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Researching Religion: Why We Need Social Science
Steve Bruce
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198786580
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786580.001.0001
Title Pages
Steve Bruce
(p.i) Researching Religion (p.ii)
(p.iii) Researching Religion
(p.iv)
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Researching Religion: Why We Need Social Science
Steve Bruce
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198786580
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786580.001.0001
(p.v) Preface
Steve Bruce
A few words about the background to this book may help the reader understand its tone and its purpose. It is an end-of-career work: a summation of everything about theory and method I wish I had said to my students. It is argumentative. In part that is a function of a personality that in previous centuries would have been described as dyspeptic or bilious. Until relieved of my gall bladder by the National Health Service I was often literally those things, but I have always been them metaphorically. Most of what I want to say about the use of social science theory and methods is a product of disagreeing with others. I try to make my case positively, but it is impossible to avoid entirely a critical tone when the best way of showing why we should study religion in this way is to demonstrate that doing it that way leads to error.
It must be said that many of the studies I criticize are, in many respects, excellent. The cheap shot has sometimes proved irresistible, but more often I have engaged critically with the work of scholars I respect because there is little merit in shooting fish in a barrel; it is much more productive to work out how good work could have been better.
Like writing a book on prose style, authoring a critical commentary on research begs colleagues to find holes in one’s own positions, so I should stress that, when I refer to my own research in what follows, it is not because it is flawless but because I am familiar with its flaws.
A paper that I co-wrote thirty years ago with the late Roy Wallis on the use of what people say about their actions in explanation was subtitled ‘defending the common-sense heresy’. I am reminded of that subtitle when I pass by the University of Aberdeen’s portrait of Thomas Reid. One of the lesser lights of the
Scottish Enlightenment, Reid was appointed to a chair at Aberdeen in 1752, 240 years before I enjoyed the same privilege. While here he wrote his 1764 classic An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. I cannot claim to have been much influenced by Reid, whose (p.vi) main concern was to reconcile secular philosophy with Presbyterian Christianity, but I was struck by the good sense of the following:
If there are certain principles, as I think there are, which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them—these are what we call the principles of common sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd.1
I take from that two general principles. First, we should resist theoretical and methodological postures that require us to deny abilities we routinely display in our everyday lives. Yes, it is hard to disentangle people’s motives from the accounts they later give of their actions, but every day we do exactly that when we listen to a student’s hard-luck story about the dog eating her essay or a child explaining why she had to take the car without first asking permission. Second, we should avoid taking seriously scholarly postures that do not inform the advocate’s day-to-day life. The day I meet postmodernists whose relativism does not disappear the minute they start talking about salaries and workloads is the day I will take relativism seriously.
There is no false modesty in saying that there is nothing new in what follows. Every principle and practice that I advocate or defend was once a standard part of the social science armoury. That any of it needs restating is a result either of a lack of preparation (in the case of those arts-trained scholars of religion who stray into matters best understood with the tools of social science) or of an unfortunate fondness for novelty (in the case of social scientists who dismiss their predecessors as fools or knaves). Insofar as this contribution to the study of religion has a programme, it is to recover the tendrils of common sense from the absurdities that threaten to choke the social scientific study of religion.
Finally, this is not a research manual but a reflection of principles that should underlie such manuals: more of a ‘why’ than a ‘how to’ book.
Notes:
(1)T. Cuneo and R. van Woudenberg (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 85.
Researching Religion: Why We Need Social Science
Steve Bruce
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198786580
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786580.001.0001
(p.vii) Acknowledgements
Steve Bruce
Much of what follows has been initially explored in previous publications and I am grateful to Oxford University Press, which has published many of my books, and to various journals for the opportunity to air my views. Many topics have also been discussed in conference and seminar presentations, and I am grateful to the organizers of, and participants in, all such events for the stimulus they provide.
My working life has been spent in just two institutions: The Queen’s University of Belfast and the University of Aberdeen. I am hugely indebted to both for allowing me to teach in fields that intrigued me and for allowing me time to pursue my research interests. The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and the University of Edinburgh hosted me during periods of research leave. At various times, my research has been supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Nuffield Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Carnegie Trust for the Scottish Universities. I am particularly grateful to the ESRC both for funding my research on loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland and for disguising the nature of that research.
My primary intellectual debts are owed to David Martin and Bryan Wilson. They are frequently treated as competing and they certainly differed over much of what is now known as the secularization thesis, but I learnt a great deal from both. I also benefited enormously at Stirling University from the graduate supervision of Roy Wallis, who appointed me to a lectureship at Queen’s University in 1978. His work on new religious movements was an inspiration, but of greater enduring impact was his sage advice on theory and methods. In
recent years I have benefited greatly from the statistical skills of two congenial collaborators: Tony Glendinning and David Voas.
An underrated source of encouragement and inspiration is the casual chat one enjoys with colleagues in a good department. To borrow the well-known quotation from Thomas Hobbes, the life of an academic may not be nasty, brutish, and short but it is certainly solitary, and corridor conversations with colleagues are important sources of affirmation and stimulus. I am fortunate to have shared a (p.viii) corridor with two very able young scholars: Marta Trzebiatowska and Andrew McKinnon.
Finally, I must acknowledge two groups of people who have made my work possible. The staff of a large number of libraries, archives, and local records offices have helped me find relevant historical material for my research. Less easy to identify but every bit as important is the very large number of people in the UK and the USA who have invited me to their services, workshops, and therapy sessions, chatted to me about their beliefs, replied at length to my questions, fed me artery-clogging amounts of home baking, and, I hope, helped me to a better understanding of religion in the Western world. Naming them would be impossible, but without such generosity there would be no social science research and no opportunity to reflect on its methods and theories.
Researching Religion: Why We Need Social Science
Steve Bruce
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198786580
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786580.001.0001
(p.x) List of Figures and Tables
Steve
Bruce
Figure
5.1.Locations matrix109
Tables
3.1.Belief in God, Great Britain, 1990 and 2000 (%)53
3.2.Belief in God and self-description as religious, spiritual, or neither, Scotland, 2001 (%)53
10.1.Church involvement in three Durham mining areas, 1851–1941 (% of adult population)223
Prelude
Researching Religion: Why We Need Social Science
Steve Bruce
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198786580
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786580.001.0001
Basic Principles of Social Research
Steve Bruce
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786580.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
So that its positive elements are not lost in the detailed critiques of errors in the study of contemporary religion, this prelude lists and briefly justifies seven basic principles that should guide the researcher. Before we can explain people’s beliefs and behaviour, we need to understand them. As talk is cheap, we should study what people do as well as what they say. Participation is always helpful because joining in activities allows us to check that we understand them. Although we should always be interested in how people see the world and hence should listen to them, we must always be sceptical of what we are told. We should always consider how representative are our subjects. We should hesitate to attribute to others motives we would not impute to ourselves. And, most importantly, we should always be polite and show gratitude to those we study.
Keywords: principles of social research,understanding,participant observation,study of religion, contemporary religion
Many general research texts, because they wish to appeal to the widest possible market, are inclusive; they treat all forms of social research as if they were of similar merit. This book is exclusive and offensive; it presents a particular vision of social science through a series of arguments. It could well have been entitled ‘Mistakes and how to Avoid them’. So that its positive principles are apparent, I summarize them here.
1. Understanding matters. Before we can explain beliefs and behaviour, we must understand them, and it is generally a good idea to begin by listening to the people we want to understand. Direct conversation is obviously the primary method for communicating with the living (and that is often better done by sidling up to people for casual chats than by formally interviewing them), but for large numbers we have the sample survey, and even the dead can be heard in the fragmentary remains of their talk: chapel minute books, letters, autobiographies, recordings, diaries, and the like.
2. Actions speak louder than words. An obvious problem of the survey questionnaire (and every other record of talk) is that it costs people nothing to assert that they believe this or that or have done this or that and sometimes they straightforwardly lie. Hence, if possible, we should always be interested in what people actually do. We watch and we try to devise measures of activities. And follow the money: one of the best way to understand people’s priorities is through studies of expenditure.
3. If you can, join in. Most religious groups are only too happy to welcome new participants, and a great deal of what they do is patently (p.2) public rather than private. Participation is a good way of learning people’s culture and thus complements my first two principles. Being able to produce a competent performance of taking part in a church service or group meditations is some reassurance that we understand at least minimally what is going on. The ethical issues of covert and disguised participation are discussed in Chapter6. Here I will say only that many commentators on research are more precious about this than are the people they purport to protect.
4. Always be sceptical. A principled commitment to listening to those we wish to understand does not mean that we should be credulous; after all, there is ample evidence that people dissemble, even to themselves. Nor does it mean we should act as spokesperson for those we study. For reasons elaborated in Chapter7, we should always think about what interests might be in play when respondents talk about their religious beliefs and actions. We should be even more sceptical about second-hand reports of what people believe or do. It does not concern religion, but the following is too good an example of credulity to miss. The Sunday Telegraph reported: ‘A fetish sex website … is getting thousands of visits each month from computers used by MPs, peers and their staff at Westminster. One such site was visited over 3,000 times in a month; another over 100,000 times.’1 The scale of those numbers should have raised doubts, but newspapers did not want to lose a good story by thinking too hard about that. The correct explanation, of course, was not a sudden outburst of prurient licentiousness among our elected representatives. It was that a bot, which someone had accidentally allowed to implant itself in the House of Commons computer
system, was automatically linking to porn websites. The old adage remains relevant: if it is too good to be true, it is probably not true.
As well as being sceptical of reports of people’s beliefs and actions, we should also be aware that we can rarely treat our research subjects as though they were experts on anything other than themselves, and sometimes they are not even that.
5. Consider how representative are your subjects or whom they can plausibly represent. This is particularly a problem for qualitative or ethnographic research. Quantitative researchers are familiar with the need to study samples of people that are representative of the wider population to which they wish to generalize, and they have well-practised techniques for deriving representative samples.2 In the (p.3) natural sciences the ideas generally come first and the research is designed to test them. Social researchers often start with only some vague notion of what might be interesting or informative about their subjects, hoover up as much information as they can, and then see what explanatory arguments might be illuminated by their data. There is nothing wrong with this, except (a) missing data and (b) inappropriate generalization. To the extent we have no idea beyond vague curiosity to guide our observations, it is always likely we will miss something that later turns out to be important. I spent hours in a far distant records office noting figures for Church of England Easter Day communicants from parish registers of services in order to chart the changing popularity of churchgoing in Hertfordshire village. Only later did I realize that, over my time period, taking communion at Christmas Eve grew to outstrip Easter Sunday in popularity. I had to go all the way back and record the Christmas figures. In order to understand the appeal of Pentecostalism, we may well study one Pentecostal congregation and treat the people we come to know well in it as if they were representative of the whole congregation and as if that congregation was representative of Pentecostal churches. Moreover, in claiming that the presence or absence of some social characteristic explains why Pentecostalism does or does not appeal, we may be generalizing about the entire population. We always need to think just how far we can generalize from our sample survey or from our study of twenty white witches.
Some topics are so well worked over that we have very large amounts of evidence; for example, about the proportions of the population that go to church, that grew up Muslim, or that believe in life after death. We can be far less confident about why people are drawn to Wicca, even if we have spent a year with a coven. There is nothing wrong with saying ‘My research leads me to hypothesize that witches tend to be x, y, and z’. All too often, however, researchers write ‘Witches are x, y, and z’, with only a grudging concession that their study is limited to one very small group of people.
6. Be reluctant to impute to those you are trying to understand motives you would not impute to yourself. In many ways the social sciences fall short of the natural sciences, but we do have the advantage that we and the people we study share a common humanity. Our research subjects may indeed be quite unlike us, but more often they are more like us than we may realize; simply asking ourselves whether whatever (p.4) we are writing would sound plausible as an explanation of our own beliefs and actions should prevent egregious nonsense. It is also worth bearing in mind, as we write, how our report would read to one of the people we are observing and explaining. All too often I read research papers in which those described seem like credulous fools. If we do not think of ourselves as credulous fools, we should be reluctant to suppose it of others.
7. Be polite and show gratitude. Finally, we must remember that our research subjects are doing us a favour. Our intrusion into their lives is very unlikely to do them any harm, but equally well it almost never does them any good. If approached in the right spirit (think ‘fulsome expressions of gratitude’), people are surprisingly willing to give time and effort to explaining themselves or to directing us to useful research resources. We should never leave them feeling exploited.
Notes:
(1.) Sunday Telegraph, 22 September 2013.
(2.) Finding representative samples for surveys has become increasingly difficult. In the last two decades of the twentieth century it was a commonplace that the young and dispossessed were difficult to survey because they were hard to contact or reluctant to take part, but by 2017 pollsters were finding that ‘of every ten people in rich countries they contact, at least nine now refuse to talk’ (‘Democracy’s Whipping Boy’, The Economist, 17 July 2017).
Researching Religion: Why We Need Social Science
Steve Bruce
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198786580
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786580.001.0001
The Value of Social Science
Steve Bruce
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786580.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords
Many elements of religious studies (expounding beliefs or interpreting texts, for example) have no need of social science, but as soon as we make assertions about changes in the popularity of religion, or of certain types of religion, or say why certain sorts of people are more likely than others to be religious, then we stray into territory that can be mapped only with the techniques of social science. This chapter presents a series of ‘things we cannot know unless we do numbers’ and, by answering the most common criticisms of what is now derided as ‘positivism’, makes the case for an old-fashioned scientific view of social science.
Keywords: positivism,relativism,bias,big data,statistics
Introduction
Religion may fascinate even those who have little of it. Most liberal democracies are considerably less religious now than they were in 1900, but, if for no other reason than that we argue about its remaining privileges, religion remains important in those societies, and it is obviously still a powerful social force in the rest of the world. There are, of course, different ways of being interested in religion, and social science has little to contribute to many of them. Religious apologists, for example, who simply want to advertise their faith to a sceptical audience can do so without coming close to social science. But when they try to make their product more attractive by claiming that it is growing in popularity, or that it is increasingly attractive to young people, or that it is socially beneficial, then they require the tools of social science.
Compared to the Germans or Americans, the British seem unusually resistant to social science. Tory government ministers believe that a good education requires Latin and Greek but not sociology, political science, or statistics. The editor of a leading current affairs magazine begins an article by asking: ‘Which is the better way of learning fundamental truths about life’ and offers only two options: ‘reading great philosophers or reading great novelists?’1 Novelists, great or otherwise, are often taken to be reliable reporters. Lara Feigel’s The Love Charms of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War, for example, sounds like social history: it is actually a study of the lives and works of six novelists. A reviewer questioned Feigel’s wisdom in treating her writers’ novels as biographical source material.2 She might have raised the bigger question of why we should treat novels (or novelists) as historical source material. We could make a good case that descriptions of mundane matters—the (p.6) detail that fills in the background of novels—can be treated as reliable reportage because the contemporaneous author is likely both to know them and to have little reason to distort them. Arnold Palmer’s Moveable Feasts: Fluctuations in Mealtimes uses novelists’ accounts of the timing and contents of meals to produce an excellent history of changes in eating habits.3 But, for matters less mundane, fiction seems an unlikely source of fact, and yet the British reading classes prefer it to social science.
The second important element of the background to British studies of religion is a particular consequence of our largely secular culture. Because there are fewer religious people in Britain than in the USA, and because religion itself seems less important, British social scientists are less likely than their US counterparts to study religion. This in turn means that relatively more of the contemporary research on religion is produced by religious professionals who have been drawn into asking questions for which their disciplinary background offers little training.
Interdisciplinary research is often excellent, and, though this book is a defence of social science, I am not particularly precious about sociology. As Philip Abrams said: ‘it is the task that commands attention not the disciplines’.4 But academic disciplines are not shipping flags of convenience. They have discrete bodies of knowledge, repertoires of questions, and specialist skills, and the three are necessarily linked. In order to know certain things one has to ask certain things and be able to do certain things. People who have little experience of designing and managing attitude surveys, for example, are more likely inadvertently to produce unrepresentative results than people with such experience. A major twenty-first-century project to assess the religious beliefs of English university students found over half describing themselves as religious or spiritual and just over a quarter describing themselves as Christian. Of those, almost three-quarters had attended church regularly. That is, some 18 per cent of students were regular churchgoers. This was presented as evidence of the enduring, or even growing, popularity of religion among young people. And it
would indeed be a remarkable finding when many other sources tell us that around 7 per cent of English adults regularly attend church and that they are disproportionately elderly. Unfortunately, the survey had a response rate of only 9.4 per cent to an email questionnaire sent to a sample of universities, which included a disproportionate number of former Church of England training colleges in quiet rural towns. The students who were invited to complete the questionnaires were randomly (p.7) selected, but it is almost certain that students who were religious or spiritual were more likely to respond than students who were indifferent or hostile to religion. Even worse, there was nothing to prevent early responders (such as members of religious student societies) encouraging their friends to complete the questionnaire. The results have considerable value for understanding the people who completed the forms, but they can tell us nothing about English university students in general.5
If one purpose of this book is to establish the relevance of social science for the study of religion, a second is to promote a particular kind of social science. The distinction between qualitative and quantitative research is often exaggerated, especially when those research styles are attached to ancient and unresolved arguments about ontology and epistemology or, in English, the nature of the world and the proper form of its study.6 That philosophers cannot agree suggests there is very little point in us now joining those debates. Nonetheless, we have to understand some of those arguments, and I will, where necessary, explain them and suggest pragmatic responses. All that needs to be said at this point is that British studies of religion are far more likely to be based on qualitative than quantitative research and that this creates a number of shortcomings that should be addressed.7 This does not mean that I denigrate ethnography, have a principled preference for descriptions in numbers rather than words, or lack interest in what sense people make of their religious beliefs. It does mean that the sort of social science often derided as positivism is essential for some of our work.
The book has a third purpose. Although its primary focus is social research, its examples are drawn from studies of religious belief and behavior, and so it also presents a very large number of what I hope are interesting and important observations about the nature of religion in the modern world.
In this chapter I want to make the case for social science in the study of religion. In later chapters I will pursue these topics in greater detail.
In Defence of de Facto Positivism
W. G. Runciman suggests we can usefully distinguish four tasks of the social scientist: reportage, description, explanation, and evaluation.8 We can report on events, situations and occurrences: what happened (p.8) in Paris in 1792? We can describe how the participants felt or understood their situations: what did the revolutionaries think they were doing? We can explain why things happened:
what were the causes of the French Revolution? And we can morally evaluate actions: were the consequences good or bad? For reasons discussed in detail in Chapter5, I am less sure than Runciman about the fourth task. I take the third— explanation—to be the primary goal of the social scientist. But we have to be clear about what we are explaining; hence accurate reportage and a clear grasp of our subjects’ understanding of their situation, motives, intentions, beliefs, and values are essential first steps.
But how should we approach these tasks? In the early days of social science there was, as the name suggests, a consensus that we should emulate the methods of the natural sciences. We could not often experiment, but the logic of developing and testing ideas that had served the study of chemicals well could do the same for the study of people. There was a lively debate in Germany around the end of the nineteenth century over the nature of the human or social sciences.9 Herbert Blumer in Chicago spent the 1950s arguing against emulating the natural sciences.10 But it was with the massive growth in the social sciences in the 1960s that such competing perspectives as symbolic interactionism, Marxism, and later feminism and postmodernism proliferated, and the roof fell in on positivism.
The errors of positivism are now legend; its critics legion. And yet, I will argue, there is no alternative to a pragmatic positivist approach if we wish to produce testable propositions about the real world. The de facto positivism that I believe to be inescapable differs considerably from the grand vision of Auguste Comte and might best be described as the bastard child of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.11 It is an ugly beast that will satisfy no philosopher of science, but it describes pretty well what most of us who study naturally occurring social phenomena actually do.
Positivism is that approach to knowledge characterized by all or most of the following:
1.the aim to produce linguistic or numerical theoretical statements; 2.a concern with the logical structure and coherence of these statements; (p.9) 3.an insistence that at least some of these statements be testable; 4.‘testable’ here meaning verifiable, confirmable, or falsifiable by the systematic observation of reality;
5.the belief that science is cumulative,
6.and trans-cultural, and
7.rests on results that can be separated from the personality or social position of the investigator;
8.the belief that science contains theories or research traditions that can talk to each other;
9.the belief that science sometimes incorporates new ideas that are discontinuous from old ones; and
10.the assumption that, underlying the various scientific disciplines, there is basically one science about one real world.12
Some of those are straightforward, but I will elaborate a little. The first two are aspirations for theory formation and are hardly controversial, unless, as Gerhard Lenski has done, one insists that our statements should take the form of mathematical axioms or, as Stanislav Andreski believes, statistics are misleading.13 We should try to frame our tentative explanations of social behaviour or social structure in ways that allow them to be tested. We cannot get far if our ideas are like the proposition advanced by one of my students that ‘secularization is all about modernity’. ‘All about’ might be specific enough for Pixie Lott’s toe-tapping pop hit It’s All About Tonight, but we need to be clear what causes what and each ‘what’ needs to be specified as narrowly as possible, as do the strength and direction of the causal relationships. Nor is it helpful, as many people in the arts do, to misuse the word ‘truth’—as in composer John Taverner’s ‘Stockhausen was a seeker after truth’—to mean conviction or enthusiasm.14
I could improve my student’s proposition by saying that individualism + religious diversity + an egalitarian ethos + political stability + state neutrality + the confidence in human faculties given by science and technology undermine traditional shared religious belief systems. This is clearer, but it would be better still if we could define each of those terms so as to identify the things in question unambiguously and specify how much of each has the desired effect. We know that states that are basically democratic (hence the egalitarian ethos in the equation) find it hard to impose conformity to a single national church if there is (p.10) considerable religious diversity, and they generally give up the struggle. But just how much religious diversity is needed to have this effect? And are there different types of religious diversity? For example, differences of religious affiliation within the upper classes might be more consequential than differences between classes. Similarly, diversity within a long-established religion may be more consequential than the arrival of an immigrant alternative: so long as the ‘natives’ share a common religion, that some migrant groups worship other gods might be of little consequence.
But, even if we can be clearer about diversity, we need to do a lot more. I have listed six contributory factors—which is already an artificial simplification of my explanation of secularization—but not specified how they interact. Does any combination have the effect of undermining religion or, just as spray-painting a lump of iron ore is less useful than spraying steel after it has been shaped into car body parts, does the order in which the various factors come into play matter? Are all six causes necessary or can a large dose of one substitute for the absence of another? For example, the Lutheran states of Northern Europe had
very little religious diversity before their state churches started to haemorrhage adherents, but they did have a lot of ‘individualism’ (one meaning of which in this context is a commitment to individual liberty). So can extra weight on one factor compensate for the absence of another?
Already it is clear how difficult it is to translate the concerns of the student of religious change into the theory style of the natural sciences, and, for reasons I will discuss later in this chapter, it seems certain that the social sciences will never come close to the precision of physics. Our wooliness is not a function of being a relatively new discipline; sociology will not, as Lenski hoped, grow up to become physics. Nonetheless, we must aim for clarity if we wish to explain anything.
The third and fourth propositions are vital. There is little point in generating competing explanations of social behaviour unless these can be tested in a manner that eliminates the worst and improves the best. For most social researchers testing means holding against the testimony of the real world. That is, we suppose that, with skill and ingenuity, we can discover facts about the object of our enquiry that allow us to develop and hone explanations. There are alternatives. Faced with a contentious assertion about, for example, the effects of contraception on teenage sexual behavior, we could ‘take it to the Lord in prayer’ or seek guidance in Holy Scripture. We could (p.11) smoke hashish and test theories against subsequent drug-fuelled revelations (if we could remember them). We could argue that whether a theory is true or false is to be known, not by how well it fits existing evidence, but by how well it encourages particular responses. For example, some Marxists argue that what distinguishes knowledge from false consciousness is not its fit with current evidence but its revolutionary potential.15 Some feminists argue that their research methods are justified by the ‘transformative’ potential of the knowledge so generated.16
The problems with such views are many, and it is enough to mention just two. First, it is difficult to agree on moral judgements. Testing through praxis requires that we agree on what would count as an improving transformation, and often we do not. Ann Oakley might find widespread agreement that the point of studying women giving birth is to reduce patriarchal oppression, but we are unlikely to agree that the way to test competing theories about the structures of terrorist organizations is to help them improve their killing operations. Second, we cannot now know which is the best theory if the transformative justification requires that we wait around to see what happens when those people who read our papers and books react to them. Fortunately, most researchers would agree that testing propositions means seeking evidence that either supports or refutes them from the here-and-now.
Our ability to make accurate observations of the world that can provide theorytesting evidence is doubted by philosophers who present reasonable arguments against the assumption that observation is, in principle at least, unproblematic. However, as such arguments have been pursued for centuries without resolution, I suggest we instead consider how well people manage observation and evidence-gathering in their day-to-day lives. My case is the pragmatic one that, between the perfectionist extremes of competing epistemological positions, there is sufficient common ground for us to go about our business. Consider the example of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship—the only attempt by a British government to measure in detail the religious affiliations of its people. This was a massive bureaucratic undertaking that used the population census structure of a hierarchy of officials responsible for distributing, collecting, checking, and returning the forms to administer a questionnaire to all known worship outlets. A church or chapel official was asked about the age and size of the church or chapel and about the (p.12) number of people attending services on Sunday, 30 March. Although the lowest level of officials put considerable effort into chasing up missing returns, a small number of generally very small outlets did not report. We can also have reasonable doubts about the accuracy of the returns in which all the figures are multiples of ten. More debilitating, the forms asked about attendances, not attenders, and, as many churchgoers then attended twice, we have to reduce the totals appropriately to get an estimate of the percentage of the population that attended church or stick to presenting a likely maximum figure (if no one attended more than once) and a likely minimum (if everyone who attended at all attended twice). But we should all agree that the census reports are still better evidence than the estimates of Mrs Effie McClumpher of Gargunnock.
More than that, we can, with ingenuity and effort, improve the census estimates considerably. Alasdair Crockett applied the sorts of mathematical and logical skills common in codebreaking to improve the conclusions by calculating possible ranges of variation.17 For example, many returns give totals in neat multiples of ten, which suggests that the reporters guessed rather than counted. Instead of concluding we should ditch the census, we can first of all estimate, by examining a sample of the original returns, what proportion suffer this defect. Then we can estimate what difference such sloppy reporting makes to overall accuracy by assuming first that all the 20s might be 15 and second that they might all be 24, all the 30s might be 25 or 34, and so on. We cannot produce exact figures, but we can calculate plausible ranges and, for many of our concerns (such as ‘is churchgoing more or less popular in 1951 than in 1851?’), figures that can be represented as ‘plus or minus 6 per cent’ will be perfectly adequate. We regularly demonstrate that we do not need to solve all the problems of epistemology by giving practical demonstrations of such principles as the more information, the better and the more informed a source, the more
reliable. That is, we have less difficulty knowing what would count as evidence in practice than in theory.
Whether knowledge advances by the accumulation of supporting examples or by the absence of negative examples—that is, by what Karl Popper called verification or falsification—is another of those unresolved philosophy of science arguments that for most purposes we can sidestep.18 Whether the advance of science depends on verification or falsification and whether either is ‘really’ possible did not stop the early anatomists improving our understanding of the (p.13) circulation of blood, and it need not stop us knowing, for example, what would count as a good test of the proposition that the danger inherent in their work made miners and fisherman particularly prone to evangelical religion (the example is pursued in Chapter10). We might haggle over every step in the process, but we can see the basic contours: find communities of miners and fisherman and compare their church- or chapel-going with that of communities of manual workers whose jobs are considerable safer. We could become more sophisticated. We could compare the religious activity of lead miners (whose work was arduous but no more dangerous than most manual labour) and colliers (whose work, because it involved poisonous and flammable gases, was unpredictably dangerous). We could compare the religious commitments of inshore and deep-sea fishermen. We could compare the churchgoing of communities based on both industries over time as they became safer. And so on. Provided we agree that there is a single real world out there, we should be able to test propositions about it.
The fifth proposition is important because, if knowledge acquired through research cannot be cumulative, research is pointless. None of us can study everything. We each build on what others have done. I can try to explain why the people of the Hebridean island of Lewis remained religious longer than the people of the apparently similar Orkney and Shetland islands only because I can read the research of people who have studied in detail elements of the economic, political, social, and cultural lives of those islands over a time period longer than my lifetime. In turn I hope that the conclusions I come to about those three islands will be refined and tested by others studying settings that are similar in some respects and different in others.
The sixth and seventh points are an extension of the fifth. Natural scientists suppose that propositions about the relationship between temperature and pressure hold true for the behaviour of gases in whatever country one performs the experiment; social scientists rather more humbly can hope that the propositions they develop are not too narrowly culturally confined.
Here we need to avoid a common misunderstanding. I do not mean that social science ignores cultural differences: that would be absurd, when such cultural differences are often the very things we study and comparison is key to that
study. As Durkheim put it: ‘comparative sociology is not a branch of sociology; it is sociology itself insofar as it ceases to be purely descriptive and aspires to (p. 14) account for facts’.19 What I mean is that we aim to identify a common set of concerns and conceptual devices for the study of more than just the one piece of culture or society that interests us now. For example, the comparative study of kinship rests on definitions that find their appropriate expression in a large number of times and places; in order to say anything worthwhile about the differences in the roles adopted by ‘fathers’ in Lutheran Norway in 1900 and Catholic Colombia in 1980 we need to have some transcultural concept of father that underlies all the different versions we see. And, if we can develop some proposition that sufficiently survives testing in a variety of cultures, then we suppose we have found out something of general applicability. If my colliers and fishermen example works for modern Britain (and I know it works for the Pacific islanders studied by Bronislaw Malinowski because I borrowed the example from him), does it work for those occupations in a wide variety of religiously very different societies? We could add Chinese and Ukrainian coal miners to our study. The intercultural application of our theories is not the universality of Boyle’s gas laws and Newton’s laws of motion. It is the lesser but nonetheless necessary ambition of identifying regularities in human behaviour in terms that are not themselves confined to the culture of the observer.
The principal objection to these points is relativism. It can be argued on a wide variety of grounds that objectivity is never possible, that every explanation is simply another narrative, that all narratives are social constructions that reflect the interests and preconceptions of those who devise them, and hence that knowledge is always only knowledge from a particular time, place, and social position. A small number of thinkers argue that even the natural sciences are social constructions in this sense.20 Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method is a classic statement of the extreme anti-science position: he called himself an ‘epistemological anarchist’.21 It is more common to exempt the natural sciences but condemn the social sciences to imprisonment within the ideological blinkers of its proponents. Some scholars condemn most research to the relativist prison but allow themselves a revelatory get-out clause. So some feminists dismiss most social science as a patriarchal social construction but claim that their emancipation allows them to discover the truth. Marxists allow an escape from false consciousness to true knowledge through their alignment with the interests of the working class (or, more usually, with what middle-class intellectuals tell the proletariat are their interests). (p.15) Again, whether we can produce knowledge rather than just another ‘account’ or ‘voice’ is one of those enduring philosophical arguments, and again my solution is the same. While there are serious practical difficulties in producing knowledge that is accepted as such beyond any one particular time and place, this need not prevent us trying, and we can find a number of justifications for so doing (which I will consider in
various places in this book). Here I will offer just the two most obvious ripostes to relativism.
First, the people who argue that knowledge is relative and that objectivity is not possible do not consistently pronounce the same death sentence on their own assertions about the world. Second, that inconsistency is repeated and multiplied in everyday life. Relativists treat their pay scales, workloads, electricity bills, mortgages in a positivistic fashion: measuring, comparing, and evaluating. It is true that electricity consumption has greater ‘facticity’ than ‘affection towards child’ or ‘religious commitment’, but only in degree, not kind. If everyday matters can be treated as though they have an explorable existence beyond the consciousness of the observer, I see no reason in principle for not applying the same assumptions to more complex issues.
The importance of point 8 is that it shows the way out of endless division into ‘schools’. People naturally associate themselves in groups and traditions of thought. In the case of popular religions, those schools are largely incommensurate. That is, you cannot become a Muslim so long as you believe Lutheran things and vice versa. While Muslims and Lutherans have much in common, they are divided by competing claims that cannot simultaneously be true. Either God’s sending Jesus, his only son, to die as a sacrifice for our sins was a once-and-final act or Allah is God and Mohammed is his only prophet. One can, of course, combine elements of both in a new third religion, but, taken in their own terms, Lutheranism and Islam are incommensurate. Academic disciplines sometimes seem as sect-riven as religions. On the question of whether religious diversity undermines religion or strengthens it, the secularization school and the supply-side or rational-choice school (discussed in Chapter9) seem thoroughly antagonistic, but they need not be. We can devise tests that allow us to decide which of these is right about what. The current adherents of those competing positions are unlikely to change their minds, but the rest of the scholarly community can arbitrate the dispute.
(p.16) The ninth point—that knowledge changes—is important because it distinguishes science from other ways of thinking. Traditional Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that their faiths were delivered complete and perfect. The good Jew, Christian, or Muslim is bound by the past; the good scientist is not. For long periods scientists may continue to work within a set of assumptions that contain a fundamental error, but, when that error is finally admitted, there will be what Thomas Kuhn called a ‘paradigm shift’.22 ‘This is what we have always done’ is a good argument in revealed religion or in Trobriand Islander fishing magic; it is not a good argument in natural science and nor should it be in the social sciences. It may often seem that grand theories in social science rise because they are novel and fall when the next generation finds them dull and dismisses them as the intellectual equivalent of Dad Dancing, but at the lower level of social science explanations of particular phenomena there are many
examples of ideas being dropped because they have failed to survive against the run of the evidence.
The final point is so central to the scientific enterprise that it could easily have been the first. Physicists believe there is just one world. If Boyle’s gas law—at constant temperature, the volume of an ideal gas is inversely proportional to its absolute pressure—is right, it is right in Nigeria and Sweden. There is not a physics that works only for Swedes or only for Nigerians. Again I have to phrase this very carefully to avoid being misunderstood. For there to be any value in social research, the social scientific study of even culturally diverse phenomena must proceed on the basis that there is just one real world to be studied, otherwise we could not plausibly claim that cultures are actually diverse. I do not mean that, for example, all witchcraft is the same. I mean that, if equally well-educated and observant Nigerian, Swedish, and American social scientists study the witchcraft of Scotland in the eighteenth century, they will eventually come to the same conclusions.23 That they come from different cultures may cause them initially to concentrate on different facets and to ask different questions, but there is just the one thing that is being studied and they will eventually reconcile their differences, or future generations will arbitrate, by devising crucial tests to eliminate the mistaken versions.
I should add that nothing I have said means that any of the above is easy and some of it may sometimes be impossible. My attempts to study the connection between inherently dangerous occupations and (p.17) receptivity to religion (the subject of Chapter10) may fail because, although we can specify what would count as good evidence, we may not be able to find it. Nonetheless, I believe that the general logic of science offers the only way to prevent social science degenerating into literary criticism or fiction. Putting twenty people who know nothing about the matter in a sealed room and asking them to write an account of the passage of the 1832 Reform Bill may produce twenty delightful narratives. But, if we want something other than fiction, we need an approach based on something like the above description of positivism.
Various criticisms of this de facto positivism will be addressed in a variety of places in what follows. Here I want to address the most pressing.
Is Human Behaviour Different?
Some social scientists suppose that the raw material of social science is not in principle different from that of the natural sciences. Famously Durkheim argued that societies had characteristics (such as a suicide rate) that were independent of the people who composed those societies and that the task of sociology was to explore the relationship between such variables in the same way that Boyle explored the links between volume, pressure and temperature. Equally well known is Weber’s supposedly competing view that sociology should be concerned with understanding subjectivities and should aim to render human
behaviour understandable. As is often the case with such polarities, whatever each may have said in their programmatic statements about research, each in practice did what the other proposed. Durkheim’s Suicide is full of guesses about subjectivities and individual motives and Weber’s ‘Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’ essay is a masterpiece of causal connections.24
Social science has to be concerned with understanding, because the cause of people’s behaviour lies in how they, not the disinterested observer, see the world. The action of the man running from the house shouting ‘Fire’ is explained by his belief that his house is on fire, and that remains the explanation even if he is mistaken. As W. I. Thomas put it in his dictum concerning the ‘definition of the situation’: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’25 We would now say ‘people’ rather than ‘men’, but the point remains valid. However, I do not see that the role of (p.18) individual subjectivities prevents us from aspiring to a basically scientific approach to human behaviour. It just means that we have an extra layer to work through: we cannot confine ourselves to external appearances. So, for example, we cannot simply say that, because yoga in India is a Hindu spiritual discipline, the young mothers who take the yoga class in my village hall on a Friday evening are being Hindu or even being spiritual. We need to ask them how they understood what they were doing. And, when we do, we find that almost all of them are engaged in a purely secular exercise programme.
While the need to understand before we can explain is sometimes presented as a weakness of the social, as compared with the natural, sciences, it can be seen as a strength. To quote Marshall Sahlins: ‘we have the possibility of knowing the cultures of others in ways that are … more powerful than the ways natural scientists know physical objects’.26 One way of testing any causal explanation is to unpack it to the level of the acting individual and ask whether it rings true. We should hesitate to apply to others any model of action that we would not readily apply to ourselves. Reflexive implausibility is not always grounds for rejection—we may be persuaded that those people really are unlike us—but, as I argue in Chapter9, it should raise questions.
Generalities and Laws
One major adaption of science for the study of people is the replacement, as our aspiration, of the universal law by the statement of probabilities. A lot of science also rests on probabilities rather than certainties, but it aspires to propositions that brook no exception. Exceptions just point scientists to the next stage of improving knowledge by better generalizations. Boyle’s law holds for all gases and all ways of measuring temperature and pressure. The social scientist has to admit that human beings are, severally and jointly, too complex for social action and social structure ever to be described in universal laws unless those laws are so bland as to be contentless. The best we can do is to develop statements of general likelihood. ‘The more sources of legitimate authority that are accepted
by the members of a religious movement, the greater the propensity to schism’ is the sort of proposition we can reasonably develop and test.27 When we say that poverty causes ill health, we do not mean that every poor person will always be in worse health than every rich person. Some people (p.19) have good genes; others have fortunate circumstances. What we mean is that, when we compare 200 people living on less than the minimum wage with 200 people earning more than £100,000 per annum, we will find more people with health problems in the first group than in the second. We also mean that the connection is not an accident or an indirect reflection of some third-party cause. Conservatives are fond of blaming the poor for their ill health and suggesting that, if they ate tofu instead of grease burgers, they would be as healthy as their wealthier counterparts. When we say poverty is the cause, we could mean either that poverty is the cause of unfortunate food preferences or that it is the cause of other considerations (such as access to good health care in infancy) that would not be changed by a change in the diet of the poor.
That we trade in probabilities rather than universal laws is important when we turn our research on its head and work backwards from our general claims to any one individual. This may seem obvious, but it should be spelt out because the point is sometimes missed. I can say with confidence that, in modern Britain, very few people who were not socialized into a faith during childhood will acquire one in adulthood. That is, religious preferences are generally acquired in the family and are unlikely to change. One source allows us to put a figure on the proportion of people raised with no religion who later became religious: about 5 per cent.28 Like all probability statements that is fine for talking about Britain as a whole, but it does not allow us to know whether the greatgranddaughter of Mrs McClumpher of Gargunnock, raised with no religion, is going to become religious in later life. But also, and this is the point some people get wrong, it does not mean that we can refute the general proposition that religion is acquired in childhood by pointing to the junior Ms McClumpher’s adult conversion to Scientology. Because it aims to express an invariant connection, Boyle’s law would be proved wrong if one day the ideal gas behaves differently. As Karl Popper argued, universal laws are destroyed by single exceptions.29 Probabilities are refuted only by exceptions that amount to more than the leeway permitted in the statement of probability. This may seem obvious, but I routinely find that a member of an audience for a talk on the decline of Christianity in Britain will respond that national data on church decline cannot be right because his or her church is growing.
To conclude this preliminary explanation and defence of positivism, I should add that many criticisms of positivism are entirely (p.20) reasonable. For example, it is true that an act of faith is involved in assuming that we can infer the future from the past and present. There is no way of proving that well-established trends will continue (other than to wait and see); but, equally well, scepticism about the validity of induction does not of itself justify expecting any particular
alternative. I am not committed to de facto positivism because it has answered all the queries that philosophers of science have raised. I accept it as the least bad approach that is available to us. Whatever faith is required to believe that, if we correctly understand some pattern of action and can see no reason to suppose a new variable will intervene, then we should assume that the next case will also fit the pattern, it involves less credulity than the metaphysics of Marxist historicism or Christian millennialism. Most social scientists are de facto positivists despite the problems of positivism because the alternatives are worse.
If this view offers a reasonable preliminary explanation of why social research should, and more often than not actually does, rely on a pragmatic positivism, I can move on to consider different sorts of research method. As I have noted, the common distinction between qualitative research (often now called ethnography) and quantitative research is exaggerated. Many scholars do both, and, as I will argue by way of rebutting some of the more extreme criticism of quantitative research, ethnographers and fieldwork researchers use the same principles of observation and argument as social statisticians. But first I will try to convince the sceptic of the value of numbers by presenting a variety of problems in the study of contemporary religious behaviour that can be addressed only by statistical analysis of quantitative data.
Things you Cannot Know without Numbers
British sociology of religion has a proud tradition of detailed studies of small religious groups. Bryan Wilson is probably now best known for his presentation of the secularization paradigm, but he had an enduring influence on the sociology of religion through his supervision and inspiration of a generation of students of small sects and new religious movements: James Beckford, Roy Wallis, Eileen Barker, Susan Budd, Michael Hill, Alan Rogerson, and James Whitworth are just some examples. Although he had no objection to statistical (p.21) research, Wilson encouraged his students to immerse themselves in the movements they studied. The case-study method was further encouraged by the institutional history of sociology in Britain. Sociology came late to Britain, once anthropology was well established, and in many universities it was based initially in joint departments. For example, the first head of the Sociology and Anthropology department at Stirling was Max Marwick, a renowned anthropologist of African witchcraft. There were notable exceptions—the London School of Economics and Nuffield College, Oxford—but most British sociologists of the 1970s and 1980s were probably trained in departments where the anthropological model of research was far more influential than what was sometimes cordoned off as ‘social statistics’.
There is much in the British tradition of ethnographic studies of religion of which to be proud: all those named in the previous paragraph produced monographs that are still read forty years on. However, there are limits to what one can infer from ethnography. For example, Tanya Luhrmann’s excellent study
of English pagan groups gives us great insight into the motives, attitudes, beliefs, and practices of the small number of people she studied.30 Anyone who reads her book will learn a great deal about modern paganism. What they will not learn is the number of pagans in Britain and whether paganism is now more or less popular than it was at some earlier time. If there is a typical pagan, one cannot learn that from Luhrmann, because her sample is too small to be representative. If we cannot distinguish typical pagans from, say, typical Unitarians, we cannot hope to explain the appeal of paganism. This may seem obvious, but it frequently confounds ethnographers. Discovering that nineteen of the twenty witches in your coven have some common feature may seem like justification for taking that as a cause of being attracted to witchcraft, but, if most of the population that has not joined the Craft also has the same characteristic, it is not. That is, the search for the cause of some action can reasonably start with just those actors, but there needs to be a second stage in which we check that the supposed cause is not just as common with those who do not act like that.
The limits of ethnography have long been well known. Blumer was one of the founders of symbolic interactionism—the theoretical approach that through the 1960s and 1970s underpinned much good qualitative sociology—and he was one of the severest critics of what he called ‘scientism’ in sociology. Over a long and influential career, Blumer repeatedly criticized the pretensions of variable or quantitative (p.22) research. Yet when he was invited to evaluate one of the masterpieces of the qualitative tradition—W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America—Blumer concluded that its casestudy method did not meet the test of the four criteria he expected of any scientific instrument: that the data generated be representative, adequate, and reliable, and allow decisive testing of competing theoretical schemes.31
‘Representative’ identifies the key weakness. How do we know that the people the ethnographer is studying are typical of that collectivity? I am sure she did not, but Luhrmann could have studied only those North London witches who fitted her tentative explanations. And how do we know that the studied collectivity is representative of the wider population to whom the ethnographer generalizes?
The problem is particularly acute with case studies, because it is precisely the exotic and the unusual that catches the eye. In 1843 a third of the ministers and laity of the Church of Scotland split off to form the Free Church. There are many detailed studies of the early Free Church; far less attention has been paid to the two-thirds who did not leave. The same point could be made about almost every religious schism: change and novelty are more attractive than stability. Over the decades survey researchers have developed protocols for ensuring that samples
