For the Glory of God

How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery

Rodney Stark

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400866809
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología de la religión

Rodney Stark's provocative new book argues that, whether we like it or not, people acting for the glory of God have formed our modern culture. Continuing his project of identifying the widespread consequences of monotheism, Stark shows that the Christian conception of God resulted--almost inevitably and for the same reasons--in the Protestant Reformation, the rise of modern science, the European witch-hunts, and the Western abolition of slavery. In the process, he explains why Christian and Islamic images of God yielded such different cultural results, leading Christians but not Muslims to foster science, burn "witches, " and denounce slavery.
With his usual clarity and skepticism toward the received wisdom, Stark finds the origins of these disparate phenomena within monotheistic religious organizations. Endemic in such organizations are pressures to maintain religious intensity, which lead to intense conflicts and schisms that have far-reaching social results.
Along the way, Stark debunks many commonly accepted ideas. He interprets the sixteenth-century flowering of science not as a sudden revolution that burst religious barriers, but as the normal, gradual, and direct outgrowth of medieval theology. He also shows that the very ideas about God that sustained the rise of science led also to intense witch-hunting by otherwise clear-headed Europeans, including some celebrated scientists. This conception of God likewise yielded the Christian denunciation of slavery as an abomination--and some of the fiercest witch-hunters were devoted participants in successful abolitionist movements on both sides of the Atlantic. For the Glory of God is an engrossing narrative that accounts for the very different histories of the Christian and Muslim worlds. It fundamentally changes our understanding of religion's role in history and the forces behind much of what we point to as secular progress.

1

God’s Truth: Inevitable Sects and Reformations

Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise, so help me God. Amen.

—Martin Luther

Every October, Lutheran churches around the world celebrate Reformation Sunday in remembrance of the religious drama played out by Martin Luther and his opponents in Germany during the sixteenth century.

Most people still use the term “Reformation” this way, but that definition has become much too narrow. Even the most partisan Lutheran historians no longer ignore the English Reformation, nor do they any longer dismiss Calvinism as a mere aftermath. Instead, they acknowledge the diversity of the Reformation even in Germany. Respectable reference works also reflect this expansion of the subject: The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions defines the “Reformation” as “Movements for reform in the Christian Church in the West, which took place in the early 16th century.”¹

But this definition is also out-of-date. Many contemporary scholars now refuse to restrict the Reformation to sixteenth-century events, noting that Jan Hus was burned for precipitating a Bohemian Reformation long before Luther was born—hence the title of James Tracy’s recent book: Europe’s Reformations, 1450–1650. But even Tracy’s time frame ignores the fact that John Wyclif planted the seeds of the English Reformation during the fourteenth century. Moreover, historians have begun to expand the Reformation to include early medieval “heresies” as well as efforts at reform that developed within the Church as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries.²

However, even this greatly increased scope is inadequate. In this chapter I will define a reformation as efforts to restore or renew standards of religious belief and practice to a more demanding level, within a religious organization. Although reformations begin as efforts within a religious organization, if they are thwarted they will often be externalized, thereby becoming sects—groups offering high-intensity religious alternatives to the conventional religious bodies. Thus defined, reformations have occurred not only in Christianity but in Judaism and Islam, and in less dramatic fashion within polytheisms as well, and sect movements are endemic in all forms of religion. Moreover, not only have reformations taken place in past times; they can be observed even today—albeit on a smaller scale. However, the early and medieval Christian Church was unusually prone to reformations as well as to sect formation because these phenomena are chronic, inevitable, and extremely bitter whenever efforts are made to sustain a religious monopoly.

Seen from this perspective, Marcion may have attempted the first reformation of the Christian Church way back in the second century and, having failed, formed an early and important sect. To amplify this assertion, an overview of what follows may be useful. I will argue that religious diversity is a fundamental feature of societies, reflecting the fact that people differ in the level of intensity they seek in religion. Where free to do so, this diversity of taste will manifest itself in a diversity of organized religious options. However, if organizational diversity is suppressed, the demand for high-intensity religion will serve as the mainspring for reformation, as those committed to high standards will be forced to work from within. But when efforts at reform fail, they will tend to erupt as external challenges to the prevailing establishment.

This definition of reformations provides for the fact that they may or may not succeed—Hus failed and so did Luther. That is, Luther may in some sense have reformed Christianity, but he did not reform the Roman Catholic Church—that was accomplished by the Counter-Reformation. Luther’s efforts at reformation were thwarted, and what he actually did was to create a new sect. He differed from Hus only in that his movement survived, and so did he. Consequently, I will credit Luther with initiating the “Protestant Reformation,” thus reminding readers that Luther did not reform the Catholic Church, but that instead he established the Protestant alternative to the Roman Catholic Church. In addition to attempting to explain why reformations occur, this chapter also explores the conditions under which sect movements and attempts at reformations attract widespread public support, devoting extended analysis to the rise of Protestantism.

However, the chapter is of much greater scope than would be needed simply to trace the gathering of religious dissatisfactions and pressures that burst forth in the “Protestant Reformation.” A principal aim is also to provide an outline of medieval European religious history to serve as an adequate context for the subsequent chapters. In doing so, I attempt to dispel a number of incorrect, but widely believed, claims about what went on and why. Three especially important examples of these incorrect claims are:

1. That the medieval period was an Age of Faith during which the average person was deeply religious.

2. That the great medieval sect movements were expressions of lower-class suffering and antagonism.

3. That the Roman Catholic Church, especially at the parish level, tended to be dominated by religious fanatics who tried to impose repressive and unnatural morality on the laity.

In addition to these, the chapter confronts at least a dozen other significant misconceptions about religion in medieval Europe, but it will be adequate to consider them as they arise.

I begin by explaining some simple, but very fundamental, social scientific principles that will be applied in subsequent sections and will be useful in other chapters as well.

RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY

In much previous work I have demonstrated that pluralism is the natural or normal³ religious state of affairs—that in the absence of repression, there will be multiple religious organizations.⁴ One reason for pluralism is that in any normal population people seem to differ according to the intensity of their religious desires and tastes. That is, some people are content with a religion that, although it promises less, also requires less. Others want more from their religion and are willing to do more to get it. Max Weber expressed this point by noting that “in every religion … people differ greatly in their religious capacities”; hence in every society some people qualify as “religious virtuosi.”⁵ Building on this observation, I have proposed that the religious diversity in all societies is rooted in social niches, groups of people sharing particular preferences concerning religious intensity. I argue that these niches are quite stable over time and quite similar in their fundamental outlook across societies and history.⁶

Put another way, in all societies people can be ranked according to the intensity of their religious concerns and tastes, and hence in the level of demands they are willing to fulfill to satisfy their needs. Most people want some intensity in their religion and will accept some costs, but not too much of either. Some people will have little religious interest and will prefer to be involved as little as possible. But in any society, as Weber noted, some people will aspire to a high-intensity faith. Given the diversity of religious demand, other things being equal there will be a corresponding diversity in religious supply: hence pluralism, the existence of multiple religious organizations. Thus in any society where diversity is not suppressed by force, the religious spectrum will include a full range of religious organizations, from some that demand little and are in a very low state of tension with their surroundings to some that offer very high-intensity faith. Enrollment in these groups will tend to resemble a normal curve, with the moderate faiths commanding the largest followings.⁷

Even in very small, very “primitive” societies, pluralism exists in the distinct totemic cults, each with its separate initiations and rites. In these societies, of course, individuals lack an opportunity to choose, and therefore the totemic cult groups probably tend to be similar in their level of intensity, although they may differ considerably from time to time because even here individual levels of religiousness will vary. However, in somewhat more complex cultures, religious pluralism will be quite evident because religious choices are “not inescapably prescribed by tribal or family adherence,” but take on “a voluntary, personal” aspect.⁸ Indeed, in polytheistic societies where the Gods are conceived of as specialized and of small scope, pluralism flourishes since it takes a substantial pantheon of such Gods to satisfy the range of things humans seek from supernatural beings, and people patronize particular deities as they see fit. Thus any ancient Roman, Greek, or Egyptian city sustained separate temples devoted to each of a score or more major Gods, with a scattering of temples to lesser deities.⁹ Within monotheism, however, the diversity of religious desires and tastes results not in a diversity of Gods but in a diversity of groups, differing in their approaches to the same God.

Just as religious “consumers” differ in the intensity they desire from religion, the primary basis for the diversity of religious organizations, in both polytheistic and monotheistic settings, is the level of intensity and sacrifice imposed on members. As Benton Johnson noted in his seminal essay, religious bodies “range along a continuum from complete rejection to complete acceptance of the [cultural and social] environment in which [they] exist.”¹⁰ This has come to be known as the “church-sect dimension,” churches being religious bodies in a low state of tension, sects being bodies in a high state of tension. The level of tension between a religious group and the rest of society translates directly into the costs imposed on membership: sects ask far more of their members in terms of sacrifice and the intensity of their commitment.

But why will they do it? Why will people choose to pay high religious costs? For centuries, starting with the earliest founders of the field, social scientists have answered that question by invoking abnormal psychology: ignorance, fear, anxieties, illusions, and, when more intense levels of faith are involved, mental pathology. On April 6, 1723, in one of his celebrated Cato’s Letters, John Trenchard characterized piety as a common form of madness, “doubtless [caused by] a fever in the head … The enthusiast heats his own head by extravagant imaginations, then makes … God to be the author of his hot head … because he takes his own frenzy for inspiration.” More than two centuries later, Gordon W. Allport, Harvard psychologist and one of the founders of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, allowed that mature adults could share his very mild (“intrinsic”) religiousness, so long as they continued to have constructive doubts, but he dismissed stronger affirmations of faith as “primitive credulity,” and as “childish, authoritarian, and irrational.”¹¹ At the time, this was the conventional view, and it is still held by many social scientists despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Thus it came as a shock, even an affront, when in 1972 the late Dean Kelley, a distinguished liberal Protestant clergyman and Director for Civil and Religious Liberty for the National Council of Churches, published Why Conservative Churches Are Growing.

Kelley had wanted the title “Why Strict Churches Are Strong,” but the publisher overruled him in favor of one more apt to provoke attention. The task he set himself in the book was to explain why, in an era when membership in the liberal Protestant churches such as the Methodists, Episcopalians, and United Church of Christ was rapidly declining, “strict” groups such as the Southern Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons, and Assemblies of God were growing rapidly. His conclusion can be expressed in simple economics. Price, or cost, is only one factor in assessing an exchange; quality is the other, and combined they yield an estimate of value. Therein lies the key to the appeal of more demanding religious groups: despite being expensive they can offer greater value; indeed, they are able to do so partly because they are expensive. That is, religions that ask more from their members are thereby enabled to give them more—in worldly as well as spiritual rewards.

Initially, Kelley’s work was almost universally rejected,¹² and he was subjected to considerable personal abuse.¹³ But the liberal churches continued to decline and the conservative churches continued to grow, and by now objective social scientists agree that Kelley was right. A persuasive empirical and theoretical literature confirms that, within limits, highertension faiths offer a far more rewarding experience to members than do permissive, low-cost faiths.¹⁴ This is not to suppose that one day most people will belong to high-tension sects. Most people will usually prefer a somewhat more moderate level of tension. However, it does mean that very low-tension faiths will fail (if permitted by the state to do so), and that sects will always enjoy a substantial appeal and will be able to generate the highest levels of member commitment. This, combined with the tendency of higher-tension groups to drift toward lower tension, makes the formation of new sects inevitable. Moreover, where sect formation is prevented, high levels of religious dissatisfaction and angry demands for religious reform are to be expected.

These tendencies are not peculiar to the United States, or to Christianity, or to modern times. They are universal. That high-tension sects abound within monotheism is easily demonstrated. Not so obvious is that this is true within polytheism as well.

SECTS WITHIN POLYTHEISM

Our impression of Greco-Roman polytheism ha...