Parameters of Paradigms
Professor R. Stephen Warner, University of Illinois at ChicagoThe announcement of a “new paradigm” in sociology of religion (Warner 1993) was sufficiently cryptic as to cause serious confusion. What was proposed in that article was not that a new theory (e.g., rational choice) be adopted by the sociology of religion in general but that a new paradigm be adopted for the understanding of religion specifically in the United States, as the title of the article stated. But the key concept of a “paradigm” was left undefined. A later commentary (Warner 1997) supplied the missing definition: “A paradigm is a ‘gestalt’ (Kuhn 1970, pp. 112, 122, 204), a way of seeing the world, a representation, picture, or narrative of the fundamental properties of reality.” The claim of the 1993 article was that religion in the U.S. works differently from religion in most of Europe and that the study of U.S. religion must therefore be freed of the blinders imposed by the imposition of a framework (called, invidiously, the “old paradigm”) that had been developed to account for the experience of religion in Europe. Aspects of the “new” paradigm were found in the works of historians of U.S. religion dating back to the 1950s and anthropologists of the 1970s, as well as more recent sociologists and economists. Indeed, to call the paradigm “new” was itself misleading, for the idea that American religious organizations had flourished since early in the 19th century under the condition of disestablishment and an open market system was new only to sociologists steeped in the Eurocentric old paradigm. The article went on to say that the religious open market in the U.S. brought about by disestablishment made it possible for religious institutions to accommodate the enormous cultural diversity generated in the U.S. by social class, racial, regional, and urban/rural differentiation and brought to the country by wave after wave of immigration. Because laws could not differentiate among religions, the system was structurally flexible and religious institutions could serve as vehicles of popular empowerment. Because religion could not be imposed, individuals were legally free to adopt whatever religion they wished. According to the article, these were the “fundamental properties” of religion in the U.S. Davie’s notion (2002) of different “conceptual maps” for religion in America, Europe, east Asia, Africa, and Latin America is, in this perspective, a parallel concept. The 1993 article only hinted at why religion takes the form it does in the U.S. and therefore did not sufficiently guard against the temptation to extrapolate the U.S. experience to other societies, either by way of scholarship or social policy. Comparative in intention, striving to avoid a false universalism (e.g., in regard to the conference theme on the connection between urban diversity and religious traditions), the present paper will take up that task. Begin with the observation that the U.S. has numerous (indeed, many hundreds of) religious denominations but only two long-standing political parties, whereas the situation is reversed in many European countries, where there are few churches but multiple political parties. The single-member-constituency representative system and plurality (“winner-take-all”) electoral rules typical of the U.S. political system militate against multiple parties. Minorities (whether social class or ethnic or other) do not easily gain political representation in the U.S., but they can quite easily gain religious representation. This is one condition–one structural parameter–behind the observation that U.S. subcultures disproportionately take on religious forms.