6/21/2009
This is, I think,
the only paper I have tried to have published. The Review of Religious Research rejected it. When I presented it in
I now regard it as
too “cute,” trying too hard to say things in a clever way. It is not serious
enough. But I had great fun reading it in a
Strictness as
Competitiveness:
An Exploration of a Rational Choice Theory of
Why Conservative Churches Grow
A Paper Presented
at the Meeting of the
Association for Sociology of Religion
Joseph Zimmerman, Ph.D.
© 1998 Joseph Zimmerman, All rights reserved
This article has not yet been
accepted by a peer reviewed journal. Please do not quote.
Abstract
Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (The Churching of America, 1990) explain
Dean Kelley's statement that conservative churches grow by arguing that
"strictness" creates group wealth and inhibits free riding. My
proposal is that strictness is really the willingness to struggle with a named
opponent, combined with a theory that supports investment in the struggle.
Since struggle is inherently interesting, churches that are unwilling to engage
in overt struggle are perceived as boring. Strictness in itself does not lead
to growth, particularism does.
"Why break up a winning
team?" - Catholic priest complaining in 1966 about changes in the
Church after the Vatican Council II
Some basic theory.
Structural-functionalism was first inspired by the metaphor of the organism (Martindale, 1981: 445). In its Parsonian "systems" form, however, the organism becomes a machine, because as we learn how organisms function, we see them more and more as machines. But human beings and their groups are not well conceptualized by the metaphor of the machine. That metaphor grows from a noble hope: savoir pour prevoir pour pouvoir.1
If we are to predict what people will do, they
must follow the immutable laws that all physical nature follows. However, the
deterministic view is empirically false. The reality matches the hope very
imperfectly. No one has yet been able either to predict or to control human
behavior with great success. This is true not only within structural-functionalism,
but also within conflict theory and rational choice theory, both of which can
be read as variants of the machine metaphor.
A much more fruitful metaphor is the metaphor of the game (Long, 1958). This metaphor combines some elements of predictability (games have rules) with unpredictability (no one knows who will win). The rules are created by the players themselves, who at times cheat. The rules are therefore always under negotiation and reconstruction. This is the metaphor that lies behind symbolic interactionism. (Recall that it was Mead who used the game as the image of adult interaction.)
The game metaphor introduces an element of playfulness into the analysis of human behavior. Games are fun, even exciting. We turn boring tasks into games in order to endure them. The metaphor of the machine is not only empirically false, but when people try to order their behavior on its basis, they become bored. What is worse, they become oppressive, both to themselves and to their fellow human beings. This is the basis of the 1960s revolt against functionalism. The revolt was a protest against oppression first of all (epitomized in Robert McNamara's systems approach to the Vietnam War), and against boredom. The oppressiveness of machine metaphors is also the basis of the postmodernist attack on science.
The merit of the "new paradigm" in the sociology of religion (Warner, 1993) is that it conceptualizes religious behavior as game behavior. The paradigm uses capitalist competition as its metaphor for religious growth and decline, but capitalist competition itself is dynamic because it conceives economic behavior as a game, with opposing players and unpredictable outcomes. Socialism fails because socialism tries to conceptualize economic behavior as a machine, best regulated by technicians.
Socialism's heart is in the right place: it talks the language of mutual support and solidarity, something that capitalism needs to take more seriously. Games fail when the players are no longer motivated to invest in them. Socialism also has the merit of being more serious about life-it is easy to be carried away with the fun and stimulation of games and fail to deal with life and death issues. But socialism's sickness is unto death: oppression and boredom are not tolerable, while capitalism's sickness is less grave: disregard of the needs of failing players and not knowing when to quit are problems that can be overcome. In all successful games they are regularly overcome.
Game behavior can be seen in deadly contexts. Warfare is a game, for the generals, though not for the troops. Capitalist investment is a game, for the rich but not for the poor. We are learning (we hope) to have fun without warfare, just as we have learned to have fun without cockfighting, dueling, and Russian roulette. Next we will learn to have fun without starving the poor.
Strictness
The new paradigm grew out of Dean Kelley's question, "why do conservative (strict) churches grow, while liberal ones decline? (Kelley, 1972)" Kelley's data pointed to an anomaly: conservative churches should not be growing, because modernity is increasingly liberal. Since modernity is increasing, liberal churches should grow, but they do not. The anomaly led to the new paradigm.
The new paradigm is a rational choice one, but its explanation of its own data is not yet complete. Finke and Stark (1992: 252) make a beginning by their argument that strict churches create group wealth, which is rewarding to the participants, and that such churches discourage free riding, which diminishes group wealth. The term "strictness" suggests that successful churches root out free riders (the Protestant approach), which obscures the role of leadership in motivating members not to free ride. Free riding is best discouraged not by the stick but by the carrot.
There is more to strictness than the creation of group wealth and the discouragement of free riders. The new paradigm acquires its real power from the metaphor of the game. This allows the introduction of new theory: religious leadership as coaching, and as fund-raising.
But before all this and above all this is the basic fact that when a church
begins to treat its operation like that of a machine,
with predictable inputs and outcomes, the church begins to decline. When a
church treats its operation like that of a team engaged in competition with
opponents, the church is likely to thrive. The real reason why liberal churches
fail is that they become imbued with a mechanistic theory of religious
behavior, learned in seminaries linked to the world of deterministic science.
Liberal churches are to religion what socialism is to economics, and the only
reason liberal churches have not been rejected as thoroughly as socialism is
that they have not had the power to enforce their ideology as effectively.
The Charismatic Leader
Strictness must be conceptualized differently for leaders and for followers. For followers strictness means being willing to invest time and money. The investment need not be burdensome- the yoke is easy, and people who invest do not consider themselves oppressed. Finke and Stark (1992:96) describe camp meetings as "fun" events, in which "as many souls were conceived as were saved." Their description of the technology of the camp meeting suggests careful attention to physical comforts and enjoyment for the masses. The same is said of Willow Creek today.
For leaders, strictness means motivating followers to invest. The ability to motivate is helped by personal characteristics subsumed under the term "charisma." Charisma is often based on some physical characteristic that strikes people as likable. Robert Bly would have been a far less successful leader of men without that magnificent head of white hair. Another aspect of charisma is dramatic skill. Goffman emphasized drama in everyday life; drama in leadership is immensely more important. Skill in staging, elocution, costume, and script are all elements of charisma.
Even more important than charisma is a good theory of winning. The successful leader sets up a goal that inspires followers to strive, delineates opponents that must be vanquished, and a strategy that will lead to winning.
Theories of winning
A theory is a story, a narrative. It is a story about causes. It is a story about causes of past, present, and future events. As narrative it is always creative and ultimately unprovable. But since it in some fashion allows us to predict, it is an essential part of science. Observation without theory is abstract empiricism. Observers spent millions of dollars and years of patient reconstruction to develop a theory of why TWA Flight 800 crashed off Long Island. The observations were guided by three theories: 1) a bomb did it; 2) a missile did it; 3) mechanical failure did it. Evidence favors the third theory, but the other theories will never be conclusively ruled out.
A theory of winning is a story about 1) why it is good to win, 2) who the opponents are, and 3) a strategy for winning.
1. Why it is good to win—the goal of the game
Effective leaders place before the eyes of their followers a clear and appealing goal. Fr. Chuck Gallagher of Worldwide Marriage Encounter set forth a goal of returning romance to the lives of married couples, thus saving them from divorce. The goal helped to motivate thousands of couples and priests to sacrifice entire weekends to the movement, often for years of involvement (I did it for five years).
When people are in a great deal of suffering, such as immigrants and frontier people so often were, eternal life in heaven is a meaningful goal. My own experience as a child growing up in World War II was that warfare makes eternal life salient. The war could intrude on anyone's life, snatching young men from their families and sending them to death. As people become more physically and economically secure, eternal life as a goal becomes less salient and psychological rewards become more attractive.
Struggle itself can be stimulating and rewarding, which is why people seek so often to play games. The joy of combat is itself a "general compensator" (Stark and Bainbridge, 1985: 6), but leaders probably do well not to call too much attention to this fact. It is tactically better to clothe the struggle in a higher ideology.
2. Who the opponents are.
Living, breathing opponents are needed for an effective theory of winning-opponents are what make a game. Abstractions are not effective. Liberal churches focus on abstractions: "we fight racism." Conservative churches focus on live opponents: "we fight the Pope," or "we fight the devil." When conservative religious people talk about fighting secularism and atheism; they have in mind specific opponents, more so than liberals who fight racism. Liberals are always afraid of losing potential allies. In their desire for allies, they kill the game.
Not only do effective leaders have living opponents, but they demonstrate that they have met them in hand-to-hand combat and have prevailed. They typically can quote the opponents (selectively), and can crush their arguments publicly and convincingly.
3. How to win.
Effective leaders spell out what you need to do in order to defeat the
opponents. Moral and ethical norms such as renouncing contraception or alcohol
are fundamentally strategies for winning. As long as such norms are perceived
as means toward the goal of victory in a game with live opponents they retain
their force. When that perception lags, either because the norms are perceived as
ineffective or the opponents disappear, the norms become ineffective and cease
to guide behavior.
Leader with Clear Opponents, Clear Goals,
and a Strategy for Winning
I will use Archbishop Fulton Sheen as an example of religious charismatic leadership.
Sheen had a prestigious degree from
Sheen was a leader with both personal magnetism and a theory of winning.
His personal magnetism was enhanced by dramatic technique. His voice had been honed by years of radio, he was careful to have camera technicians emphasize his deep-set eyes (Noonan, 1972), and his Catholic bishop's robes, including a knee-length cape that he could swing around him with a flourish, were a great costume. His elocution was worthy of a Shakespearian actor. He could alternate shout and whisper, all delicately timed with appropriate pauses.
Sheen's theory of winning was even more important.
The goal that Sheen proposed to his listeners is expressed in the title of his best-selling 1949 book: Peace of Soul (Sheen, 1949). The book, similar to the self-help literature that swamps bookstore shelves today, described a state of individual well-being in the midst of all the problems faced by post-immigrant, postwar Catholics struggling to become successful in capitalist games. He spent no time describing the joys of eternal life. It was psychological well-being here and now that he sold, concretized in the everyday relations of human life.
Sheen urged his viewers to find happiness through regular prayer in the midst of routine. This down-home Catholic strategy, already popularized among the faithful for decades in the devotion to St. Therese of Liseiux, suggested that victory could be won by ordinary people doing ordinary things with extraordinary love. His first TV broadcast, entitled "Life Is Worth Living?", ended with the statement: "Life Is Worth Living when we live each day to become closer to God. When you have said your prayers, offered your actions in union with God, continue to enjoy the "Thrill of Monotony," and Do it again!" (Sheen, 1953: 9)
Sheen had clear enemies: Communism and, to a lesser extent, godless intellectuals, epitomized by (Freudian) psychiatrists. Six of the 26 programs in the first year of broadcast were explicitly focused on Communism, with such titles as "The Philosophy of Communism," and "Death of Stalin." (The fact that Joseph Stalin died nine days after the latter broadcast increased public confidence in Sheen's charisma.) Sheen had met his enemies in combat; Noonan (1972: 24) says that he had read every word of Marx and Lenin, and he let his audience know that he had read them.
Sheen's strategy for winning was: know the enemies' ideas and beat them at their own game. By making himself familiar with Russian authors and Karl Marx, he modeled an approach that Catholics would shortly take up with a vengeance in an ecumenical age. By taking on the best of evening television and vanquishing it, he demonstrated that it was legitimate for the faithful to use the enemies' weapons. Fundamentalists would soon learn the same lesson.
Riches, Poverty, and Religious Success
Finke and Stark (1992: passim) put considerable stress on the
correlation between poverty and religious success. As the frontier became more
developed, camp meetings died out, and religious leadership passed from the
Methodists to the (poorer) Southern Baptists and Holiness churches. The authors
(1992: 159) cite Charles Wesley's "
Weber, to the effect that as Methodists became more rich, they lost fervor. The dynamic of group movement from poverty to riches needs to be explored further.
As both leaders and followers in poor churches become more wealthy, they begin to see the value of alliances, in both business and social life. Each alliance removes a potential opponent from a competitive model. The more successful the person, the fewer enemies the person has. Politics is the route to power, and politics thrives on alliances. Secular politicians can break alliances as fast as they make them and thus gain new enemies, but religious politicians, especially Protestant ones who reject "hypocrisy," are condemned to a loss of opponents.
Furthermore, there is a story line that goes like this: the poor struggle, but as they become rich, the struggles are left behind. As I noted in the first section of this article, this story is fallacious, because no sooner have the rich "made it" than they proceed to play games with their wealth. The fallacious story line does, however, rule secondary aspects of life, especially family and religion. In these areas there is no struggle: the system is perfected, fixed, and boring. Struggle is seen as a symptom of system failure.
A third aspect of the dynamic of poverty to riches is science. The surest way to prestige and wealth in modern societies is through the professions, and the professions are based on science. That means that there is a steady pressure throughout society for people to become more scientific.
Science is observation plus theory, but the mentality of science is a questioning mentality-science is incurably skeptical. This makes science corrosive of all existing theories, including theories of winning. No coach can afford to raise scientific questions, at least not in the middle of a game, about her goals, her strategy, or whether the opponents are worth beating. Science questions the credibility of the goal of eternal life after death. Science raises questions about strategy, for example, about the advisability of having lots of children, or about the destructiveness of the use of alcohol. Part of the game of science is to have fun demolishing age-old religious opponents.
The corrosive effect of science is felt especially in the seminaries. Seminaries are under pressure to communicate with universities, because religious leaders need to have intellectual tools to combat their opponents (remember that the leader has to have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy). Universities are engaged in their own games, focused on defeating opponents in the academic world. The theories come so fast and furious that the typical seminarian does not have time to sort them out. As a result, the seminarian leaves the seminary without an effective theory of winning. He or she is not sure whether the rewards are worth the struggle, who the opponents are, and which strategies for combat are ethically acceptable.
The process is thus: as poor people and their clergy become richer, they lose all three parts of an effective theory of winning. They lose a sense of rewards because of the questioning of scientific skeptics, they lose opponents because of new alliances with former enemies, and they lose strategies because science raises questions about the value of existing strategies.
Conclusion
The anomaly can be explained. Strict churches grow when they have charismatic leaders and good theories of winning. Leaders motivate their followers by describing attractive goals, by setting up clear opponents with whom the group must struggle, and by developing strategies perceived to be successful. The failure of liberal churches is due mostly to their neglect of theories of winning. Liberal churches allow science to erode confidence in their goals and strategies, and they allow the desire for allies to deny them effective opponents. Above all they fall into the scientistic trap of conceptualizing religious behavior as machine-like, thus ignoring the extent to which it is game-like.
Their sickness is not unto death, provided that they get into the game.
Notes
1 "[The purpose of] knowledge is to understand, in order to predict, in order to control."
2 "But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and the love of the world in all its branches. How then is it possible that Methodism, that is, a religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay tree, should continue in this state? For the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they disproportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life." (Weber, 1930: 175)
References
Finke, R. and R. Stark.
1992. The churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and losers in our
religious economy.
Martindale, D. 1981. The nature and types of sociological theory. 2nd
ed.
Noonan, D.P. 1972. The passion of Fulton Sheen.
Kelley, D. 1972. Why conservative churches are
growing.
Long, N.E. 1958. The local community as an ecology of games. The American Journal of Sociology 64:251-261.
Martindale, D. 1981. The nature and types of
sociological theory. 2nd edition.
Sheen, Fulton J. 1953.
Life is worth living.
---------- 1949. Peace of Soul.
Stark, R. and W.S.
Bainbridge. 1985. The future of religion: Secularization, revival and
cult formation.
Weber, M. 1930 [republished in 1996]. The Protestant
ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons.
Warner, R.S. 1993. Work in progress toward a new paradigm
for the sociological study of religion in the United States. The American
Journal of Sociology. 98:5, pp. 1044-1093.