The Sacred Project of American Sociology

by Christian Smith

Frequently the state is seen and portrayed as callous, inept, and corrupted by elite interests. The state is conceptualized as the agent of socially legitimate violence and so essentially a malign force in human life. On the other hand and simultaneously, American sociology’s spiritual vision looks to the state to finally solve most of the social, economic, cultural, and political problems it is committed to ending. Great confidence most sociologists place in government programs, policies, and regulations (and courts to enforce them when administrations grow weak-kneed) to end discrimination, fairly redistribute wealth, establish universal equality, achieve comprehensive justice, and legislate away exploitation and oppression. So, oddly, the state simultaneously wears a white hat and a black hat. And the only way as far as I can see that this contradiction is (seemingly) resolved is by embracing the perennial leftist (and far right-wing) confidence that once the currently corrupt state is stormed and transformed, once government power has been taken over by those on the side of truth and righteousness (us), then the black hat will be cast away forever and the state will don the white hat only, as it establishes justice, equality, and the acceptance of all by all, riding off heroically into the sunset.

Let us return first to the Regnerus affair described above to consider one important example. Most obvious in that episode was the attack on Regnerus himself. Less obvious but no less important was the assault on the integrity of the double-blind peer-review process involved in those attacks. Recall that Regnerus’ paper had been evaluated by six blind reviewers, all of whom recommended publication. Recall that the quality of Regnerus’ sample was, though not perfect, superior to any other that had been used to answer this research question prior to his study. Nothing in the review process was unusual or dubious, a fact that even the appointed auditor of it, who was extremely hostile to Regnerus and his work, later had to admit. In short, there was no good reason to subject the review of this paper to any extraordinary scrutiny. Respectable members of the journal’s editorial board should have conferred with the editor to confirm the facts and then stood up to publicly defend the review process, together telling what was by then becoming an academic lynch mob to back off and respect the established process. But that is not what happened. Instead, the political pressures overwhelmed the established system and authorities. The journal’s editor finally agreed to appoint one member of his publication board to conduct a thorough investigation and produce a report. Unfortunately, in order to appease the critics, one of the most (as I will show below) resentful, slanderous, and acti...

In this smear campaign, the truth proved a greater casualty than it usually suffers in war. The entire affair was driven by a determination to destroy a credible scholar whose research was (needlessly) interpreted as threatening to a sacred vision—no matter how much distortion and character assassination it would take—and with the active cooperation of many academic sociologists.26

the crucial point to learn from that sorry episode is this: It has now become acceptable to launch an investigation of the journal review process by which any sociology article is published as long as enough readers do not like the findings of the article and can mobilize enough protesters to pressure an editor into submission. With this, we have turned a decisive corner toward the tolerability of scholarly review by mob intimidation. And that is the end of credible social science. The consequences of this episode are colossal and malign. So why are more sociologists not disturbed by what happened? It seems that either their personal sympathies for the attack on Regnerus were strong enough to enable them to ignore the destructive meaning of this event, or most were simply too intimidated by the political forces mobilized against Regnerus to say or do anything publicly in resistance.27 Either way, the stink is putrid.

The acids spilled by this incident, and others American sociology’s spiritual mission might provoke, have astonishing powers to corrode the integrity of sociology’s scholarly peer-review process, and therefore reasons to trust it. We would be foolish to write the Regnerus incident off as an isolated anomaly: it is indicative of a real, larger problem.

I do not mean to suggest that sociology’s journal peer-review system is rampant with corruption, but I do think it is vulnerable to pernicious influences exerted by some scholars who are driven by some of the less admirable aspects of sociology’s sacred project. The Regnerus debacle shows that it can happen and has happened. The potential for more abuse is real.

This third review, the author said, was the kind that his graduate-school mentor had in warning called an “FLR”: “a funny-looking review … that makes little sense and not only reflects the bias of the reviewer, but how uncomfortable they are with the findings.”29 Some scholarly papers contain findings that challenge the orthodoxies of sociology’s sacred project. In this case, it was the finding that religion is not an unmitigated bad that would best be swept away by the forces of rational, universal, enlightened secularism. And, no matter how potentially methodologically solid such findings are, many sociologists caught up in their sacred project have difficulty evaluating them fairly.

The most accurate way to state what can and sometimes does happen is to say that these blogs are used to conduct extra-institutional vigilante peer reviews.

So what does it do to the credibility of the peer-review system when sociologists involved believe or know that the colleagues who are reviewing their papers are the same people who are also publishing the above kind of posts on Internet blogs? Can their paper reviews be assumed to be fair, even-handed, unbiased? Having spewed the above kinds of middle-schoolish vitriol, can such colleagues be assumed and trusted to engage the scholarly review process as true “professionals?”

The more focused point for present purposes that all sociologists need to grapple with, however, is simply that the Internet has created new means by which American sociology’s spiritual project—especially in its more sectarian and activist forms—can and does interfere with the integrity and trustworthiness of the social-scientific, journal article peer-review system. The very possibility of sustaining this essential mechanism for ensuring the reliability of published social science requires a searching reflection on the reality and influence of that sacred project.

The main question from any parents that sociologists ever have to answer is, “What practically is my daughter ever going to be able to do with a sociology major?” It is the material self-sufficiency of their children, not the spirituality of sociology, that students’ parents have on their minds.

In fact, in sociology’s dominant view, it is ordinary people and institutions that are a main part of the problem with the world. Therefore, sociology as a discipline—the movement of enlightened ones—needs to act as the vanguard to push people and society, to become activists in protest, to agitate, to mobilize, to force people to do the “right” thing.

At stake in American sociology’s project are a vision and a cause expressing what are believed to be the greatest, highest, most authentic goods, truths, values, meanings, and purposes. In question are fundamental and ultimate issues of human existence, experience, feeling, and desire. This is a Durkheimian sacred. Mobilizing sociologists in the struggle on behalf of the project is a dedication of the human spirit to what is believed to be most worthy of one’s devotion, true goods to be cherished, and purposes justifying a life’s investment and dedication.

am in fact not a conservative, but a personalist, which actually makes more than a few of my views more radical than those the American liberal-progressive-lefty program typically offers up

Sociology continuing tenaciously to pursue its sacred project, even while living in denial about the fact that it actually is and has such a project, will not foster a bright future for the discipline, given the kind of problematic and sometimes destructive consequences caused by that project. Sociology needs to do some serious, truly open-minded soul searching about its proper purpose, identity, and practices before it loses what is genuinely good in what is has to offer. 1

personalism instead emphasizes human development, activity, and self-realization that are proper to its natural condition.

Sociology’s sacred project is suspicious of social institutions and structures as almost innately oppressive, exploitative, and constraining. Personalism recognizes the powerful capacity and frequent tendency of social institutions and structures to be those things, but more deeply understands them as good and necessary conditions for human flourishing—indeed, when constructed and lived well, as constitutive expressions of human thriving.

Martin Luther King, Jr. would not stand with the dominant project of American sociologists now, however much sociologists would like to own him. He did stand and would stand with the personalist project. Other important personalists that American sociologists may know—and if they do not, they should, if they could possibly do so with an open mind—are Michael Polanyi, Martin Buber, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Maritain, Karol Wojtyla, Dorothy Day, and many others whose thinking and lives are well worth taking seriously, even if we may not fully embrace everything they said and did.

Sociologists trying to do sociology without the proper kind of grounding in philosophy is like biologists trying to do biology without adequately understanding chemistry, or chemists doing chemistry without a solid understanding of mathematics—it can certainly be done within limits, but it is often misled and stymied, and always curbed in its potential by its background limitations.