Don’t Over-Spiritualize It: Identifying the Relevance of Religion within Institutional Change Processes

Andrew Chalfoun, University of California, Los Angeles

Sociologists of religion frequently argue for the salience of religious beliefs and practices to diverse social processes, including state formation and changing perceptions of the self. By and large, these arguments have treated religion as an independent variable and have, implicitly or explicitly, relied on the “strong program” conception of culture. With the rise of practice theories, this picture has grown less plausible, leaving the sociology of religion without an overarching framework for understanding religion’s causal significance. At the same time, challenges to narrowly Protestant assumptions built into our working definitions have forced us to rethink how we view religion, with some scholars questioning whether the concept remains a useful analytic category. Drawing insights from Rebecca Emigh’s negative case method and Michael Burawoy’s extended case method, I propose a pragmatic way forward that avoids the theoretical baggage of previous strategies. Rather than starting from a picture of religion and seeking to establish its causal significance to processes of institutional change, we should start with a religious site and see how far we can get in explaining its dynamics using models developed for secular contexts. This approach allows the researcher to remain initially agnostic about where and how religious commitments are causally salient, facilitating attention to local variability. I begin by positioning my approach in relation to existing methodological strategies for studying religion. I then demonstrate its utility through the case of Southern Baptist missionary leaders’ response to pressure from denominational hardliners in the 1980s and 1990s. I argue that evaluating the conflict’s outcome against the predictions of organization studies and social movement theory avoids prematurely focusing on spiritualized rhetoric and draws attention to the specific causal pathways in which religion was influential. I conclude with suggestions for how this methodological approach can be applied in a variety of cases.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 125. Research Methods in the Study of Religion