Why "Why Christianity Works" Works

Why "Why Christianity Works" WorksAuthor(s): Christian SmithSource: Sociology of Religion, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Winter, 2008), pp. 473-488Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20453252 .

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Sociology of Religion 2008, 69:4 473-488

Why "Why Christianity Works" Works

Christian Smith University of Notre Dame

I thank my respondents for their feedback on my essay and David Yamane for providing the opportunity of this exchange to clarify issues and hopefully move forward our understanding of significant matters in our field.

It is important, after considering the details of my respondents' reactions, first to step back to gain some larger perspective on the original nature and purpose of the essay in question. As to genre, my essay is a theoretical thought piece, intended to float ideas that may offer useful approaches and perspectives for future research in the field. I agree with the editor that such thought pieces deserve a hearing in our joumals, alongside more standard articles, because they hold the potential to contribute in their own way to our self-reflexivity as schol ars and creative reflection on alternative perspectives in our field. As to argu ment, to reiterate, I believe that the sociology of religion needs to develop a stronger empirical research program examining how religious beliefs and prac tices generate for adherents subjective experiences involving emotional respons es which help to reinforce people's commitment to those religions. Exactly how and why that happens (assuming the suggestion itself has any merit) is an open empirical question, but one that is currently neglected and I think well worth investigating more seriously in the future.

The specific case that I took up in my essay as an example of how this might work was Christianity, a multifaceted case the argument about which could of course be developed and complexified well beyond what my short essay offered. I suspect that this proposed research agenda would also prove fruitful if applied to

most other religions, although the specifics of the analytical stories to be told will no doubt vary by the religious tradition and sub-tradition being studied. As to style and tone, my essay was intentionally written with a strong feeling of sub jective experience and affect, in order to create something of an aesthetic corre spondence between the theoretical argument and the tenor of the prose. My pur pose was to give some sense of the phenomenological perspective embedded in my argument, which necessarily introduces subjectivity and affect into our under standing and explanation. This purposeful discursive move I made explicit in the seventh sentence of my essay's abstract, which stated, "I also reflect the subjec

Direct correspondence to: Christian Smith, Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556 ([email protected]).

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tive focus on emotions in the tone of the article, which introduces a strong sense of subjective experience and affect." At least some of my respondents seem to have mistaken this deliberate writing style as a kind of a personal confessional testimony, which is unfortunate. I suppose those are the kind of risks any of us takes in writing something that does not fit the standard formulas and cookbook styles for publications.

More broadly, my essay is one part of a larger commitment I have to promot ing critical realism as a general philosophical approach to social science that I think offers the most promising way forward with our work, given what social sci ence has accomplished to date and the shortcomings and roadblocks we have come recurrently to hit in our work. Critical realism offers a genuine alternative to the two irreconcilable philosophies of social science that have dominated arguments for decades, namely, positivist empiricism and hermeneutical inter pretivism. Those debates have grown increasingly fruitless and wearying. As a third-way alternative emerging in the present context, critical realism signifi cantly reconstructs from some important insights our assumptions and priorities in ways that redirect our focus and practices concerning explanation, causation, evidence, method, and much more. It was not the purpose of my original essay to spell out the philosophy of critical realism itself in any detail, nor is it my purpose here. Fortunately, as my essay indicated, plenty has already been published on critical realism from which interested readers can begin to learn (e.g., Sayer 1992, 2000; Dannermark, et al. 2002; Bhaskar 1997, 1998; Bhaskar, et al. 1998, Archer 1995; Manicas 2006), including a related book in progress of my own (Smith 2008b).

My essay took critical realism as an explicitly presupposed starting point and developed from there one line of reasoning relevant to the sociology of religion. But critical realism is about much more than debates about why a religion "works" or not. Critical realism-if we are actually willing and able to engage, assimilate, and deploy it-would require us to change our scholarly thinking and practice in many significant ways. It does not underwrite business as usual. I am therefore not surprised that a thought piece presupposing critical realism would receive the kind of reaction that my essay evoked. A good bit, though not all, of that reaction is the result of business-as-usual approaches to sociology trying without success to address an argument whose basic assumptions and commit ments it does not understand or even recognize as different. The sociology of reli gion as a field specifically, sociology as a discipline more broadly, and in fact all of the social sciences generally need critical realism to resolve our recurrent prob lems, push beyond our characteristic limitations, and achieve our promise and potential as contributors to generalizeable, explanatory knowledge of human social life. That is a purpose worth struggling for.

Having set out this larger perspective on my original essay, I turn next to interact with my respondents on more specific matters in question. Between them, they have advanced three distinct though somewhat related main critiques



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of my original essay: (1) that I have eradicated the diversity within Christianity by portraying a falsely uniform version of it; (2) that the version of Christianity my essay described is essentially American evangelical Protestantism; and (3) that my account does not involve the kind of analytical comparisons necessary to be able methodologically to establish its validity. A variety of minor critiques also surface in their replies, including (4) that "human nature" does not entail the kind of consistency across time and space that my account presumes; (5) that my account fails to acknowledge the central role of force, conquest, murder, and per secution in Christianity's "working"; (6) that my essay does not include as evi dence actual empirical cases of emotionally-charged religious experiences; and (7) that my theory may not account for religious conversions. Lastly, (9) Lynch takes me to task for alleged psychological reductionism, which his theological perspective opposes. In the following pages I respond to these criticisms. My pri mary goal is not so much to defend my 2007 essay per se but rather to make the research program which that essay proposed more clear and compelling.

A Falsely Uniform Christianity? What I have learned most profitably from some of my respondents is that the writing in my essay conveyed to at least some readers, as a matter of performative effect-perhaps partly because of the missing passages mistakenly deleted during editorial production, as described in the edi tor's introduction to this forum-something that I do not believe and that is not essential to assume for my argument to work. That is that there is one Christianity that looks, sounds, and operates the same everywhere and at all times. I do believe that there are more commonalities within most of the larger Christian tradition than some of my respondents do. But my theoretical propos al in no way needs to assume a uniform Christianity.

My theoretical proposal actually entails two conceptual levels of operation. The first concerns general human needs, desires, and interests, which I think most versions of Christianity do in fact mostly effectively respond to, though in a whole variety of ways in different times and places (certainly, some other reli gious traditions do as well-although I was not trying in my essay to explain non Christian religions). The second level concerns the variety of particular expres sions of belief, practice, culture, and feeling in diverse forms of Christianity which work differently, my theory suggests, to more or less address those more basic human needs, desires, and interests. The misstep I made in writing my essay was not to more clearly distinguish those two conceptual levels and so to inad vertently allow my readers to think that I was conflating them-hence, the respondents' perception that I was advancing a falsely uniform model of Christianity.

To be clearer, then, this is what I mean. The more general mental and emo tional human needs, desires, and interests that dissimilar expressions of Christianity appear suited to address and more or less well satisfy are these, as I spelled them out:




* "a universe that is not cold and empty" (167, 169) * the "security, significance, and purpose" of "a meaningful life" (169, 170) * "unconditional love" expressed in "recognition, affirmation, and care" (171) * a way to address the "brokenness and darkness in the world" and "guilt, regret,

remorse, and shame" (172, 173) * "freedom," "relief [and] release" through the resolution of wrongs and failures (173) * "personal and collective worship experiences" involving a sacred or transcendent

(174) * "moral bearings" (175) * "social belonging in morally-significant communities" (176)

I have no problem whatsoever offering these as plausible basic or even universal human needs, desires, and interests-as long as "universal" here is understood as something like primordial, ineradicable, and recurrently present in populations and cultures across known time and space, not as empirically manifest in every last human being. These general needs, desires, and interests, however, need to be distinguished from the many particular expressions of Christianity which, according to my theoretical proposal, address them differently in various ways. By these I mean things like the many specific doctrines of and practices concerning creation, providence, sin, confession, absolution, praise, liturgy, law, and ethics that divergent Christian sub-traditions promote and reflect. Those involve the second, more particular and diverse conceptual level of my argument. I see that in my essay I inadequately distinguished these two conceptual levels for readers and offered too narrow a range of examples of the second. I thank my respondents for making that clear, so that, having clarified the matter, the research program that my essay proposed may now be more understandable and inviting. I am indeed aware that the larger tradition of Christianity is constituted by a great variety of sub-traditions representing various times and places in Christian histo ry; that many if not most of these are in various ways very different with regard to their outlooks, concerns, beliefs, rituals, and textures; and that these different expressions of Christianity will therefore address and satisfy the basic human needs, desires, and interests noted above in very different ways. All of that is fully compatible with the larger argument of my essay and the research program it pro posed.

At the same time, it is worth standing for a more moderate position on the commonality-versus-diversity issue than that which some of my respondents take. Lynch assumes a temperate approach to the issue, noting that "Christianity is a diverse tradition" (p. 461) and referring to Christianity as an "it" in the sin gular (p. 463). But others take a harder line. Spickard writes comfortably of Christianities not as a broad religious tradition comprised of diverse sub-tradi tions but as "a group of religions that trace themselves to.. .events in Roman Palestine" (p. 468). Edgell's response also places emphasis on the particularities of religious expression across time and space. But rather than thinking in terms of clear boundaries demarcating similar insiders from dissimilar outsiders, on the



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one extreme, or in terms of nearly absolute differences within Christianity that go nearly "all the way down," as some respondents seem to want to have it, at the other extreme, I suggest we think instead of the sub-traditions within the larger Christian tradition as involving family resemblances, fuzzy-set identities, Venn Diagram circles with significant but not total overlap at the center, and similar images indicating degrees of similarity and difference operating on many dimen sions. All Christians across history and around the globe are not the same. But neither are they absolutely different from each other either. For all of the ways they have and do disagree and express their faith differently, most Christians share at least some primal elements of belief and practice that, I argue, tend to give rise to often roughly comparable activities involving emotional experiences that trigger certain similar commitment reinforcement mechanisms. With more space, I believe I could make a good argument that these would include (howev er differently they are conceived, emphasized, and articulated): Trinitarian theism, the centrality of the God/man Jesus Christ, the Bible as divine revelation, salvation from sin, prayer, baptism, Eucharist or communion, scripture reading, certain moral standards, and the regular gathering of believers. To be sure, certain of what some might call "quasi-Christian" religious groups are not included in this conception of Christianity (e.g., Swedenborgians, Mormons, Jehovah's

Witnesses, Church of Christ Scientist, Unitarians, etc.), but that in no way implies that sociologically they are any less real, legitimate, or worthy of study as religions. They simply are not what nominally is and should be most reasonably considered "Christian," given the identifiable historical meaning of that term as it has been defined and shared by the vast majority of those claiming the name.

Returning to Spickard with this view in mind, then, I find the examples of diversity within Christian history that he raises (p. 468) to be instructive. The Christological conflict he mentions between the Arians and Athanasians over homoiousia versus homoousia was of course itself predicated on their shared and more fundamental commitment to some rational and biblically-responsible account of how Jesus Christ the savior could have been both God and man. Likewise, the Great Schism of the Eleventh Century presupposed at a deeper level a common viewpoint shared by both of the East and West, that the Christian

Church was a visible institution vested in its leadership with the authority of Christ to promulgate authentic teachings to the faithful. Likewise, the Sixteenth Century European conflicts over transubstantiation and the nature of grace pre supposed a more basic shared commitment to the centrality in the Christian life of the Eucharist rightly understood and practiced, and of the work of God achiev ing human salvation through the work of Jesus Christ. The more surface dis agreements simply concerned exactly how and why these were so. More general ly, we know sociologically that beneath every social conflict is some set of deep er, shared beliefs or interests. Scholars can and should highlight diversity within the Christian tradition. But to do so at the expense of seeing what is also shared across the difference is empirically unbalanced.




This does not itself negate Spickard and Edgell's general points about diver sity within the larger tradition. The sharing of certain core resemblances, simi larities, themes, and practices is compatible with significant differences in how they are worked out in specifics and on other points. If this was not true, then the general label "Christian" would be entirely useless in language and should be dis carded. Spickard asks, "By what standards does [Smith] elevate his particular ver sion of those principles above those that people actually practice?" My answer is: first, the things that various forms of Christianities objectively do share in com mon mean that I am not elevating "my particular version" here; so the standard is: the objective-though-necessarily-needing-interpretation reference of the actu al, shared, historical markers of Christian identity and practice. About these we can disagree on specifics. But to deny that they exist per se is obscurantism, par ticularly for sociologists who necessarily and recurrently rely on such categorical markers to make generalizations and typologies. There do exist recognizable iden tity markers objective to our subjectivities and assertions by which to judge iden tities and belonging for analytical purposes. Again, the issue at stake here is not a matter of worthiness or recognition as such, much less actual "truth" or "salva tion." And the differences are not black or white but a matter of something like fuzzy set memberships or family resemblances.

So here is the point on which I hope all can in the end agree: Christianity is comprised of many sub-traditions across time and space that involve big differ ences over many issues and expressions but which also entail some significant shared texts, conceptual references, beliefs, practices, and so on which give the label "Christian" some real meaning. That is my actual view, although I inade quately reflected the first part of it in my published essay. Note, however, that the differences that my respondents rightly highlight do not negate my causal argu ment about Christian beliefs and practices triggering certain experiences involv ing important emotional components that tend to reinforce adherence and com

mitment, leading to the tradition's surviving and sometimes thriving over time. Existing, bounded differences within Christianity and my theoretical proposal are perfectly compatible. So, I place my chips on the bet that good empirical inves tigations generated by a sustained research program animated by my essay's the oretical proposal would in fact demonstrate the central importance of (among other factors) concept- and practice-inducing, experience-based emotional dynamics for making Christianity work. This, I think, we would find whether the cases in question involve First Century Jewish Palestinian Christianity, Second Century Hellenistic Christianity, Fourth Century North African Catholicism, Medieval German Christianity, Eleventh Century Russian Orthodoxy, Mid Sixteenth Century Japanese Catholicism, Eighteenth Century Pennsylvanian Anabaptism, contemporary Latin American and sub-Saharan Pentecostalism, or liberal Protestant Congregationalism in Harvard Square. Of course, exactly what this would look like and how it would be discovered to work would differ in specifics. That is why we need the empirical research. But, if I am right, we would



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find similar underlying causal dynamics and mechanisms despite those differ ences.

Hegemonic Evangelicalism? Thomas Lynch says that the argument of my essay is "particularly applicable to Western Protestantism" (p. 461). Spickard suggests

more specifically that the Christianity I portray "looks remarkably like.. .American evangelical Protestantism" (p. 468). Edgell objects to the "ahis torical" narrative of a "gendered," "patriarchal," "paternal" version of faith and the "personal, loving God" who is "favored in contemporary American evangel ical theology and popular culture" (p. 448), which, she says, I present in my essay simply as Christianity per se. That, she claims, "devalues.. .features of the lives and experiences of the particular others" who I do not represent in my account (p. 449-50). Apparently, that also has something to do with "men jockeying for positions-like university professorships" and "the casual denigration of the... humanity [of atheists]" like Daniel Dennett (p. 450).

I think my respondents have over-argued their cases here. For starters, they are confusing American evangelicalism as a very specific entity with the many, much broader streams of indigenous, populist, Pentecostal, revivalist, charismat ic, fundamentalist, evangelical, expressive, holiness, pietistic, "Spirit-filled," prosperity gospel, and "end times" expressions of Christianity that have spread and are spreading around the world (Jenkins 2002). Nearly everything I wrote in my essay in fact pertains to all of these groups-I have seen it in many countries in Latin America and Africa with my own eyes. American evangelicalism is only one little piece of this much larger picture. So to reduce my essay's illustrative descriptions of faith-based emotions at work as merely depicting American evan gelicalism per se is-ironically-itself to draw a highly compressed and parochial caricature of many massive and disparate religious movements around the globe. Furthermore, for my respondents to suggest that Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and non-evangelical Protestantism do not in different ways retain adherents in sig nificant part because their beliefs and practices evoke various emotional respons es that help to validate those faiths is odd. Evangelicals are not the only Christians interested in things like community belonging, moral bearings, for giveness, subjectively meaningful worship, and significance in life, and who are affected by the emotions that religious beliefs and practices responding to those interests generate. Note too that evangelicals would also be among the least like ly to use the liturgical prayer of confession that I quoted (p. 172), which is actu ally a "high church" version of penitential practice. Edgell mentions my "evan gelical" depiction of a "personal, loving God." But, in fact, in every version of Christianity, God is actually both personal and loving. Is Edgell really suggesting that most non-evangelical Christians believe in an impersonal God who does not love? Furthermore, nearly every version of Christianity-including Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anabaptist, Pentecostal, Restorationist, and, for that matter, most of mainline-liberal American Protestantism-are




patriarchal. Modem evangelicalism hardly holds the monopoly on a gendered Christian God and the ideological and organizational dominance of men. Edgell also says that I falsely universalize an evangelical interest in "ontological certi tude" (p. 449). Here she mistakes a concern for certitude of one (evangelical) kind with certitude of some kind, as if liberal Protestants and others do not have their own versions of certitude. Most liberal Protestants are certain about a lot of things. One simply cannot draw a clear line between liberal and evangelical Protestants on the issue of certitude.

Having said that, however, I can say that my essay's illustrations of some experiences of commitment-reinforcing emotions did lean somewhat too heavi ly in an evangelical direction. Again, here I did not make adequately clear the difference between the general analytical points I wished to promote and the lan guage of many of the specific examples I used to illustrate them. I could and should have used an even wider range of kinds of illustrations from different times and places representing different traditions in order to illustrate my general ideas. This would not have been difficult, since my essay's theoretical proposals do apply to most versions of Christianity, albeit in various ways.

Analytical Flaws? Both Edgell and Sharp critique my essay for alleged analyt ical flaws that they say make my conclusions invalid. Sharp argues that "to make such causal claims [as Smith does], a researcher (1) has to show that the charac teristics that have made Christianity work... also characterize other religions at work... and (2) cannot select on the dependent variable. That is, the researcher has to show that these hypothesized characteristics don't exist in failed religions" (p. 454). Edgell echoes this by claiming "one must demonstrate that one has ruled out other causes for [Christianity's] success. One must also show that potential competitors failed because they were less emotionally satisfying" (p. 446). In short, they claim, for my causal explanation for Christianity endur ing to be acceptable, it must also explain all other religions that endure, must not be operative in any religions that do not endure, must be the sole factor explain ing cases of other religions that do not endure, and may not be accompanied by any other possible causal explanations of Christianity's endurance. But these are erroneous demands based on problematic reasoning. They would be valid if my argument necessarily assumed or definitely stated that (a) the same causal forces explain not only Christianity but the success of all religions, (b) that any given real causal force in social life must always produce the same outcome for all of the groups it potentially affects, and (c) that I have identified all of the causal forces explaining Christianity's working. But it did not. The critical realism animating my essay tells us that different religious traditions may, and in fact no doubt do, "work" for different reasons. Some reasons may be similar across religions but others may be very dissimilar. Furthermore, the same cause operating on different groups or traditions may very well result in different outcomes, depending on a host of other interactive, conditioning factors. My case is not deterministic,



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nor-as a critical realist-do I assume some kind of positivist "covering law" that will explain all similar outcomes in relevant cases or that one can identify every causal force contributing to Christianity's working. The point is simply that the causes I did identify significantly help to explain Christianity's longevity and sometimes popularity. Merely because the emotional experiences that doing Christianity addresses for many or most Christians do not succeed for everyone and all religions does nothing to negate the fact that they do address those needs for those Christian people and that that has something significant to do with why those people continue in that Christian faith. Just because some religions that do not succeed may have beliefs and practices that generate emotional experiences that meet some needs and desires does not mean that meeting emotional needs and desires is not a cause of Christianity's success.- Too many who think otherwise on these matters are captive to the narrow, "variables sociology" (Esser 1996; Ragin 2000; Abbott 1997; Blumer 1969) mentality sustained by a misguided background view of positivist empiricism.

Edgell's and Sharp's responses read as if pages 166-167 of my essay did not exist, so they focus on particular kinds of variation and comparative difference. Thus, Edgell insists that "sociology as a discipline really is all about understand ing variation in social life" (p. 450) and that my question of Christianity is "inherently comparative" (p. 446). This itself falsely universalizes one particular perspective on analysis to the exclusion of others. It is a mentality we need to get away from. As a critical realist, I believe in multiple, complex, and conjunctural causation. Critical realism distinguishes real causal capacities from activated ones, which complicates the simple standard picture. I have no interest in dis covering some positivist "covering law of religious success" that would apply to and explain all cases. Nor am I am interested in (the Humean empiricist project of) identifying significant associations between observed events per se, but rather want (with the realist scientific project) to understand what is real and why and how it operates as it does, including through a variety of other methods than cor relating variables and comparing similarities and differences. Critical realism seeks to identify characteristic causal mechanisms that generate certain facts and events through complex processes in different contexts (see Hedstrom and Swedberg 1998) rather than modeling "independent variables" that "produce" "effects" similarly in entire populations. Finally, critical realism reminds us that it is entirely reasonable to believe that, while some causes operate with great vari ability, other powerful ones (e.g., gravity, ubiquitous American individualism) in fact cannot be easily detected or demonstrated in their effects through measures of variability. Sayer (2000: 14, 15) states it well:

What causes something to happen has nothing to do with the number of times we have observed it happening [or not]. Explanation depends instead on indentifying causal mechanisms and how they work, and discovering if they have been activated and under what conditions.... There is more to the world, then, than patters of events. It has onto logical depth: events arise from the workings of mechanisms which derive from the struc




ture of objects.... This contrasts with approaches which treat the world as if it were no more than pattems of events, to be registered by recording.. .data regarding "variables" and looking for regularities among them.

I take it as a sign of scholarly astuteness and intellectual faimess to first under stand an argument well within its own terms, before jumping to criticisms that are alien to the frame of the argument itself. Imagine opening a Chinese restau rant in a town that is overrun with hotdog joints and then having customers come and complain because they are not being served hotdogs. The approach of my essay is explicitly and intentionally different from the standard fare, and ref erences a serious, alternative philosophy of social science, critical realism, to back it up. It should be read in that light.

So then let us return to the basic causal issues here by considering a simple analogy. Suppose three students sit outside my office with failed exams in hand.

Why are they there? Because they are unhappy about their grades and want to complain. That is the causal reason. According to Edgell and Sharp's thinking, however, we are not allowed to offer that causal explanation until we have first clearly show that (a) the rest of the students who failed the exam are not also sit ting outside of my office, (b) no other students are sitting outside my office for any other reason than to complain about their exam grades. But the real cause of the three people sitting outside my office can certainly be their unhappiness with their exam grades without that cause operating identically on all other students or there being no other causes why some other students may also be sitting out side my office. Some unhappy students do not come to complain for a variety of other reasons (e.g., busyness, timidity) and some come to talk for reasons unre lated to exam grades. But that does not make unhappiness over exam grades not the reason why three students are sitting outside my office. Nor does it pinpoint, say, a lack of busyness or lack of timidity as the "real" reason why they are sitting outside my office. Analogously, any of us is perfectly entitled to believe that a central reason Christianity "works" is because its beliefs and practices character istically generate emotional experiences that foster confidence and commitment,

without also having to show that this cause explains all religious success stories, that it is always absent in religious failure stories, and that success is not also caused by other factors (see Manicas 2006: 151-70). As Danermark, et al. (2002: 55) put it:

A causal statement does not deal with regularities between distinct objects and events (cause and effect), but with what an object is and the things it can do by virtue of its nature. This also entails that objects have the causal powers and liabilities they have, independently of any specific pattem of events. The mechanism is not only existent

when A leads to B, but also when A does not lead to B; this is a cardinal point in criti cal realist causal analysis, and has far-reaching consequences for social scientific expla nation.



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If successfully identifying the causal forces helping to explain some specified outcome requires that those same causes operate the same for all possible cases, that they are never actively operative in cases of positive outcomes, that they are always non-operative in cases of negative outcomes, and so on, then sociology (and economics and psychology) can simply close up shop now and go home. Real human social life is not such that we could do those. We are not-critical realism reminds us-studying deterministic "closed systems" in which a few key "independent variables" explain the observed variance. The social world is con stituted by a host of complex, interactive causal forces that produce different out comes in different combinations, for different cases, and in different contexts. Some causes help to explain Christianity's endurance. Other causes help to explain why non-religious people are non-religious. Some of them may be relat ed, some different. The goal is to explain particular kinds of outcomes by better understanding the causal mechanisms that produce them. And that cannot be accomplished by the simple one-size-fits-all "variables sociology" mentality that so dominates our discipline. We need an alternative approach. Critical realism provides it. But it takes investment into learning new ideas to understand and make good use of it.

The Question of Human Nature. Lynch and Sharp both raise questions about my use of human nature, asking whether my account of what I called "basic" needs, desires, and interests are really universal and how I might know that. I am fully aware that even to speak of "human nature" in the contemporary academy is worse than unfashionable. Anthropology, postmodernism, and various forms of anti-essentialism have promoted cultural relativism, deconstructed the human, and attacked any notion of a shared or common humanity. But such views in their strong forms are intellectually incoherent, empirically mistaken, and moral ly impoverishing. Anyone who doubts that there is a common human nature shared across the species that matters for the work of social science needs to read the anthropologists Brown (1991) and Carrithers (1992) and a forthcoming book of my own (Smith 2008b). But to briefly spell out here points relevant for this discussion, again, my argument distinguishes between basic human needs, desires, and interests, and the particular, variable versions of human culture that more or less well respond to them and cultivate specific and different human experiences.

On what is basic, I think the empirical historical and anthropological evidence is on my side. It is not possible to produce empirical instances of cultures sus tained over time where, for example, concern for meaning, loving care, moral bearings, worship of the sacred, social belonging, and ways to address darkness and brokenness in the world in some way or other are absent.

It seems to be the temptation of every generation (and a particularly modern conceit) to believe that it is (and we are) unique, unlike all who have gone before, special in our challenges and experiences. Yes, moderns do appear more oriented toward plumbing the depths of personal subjective inwardness, for




example, than were many pre-modem peoples (Taylor 1989; Watt 2001). But we should not overestimate the subjectivity of modem people compared to pre-mod ems, since plenty of ancient literature-such as the Hebrew Psalms and St. Augustine's Confessions, for starters-reveals the potential for profound depths of subjective reflexivity among pre-modems. The fact that we observe human vari ability across history and cultures with regard to the expression of certain human features which my essay raises does not itself undermine the fact that humans qua humanity naturally possess these capacities and needs and often do activate and meet them in various ways.

Endurance through Force, Murder, and Persecution? Edgell poses as an altema tive explanation to my belief-practices-emotions account the suggestion that Christianity has actually thrived for two millennia because powerful, armed authorities have imposed it upon others through conquest and empire, forced conversion, persecution of dissent, and genocide. History is clear that in some times and places Christianity was spread by political force and military conquest (e.g., the Spanish Conquest of the Americas) and that in other times and places it was not (e.g., the spread of Christianity in its first two centuries throughout the

Roman Empire, much of the 19th Century churching of North America). So, without forgetting the stories of force, oppression, persecution, and empire that definitely run in and out of Christian history, we cannot simply reduce Christian history to a function of those realities without doing violence to the complexities of that history itself. Furthermore, there is an important difference between the imposition and spread of a religion versus its ongoing endurance. It is much eas ier to impose a faith on a people by force than to make it endure over the long run through coercion. We know sociologically that coercion alone cannot impose an unwanted institution or ideology on a populace indefinitely. At some point minimal legitimacy becomes necessary. Police states ruling through naked power live on borrowed time-either they eventually shore up their legitimacy or fall. Edgell's suggestion that coercion be figured into the complexifying explana tion of Christianity's success is a good one, but I think it runs up against real lim its in its ability to account empirically for the kind of "working" that my essay sought to explain. Eventually we will have to bring in beliefs, practices, experi ences, and commitments that actually engage and appeal to adherents.

Empirical Evidence of Emotional Experience. Spickard critiques my phenome nological approach by observing that "the only 'experiences' that appear in his article are hypothetical ones. Nowhere does he show us actual, concrete people having actual, concrete experiences" (p. 470). True. My essay is a theoretical thought piece suggesting a particular research program, not the conducting of the research program itself. Yes, its phenomenology demands that the research pro gram produce empirical analyses that show actual, concrete people having actu al, concrete experiences. But there needs to be room in sociology for theoretical



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proposals intended to stimulate certain research programs but which do not themselves carry out those programs.

Related to the topic of experience, some of the critiques of my essay (Spickard, pp. 467, 470, 471; Lynch, p. 461) implied that I focused entirely on religious beliefs and concepts, as if I had argued that people holding beliefs alone will generate commitment-enhancing emotional responses. My argument, how ever, repeatedly linked beliefs and practices, emphasizing as strongly the active doing of faith as it did the cognitive thinking of faith in emotional experience. Thus, to use a distinctly non-evangelical example, priests rubbing crosses direct ly onto believers' foreheads with ashes, looking them in the eye, and speaking to them directly, "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return," has the potential to generate an emotional experience with impact more powerful than the same believers simply reminding themselves of the cognitive concept, "I am mortal and will die someday." The empirical research that my proposal aims to generate must focus not only on beliefs but also embodied practices.

Explaining Religious Conversions. Lynch (p. 462) asks how my account explains religious conversions and deconversions. Most voluntary Christian (to stay particular) converts, to the best of our knowledge, typically go through a gradual identity change process-usually facilitated by social network ties with whom they also have affective relationships-which involves learning the narra tives, vocabularies, beliefs, practices, enactments, and accompanying emotional expectations and experiences of the faith into which they are converting. It is not that first they learn beliefs and then later have emotional experiences, or vise versa, or any other similarly linear, sequential progression. The interaction between beliefs, practices, and subjective experiences transpires in complex, interactive processes over time. This model is also relevant for de-conversion. Processes of lived experience centrally involving emotionally stimulating events (whether, in this case, entailing an increase in negatively charged emotions or simply a growing emotional apathy) process the interactive engagement of ideas, practices, and affect in ways that result in religious disengagement. This is not to propose some kind of "social law of religious de-conversion." The point is simply that induction into and exit out of religious identities and communities will, if my proposed account is right, involve processes in which beliefs, practices, expe riences, and emotion interact to produce religious changes in identities and affil iations.

On a related note, Edgell (p. 447) is entirely right in pointing out that reli gious traditions, working over time through institutions and cultures, can form people to be more receptive to certain proffered religious solutions-involving emotion-inducing beliefs and practices that satisfy basic human needs and desires-so that, lo and behold, those people then find those religion solutions attractive. The Roman/Christian West, for instance, has definitely shaped a civ ilization which is distinctively concerned with legal guilt, responsibility, and sat




isfaction-and therefore forms its members to be particularly disposed to responding to (a certain version of) Christian teachings about law, sin, atone ment, forgiveness, etc. Still, this has nothing to do with a "direction of causality" flaw in my account, since the observation fits my theoretical proposal well.

Covert Theological Apologetics? Edgell states that "Christian apologetics have no place in our discipline's scholarly journals" (p. 451). I agree. (Even so, let's be honest: sociologists in fact routinely write as "apologists" for all sorts of "particu lar sets of value commitments"-need I actually name them?-which are simply

more taken for granted in academia and therefore not as visible or provocative in discourse as Christianity is.) Still, Edgell is concerned about the "real and pres ent dangers" of alleged scholarly distortion and censorship resulting from confus ing apologetics and sociology. Yet her writing here is uncharacteristically oblique-she does not actually name, much less justify, the source and nature of the danger that concerns her. All we have are hints, allusions, and insinuations. But, as to the apparent point itself, as far as I'm concerned let the sociological debates range, let the dissenting voices speak, let untenured scholars write good, even if highly unflattering, sociological analyses of Christianity, and more. I am all for it (e.g., Smith 2000, 2002, 2003: 60-73, 2007, 2008b; Smith, et al. 1998: 178-217; Smith, et al. 2008; Emerson and Smith 2000; Emerson, et al. 1999; Gallagher and Smith 1999).

Psychological Reductionism? I find Lynch's charge of psychological reduction ism to be interesting and perhaps worth engaging in another context, but essen tially theological, not sociological, and so not-particularly given the length of this reply already-appropriate to respond to in the pages of this journal.

Finally. I am happy to own and defend things I write. I am less enthusiastic, however, about taking responsibility for ideas that I have not written. It is an odd experience reading responses to one's work saying that one wrote things which one actually didn't write. Replying to such points in detail here is not necessary. Attentive readers can simply see that my essay said nothing about, for instance, "good" religion, all religions, all adherents, rational choice cognitions, the "cen ter" of all religious life, single dimensions of variance in religion, or what I per sonally do and don't find compelling about religion.

Conclusion. The sociology of religion today needs some creative ideas, alter native theoretical frameworks, and innovative general scholarly approaches with which to pursue better future research in the field (Smith 2008a). We of course always need to be rigorously self-reflexive about new ideas and methods in order to sustain basic quality standards in our work. At the same time, some of our intra-field routines, discussions, and critiques also tend to reinforce stale, highly routinized, "cookbook" ideas, standards, and practices. I think sociology suffers



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from more intellectual sclerosis, habitual reliance on inadequate assumptions, and failure to read and think beyond conventional standards which are actually quite problematic than we often realize or admit. I for one am interested in fur ther exploring what seem to be promising new ideas and approaches. One of those for the sociology of religion, I think, as I suggested in my original essay, is better understanding how religious beliefs and practices generate various kinds of emotional experiences that shape people's faith commitments in ways that help determine the long run fates of religious traditions. Another, broader, more gen eral approach is the critical realist philosophy of (social) science, which promis es to help us get un-caught from between the horns of the old positivist/empiri cist versus constructivist/interpretivist dilemmas and to better understand the actual causal mechanisms that produce the social world that we experience. I commend both of these ideas to my colleagues as valuable and interesting approaches worth engaging and I look forward to enjoying reading the good scholarship that I trust they can help to produce.

REFERENCES

Abbott, Andrew. 1997. "Of Time and Space." Social Forces 75: 1149-82. Archer, Margaret. 1995. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Bhaskar, Roy. 1997. A Realist Concept of Science. London: Verso. _. 1998. Critical Realism. New York: Routledge.

Bhaskar, Roy, Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier, and Tony Lawson. eds.. 1998. Critical Realism: Essential Readings. New York: Routledge.

Blumer, Herbert. 1969. "Sociological Analysis and the 'Variable'." Pp. 127-39 in Symbolic Interactionism. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Brown, Donald. 1991. Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Carrithers, Michael. 1992. Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social

Diversity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Danermark, Bert, Mats Ekstrom, Liselotte Jakobsen, and Jan Karlsson. 2002. Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences. New York: Routledge.

Emerson, Michael, and Christian Smith. 2000. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Emerson , Michael, Christian Smith, and David Sikkink. 1999. "Equal in Christ, But Not the World: White Conservative Protestants and Explanations of Black-White Inequality." Social Problems 46: 398-417.

Esser, Hartmut. 1996. "What is Wrong with 'Variables Sociology'?" European Sociological Review 12: 159-66.

Gallagher, Sally K., and Christian Smith. 1999. "Symbolic Traditionalism and Pragmatic Egalitarianism: Contemporary Evangelicals, Family, and Gender." Gender and Society 13: 211-33.

Hedstr?m, Peter, and Richard Swedberg. eds. 1998. Social Mechanisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jenkins, Philip. 2002. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press.




Manicas, Peter. 2006. A Realist Philosophy of Social Science: Explanation and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ragin, Charles. 2000. Fuzzy-Set Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sayer, Andrew. 1992. Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach. New York: Routledge. _. 2000. Realism and Social Science. New York: Sage Publications.

Smith, Christian. 2000. Christian America?: What Evangelicals Really Want. Berkeley: University of California Press.

_. 2002. "Las Casas as Theological Counteroffensive: An Interpretation of Gustavo Gutierrez's Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41:69-73.

_. 2007. "Evangelicals Behaving Badly With Statistics." Books & Culture, January/February, p. 11.

_. 2008a. "Future Directions in the Sociology of Religion." Social Forces. 86: 1561 90.

_. 2008b. What is a Person? Critical Realist Personalism and Sociological Theory. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame.

Smith, Christian, ed. 2003. The Secular Revolution: Power, Interest, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Smith, Christian, with Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink. 1998. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Smith, Christian, and Michael Emerson, with Patricia Snell. 2008. Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Dont Give Away More Money. Oxford University Press.

Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Watt, Ian. 2001. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press.



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