Introduction

Jeff Levin

In 2008, Templeton Press launched a book series on the theme of science and religion. This was a signal event for scholars whose research and writing falls at the intersection of these two great institutional domains. Religion and science evolved as a formal field of study many decades ago, and journals such as Zygon provide a scholarly home for the best work in this field, as do edited works such as The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science. But the Templeton Religion and Science Series was instrumental in providing, for the first time, detailed state-of-the-science summaries for work on religion within numerous respective scientific disciplines and fields, including contributions from medicine, neuroscience, technology, cosmology, paleontology, mathematics, genetics, environmental science, and cognitive science. The book series is also notable for providing guidance for prospective investigators — both bibliographies of key works in each field as well as a blueprint for the future of scientific investigation on each respective subject.

As I began working my way through these fascinating monographs, it struck me that a project such as this might be usefully replicated for the social sciences. If not an entire series of books, then certainly a single volume covering the state of the science for many of the most prominent and promising social science disciplines and fields. The Templeton series made clear that there is lots of existing religious scholarship taking place outside the traditional religious studies fields such as theology, biblical studies, comparative religion, pastoral studies, church history, and so on. Scientists from across the intellectual spectrum have focused their research on religion and have contributed important works on the intersection of their particular domain of science with faith, spirituality, and religious experience. The same can be said for the social sciences.

RELIGION IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Of all the social sciences, sociology has given the greatest attention, by far, to religious phenomena, including the impact of religion on human lives and social institutions, and the impact of human life and social institutions on religion. Each of the classical theorists whose work led to the evolution of the most significant grand-theoretical perspectives for sociology — Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber — wrote significant early-career works on religion, which continue to be read and to influence scholarship a century after their publication. These individuals, and specifically their prominent writing on religion, were influential in the development, respectively, of conflict structuralism, functionalism, and symbolic interactionism. More than any other profession of social scientists, whether from established disciplines or newer applied fields, sociologists have been attuned to researching, theorizing about, and commenting on the impact and salience of religion, for better or worse, on phenomena of interest.

Following the classical theorists, significant work on religion continued to appear in sociology throughout the subsequent decades. This includes important early to mid-century contributions by Ernst Troeltsch, H. Richard Niebuhr, Joachim Wach, and Pitirim Sorokin. Troeltsch, a German theologian, posited his famous church-sect typology in The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, the grandfather of all subsequent such typologies and schemata by sociologists. Niebuhr, a Yale theological scholar, in his Social Sources of Denominationalism, offered a trenchant and extended commentary on the "ethical failure of the divided church" and on the thesis that the "history of schism has been a history of Christianity's defeat," a perspective that still resonates among many sociologists. In Sociology of Religion, Wach, a University of Chicago historian of religions, defined the thematic foundations for much of what followed, including germinal discussions of the functions of religion, religion and natural groups, religion and social stratification, and types of religious authority. Sorokin, a Russian expatriate who founded Harvard's Department of Social Relations, wrote in his later career a series of expansive works on the religious and spiritual roots and correlates of altruistic love, a subject experiencing a renaissance among contemporary researchers. Works such as these influenced the generation that followed, whose research on religion began to engage modern methodological innovations such as use of large-scale community or national probability-sample survey data, as well as to integrate theoretical and conceptual contributions from other disciplines, including psychology, economics, and political science.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a cohort of sociologists emerged who began the social construction of what today is recognizable as the sociology of religion, an established specialty within sociology. Pioneering works in this vein include Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew; J. Milton Yinger's Religion, Society, and the Individual; Gerhard Lenski's The Religious Factor; C. Eric Lincoln's The Black Muslims in America; Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark's Religion and Society in Tension; Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy; Bryan Wilson's Religion in Secular Society; and important books and articles by Andrew M. Greeley, Robert Wuthnow, Robert N. Bellah, Jeffrey K. Hadden, Wade Clark Roof, Phillip E. Hammond, William Martin, William Sims Bainbridge, and others. Bellah's essay, "Civil Religion in America," was especially influential, and a good source of his collected writings is available. Also significant were the earliest efforts at multidimensional religious assessment, which evolved in equal parts from Glock's five-dimensional model of religiosity and Stark's taxonomy of religious commitment, and which represent ground zero for all subsequent social measurement of religion by sociologists. Greeley and his colleague, William C. McCready, also contributed by ensuring that religion was a major focus from the beginning of the annual General Social Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Today, the sociology of religion is a vibrant field of research comprising, in large part, sophisticated empirical research programs that use national and global population data. Multiple professional societies of long standing publish associated peer-reviewed journals, and important academic handbooks have been published for the field. Most large university departments of sociology have experts who conduct research on religion and teach undergraduate and/or graduate courses in the sociology of religion.

Significant figures in sociology continue to explore religion, whether as an "independent" or a "dependent" variable. That is, studies have examined religion as a meta-construct whose impact contributes to and shapes experiences and phenomena in numerous sectors of life, including politics; crime; family dynamics; fertility; sexuality; social stratification; occupational mobility; nationalism; mental health; and myriad other beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and statuses. Other studies have investigated dimensions of religiousness as constructs that are in turn shaped by these experiences and phenomena, and are conditioned in part by sociodemographic characteristics such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, and social class. Sociological research, from population-based survey investigations to the results of qualitative and social-historical studies, points to the ubiquity of religion's influence on the lives of human beings, both individually and collectively. Sociologists continue, as well, to contribute insightful theoretical syntheses that seek to make sense of the how and why of religion's place in society.

So, to summarize, within sociology the study of religion has long been an established and flourishing area of investigation. But this is less the case — or is not the case at all — in other social sciences. Either the history of scholarship does not go back as far, or contemporary efforts are less voluminous, less sophisticated, or of more recent vintage.

An exception is the psychology of religion. Notable work in this field goes back at least as far as William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, first published in 1902, and important research and writing have appeared in the century since that time. The field's trajectory, however, has been somewhat of a broken line. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi has described the "rapid decline and final demise" of the psychology of religion as an academic field after about 1930.33 Only since Gordon W. Allport's The Nature of Prejudice, published in 1954, and the subsequent psychometric development of intrinsic/extrinsic (I/E) religiosity as an empirical construct, in the 1960s, has study of the psychology of religion begun to evolve into a large and influential area of empirical research. Within psychology today, as within sociology, are multiple established peer-reviewed journals and major edited volumes focusing on religion, as well as, significantly, a formal division within the American Psychological Association with thousands of members. A very important milestone has been publication of the two-volume APA Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality, whose editor-in-chief, Kenneth I. Pargament, is lead author of the psychology of religion chapter in this book.

Aside from sociology and more recently psychology, religion has been much less a focus of scholarly work in the other basic social science disciplines and applied social research fields. Fortunately, this is beginning to change. Evidence suggests that, in some disciplines and fields, this evolution is happening quite rapidly. For example: specialists in religion have become the largest topical subgroup of the American Historical Association; the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture just sponsored its seventeenth annual conference; and the Religion, Spirituality, and Aging interest group is among the most flourishing specialty groups within the Gerontological Society of America.

All of these developments suggest that the time is right for this book. The intention in this volume has been to solicit state-of-the-science reviews from among the leading and most senior religious scholars within respective social science disciplines and fields. The sociology of religion has garnered the largest share of attention up to now, as noted, but in all of the other disciplines and fields covered in this book there is a story to tell about the emergence of programmatic religious research. There is a need for a single resource that focuses in depth on the subject of religion as investigated by social scientists whose work draws on theoretical, methodological, and professional traditions outside sociology. As noted, religion is becoming a mainstream and nearly ubiquitous topic of research within sociology, and one can find summaries of this work in many places. But the "story" of religion within other areas of social science is still about a collective work in progress.

For those who nonetheless would have wished to see this book include yet another field summary on sociological research on religion, two of the chapters in this book — on criminology and on aging — are authored by prominent sociologists. The author of the chapter on epidemiology (and the editor of this book) has a degree in sociology, and others among the chapter authors are regular collaborators with sociologists or publish in sociology journals. Finally, the author of this book's foreword, who has given this book his imprimatur, is the dean of all sociologists of religion. So sociology is well represented here, but, as just noted, there is an especially pressing need for a single book that brings together the best of what the other social sciences have to offer on the subject of religion. It is my hope that Religion and the Social Sciences will spark a renaissance of social science research on religion, especially from outside the province of academic sociology where it appears to be well established.

RELIGION AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

The Templeton Science and Religion Series provides "brief tours," summary statements for general audiences interested in the relation between science and religion and theology. This book, by contrast, offers detailed and comprehensive statements on religion from the perspective of nine academic social science disciplines or fields. Each of the chapters is written in language that will be accessible to knowledgeable general audiences with interests in religion and in the social sciences, but the purpose is more explicitly to provide guidance for prospective academic investigators. Each chapter includes an overview and history of religion as investigated within a respective social science, a thorough summary of existing findings and theories, a roadmap for future research, and an annotated bibliography of seminal works. Each chapter is also thoroughly referenced. The authors were given a simple instruction: to write their "ultimate" statement on religion from within their respective social science, and they were given carte blanche to be as comprehensive, scholarly, and provocative as they wished. The end product, I hope, is a series of prolegomena and detailed field overviews for the social scientific study of religion that will serve to introduce this subject to both new and established investigators and to offer resources to jumpstart their own work on religion.

Each of the following four chapters in Religion and the Social Sciences provides a state-of-the-field summary overview of research and scholarship on religion for a respective basic social science discipline. These disciplines include psychology, political science, economics, and history. Each chapter author is widely recognized as a leading expert on the study of religion within his or her home discipline.

In their chapter on the psychology of religion (Chapter 2) Pargament and Exline outline the substantive contributions made by psychology to our understanding of religion. These contributions include research and writing on religious motivations, on the mechanisms of religious development over the life span (including discovery, conservation, struggles, transformation), and on the different ways of being religious.

In his discussion of religion and political science (Chapter 3), Gill begins by providing a helpful conceptual roadmap for engaging the place of religion and the church in politics and the state. He then follows with a lucid theoretical discussion that goes into considerable depth on two schools of thought, which he terms the ideational and economic perspectives.

The chapter on the economics of religion (Chapter 4), by North, begins by proposing a model of individual religious choice, including the role of religious capital. Also included are a detailed summary of research on the behavior of religious organizations, a lucid discussion of religious markets and regulation, and an introduction to research on religion and economic growth.

In his sweeping summary of the historical study of religion (Chapter 5), Hankins traces the evolution of the field from the work of church historians to the emergence of the history of religion as an academic discipline. Focusing primarily on twentieth-century American religion, he offers a comprehensive summary of trends in contemporary scholarship, including the new social history, studies of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic history, and the rise of global Christianity.

Throughout these four chapters, and within each of these disciplines, major points of narrative keep repeating.

First, until recently (and perhaps still), the study of religion has been taboo or at least marginalized. As a result, there has been a price to pay for a career focus on the impact of faith, spirituality, and religious beliefs and practices.

Second, despite this perceived status, scholarly writing on religious themes dates to the earliest days of the discipline as an organized intellectual endeavor. Writing on religious themes can be identified among the work of the discipline's founding fathers.

Third, contrary to a general sense within the discipline that not much work on religion has been done or that existing work is inconclusive, large amounts of research and scholarship have been published. Further, where empirical studies are the norm, the weight of evidence is statistically and substantively significant and is mostly positive (that is, religion on the whole is a force for good).

Fourth, there is much in the way of conceptual development and theory — however each discipline may choose to define theory. This has enabled sophisticated interpretation of historical and contemporary phenomena and, where pertinent, findings drawn from analyses of data.