailing moral order (down with “false consciousness”), and many others because they despised religion, regarding it as a bundle of irrational superstitions incompatible with enlightened thought. Indeed, in his The Positive Philosophy (1830–42), Auguste Comte proclaimed that a new science, to be called “sociology,” would replace religion as the basis for morality; this science would constitute a sort of ethical calculus.
Of course, nothing of the sort took place, and for most of the twentieth century social scientists have been content to teach that the primary social function of religion is to sustain the moral order. They have therefore assumed that the more religious members of any society will be less apt to violate the moral code (Parsons 1964a; Merton 1968).
Nevertheless, with the exception of studies of the linkage between denomination and suicide (which we will pursue in detail in Chapters 2 and 3), social scientists were mostly content to assume that religion was a major factor in social control. Consequently, as research on the correlates of crime and delinquency grew into a major enterprise, little serious attention was paid to religion. For example, a survey of 28 criminology textbooks found that only four included religion in their indexes (Stack and Kanavy 1983). Thus, it was to everyone's amazement when, in 1969, Travis Hirschi and Rodney Stark (reluctantly) struck a blow to social theory as well as to common sense by reporting their inability to find any correlations between measures of religiousness (Sunday school and church attendance as well as belief in Hellfire) and delinquency among high school students in Richmond, California. Soon, this finding was reconfirmed by Burkett and White (1974), who worked with data collected in Oregon.
Social scientists love nothing so much as irony, and Hirschi and Starks seemed the most ironic finding of them all: that kids were as likely to strip your car on the way home from Sunday school as they were on their way home from the pool hall or the video game arcade. Hence, the lack of a religious “Hellfire effect” on delinquency was enshrined in most introductory sociology textbooks.
Ironically, Hirschi and Starks finding applies only to the West Coast. As we will see in Chapter 5, studies done elsewhere in the nation unanimously discover strong negative correlations between religiousness and delinquency.
The Social a Nature of Religion
Our approach to the topic of religion and the moral order will not pursue a “Hellfire effect.” We do not locate religious effects primarily within the individual human psyche, but within the human group. That is, the propositions we will formulate and test stress that the way in which religion sustains the moral order is primarily social. Granted that persons having deep religious convictions about sin and divine judgment may strive to lead blameless lives. But, as we shall see, their capacity to do so—indeed, their ability to form and sustain deep religious convictions—will depend greatly on the religiousness (or lack of it) of those around them.
Keep in mind, too, that although religion may generally function to support the moral order, clearly it does not always do so. Often enough, religious organizations and movements challenge the prevailing secular culture, and in so doing can be seen as a source of deviant behavior rather than as a source of social control. The role of churches in resisting and eventually overturning totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe is a case in point. After the collapse of Soviet-bloc communism, the Roman Catholic Church in Poland or the Orthodox Catholic Church in Russia appear to be bastions of conventional morality. But under the old regimes they were considered sufficiently deviant to prompt serious repression and frequent official condemnation. It also needs to be recognized that many religious movements unsuccessfully challenge secular culture and the state. In doing so they become identified as “cults” and “sects,” and mere membership in such groups often qualifies as deviant behavior. We shall have much to say about such groups in the second part of the book.
As these examples illustrate, throughout the book our focus will be on religion as a social rather than as a psychological phenomenon. Thus, for example, we will be far less concerned about whether people holding strong religious beliefs are less apt to commit crimes than we will be to learn whether crime rates vary across communities according to differences in the degree and quality of community religiousness. Indeed, our emphasis will be on the morality of communities, not on individual morality. Consequently, although we will analyze individual-level data, our usual objects of study and comparison will be collective: cities, states, regions, nations, high schools, religious groups, and Utopian communes. Such units of analysis are often also referred to as ecological units, indicating that they surround individuals.
From time to time we will examine data based on individuals, but even then we will emphasize the effects of denominational membership and church attendance—the social aspects of faith—rather than belief.
There is nothing new about stressing the social role of religion. The earliest social scientists did not limit themselves to the assertion that religion causes people to behave themselves (although they assumed that this was true), but that religion maintains the moral order of society. However, none of the early social theorists claimed that religion was the only basis for community morality. As an introduction to the book, it will prove useful to distinguish between social and moral sources of social integration.
Social Integration
The idea of social integration is central to all discussions of social deviance. How do societies hold together? How are people able to pat tern their behavior so as to resist temptations and opportunities to harm others to an extent sufficient to permit a relatively orderly social life? In his great work, Leviathan, the English social philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) postulated an original human situation lacking “society.” Had this been the “natural condition of mankind,” Hobbes wrote, it would necessarily involve a war of all against all, for no one could trust anyone, and as a result life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But, this is not the way things are, Hobbes noted, because people have somewhat subordinated their selfish impulses to society. And the key to this subordination is social integration—a shared willingness to conform and to cause others to conform to a set of norms or rules defining proper interaction. To the extent that members of a group can trust one another not to murder them in their beds and/or carry off their possessions, the group is socially integrated. Put another way, the rules governing proper interaction define the moral order of the group, and social integration refers to the extent to which the moral order prevails. It must be noted that rules governing proper interaction are not limited to prohibitions of severe misdeeds against others, but often extend to minor courtesies, such as not belching or picking one's nose in the presence of others.
Social Sources of Integration
It is obvious that the basis of human existence, indeed of being human, lies in relationships with others. Most of what we need and desire we must get from, or in cooperation with, others. Typically, we come to rely on specific others to provide certain rewards—regular trading partnerships arise. Such partnerships often are called attachments. We tend to exchange with the same people on a regular basis, and a major part of what is exchanged is emotion. That is, we tend to like and even love those to whom we are attached.
From sociology's earliest days, social scientists have regarded attachments as the fundamental social glue. Thus, when the famous French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) argued that humans are moral only to the extent that they are social, he was asserting that people conform to societal norms only to the extent that they are restrained by their attachments. Most of us conform, most of the time, in order to retain the good opinion of those to whom we are attached and to protect these valued relationships. Two propositions follow from this view, the first about individual behavior, and the second about social or collective units.
At the individual level: Persons will conform to the norms to the to to extent that they are attached to others who accept the legitimacy of the norms. Conversely, people will deviate from the norms to the extent they lack attachments.
At the group level: Deviance rates will be higher in having a groups lower mean level of attachments.
When we are alone, most of us do things we wouldn't do in front of others, especially not in front of others whose opinions of us we value. People deficient in attachments are effectively alone all the time and therefore are free to deviate, since they have no attachments at risk. When there are relatively many such persons in a group, their behavior will generate high rates of deviant behavior.
Many studies have found that the individual level proposition holds. For example, attachments are excellent predictors of crime and delinquency. But, for a long time there was little of value done to test the group level proposition even though it was of substantially greater theoretical interest. In large part this was because it seemed too expensive to assess levels of attachments for a large number of groups having many members—cities, for example. Our efforts to test this proposition in early chapters are based on the recognition that available data—measures of the degree to which a population consists of strangers and newcomers—can serve as an excellent inferential measure of attachments within collective or ecological units of analysis. Nearly all strangers and newcomers necessarily must lack attachments in comparison with people who have resided in the same place for a long period of time.
Moral Sources of Integration
Attachments may give force to the norms, but it is a shared moral conception that gives the norms coherence and meaning. It is here that the role of religion always has been stressed. This is because all of the world's great religions not only impose sacred obligations towards the divine, but specify moral demands concerning the behavior of their adherents towards one another. For example, the first four of the Ten Commandments concern duties towards God, but the remaining six are about basic interpersonal morality and specify rules for sustaining social integration.
It has long been recognized that social and moral sources of integration interact. Lack of attachments not only reduces social integration, but weakens religious organizations and thereby the level of moral integration. It is difficult to sustain any form of organized activity, including religious activity, in communities where everyone is coming or going—in communities of strangers (Welch 1983). Indeed, it was the fear that the rapid urbanization that had begun in the nineteenth century would create huge immoral cities of strangers that animated early sociologists. Thus, Durkheim anticipated a society adrift in what he called anomie, a condition of normlessness that would arise because societies of the unattached would be unable to adequately teach people what the norms are, let alone induce them to conform. It turned out that these fears about cities were largely groundless—human capacities to create and sustain relationships proved far more durable than Durkheim and his colleagues thought. Nevertheless, the basic claim that attachments are required to sustain organized action is valid— indeed, it is self-evident. In 1891 the pastor of the Collegiate Church in New York City explained his lack of members because of:
the constant changing of residence by the great mass of the people… Hence a congregation is always changing, and with this its cohesiveness, efficiency and strength are steadily weakening. This uncertainty of residence makes the people reluctant to form any close association with Christian work; and in the majority of cases keeps them from going to church at all. Everybody and everything is strange on both sides, and from day to day there is no firm step taken to establish any church relation, (quoted in Schauffler 1891: 10)
Durkheim went even farther in connecting social and moral sources of integration: he frequently proposed that the latter was only a reflection of the former. As we will see in Chapter 2, Durkheim often argued that religion was but a reflection of underlying social integration, not a contributor to it. Here he echoed Marx, who usually regarded religion as simply a cultural epiphenomenon, a mere reflection of the “real,” material bases of society—except when it suited his purposes to argue otherwise, as when he attributed to religion the independent capacity to create false consciousness by serving as an opium of the people. In later chapters we will see whether there are religious effects on moral behavior that are independent of social sources of integration.
We may, therefore, formulate two additional propositions.
At the individual level: (other things being equal) Religious individuals will be less likely than those who are not religious to commit deviant acts.
At the group level: Rates of deviant behavior will vary across ecological or collective units to the degree that they exhibit moral integration.
The “other things being equal” clause applies to all theoretical propositions—although theorists usually treat it as implicit. Here we make it explicit so as to warn readers that, come Chapter 5, we will append a contingent clause to this proposition, indicating special circumstances under which the proposition does not hold—circumstances in which other things are not equal.
Part One of the book is devoted to developing and testing these four propositions about religion and deviance. Along the way we will explore many other concerns as well, inquiring into Durkheim's “suicide” and examination of the role of religion in the prohibition movement.
In Part Two we will shift our focus from the role of religion in sustaining the moral order to an examination of religion as deviance. We will examine the spread and growth of cult movements, claims about religious insanity, and the durability of religious Utopian communes.
In the final chapter we will reflect on the neglect of religion by criminologists and sociologists and suggest some potentially fruitful directions for future study.
Finally, we have written this book for the general reader as well as for our social scientific colleagues. Therefore, while most chapters include statistical analysis, and a number of tables have been included to provide other scholars with our precise results, we have written the textual discussions of these results in such a way that one need not examine the actual tables to fully grasp our findings.
Part One
Religion and Deviance
2
Religion and Suicide
Partly by accident, suicide rates played a crucial role in the founding of sociology. At the end of the eighteenth century, several European governments began to collect data to identify and compare various causes of death. When these mortality statistics were assembled it was possible, for the first time, to examine the prevalence of suicide. The data revealed two very shocking patterns.
First, the number of people who took their own lives was extremely stable over time: year after year, in a particular place, virtually an identical number of people committed suicide. This stability shocked many early observers because it forced them to recognize that what had up to then seemed the most individual of actions, rooted in each persons psychological makeup and personal circumstances, must in fact be of social origin. Were suicide the sort of idiosyncratic, individual action it had been thought to be, the number of s...

Table of contents