A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the "Secularization" of Europe di Rodney Stark and Laurence R. Iannaccone

A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the "Secularization" of Europe di Rodney Stark and Laurence R. Iannaccone

• tesi: i problemi sono nell offerta + che nella domanda religiosa
• corollario: nn possiamo parlare di secolarizzazione
• l europa nn è secolarizzata le preferenze religiose sono stabili
• cocncentrarsi sulle imprese religiose anzichè sui consumatori di religione
• ...
• definizione di religione: interesse x le cose ultime postulando il sopranaturale
• 1 il monopolio di una religione dipende dall intervento statale
• 2 senza monopolio fiorisce il pluralismo e la specializzazione
• 3 quanto + il pluralismo si afferma tanto più la religiosità si propaga
• 4 la comp. garantisce anche la laicità del paese
• 5 deregolamentare = laicizzare... e evangelizzare
• ...
• Cosa incide sulla religuosità di un popolo? the degree of regulation of religious economies
• Cosa conta? we stress supply-side weaknesses (ovvero: i preti)... rather than a lack of individual religious demand.
• Dopo i test: the results, suggest that the concept of secularization be dropped for lack of cases to which it could apply.
• There also has been nearly universal agreement that Europe's secularization represented the future of all societies
• Anthony F. C. Wallace: The evolutionary future of religion is extinction.
• secularization is an absorbing state - that once achieved it is irreversible,
• L'anomalia: the enormous vigor of religion in the United States causes great difficulty. "deviant case."
• Few have been willing to accept Tocqueville's (1956: 319) elegant solution that the secularization theory is simply wrong
• We dispute the claim that any European nation is very secularized.
• what is needed is not a theory of the decline or decay of reli- gion, but of religious change,
• ethnic diversity is the source of America's religious vitality... high levels of religious vitality in other immigrant based societies
• emphasis on the changing behavior of religious firms rather than on the changing attitudes of religious consumers
• A THEORY OF RELIGIOUS MOBILIZATION
• Past discussions of secularization usually postulate a decline in the demand
• consumers in a mod- ern, enlightened age no longer find a need for faith
• What happens when only a few, lazy re- ligious firms confront the potential religious consumer?
• Scandinavia, for instance, reflect weak demand primarily, or an unattractive product,
• Definizione di religione. Religion is any system of beliefs and practices concerned with ultimate mean- ing that assumes the existence of the supernatural.
• Prop. 1: The capacity of a single religious firm to monopolize a religious econ- omy depends upon the degree to which the state uses coercive force to regulate the re- ligious economy.
• Prop. 2: To the degree that a religious economy is unregulated, it will tend to be very pluralistic.
• Prop. 3: To the degree that a religious economy is pluralistic, firms will spe- cialize.... the medieval church was surrounded by heresy and dissent.
• Prop. 4: To the degree that a religious economy is competitive and pluralistic, overall levels of religious participation will tend to be high.
• Un esempio di monopolio. Church of England in particular, Adam Smith noted their lack of "exertion" and "zeal":
• Prop. 5: To the degree that a religious firm achieves a monopoly      it will seek to exert its influence over other institutions and thus the society will be sacralized. Abbondano... public political occasions and ceremonies.... Close ties between religion and politics
• Prop. 6: To the degree that deregulation occurs in a previously highly regulated religious economy, the society will be desacralized.
• Prop. 7: The relationship between the degree of regulation of the religious econ- omy and start-up costs for new religious organizations is curvilinear - declining as the state exerts less coercion on behalf of a monopoly firm, but rising again as fully developed pluralism produces a crowded marketplace of effective and successful firms.
• There are two rather independent sources of start-up costs that new religious firms must overcome. The first stems from repression.... in seguito a... complaints of heresy
• EUROPE'S REGULATED AND MONOPOLIZED RELIGIOUS ECONOMIES
• Catholic "Monopolies"
• Writing in 1882, William F. Bainbridge:........."the police detectives of Pius IX searched all our baggage to keep us from taking a Bible into the Holy City"....
• as recently as the 1970s, only Catholic priests could perform valid religious marriage services in Italy and Protestants could not
• Italian law still specifies that criminal offenses committed against Catholic clergy are "aggravated,"
• The government-owned radio and television services broadcast many hours of Catholic programming weekly.
• On October 30, 1981, the Belgian government fmally withdrew its absolute ban on the transportation of Jehovah's Witnesses' publications, including Bibles, by the railroad
• Portugal routinely confiscated Bibles and tracts from them... "to be one of Jehovah's Witnesses . . . was dangerous and even subversive.
• In January 1991, Portugal amended a law that permitted only Catholics to teach religion,
• In 1992 the Spanish government extended tax exempt status to a federation of evangelical Protestant groups... However, these new rights were not extended to Protestant groups that were not part of the federation, nor to non-Christians
• Protestant "Monopolies"
• In most of Europe's Protestant nations the state continues to offer "free" religion - or at least religion that the consumer already has paid for through taxes
• Swedish Lutheranism epitomizes the state church syndrome. Since its inception, the Church of Sweden has served as an organ of the state.
• the King, as head of the Church, names the archbishop... Swedish citizens obtain automatic membership
• Until 1862 all Swedish citizens were required by law to attend church at least once a year.
• Even today, when only two percent of Swedes attend the Church's Sunday services in any given week... social pressures are such that 90% retain official church membership and 80% have their children baptized and confirmed in the Church
• the Church runs on tax funds.
• Tax money pays the salaries of the Lutheran clergy... Swedish clergy are well paid and have civil service job security...
• Direct contributions and payments from worshippers amount to almost nothing.
• Not surprisingly, the Church of Sweden suffers from high costs and low productivity.
• One might suppose that Sweden's Social Democratic Party would have managed by now to dismantle or disestablish the Church... However, after coming to power in the 1930s the socialists became supporters of continued establishment.
• David Martin (1978: 23) has argued that Lutheran State Churches are more subject to the state than the Catholic church and for that reason adapt themselves more rapidly to changes in the character of the state....
• In fact, many Swedish clergy became strong supporters of state socialism.
• Members of parish boards and the church council are elected more for their political positions and convic- tions than for their religious faith.... Indeed, for some years Sweden's Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs was Alva Myrdal, wife of Gunnar Myrdal and herself a famous leftist economist and nonbeliever.
• commission to compose a new translation of the New Testament for "general cultural reasons"
• However, the in- difference of the Lutheran clergy does not extend to potential competitors.
• Protestant groups often find it difficult to get the proper permits to qualify a building
• most Swedes in church on any Sunday at- tend the free churches - which often turn out 70% of their members
• Peter Lodberg (1989: 7), General Secretary of the Ecumenical Council in Denmark, noted that ......"Parliament still has the abso- lute power in the Administration of the National Church [the Evangelical Lutheran Church]."... Parliament had passed a law authorizing fe- male pastors... It is characteristic that this question was not seen as a matter of the inner life of the church, but as some- thing concerning the administrative system of the National Church, that is, it was regarded as being an is- sue for Parliament rather than the bishops.
• .QUANTIFYING RELIGIOUS REGULATION
• six-item scale: "whether or not (1) there is a single, offlcially designated state church; (2) there is official state recognition of some de- nominations but not others; (3) the state appoints or approves the appointment of church leaders; (4) the state directly pays church personnel salaries; (5) there is a system of ecclesi- astical tax collection; (6) the state directly subsidizes, beyond mere tax breaks, the operat- ing, maintenance, or capital expenses for churches."
• Those nations that scored zero, as having unregulated religious economies, were Australia, Canada, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States. France received a score of one. Spain and Austria were scored two. Belgium, Britain, Italy, Switzerland, and West Germany were scored three. Norway and Denmark scored five. Sweden and Finland scored six... general lack of free-market religious economies in Europe.
• The elimination of legal ties between church and state is a major step toward a free market religious economy
• PRELIMINARY TESTS OF THE THEORY
• (Iannaccone, 1991). Pluralism was measured with a classic index of market concentration... rates of weekly church attendance operationalized religious participation. Regression results proved very strong, with pluralism accounting for more than 90% of the variation in church attend... Moreover, the United States is not a deviant case, but lies close to the regression line
• A second test of the theory focused on Catholicism (Stark 1992)... the paper tested the proposition that the level of commitment of the average Catholic varies across nations inversely to the proportion of Catholics in the population. That is, the Catholic Church will be more effective in mobiliz- ing its members where it is confronted
• Other research had demonstrated the validity of the number of priests per 10,000 nominal Catholics as a measure of member commitment
• A third test...(Chaves and Cann 1992)...regulation strongly predicted church attendance rates: The more regulation, the less attendance.
• .Finke and Stark (1988) found a very strong re- lationship between religious diversity (measured by the Herfindahl Index) and rates of church membership.
• Deane, and Blau (1991) used religious census data from early in the century to examine pluralism and church membership rates for the coun- ties of the United States, and claimed to have discovered support for the traditional position that pluralism harms religious commitment.... difetto: farmers often cross county boundaries to attend church.
• A third study, by Hamberg and Pettersson, included in this issue, is based on 284 mu- nicipalities of Sweden and also uses the Herfindahl Index... huge effects on rates of at- tendance. This study is of particular interest because the low levels of church attendance and the quite limited pluralism
• Finally, a study based on 198 nations found a huge, positive effect of pluralism on rates of religious conversion or religious switching (Duke, Johnson, and Duke 1993).
• C'è chi interpreya male i tisultati... Frank J. Lechner (1991: 1111)... revivals and innovation are indeed to be expected. But nothing similar is to be found in most Western European countries.
• However, rather than pursue this line of reasoning by asking what might happen if Euro- pean religious economies were deregulated so that they could more closely approximate the American situation, Lechner was content to have thus "explained" American exceptionalism
• Problemone. How can a supply-side approach account for the powerful religious monopolies of times past? 
• MASS PIETY IN SACRALIZED SOCIETIES
• Ortodossia. religion has crumbled since medieval times
• Europe's "Age of Faith" constitutes the primary benchmark against which scholars measure modern secularization.
• historians have assembled evidence that the medieval masses were, in fact, remarkably irreligious, at least in terms of religious participation
• Andrew Greeley (forthcoming) has summarized these historical conclu- sions with characteristic succinctness:.......... There is no reason to believe that the peasant masses of Europe were ever very devout Christians, not in the sense that we usually mean when we use these words. There could be no deChristianization as the term is normally used because there was never any Christianization in the first place. Christian Europe never existed......
• Massa ed elites. The celebrated medieval piety might have characterized the nobility,
• peasants were simple spirit worshippers whose folklore included some Christian content.
• Jane Schneider (1990) described the religion of medieval Europe as "animism," noting that Christian saints
• Competizione tra santi.
• peasants were essentially ignored by the medieval Church which, according to Greeley (forthcoming), lacked the resources "and perhaps the motivation to catechize
• Paul Johnson... The truth is that the Church tended to be hostile to the peasants. There were very few peasant saints. Medieval clerical writers emphasize the bestiality, violence and avarice of the peasant....
• Max Weber (1961: 1139) also noted that "the churches of the Middle Ages" held an "ex- tremely derogatory" attitude towards the peasants.
• Rosalind and Christopher Brooke...typical church to be "a small box with a tiny chancel, the whole being no larger than a moderately large living room in a modern house." The Brookes emphasize the intimacy this made possible between priest and parishioners during mass, but these tiny churches are also indicative of widespread indifference.
• Keith Thomas (1971: 159)... "it is problematical as to whether cer- tain sections of the population [of Britain] at this time had any religion at all"
• Comportamento a messa... "members of the popu- lation jostled for pews, nudged their neighbours, hawked and spat, knitted, made coarse re- marks, told jokes, fell asleep, and even let off guns" (Thomas 1971: 161)... a man...who was charged with misbehaving...after his "most loathsome farting, striking, and scoffing speeches"...
• Ignoranza. In 1551 the Bishop of Gloucester systematically tested his diocesan clergy. Of 311 pastors, 171 could not repeat the Ten Commandments and 27 did not know the author of the Lord's Prayer
• Archbishop Giovanni Bovio, of the Brindisi-Oria... most of his priests "could barely read and could not understand Latin"... the majority kept concubines,
• Peter Laslett (1965) reported that only 125 of 400 adults in a particular English village took Easter com- munion late in the eighteenth century.
• If we use 1800 as the benchmark, then church membership in Britain is substantially higher today. In 1800 there were a total of 1,230,000 church members (Protestant dissenters and Catholics, as well as Anglicans) from a population of 10,686,000 (England, Scotland, and Wales). That comes to 11.5% of the population. In 1850 there were 3,423,000 church mem- bers, or 16.7% of the population. The 1900 church membership rate was 18.6% (calculated from Currie, Gilbert, and Horsley 1977 and Mitchell 1962). In 1980, the church membership rate was 15.2 - a decline, but hardly a precipitous
• There is solid evidence that less than a third of the Irish attended mass in 1840... The celebrated Irish piety - with mass attendance hovering around 90% arose subsequent to the Potato Famine when the Church became the primary organizational vehicle for Irish na- tionalism resisting external domination.
• Usa. Fewer than 20% of the inhabitants.of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts belonged to a church... (Stark and Finke 1988).
• SUBJECTIVE RELIGION AND POTENTLIAL DEMAND
• Medioevo soggettivo: ...magic and animism
• religious tendencies as representing a potential demand for organized religion in these societies - potential in the sense that it awaited activation by aggressive suppliers.
• equal force today. That is, the secularization thesis seems strong when measured in terms of par- ticipation in organized religion, but it seems false when religion is measured subjectively.
• Iceland has often been proposed as the most secularized nation on earth... church attendance is extremely low... sexual norms are very liberal
• Nevertheless, William Swatos (1984) reported high levels of in-the-home religion in Iceland today,... when asked "Independently of whether you go to church or not, would you say you are a religious person?" 66% of Icelanders say "yes."... only 2% say they are "convinced" atheists.... Indeed, these totals are not so dif- ferent from those for the United States... most people believe in life after death,
• In our judgment these data fully justify the supply-side interpretation of Northern Europe's low levels of religious participation.
• PROTESTANT GROWTH IN LATIN AMERICA
• Il libro. David Stoll's Is Latin America Turning Protestant?
• Until these books were published, the steady and rapid growth of pluralism in Latin America and the successful entry of highly competitive firms, had gone largely unnoticed in scholarly circles... scholarly world assumed that such changes were impossible.
• Martin and Stoll deserve great credit, their books were not all that timely.
• Given the lag time involved in the scholarly discovery of the religious reshaping of Latin America, it would not seem premature today to begin assessing the possibility of the rise of highly pluralistic European religious economies,
• THE CHURCHING OF EUROPE
• there has been a substantial allocation of missionaries and mission resources from North America to Europe.
• Jehovah's Witnesses grew by 72% in Europe from 1980 through 1992,
• Moreover, Europe's fate does not await religious instruction from North America. Locally led evangelical Protestant movements are growing all across Europe.
• HOW RELIGIOUS ARE 'RELIGIOUS' SOCIETIES?
• if full-blown pluralism develops in Europe, how religious could we expect it to become?
• Americans who actually belong to a specific church congregation...has hovered around 65%... Perhaps that is about the ceiling under conditions of modern living. Il resto religione fai da te.

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