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Contrasting Views of the Corporation Rodney Stark

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Advice for the Conclave

by Christopher Chantrill
April 11, 2005 at 10:16 pm

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EVER SINCE the death of John Paul II people have been generously offering to help plan the future of the Catholic Church. They recognize that the Church occupies a unique position in the world, and they want it to succeed.

OK. They just want to graft their own agenda onto the Church’s robust root stock and grow their own fruit upon it.

The British atheist Matthew Parris wants the Church to become amiably feeble like the Church of England, and the left wants it to incorporate its secular sacraments of abortion, women in the priesthood, contraception, condoms, and gay marriage into the already substantial list of seven sacraments: baptism, confirmation, eucharist, penance and reconciliation, anointing of the sick, holy orders, and matrimony.

All this free advice would be comical if it weren’t so outrageous. How in the world does a secular journalist imagine that she has standing to advise the Conclave of the College of Cardinals on the content of the Catholic faith? Strictly speaking, of course, nobody has standing, since the Church has always been a top-down church, a magisterium. If you prefer bottom-up religion, go plant a Protestant church!

But there is one way in which we interfering opiners can help. We can apply our Yankee ingenuity to the market share issue. Granted that the Catholic Church wants to remain the market leader in the global religion industry, what should it do to stay No. 1?

Fortunately, the U.S. is home to a coterie of academic sociologists that has studied just this problem: How does a church find the “sweet spot” in the religious market, and grow to become market leader?

It seems sacrilegious to develop a sociology of religion that treats religion as a market. But that is what sociologist Rodney Stark and his collaborators have done.

Suppose you think in terms of supply and demand for religion, and symbolize religious organizations as “religious firms” led by “religious entrepreneurs.” What then? You could think of a big, corporate religious firm as a “church,” and a start-up religious firm as a “sect” or “cult.”

The whole point of a church, as the Jewish spokesman Will Herberg advised in 1966, is to take its stand “against the spirit of the age—because the world and the age are always, to a degree, to an important degree, in rebellion against God.” There should be, and there usually is, a “tension” between a church and society. A church should keep a certain distance from the secular world to demonstrate the distance between what is and what should be.

Some religious firms, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect, keep a large distance from the secular world, maintaining a separate community in “high tension” with secular society. Sects usually impose heavy costs and prohibitions upon their members. Others, like the average Pentecostal or “fundamentalist” church, maintain a medium tension with godless, secular society and impose fewer costs and prohibitions upon their members. There are others, liberal religious firms like the Unitarian Universalist Church, that maintain almost no tension with the dominant secular society and the educated, secular elite. For their members there is almost no cost to membership.

Church members understand that to get a really superior product you have to pay more.

For budding religious entrepreneurs or CEOs, the question arises: Is there a “best” level of tension? In Acts of Faith Rodney Stark and Roger Finke asked just this question, and they found that there is a Bell Curve associated with religious tension or strictness. Very strict and very liberal churches are usually small. The “sweet spot” with the biggest churches is the moderately strict religious market niche in moderate tension with secular society.

The Catholic Church used to have a reputation for strictness. It was a church that was notorious for imposing substantial costs upon its adherents, in particular upon its religious, the male celibate priests and female celibate nuns. But in the 1960s the Catholic Church suddenly decided to reduce its tension with the rest of society, and “updated” its doctrines and its beliefs. It reduced the cost of being a Catholic (by relaxing the threat of excommunication and the requirements to attend church) and it reduced the benefit of being a religious priest or nun (mainly by annihilating the feeling of being set apart, according to Stark, “in a special state of holiness”). All of a sudden, the churches emptied and the religious lost their vocations.

Fortunately, along came John Paul II and made the church stricter. The Catholic Church started to grow again except, of course, in Old Europe.

You can understand what the unpaid, un-solicited secular advisers are proposing for the Catholic Church. They are proposing that it reduce its “tension” with secular society. They are proposing that it become smaller.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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