273 - American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of Religion and Their Directions

American Sociology:
Worldly Rejections of Religion and Their
Directions
By Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985. 380 pp. $30.00.

This is an extraordinary and fine book. Its thesis is simply that the responses of American sociologists to a belligerent, often chaotic industrial and urban world "were informed and otherwise affected by conceptions and understandings that with varying degrees of sublimation, transvaluation, and secularization were derived from the Protestant heritage." The sub-title might well have read, "The Protestant ethic and the spirit of American sociology"; certainly many sociologists adopted that ethic and were informed by a spirit of moral uplift that makes their work an extension of the social gospel.

Some sociologists have long tended to believe that even a heterogenous, sprawling, and often conflict-ridden society like the United States would be able to knit individual desires for self-realization into efforts that were mutually beneficial to a wide range of other citizens seeking their own advantage. Even the earliest American sociologists believed that such efforts would contribute to national solidarity and could develop into a coherent political expression through the democratic state. From the outset, however, there were other sociologists convinced that a civil religion of self-actualization could never serve the public interest. These sociologists found modern nations to be dominated by powerful military and bureaucratic institutions. In such nations, the

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crowd, sometimes riotous, sometimes organized into a strike, was the volatile but often powerful court of last appeal, an appeal not to the public interest but only to volatile public opinion. This latter tendency ill sociology finds no civil religion that could provide for national solidarity; even its optimists, like Park at Chicago, perceived only a congeries of small, but potentially self-determining and cooperative communities, whose mutual interchanges could provide a basis for a satisfactory, if not morally integrated, social system. These disagreements between the two tendencies have persisted to the current generation of sociologists.

Anyone concerned with the impact of sociology on contemporary theology should read this book. I do not refer simply to the sociology that offers help in managing and organizing institutions "effectively." Although it may help the church to define social problems and offer strategies for limiting the damage caused by racism, sexism, and poverty, this utilitarian streak no doubt also helps to secularize the church's thinking. More is at issue, however, than the church's widespread adoption of a highly utilitarian and pragmatic version of sociology. This book will also call into question the type of sociology that attempts to locate individual and social problems in the context of a nation's own sense of its historical role, mission, and destiny.

The "civil religion" hypothesis is only one, well-known variation on this theme, but the authors fault it in each of its several sociological expressions. Even when sociologists describe American society as a "system," they justify and explain chronic human suffering in systemic terms. In these accounts, authority is disguised in terms of a system and its processes; evil is covered by accounts of uneven processes of social change and differentiation. To embed authority in a system is to make the individual responsible for considering the system itself as an object of moral obligation. Sociology thus gives a thinly veiled theodicy (the authors call it a "sociodicy") for the cruel and the stultifying aspects of American social life. As God disappears into society, society disappears into a system, a system into its functions; these functions disappear into "communicative" or strategic exchanges, and reality itself disappears into the careful management of impressions. This is the world to which sociologists seek to accommodate the individual by explaining and describing its processes. They offer a secular civil religion if only by arguing that the myriad covenants of everyday life actually constitute a system. Alienation from that world, therefore, appears to be a condition that resembles the human condition itself.

The authors might simply have said that sociological thinking is the opiate of the religious intellectual: of clergy and theologians who adopt sociological perspectives without challenging their premises; the opiate also of the sociologists who present themselves, whether as pragmatists or prophets, as providing an adequate account of the possibilities and limits of social life in a modern society. In studying sociology as a means for understanding the process of secularization, the churches not only

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have made friends with a discipline that exhibits the tendencies it describes; they have befriended a discipline that is one of the causes of the secularizing tendencies it portrays. There is a close tie between pragmatists like William James, who according to these authors "took God's work out of his hands and put it ever so confidently into their own" and the clerical or sociological pragmatists who offer "a sociodicy of self-love" in which one imputes the qualities of humanity to others only in the hope of being equally well-endowed by the public's opinion of oneself.

Paradoxically, the secularization of sociology is due in part to its close association with Protestant clergy and theology during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The authors make it clear that many sociologists studied under Protestant teachers and devoted their lives to relating Christian ideals for a national society to the hard facts of industrialism, of the city, and-in the West-of a brutal and unruly frontier. Partly, then, it was because they wished to connect the world of Christian aspiration with a modern society based on conflict and productive of loneliness and oppression that they turned to pragmatism, to programs of social uplift, and to theoretical explanations for the possibilities and limits of action in modern societies. I wonder whether their close Christian associations led sociologists to develop an uncritical acceptance of the state. Sociologists saw that institution at the outset as the public agent of their society's profoundest beliefs; it became the legitimate source of public authority and the agent for the very reforms that the sociologists thought necessary to make capitalism safe for democracy. Finally, the state broke out of the frame either of Christian idealism or of liberal democratic thought and became, in the sociological view, merely a broker of competing interests, a base for the formation of social policy, and the employer of first resort for those sociologists eager to take a role in the formation of such policy. The Protestant connection, which also accepted the state in these increasingly secularized postures, may have made this transition relatively easy on the sociological conscience.

Sociology, in the view of these authors, aids and abets the secularization of theology. For instance, sociology takes the idea of vocation and turns it into a series of secular equivalents, the individual's responsibility to the self, to the self's potential, or to various social duties, institutions, and processes. Sociologists turn the notion of Christian community into a geographic or ethnic fraternity, into a hypothetical national society, or into the residues of humanity left after global processes have obliterated traditional forms of human community. Sociology not only documents but develops the process of secularization by substituting its own abstractions for religious dogma and its own rationality for the method and program that may once have led to the development of Christian character and civic virtue. Social policy and program take the place of religious vision and commitment. Not content either with portraying or

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furthering the secularization of the world, sociologists announce the end-result as a world in which theology, like God, has been pushed to the periphery. Instead of a fulfillment of the religious vision, secularization can only lead to its eclipse. For many sociologists, including Bellah, "ethics, morality, and eschatology become the province for the scientific intellectual," and the intramural disputes of sociologists become "a cockpit of creeds." In replacing theology, sociologists have taken on its own sectarian divisions.

The authors are particularly forceful in noting the contribution of sociology to the illusion that there are moral values undergirding American society as a whole, values that provide the basis for justice and for the pursuit of harmony. One of the authors (Vidich), in Small Town in Mass Society, was similarly cogent in unmasking illusions of moral unity and integrity in a small town in upstate New York. He notes, for instance, the embarrassing attempt of Albion Small, the first editor of the American Journal of Sociology, to locate in a sample of civic leaders, "core American values," such as Americanism and the rudiments of a civil religion. The attempt was embarrassing partly because fewer than a fifth of the sample of leaders responded and partly because, as Small put it, "except in certain vague superficialities, American minds are anchorages for a heterogeneity of ideas. American life is correspondingly uncorrelated." As a remedy, the authors go on to say, Small called for "a resurgence of nationalism." Certainly, other sociologists have carried the torch for a national faith. Lazarsfeld, a Columbia sociologist, saw sociology in the Soviet Union as well as in the United States as having precisely this task, that is, to enable public officials and political leaders to administer the social system in ways that overcome alienation, ways that remind the individual of the coincidence between private aspiration and public purpose. It is a priestly function for sociology in the service of what the authors repeatedly and critically call a "civil religion."

Not all of sociology is technocratic, utopian, or moralistic. In the work of Blumer and Goffman, the authors locate a sociology that is genuinely attuned to the nuances of mass society. Whether considering the family's response to industry and the city, unions competing with management for influence in the body politic, or individuals and small groups assessing their separate advantages in a fluid and ambiguous situation, these sociologists know that perceptions and values are the "intervening variables" between large-scale social process like industrialization and the concrete worlds of everyday life. Opportunism and fashion prevail in this intermediate world of shifting situations. That is a far cry from the enlightened viewpoint of the citizen worker, so characteristic of Protestant, utopian strands in sociological thought, and an equally far cry from the alienated job-slave of Marxian analysis. In. American society, conflict is displaced from one arena to another, until management-labor issues, for instance, are delegated to politicians or

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administrators. The only legitimate authority, therefore, is based on agreement concerning the rules of the game rather than on any more abstract moral consensus or on a commitment to the public interest. That interest, in any case, becomes public opinion, another form of the fashion that governs the flow of sociological as well as political ideas and lacks any basis outside the provisional agreements by which parties manage to endure, if not resolve, their conflicts. As the authors put it, "insofar as modernity lacks any specific content, it is always in the process of being defined in a continuously flowing present. Modern society is placed in the situation of permanent moral ambiguity because morality itself is subject to the dictates of fashion." It is a conclusion that provides little scope for sociologists or ethicists who would like to discern, in all this ambiguity, the outlines of a moral consensus, an American way of life, an American creed, or a civic faith.

There have been other attempts to purify sociology of its contamination by utilitarianism, moralism, and secular notions of progress. The authors pay scant attention, for instance, to Mill's attack on pragmatism to Friedrich's Sociology of Sociology, or Gouldner's various attacks on the utilitarian strands in American sociology. It will be difficult, I hope, for the church to ignore any such attempt to put the sociological house in order, especially this one. If sociology can come to terms with the moral ambiguity and anarchy of American society, Christians will thereby be confronted by the challenge to faith implicit in the author's concluding comments on Goffman's view of the world: "contemporary religious escapes from the paradoxes of self and dilemmas of conscience prove, only more distressingly, that there is no exit from the burdens and acceptance of responsibility for the world."

The publication of this book could be an occasion for reassessing the partnership of theology with sociology. It would appear that Protestantism has left sociology with a legacy of concern for the national community, but has not provided sociology with an adequate base for criticism of the nation-state. Part of that legacy has been a sustained moral concern for a society that strengthens the family, forms character, motivates workers, develops responsible citizens, and sustains political vision. In return, sociology, freed both from its more utopian and utilitarian appropriation of its legacy from Protestantism, may well be in a position to challenge faith with an account of a world in which faith has little support, a world of carefully sustained illusions that nonetheless fail to relieve the individual's fundamental anxiety. I recommend it to all concerned with theological education, both in the seminary and in local congregations. It is what sociology can sometimes be, a strong tonic against either cynicism or sentimentality.

Richard K. Fenn

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey