The Sacred Project of American Sociology

by Christian Smith

Why should we trust sociology to tell us the reliable truth any more than any other human social institution or tradition? On what grounds is sociology uniquely immune from the debunking powers of its own method?

Even if the issue was merely political, there would still be very good grounds to justify a discussion about whether sociology really is or should be essentially the criminal investigation unit of the left wing of the Democratic Party.

What I am against—for reasons I will explain below—is American sociology being and actively promoting a particular sacred project while also living in denial about the real nature of that project and presenting itself instead to others as the mere “science of human social life.”

Collectively, they are focused on threatening social problems (about which sociologists are the prophetic experts), injustices committed (about which sociologists are the whistle blowers), abuses by economically and politically (especially “neo-liberal”) powerful elites (ditto on whistle blowing), and mobilizing social and political movements for sociopolitical and economic change (about which sociologists are the scientific experts and cheerleaders).

religion actually has at least one good thing to offer by sponsoring progressive justice movements,

sociology’s spiritual project.

But we should not miss the relevant themes related to the larger sacred project: systemic oppression, problems of uniformity and privilege, the danger of support for the wrong political and ideological positions, threats to individual autonomy, and the need to “resist” the system.

the problem is not them but the larger context in which they are working. Most revealing, in my view, is how this empirical fact can be treated among American sociologists in a top journal as if it were actually a surprise, something of which we have to take note. This reflects, I suggest, a determined passive-resistance on the part of sociologists to hear and believe the empirical fact that American evangelicals actually are a diverse group theologically, ideologically, and politically. But why? Because that fact is not easily assimilated into or comprehensible in light of American sociology’s sacred project.

Sociology’s central goal is to eliminate social inequalities.

American sociology is not only about conducting and sharing scientific scholarship, but also promoting social-change activism through social movements and policy interventions designed to eliminate socioeconomic inequalities. That activist project—which I am saying is ultimately a Durkheimian sacred—and the particular view of human persons that underwrites it stand at the heart of American sociology as a discipline.

American sociologists are an extremely particular group of people, most of whom are more or less committed to a very distinct sacred project, which much of the world, even much of the population of America, does not share.

One good example is the idea that we are free individuals responsible for our lives.” Apparently, then, college students will enjoy “personal growth” by realizing through sociology that they are not free and are not responsible for their lives. And what, we might ask, is the problem with holding such a “common sense” view? The trouble, it tells us, is that “we may be more quick to praise successful people as superior.”

In sum, sociology’s value to undergraduate students in a nutshell is that it (1) disabuses their common-sense views of freedom and responsibility (and then we wonder why all the binge drinking and date rape), (2) turns students into “better [game] players” who “pursue … goals more effective” (and then we wonder why so many want to be business majors), (3) “empowers” students to “set out with others to change” society (which is the hook for sociology-major prospects), and (4) causes students to doubt the value of their own cultural ways of life, thus paving the way for a tolerant multiculturalism (elaborated subsequently on page 51 of the text). With that kind of impressive (secular) personal growth program, who needs religion?

Why does nearly every published introductory-sociology textbook explain sociological theory through a gross misrepresentation of what “sociologists make use of,” despite having had repeated chances (in the case of this particular textbook, 11 editions of “enhancement”29) to improve on their truthfulness? The answer cannot be that students cannot handle an accurate, basic depiction of sociological theory today, since it’s not that complicated.30

more sociological homogeneity.

Once, while teaching a graduate seminar on qualitative research methods, one of the students, a lesbian, insisted, during a larger discussion on the purpose of sociological research, that, as she informed us, “I am not in my research simply to win same-sex rights. I am in it to overthrow the entire Judeo-Christian cultural and social system.”

this student was after a visionary and comprehensive revolution of a system that she viewed as violating the most important human goods, values, feelings, desires, and purposes imaginable.

“Isn’t the study of Christianity too normative?” What did that actually mean? Simply that treating Christianity as an object of serious academic attention somehow threatened to violate the sacred project of American sociology—of which this particular questioning colleague was an archetypical representative and apostle—enough that some intervention, no matter how illogical, bigoted, and based on a double standard, had to be ventured to stop it.

the general rule about sociology as a discipline—namely, that it is driven by a powerful, pre-scientific, sacred project and so not particularly subject to the constraints of evidence or reason when they seem to challenge that project.

This scholar’s personal religious and political commitments so threatened to violate the sacred project in which the majority of this sociology faculty were so invested that they were prepared to engage in university standards-violating and even illegal measures to prevent him or her from becoming a permanent member of their department. Heterodoxy was polluting.

The important questions for present purposes are these: Why were Weitzman’s original findings so widely accepted and heralded by most sociologists (including myself), other scholars, and the media? Why were the few well-established scholars who raised doubts about her findings so readily dismissed and ignored? Why were studies conducted before and after Weitzman’s that reported discrepant findings also paid so little attention by many sociologists? And why did eventual revelations of her gross errors (at best) not create major disciplinary negative criticism and consequences? In retrospect, actually, we see more clearly that her original research design and data were not only not nationally representative but in fact not terribly impressive.

Despite growing doubts expressed by colleagues, Weitzman reiterated her “73/42” statistic testifying before the U.S. Congress. Legislatures around the country also reconsidered their divorce laws in reaction to her findings. In fact, Weitzman personally took credit in 1996 for shaping 14 laws in California alone.51 President Bill Clinton actually cited her book’s findings in his 1996 budget proposal.52 And, as I noted above, Weitzman’s erroneous findings continue to be cited today without problem in the best-selling Introduction to Sociology textbook on the market, 15 years after Peterson’s replication and discrediting of her work.

The answer to the questions above is that Weitzman’s findings—especially the “73/42 percent gap” in standard of living between divorced men and women—provided a grand-slam hit for sociology’s spiritual project that was too wonderful to be doubted or criticized.

She is currently the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Sociology and Law at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. She meant well, it seems, and she helped advance the sacred project. So what’s the big deal with untrue research findings and a questionable refusal to let skeptics gain access to her publicly funded data for 10 years?

the most important fact about this travesty of sociological justice—which, no matter how obvious it was and is, most sociologists I communicated with could never see, admit, or consider—was the blatant double standard of methodological and political criticism very selectively condemning Regnerus but never applied to any other scholarly research publication on the same topic despite their typically relying on much weaker samples and analytic methods. Any reasonably open-minded comparison by any even moderately perceptive person could see that the only difference explaining why Regnerus and his article were assaulted and the other publications and their authors were never attacked is that Regnerus’ study produced the “wrong” findings and the previous studies produced the “correct” findings. No other difference explains the gross discrepancy in critical response from so many sociologists.75 The real problem was not that it was a particularly bad article scientifically, but that it was a “politically insensitive article,” in the frank and revealing words of a sociologist commentator who wrote in a subsequent issue of the same journal.76 Those very few of us who pointed out this uncomfortable fact at the time were brushed aside or ignored.

Long story short: Mark Regnerus dared to publish peer-reviewed sociological findings that cut the sacred project of American sociology to the quick, and consequently he was made, no matter how unjustly, irrationally, or indefensibly, to pay a personally and professionally highly damaging price for doing so. Also very important is this fact: As collateral damage in social science more broadly, the chance that any other sociologist will publish findings similar to Regnerus’ or even consider researching this topic with an open mind, that any sociology journal editor will consider publishing another article like his no matter how solid the data and analyses, or that any potential journal-article reviewer will ever even consider accepting the job of reviewing such an article at the request of any editor has been reduced to zilch by the way that Regnerus was put on public sham trial and damned.

Here then is the bottom line of what’s going on: Same-sex households on average have had higher levels of instability than heterosexual households (whether this remains true in the future we do not know), and such instability causes greater problems in the lives of children who come from them. We know this. Yet instability does not cause same-sex households, rather the opposite: some features about same-sex relationships in our society (that last point about society context being potentially decisive) produce experiences of greater household instability. Sociologists advocating the “no difference” conclusion argue that it is really the instability per se, not the same-sex feature, of the household that produces the worse outcome results. That turns “instability” into a generic variable abstracted away from the causally driven disproportionate amount of instability that in fact characterizes same-sex households. However, if that instability is actually caused by something about the same-sex nature of the parent relationships (in the context of a certain kind of society and culture), then controlling for instability only obscures our understanding of how and why the mechanisms-process works to produce outcomes. Otherwise, one would have to claim that the same-sex factor is spurious, which does not make sense. (Consider,

So the standard practice on this research question has become to always control for household instability and thus make the unacceptable finding of worse outcomes go away. But that is like showing (as a hypothetical example) that attending public schools in richer neighborhoods does not really cause more access to admissions to “better” colleges because if one controls for student SAT scores and impressiveness of résumés and application essays, then neighborhood wealth and school resources become statistically insignificant—which, any sociologist would know, is ridiculous. But apparently anything now that deviates from the currently standard approach—even if for better analytic reasons—is now defined as “breathtakingly sloppy” and “gets everything wrong.”

James Faubian, following the view of Max Weber, correctly observes: The existential threshold of modernity [is found] in a certain deconstruction: of what [Max Weber] speaks of as the “ethical postulate that the world is God-ordained”.… The threshold of modernity may be marked precisely at the moment when the unquestioned legitimacy of a divinely preordained social order began to decline. Modernity emerges … only when what has been seen as an unchanging cosmos ceases to be taken for granted.4

belief in the possibility that society could be actively formed by conscious human activity.…

As a project, sociology belonged at the heart of a movement that self-consciously and intentionally displaced western Christianity’s integrative and directive role in society. It was a key partner in modernity’s world-historical efforts to create a secular, rational, scientific social order. In this sense, sociology as a discipline operated functionally in direct structural parallel to the Roman Catholic Vatican’s Curia and European Protestantism’s early modern theology faculty—all being assigned the task of conducting the systematic intellectual work undergirding attempts to exert far-reaching influence over society. Sociology was not merely about piecemeal reforms but world transformation guided by a radically new sacred vision of humanity, life, society, and the cosmos.9

American sociology sustained a sacred vision, mission, and character—even if not always as self-reflexively as one might have hoped.

“When sociology lends itself so readily to a sort of religious interpretation of social movements, it is not strange that many persons find in it a kind of inspiration for life.

Edward Hayes proclaimed that sociology’s immodest goal as a social science was none other than to take over the human task of moral reasoning: “Sociology aims at nothing less than the transfer of ethics from the domain of speculative philosophy [including religion] to the domain of objective science.”

Echoing themes above, Daniel Bell thus observes that modernity is essentially about “the rejection of a revealed order or natural order, and the substitution of the individual—the ego, the self—as the lodestar of consciousness.”

There are no doubts about the moral authority of the self; that is simply taken as a given. The only question is what constitutes fulfillment of the self.30

For an analysis of modern Western secularism’s highly particular views of human agency and authority, particularly its connection to the “romance of resistance” that is central to American sociology, see Talal Asad, 2003, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

“The identity of ‘sociologists’ in the public mind was fixed during this era [the 1950s], and their message was this: differences between people, whether these were differences in suicide rates or rates of coronary occlusion, crime, poverty, and the like vary in relation to ‘social facts’ such as class position and race; therefore, ‘society’ is causally responsible for these differences. The moral of this story … was that the state ought to intervene” (Turner and Turner, 1990, p. 137).

The first and most obvious problem is that—to the extent that sociology misrecognizes and somewhat masks the fact that it is and has a sacred project—the discipline is being dishonest with itself, its students, their parents, college and university administrators and donors, and American taxpayers. Sociology is caught in a conundrum here. It is and has a sacred project, but it cannot own up to that fact and say it in so many words. There is small chance that sociology will simply abandon its spiritual project, but it also cannot come completely clean with its various constituencies about it. So sociology is forced to finesse that difficult position by somewhat obscuring its commitment to its sacred project to itself and to others.

about a crucial part of its basic identity and mission. What sociology is doing is essentially no different morally than religious proselytizers coming to one’s door and pretending at first to be there for some other purpose than to convert you to their faith—and starting to preach only once they get inside the door. Only, things are actually worse with sociology, since its primary target for conversion to its sacred project about which it is not entirely upfront are 18- to 22-year-old college students, many of whom are captive audiences in classrooms and who are trying to figure out their own lives, identities, and commitments.

I suppose the focus in sociology’s spiritual vision on the imperative of other people and institutions needing to be changed enables sociologists to come to assume that they have no personal changing to do themselves.

Human knowledge and learning advance through the clash, engagement, and clarification of ideas and their investigation. But that actually taking place presupposes the presence of real intellectual differences. It requires representatives of interpretive and discursive communities being willing and able to engage, critique, and answer to those with whom they differ. The improvement of knowledge happens, in other words, through the right kind of virtuous conflict.

Through various subtle and obvious ways, it marginalizes, and in some cases even punishes, those seen to be not on board the project. That has the effect over time of homogenizing sociology internally and starkly differentiating the character of disciplines across the social sciences. The resulting lack of true diversity within the (increasingly sectarian) discipline produces a lack of meaningful difference and debate among sociologists, and the quality of scholarship and education suffers.

Moving our focus to the meso-level problem of sociology in particular, the fact is that very little intellectual conflict takes place in the discipline anymore.

related reason why contemporary American sociology engages in so few meaningful, substantive intellectual debates is that sociology itself has become less theoretically interesting and philosophically reflective over time. Sociology today is simply not very strong on broader intellectual substance. Increasingly, sociology graduate programs are turning out not intellectuals, but specialized technicians.

In short, what is in fact most interesting about sociology lately—to reconnect to my larger thesis—is not really intellectual but, rather, spiritual. That, too, helps partly to explain the power of sociology’s sacred project: it at least is interesting and invigorating. In sum, most of American sociology has becoming disciplinarily isolated and parochial, sectarian, internally fragmented, boringly homogenous, reticently conflict-averse, philosophically ignorant, and intellectually torpid. Sociology lacks the kinds of sustained, fruitful, and intellectually meaningful clashes, struggles, and clarifications needed for a discipline such as itself to generate important scholarship and education.

In fact, returning to my main line of argument, I suggest that the hegemony of its sacred project in American sociology has the effect of deflecting and pushing out those invested in any other possible spiritual projects.

Sociology has at a deep level become, to use Harold Rosenberg’s apt phrase, “a herd of independent minds.”

In short, in the 1980s, especially, American sociology got caught with its scholarly pants down (or skirts up), and it has taken decades to try to get them pulled up (or down) enough again to perhaps make a useful contribution to properly understanding religion around the globe.19 It remains uncertain whether American sociology will be capable of ever doing that, despite some admirable tries.

—sociology’s spiritual vision actually distorts the discipline’s capacity to do its proper job as well as it might and ought.