Contemporary Sociology

More recent analyses of American society, especially those that touch on the relation of religion and economic life, address Weber's concern about the diminishment of social resources, or "social capital," as Robert D. Putnam calls it in a much-read study, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Another post-Weberian work of sociology of much interest to leaders of congregations is Robert N. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Putnam and Bellah share Weber's concern for the decay of noncommercial forms of association in the face of rapid economic growth.

In the last 10 or 15 years a number of sociologists have looked specifically at the role of money in religious attitudes and institutions. Robert Wuthnow has produced a body of data and analysis that will feed such study for a long time. In God and Mammon in America, Wuthnow draws a portrait of contemporary attitudes about religion and economic behavior. Using his own survey data, he shows that Americans have yet to reconcile their inherited religious and moral traditions with the radical changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying migration of the workforce from farms and small towns to cities and by unprecedented economic growth since World War II.

In Poor Richard's Principle: Recovering the American Dream through the Moral Dimension of Work, Business, and Money, Wuthnow uses new survey research to describe the moral quandary of modern Americans drawn by materialistic pursuits but also restrained by higher values of which many of them are only vaguely aware. Wuthnow advocates that we reclaim and build on moral traditions exemplified for him by the philosophy expressed in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack. Turning specifically to religious institutions in The Crisis in the Churches: Spiritual Malaise, Fiscal Woe, Wuthnow gives evidence that many churches succeed neither at providing guidance for their members nor at making a convincing case for their own financial support. While finding "ample reason to be hopeful about the future of Christianity,"⁵ Wuthnow makes a convincing case that clergy and congregations can no longer afford to treat money as a topic too delicate to be faced directly.

Even more directly focused on religious institutions is the work of Dean Hoge and his collaborators, whose Money Matters: Personal Giving in American Churches provides the closest analysis to date of the motives that influence people to give (or not to give) to churches. Setting out to test 22 hypotheses about money, the authors offer a convincing, if somewhat laborious, exposition. Luckily the same material is available in a much more accessible form in the aptly named Plain Talk about Churches and Money by Dean Hoge, Patrick McNamara, and Charles Zech.

Mark Chaves and Sharon Miller have edited a useful collection of writings, Financing American Religion. Ranging in subject matter from Calvin O. Pressley and Walter V. Collier's "Financing Historic Black Churches" to Michael O'Neill's "Religious Nonprofits in Illinois," the collection lacks editorial polish and a clear unifying purpose. But perhaps it is enough to collect and make available some recent work in what, to date, has been a field rich in conviction but poor in evidence and clear analysis.

5. Robert Wuthnow, The Crisis in the Churches: Spiritual Malaise, Fiscal Woe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8.