History, Time, Meaning, and Memory: Ideas for the Sociology of Religion

Abstract

The quantitative turn in sociology from the 1950s, and the cultural turn in history of the 1980s, has left qualitative research in the positivist or critical realist traditions in partial limbo. Sociologists across a number of substantive areas with more concern for the right method for the right question, rather than credentialization via technical firepower, may feel somewhat marginalized. This intriguing collection of papers therefore calls for greater historicization of sociological inquiry in religion, arguing for the significance of time, place and circumstance for phenomena such as the emergence of religious movements and their diffusion, the quiddity of religiosity, and religious change and persistence. It has its genesis in Kevin J. Christiano's 2006 Presidential Address to the Association of the Sociology of Religion, published in 2008 in this Journal, and a revised and expanded version of which is included here. This version further suggests integration of deductive and inductive methods, and that rigor and realism can be maintained while avoiding the dead ends of hypothesis testing, pure interpretivism, or method-free narrative. This, together with the contributions by William H. Swatos Jr., Peter Beyer, and John H. Simpson in his afterword, forms the core of this collection. They generally eschew the dualism counterpointing sociology and history, quantitative and qualitative analysis and so forth, which is welcome; it would, however, help to have more detailed assessment and examples of what a good social science history of religion constitutes. Formal methods have made inroads to qualitative sociology and history, with social network analysis a prime example. Approaches such as rational choice history and grounded theory method arguably allow historians to work deductively to establish causal mechanisms, which is ultimately our shared interest.