Does Christianity Work? What we would Need to Validate Smith's Approach*

Abstract

In Why Christianity Works, Christian Smith (2007) called for an increased attention to emotions as a means of accounting for religious commit ment. Using Christianity as an example, he presented what he called a phenom enological account of how Christians emotionally experience life through the core categories of their religion: God, love, sin/confession, grace, transcendence, and morality in community. He did not deny the worth of looking at broad social and cultural forces to explain major religious trends (p. 166). But he claimed that Christianity's persistence over 2,000 years cannot be explained by such extemal matters alone. Something internal must also be going on. In his essay, he asked What is it about Christianity itself that makes the faith tradition work? (p. 167). He then suggested a number of routes by which the emotional resonance of core Christian concepts might contribute to an answer. Though I don't personally find the persistence of Christianity-or any other religion-particularly problematic, I do agree that sociologists have given less weight to religion's emotional side. Survey research too frequently identifies indi vidual religiosity with people's propositional beliefs, and even ethnographers too often focus on the odder views held by whatever natives are under discussion. Smith's own book on the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers (Smith 2005) is full of such stuff, excellently presented. I hear Smith now argu ing for supplementing this, and I applaud. I emphasize this supplementarity, for I do not read Smith as denying the worth of current work in the field. I read him wanting to explain the continued of religion, using Christianity to illustrate his argument. To phrase his quest in terms he does not use, I detect a wish to expand Peter Berger's (1967) concept of plausibility structures beyond its original institutional and cognitive foci to include sources of emotional plausibility. Theological ideas, he seems to be saying, can be sources of this emotional plausibility, beyond their intellectual