The Talcott Parsons Reader

part I - Religion and Modern Society

I.1 - Christianity and Modern Industrial Society

The volume [for which this chapter was originally written was] conceived as a tribute to Professor Pitrim Sorokin as a distinguished elder statesman of sociology, not only in the United States but also throughout the world. One of the highest achievements, particularly in a rapidly developing discipline in its early phases of development, is to serve as a generator and focus of creatively important differences of opinion. Such differences pose problems which, though not solved or in any immediate sense soluble in the generation in question, still serve to orient the thinking of professional groups. For such differences to be fruitful there must be a delicate balance of commonly accepted premises, which make a fruitful meeting of minds possible, and difference of interpretation in more particularized questions which are open to some sort of empirical test.

In the sociological profession today Professor Sorokin and the present author are probably defined predominantly as antagonists who have taken widely different views on a variety of subjects.¹ The objective of this chapter is to take explicit cognizance of one, to me crucial, field of such difference of opinion, but to attempt to place it within a framework of common problems in the hope that consideration of the difference may help others toward a fruitful solution of these problems.

In the highly empirical atmosphere of American sociology in recent times there has been a tendency to neglect the importance of the great problems of the trends of development of Western society and culture in a large sense, of its place relative to the great civilizations of the Orient, and similar problems. Within this field the problem of the role of religion and its relation to social values stands in a particularly central position. In my opinion it is one of Sorokin's great services to have held these problems consistently in theforefront of concern, and to have refused to be satisfied with a sociology which did not have anything significant to say about them. In this fundamental respect Sorokin stands in the great tradition of Western sociological thought. This emphasis coincides with my own strong predilections, shaped as they wereby European experience under the influences in particular of Max Weber and Durkheim.

It can, I think, safely be said that we share the convictions, first, of the enormous importance of the general evolutionary and comparative perspective in the interpretation of social phenomena and, second, of the crucial role of religion and its relation to values in this large perspective. When, however, we turn to more particular problems of spelling out this context, differences of opinion emerge. A particularly important test case is that of the interpretation of the relations of religious orientation, values, and social structure in the course of that development in the modern Western world which has eventuated in modern industrialism. I propose to set over against a very schematic but I hope accurate outline of Sorokin's view, my own, which I think may be the kind of alternative which, though differing sharply from his view, may pose fruitful empirical questions on which future research may be expected to throw light. Only in this broadest contrast will I attempt to take account of the Sorokin position. My objective is not to present either a full statement or a critique of his conceptions as such, but to state my own as clearly as possible.

The heart of the Sorokin position which is relevant here I take to be his classification and use of three fundamental types of cultural orientation – the "ideational," "idealistic," and "sensate."² What may be called orientations in terms of the grounds of meaning on the one hand and values for social and personal conduct on the other, are treated as by and large varying together.

The ideational pattern is one which gives unquestionable primacy to transcendental and other-worldly interests in the religious sense. Reality itself is defined as ultimately beyond the reach of the senses, as transcendental. The goal of life must be to reach the closest possible accord with the nature oftranscendent reality, and the path to this must involve renunciation of all worldly interests. Broadly speaking, other-worldly asceticism and mysticism are the paths to it. The ethical component which is so prominent in Christianity generally is not missing from Sorokin's conception. It takes, however, the form on which his later work has placed increasing stress: that of altruistic love, of pure personal selfless acts of love by individuals. In this discussion I would like to differentiate this form of altruism from the institutionalization of Christianethics to become part of the structure of the society itself. It is the latter with which my analysis will be concerned.

The opposite extreme to the ideational pattern is the sensate. Here the empirical, in the last analysis the "material," aspect of reality is taken as ultimately real or predominant. In practical conduct the implication of a sensate view of the world is to make the most of the opportunities of the here and now,to be concerned with world success, power, and - in the last analysis - to put hedonistic gratifications first of all.

The idealistic pattern is conceived as intermediate between the two, not in the sense of a simple "compromise," but rather of a synthesis which can achieve a harmonious balance between the two principal components.

This basic classification is then used as the framework for outlining a developmental pattern leading, in the history of a civilization, from ideational to idealistic predominance and in turn from idealistic to sensate. Though very generally applied, the two most important cases dealt with in Sorokin's works are the civilization of classical antiquity and that of the Christian West. In both cases there was an early ideational phase which gradually gave way to an idealistic synthesis: in the classical that of fifth century Greece, in the Westernthat of the high Middle Ages. The idealistic synthesis has then proceeded to break down into an increasingly sensate phase - in the classical case the late Hellenistic and Roman periods, in the Western the modern "capitalistic" or industrial period. Sorokin tends to regard the contemporary period, exemplified particularly in the United States, but also in the Soviet Union, as close to the peak of the sensate phase of development and destined for a general breakdown comparable to that of Greco-Roman civilization before a new ideational pattern can become established.

From one point of view the general developmental trend Sorokin outlines may be described as a progressive decline in the "religiousness" of the society and culture until a radical reversal is forced by a general societal breakdown. In the Western case the phase of early Christianity was the most religious, characterized by a primarily ascetic disregard for virtually all worldly interests, and the practice of brotherly love within the Christian community itself. Correspondingly, however, Christianity in this phase had little power to organize social relationships beyond the church. With the development of the idealistic phase,however, for a time it was possible to permeate secular life with at least an approximation of Christian ethics, but the balance was precarious and broke down relatively soon.

There may well be a considerable measure of agreement up to this point. Sorokin, however, clearly regards Protestantism, compared with medieval Catholicism, as primarily a step in the general decline of religiousness, and the secularism which has been prominent since the Age of the Enlightenment asthe natural further step in the same direction. It is hence on the interpretation of Protestantism in the general process of Western social development and its sequel after the Reformation period that I would like to focus my own view. It will be necessary, however, to say a few things about more general theoretical orientation, and about the earlier historical phases as background for this analysis

An Alternative Interpretation

There are two interrelated theoretical issues which need to be discussed briefly before entering into a historical analysis. These concern factors in the structure of a religious orientation itself on the one hand and the senses in which religious orientations and their institutionalization in the social system can undergoprocesses of structural differentiation on the other.

In the former respect Professor Sorokin seems to think primarily in terms of a single variable which might be called "degree of religiousness." This in turn tends to be identified with transcendental orientation in the sense of other-worldliness as defining the acceptable field of interest and activity. This is to say that, so far as religious interests are in any sense paramount in a motivational system, the religious person will tend to renounce the world and engage so far as possible in ascetic or devotional practices or mystical contemplation and purely spontaneous acts of love, reducing his involvement in "practical" affairs whichinvolve institutionalized obligations to a minimum. He will therefore tend to be oriented to the reduction of all desires to participate positively and actively in worldly activities like political or economic function. By the same token, positive commitment to such worldly interests and responsibilities is taken as an index of relative lack of religious interest.

Relative to the degree of religiousness we suggest the relevance of a second variable which we think is independent. This is the one which Max Weber formulated as the variation between other-worldly and inner-worldly orientation. Combined with a high degree of religiousness, the choice of one alternativeleads to religious rejection of the world, the choice of the other to an orientation to mastery over the world in the name of religious values. There are further complications in the problem of a general typology of religious orientations, but suffice it to say for the present that I propose to explore the possibilities implicitin the hypothesis that Western Christianity belongs in the category of orientation which is high in degree of religiousness, with a predominantly inner-worldly orientation so far as the field of expected action of the individual is concerned. In ways I shall try to explain, this applies even to early and medieval Christianity, but becomes most clearly evident in "ascetic Protestantism." I feel that this hypothesis is excluded by Sorokin's assumption that religiousness ipso facto implies other-worldliness, supplemented only by spontaneous altruism.

The second main theoretical point concerns the question of differentiation. I think of religion as an aspect of human action. Like all other aspects, in the course of social, cultural, and personality development it undergoes processes of differentiation in a double sense. The first of these concerns differentiationwithin religious systems themselves, the second the differentiation of the religious element from nonreligious elements in the more general system of action. In the latter context the general developmental trend may be said to be from fusions of religious and nonreligious components in the same action structures, to increasingly clear differentiation between multiple spheres of action.

A special problem arises when we deal with a system over a sufficiently long period of time to include two or more stages in a process of differentiation. Structural parts of the system have to be named. It is in the nature of the process of differentiation that what was one part at an earlier stage becomes two or more distinct parts at a later. The simple logical question then is whether the name applied at the earlier stage is still used to designate any one of the parts surviving at the later. If the process is one of differentiation, clearly the surviving entity which carries the same name will be narrower in scope and more "specialized" in the later than it was in the earlier stage. It will then, by mere logic, have lost function and become less important than in the earlier phase. The problem then becomes one of analyzing the continuities, not only of the component called by the same name in the different stages, e.g., religion, but also of the senses in which the patterns of orientation given in the earlier stages have or have not been fundamentally altered in their significance for the system as a whole, considering the exigencies of the situations in which action takes place and the complex relations of this part to the other parts of the more differentiated system, e.g., the nonreligious or secular.

It is my impression that Professor Sorokin has not given sufficient weight to these considerations and has tended to measure the influence of religion, from earlier to later stages, as if it were reasonable to expect maintenance of the same "degree of inclusiveness" in the direct "definition of the situation" for actionwhich it enjoyed in the early stage of reference. Judged by this standard the degree of religiousness of Christian society has clearly suffered a progressive decline by the mere fact that the society has become functionally a more highly differentiated system of action than was the early "primitive" church.

The Setting of the Problem: Christianity-Society

As a first step it is necessary to outline a few essentials of the nature of the early Christian church and its relations to the secular society of the time. Its structure comprised, as is well known, a very distinctive synthesis of elements derived from Judaism, Greek philosophy, the Greek conception of social organization,and of course distinctive contributions of its own.

The Hebrew and the Greek patterns had in common the conception of a solidary, religiously sanctioned social unit, the organization of which was based on values fully transcending the loyalties of kinship. In the Hebrew case it was the confederation of "tribes" bound to Jahweh and to each other by theCovenant. These units became fused into a "people" whose main orientation to life was defined in terms of the Law given to them by Jahweh, a firm collectivity structure defining its role as the fulfillment of God's commandments. In the historical course, by what precise stages need not concern us here, two crucial developments occurred. First Jahweh became a completely universal transcendental God who governed the activities not only of the people of Israel but of all mankind. Second, the people of Israel became, through the exile, depoliticized. Their religion was the essential bond of solidarity. Since this was no longer expressed in an independent political community, it was not exposed to the "secularizing" influences so importantly involved in political responsibility.

On the Greek side the polis was a comparable solidary confederation, in the first instance of kinship lineages. It was the "political" society almost par excellence, but one which eventually came to be based on the principle of the universalistic equality of citizens. Religiously it was oriented not to a transcendental God but to an immanent polytheism. The conception of the ultimate unity of divinity emerged in Greek civilization, but essentially as a philosophical principle the necessity of which was demonstrated by reason.

Seen against the background of Judaism and in certain respects also of the Greek component, the most important distinctive feature of Christianity of importance here was its religious individualism. In Judaism the primary religious concern was with the fate of the Jewish community as God's chosenpeople. In Christianity it became the fate of the individual soul; God was concerned with the salvation of individuals, not simply with the extent to which a social community as such adhered to His commandments.

This new conception of the relation of the individual soul to God might seem, given the fundamental transcendental character of the God of Judaism, to imply the virtual abandonment of concern with life in the world, to make the life of the Christian center primarily in devotional interests in preparing for the life tocome. Indeed this strain in Christianity has always been a crucially important one and marks it off sharply from the main trend of Judaism. In this respect Christianity, however different its theological orientation, was closely analogous to Indian religion. But there was another aspect to Christian individualism: the fact that its adherents came to constitute a very special type of social collectivity on earth, the Christian church. The theological significance of the Christ figure as the mediator between God and man is central as defining the nature of man's relation to God, in and through the Church of Christ. It was the conception of the church which underlay the nature of the ethical conception of Christianity and was the basis from which the moral influence of Christianity could operate on secular society.

In theoretical terms this may be expressed by saying that the conception of the church, which implied the fundamental break with the Jewish law which Paul made final, constituted the differentiation of Christianity as a religious system (a cultural system) from the conception of a "people" as a social system. Given the Roman ascendancy in the secular society of the time, this differentiation was expressed in the famous formula "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" - i.e., the church did not claim jurisdiction over secular society as such.

At the same time this church was a solidary collectivity. The keynote here was the conception of "brothers in Christ." Its members were by no means concerned only with their respective personal salvations, but with the mission of Christ on behalf of mankind. This had the dual meaning of an obligation to extend the Christian community by proselytizing and, within it, to organize its internal relations on the basis in the first instance of mutual brotherly love.

Though, religiously speaking, 'this was a radically individualistic doctrine, it was not an anarchistic, but what we have come to call an "institutionalized" individualism. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity, compared with Jewish unitarianism, is intimately connected with this development. Instead of a single "line" of relationship between an ultimately transcendental God and man, God became related to man through the Christ figure who was both God and Man, and Christ became the head of the Church, the "essence" of which was formulated as the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

As I interpret it, this implied, correlative with the differentiation of the church from secular society, a differentiation within the religious system itself, in the broadest respect between the aspect of devotion and worship on the one hand, and the aspect of the Christian's relation to his fellow men on the other. The Christian community was constituted by the fact of common faith and common worship, but the contexts in which worship was paramount were differentiated from the context of love and charity which bound the community together in bonds of human mutuality.

From the present point of view this differentiation was just as important as the first, and intimately connected with it. The Jewish law had held the individual to highly detailed prescriptions of conduct which were "rationalized" for the most part only in the sense that they were declared to be Divine commandments. Now, as a member of the church he was held to a set of principles of conduct - the obligation to act in accord with the Holy Spirit. And though obviously directly connected with his commitment to God through faith, conduct in this world could be made to a degree independent of this, above all, in the sense thatdetailed prescriptions of behavior were not taken as religiously given but only the general principles of ethical action. Thus action decisions in particular cases had to be left to the conscience of believers and could not be prescribed by a comprehensive religious law. The context of worship was an independent context which generated motivation to act in accord with the spirit, but was not exactly the same thing as this action.

This differentiation occurred, however, within a genuine unity. The key theological problem here was the doctrine of the Creation and whether it implied an ontological dualism. In the great formative period this came to a head in the struggle with Manichaeism, and Augustine's fundamental decision against the latter broadly settled the issue. The sphere of the church as that part of man's life on earth directly dominated by the Holy Spirit was then a point of mediation between the direct expression of Divine will through Christ and the rest of the Creation. But the implication was that this remainder of the Creation could not be governed by an ontologically independent principle of evil and was hence inherently subject to Christianization.

Thus religious individualism, in the sense in which it became institutionalized in the Christian church, represented, relative to Judaism, a new autonomy of the individual on two fronts. In his own relation to God as an object of worship, the individual was released from his ascriptive embeddedness in the Jewishcommunity. Whatever the relation of dependence on God implied in this, it was as an individual in the religious relation that be could be saved. There was also a new autonomy in his relation to the field of human action, in the first instance as a member of the church and in his relations to his fellow members inbrotherly love. The church was an association of believers, manifesting their attachment to God in their conduct in this World. The church was thus independent, not an ascribed aspect of a total society. There was hence, through these channels, a basic legitimation of the importance of life in this world, but in a situation where the church could reserve a basic independence from those aspects of secular society not felt to be permeated with the Holy Spirit.

Life in this world clearly includes human society. Indeed the church itself is clearly a social entity. But the early Christians judged the secular society of their time, that of the Roman Empire, to be ethically unacceptable, so the Christian life had to be led essentially within the church. This was connected with theChiliastic expectation of an imminent Last Judgment. But gradually this expectation faded and the church faced the problem of continuing to live in the world and of attempting to come to some sort of long-run terms with the rest of the society outside itself.

I have stressed both the social character of the church and its radical break from the Jewish community because the pattern I have sketched formed a basic set of conditions under which Christian orientations could exert a kind of influence on secular society different from that which was possible to religion in the Jewish pattern. First, proselytizing on a grand scale was possible without carrying along the whole society immediateiy. While conversion to Judaism meant accepting full membership in the total Jewish community, a converted Christian could remain a Roman, a Corinthian, or whatever; his new socialparticipation was confined to the church itself. There were important points at which the church potentially and actually conflicted with the societies of the time, but most of them could be solved by relative nonparticipation in "public affairs."

If in this respect the church limited its claims on its members, it also maintained a position of independence from which further influence could be exerted. It established a "place to stand" from which to exert leverage, and it developed a firm organization to safeguard that place. But the process was notto be one of absorption of the secular society into the religious community itself; it was rather one of acceptance of the fundamental differentiation between church and state, but the attempt to define the latter as subject to Christian principles.

There were certainly tendencies to a radical rejection of secular society in principle, but at least for the Western branch of Christianity by the time of St. Augustine the door was opened to the possibility that a Christian society as a whole could be attained. The most important vehicle for this trend was the building into Christian thought of the Greco-Roman conception of natural law. This implied a differentiation of life between spiritual and temporal spheres and a relative legitimation of the temporal, provided it was ordered in accordance with natural law. From this point of view, Roman society could be defined as evil, not because it was a secular society as such, but because as a society it failed to live up to norms present in its own culture.

The other principal focus of the process of Christianizing of society lay in the implications of the attempt to universalize Christian adherence within the society. Christianity was gradually transformed from a sect that remained aloof and in principle expected a Christian life only for the segregated special group of its own members into the church which was the trustee of the religious interests of the whole population. In proportion as this happened, persons in positions of responsibility in secular society automatically became Christians, and the question could not but arise of the relation between their church membership and their secular responsibilities. The focus of the emerging conception was that of the Christian monarch. The great symbolic event in this whole connection was the coronation of Charlemagne by the Pope. The symbolism of this event was dual. It was an act by the head of the church of legitimation of secular authority, which could be interpreted as the definitive ending of the conception of aloofness on the part of the church, of the position that it could take no moral responsibility in relation to the secular sphere. It also symbolized the acceptance by the monarch of the obligation to act, in his capacity as chief of government, as a Christian. Church and state then symbolically shared their commitment to Christian values.

It is not, in my opinion, correct to interpret this as the subordination of secular authority to the church. It was definitely a putting of the seal of religious legitimacy on the differentiation of the two spheres and their fundamental independence from each other as organized collectivities. But a true differentiation always involves at the same time an alliance to common values and norms. In terms of the ultimate trusteeship of these values, the church is the higher authority.

Perhaps a good analogy is the administration of the oath of office to an incoming American President by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. This clearly does not mean that the Chief Justice is the "real" chief of government and the President his organizational subordinate. What it means is rather that the Supreme Court is the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution, and the legitimation of presidential office by the Chief Justice is a symbolization of the subordination of the Presidency to constitutional law, which is equally binding on the Court.

In very broad outline this seems to be the way the stage was set for the development of a process of the "Christianizing" of secular society, not, be it repeated, through absorption of secular spheres into the "religious life" in the sense of the life of the church or its religious orders, but by exerting influence on a life which remained by the church's own definition secular, hence, in the Catholic phase, religiously inferior to the highest, but still potentially at least quite definitely Christian.³

The first main phase was the medieval synthesis, which produced a great society and culture. But from the present point of view it must also be considered a stage in a process of development. The dynamic forces which led beyond the medieval pattern were in the present view inherent on both the religious and the secular sides. Brief consideration of some of the essential constituents which both went into the medieval synthesis and led beyond it will help to lay a foundation for understanding a little of the mechanisms by which a religious influence could be exerted on secular society.

First let us take the church itself. Differentiation of the church from secular society represented in one sense 'a renunciation of influence on secular life. There was no longer a detailed, divinely sanctioned law to prescribe all secular conduct. This may, however, be looked on as a kind of renunciation similar tothat involved in a process of investment, a step toward a higher order of "productive" results in the future by a more roundabout process. Here resources are not simply mobilized to maximize short-run production. Some current resources are diverted into temporarily "unproductive" channels in uses which prepare a later production effort. To do this, however, this set of resources must be protected against pressures for their immediate consumption. In the religious case the church was such a base of operations which was keptsecure from absorption in the secular life of the time. Such pressures to absorption were indeed very prominent in the period after Constantine, in the West perhaps above all through the tendency of bishops to become heavily involved in secular political and economic interests.

The most important single fortress for the maintenance of the purity of religious orientation through this period was certainly the religious orders where segregated communities were devoted to a special religious life. Even this, however, had its this-worldly aspect, notably through the place taken by useful work in the Benedictine rule, which in many cases expanded into a generally high level of economic rationality. Furthermore the orders served as a highly important direct ground for the development of social organizationitself; there were highly organized communities, administered in much more universalistic and less traditionalized ways than was most of the secular society of the time.

Secondly, however, that part of the church which served the laity through the secular clergy in the early medieval period underwent a major reform, significantly under monastic impetus. This of course is particularly associated with the Cluniac order and the name of Pope Gregory VII, himself a Cluniac monk. In one major aspect at least, it consisted of an extension of the monastic conception of purity of religious orientation to the roles of the secular clergy. There were two particularly important and closely related points here. One was the final defeat of the Donatist heresy and the firm establishment of the principle that priesthood was an office with powers and authority clearly separable from the person of the individual incumbent, or any particularistic network of relationships in which he might be involved. The second was the doctrine of clerical celibacy, which not only had not previously been enforced but also had not even been firmly established as a policy, and never was in the Eastern church.

These crucial reforms had two orders of significance. First, they served to consolidate and extend the independence of the church from secular influences. The particularly important extension was of course to the region of most direct and continuing contact with the laity through the secular clergy. Second, however, the structure of the medieval church came to serve, well beyond the Orders, as a model of social organization which could be extended into secular society. As Lea made so clear, in a society very largely dominated by the hereditary principle, clerical celibacy had a special significance.⁴ Put in sociological terms, we may say that it made possible a social island which institutionalized a universalistic basis of role-allocation manifested in careers open to talent. The clergy was of course very far from being immune to class influence and at various times bishoprics and cardinalates were virtually monopolized by narrow circles of noble lineages. But this is not to say that the institution of celibacy and with it the barrier to inheritance of clerical office was unimportant.

There also was an intimate connection between the conception of clerical office which became crystallized in the Middle Ages and the building of much of Roman law into the structure of the church itself through canon law. In place of the relatively unrationalized and historically particularized Jewish law, theChristian church developed for its own internal use a highly rationalized and codified body of norms which underlay the legal structure of the whole subsequent development of Western society. Certainly the reception of secular Roman law in the late Middle Ages could not have happened without this.

Closely related to the church's use of Roman law was the place it made for the secular intellectual culture of antiquity. There is a sense in which this was already implicit in the place taken by Greek philosophy in theology itself. It was greatly reinforced by adoption of the conception of natural law as governing the secular sphere. Its medieval phase culminated in the very central place accorded to the work of Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas.

There was, however, also a structural aspect of the place of intellectual culture. Though in the earlier period it was only in the monasteries that the culture of antiquity was preserved and cultivated at all, as the medieval universities began to develop, the role of scholar and teacher assumed an importantdegree of independence both from the orders and from the hierarchy of the church. Though most of the schoolmen were monks, as scholars and teachers their activity was not directly controlled by their orders or chapters, nor by the bishops of the territories where they worked and taught. In terms of the crucial role of intellectual culture in later social development, notably through the rise of science, the structural basis of its independence is of an importance hardly to be exaggerated. This is perhaps the most critical single point of difference between the development of Western Christianity and of Islam, since in the latter case the influence of orthodoxy was able to suppress the independence of the scholarly class who had made such brilliant beginnings in the reception and extension of classical culture. The church's censure of Galileo should not be allowed to obscure the fact that, compared to other religious systems, Catholic Christianity made a place for an independent intellectual culture which is unique among all the great religions in their medieval phase.

There is one further important focus of the synthesis between medieval Christianity and the classical heritage. The universalism of Christianity held up a conception of a moral order for Christendom as a whole, with Christendom ideally expected eventually to comprise all mankind. This matched and was without doubt greatly influenced by the Roman conception of a universal sociopolitical order governed by a single universal system of law, a natural law coming to be institutionalized as the law of a politically organized society.

In basic Christian thinking, the Roman Empire as the secular order of the world had never ceased to exist. But since Charlemagne it could be defined as the Holy Roman Empire, as the normative framework of a universal Christian society. The empirical course of political development in Europe was to be such as to make this dream of unity under law in some respects progressively less realistic, at least for a very considerable period. Nevertheless the importance of the conception of a universal order should not be underestimated.

I have argued above that Christianity originally involved a cultural "marriage" between Judaic and Greco-Roman components. Though the early church repudiated the secular society of the contemporary Roman Empire, the above considerations make it quite clear that the normative aspect of classical culture was not repudiated; essentially a fundamental trusteeship of this heritage was built into the basic structure of the Christian church itself. It became the primary source from which this heritage was rediffused into thesecular world and became the basis for further developments which somehow had failed to materialize in the ancient world. It is essential to my general argument here that this was a genuine integration.

Perhaps particularly from a Protestant point of view it is common to think of medieval Catholicism as mainly a pattern of compromise between a set of religious ideals and the exigencies of life in the world. It is quite true that, as Troeltsch so clearly brings out, the conception was that of a series of levels of closeness to and distance from full contact with the Divine, with the monastic life at the top. But this is not to say that positive religious sanction was withheld from everything except devotional self sacrifice that for example natural law was thought of merely as a concession to human weakness. Very much on the contrary, a secular world governed by natural law was thought of as ordained by God as the part of His Creation which was to serve as the field for man’s activity. Secular society was, to be sure, a field of temptation, but also ofopportunity to lead a Christian life. And an essential part of the Christian life came to be the control, if not the shaping, of secular society in the interest of Christian ideals.

Professor Sorokin is quite right, I feel, in regarding this as a synthesis rather than merely a compromise. But, as noted, it is my view that this was not the end of the road, the point from which the process of religious decline started, but rather an essential station on a road which has led much farther. A few more general things about the nature of the process need to be said. The point of view I am taking here is meant to be very far indeed from any idealistic "emanationist" conception of the process of social development.

A crucial initial point is the one stressed throughout, that the church was from the beginning itself a special type of social organization. We do not have to think of the cultural aspect of Christianity as socially "disembodied" and suddenly, by a kind of sociological miracle, taking over the control of a society. On thecontrary, it developed, survived, and exerted its influence through the same kinds of processes of interaction between cultural and social systems which operate in other connections. First, we have noted, it maintained and consolidated its independence, and developed its own internal structure. Second, it became diffused so that, within the society in which it operated, it could assume that the whole population was, in the religious sphere, subject to its jurisdiction; it successfully eliminated all organized internal religious competition - by "propaganda" and various types of more or less political process.

It had in its own social structure institutionalized a set of values. Through the universality of membership in it, it had the opportunity to play a critical part in the socialization process for all members of the society. Though not directly controlling secular social organization, at certain levels of personality its "definition of the situation" and the importance of its special sanctions could, however imperfectly, be universalized. There was much revolt and much "back-sliding," but relatively little indifference to the Christian point of view was possible. The long-run influence of such a set of forces should not be underestimated.

The church was not only an agency of reward for approved behavior and punishment of what it disapproved. It was a crucial focus of psychological support over a very wide range of human concerns - its role in administration of the rites de passage is a good index of this position. Finally it was a source ofdirect models, not only for values at the most general level, but for modes of organizing social relationship patterns at a relatively general normative level, in such fields as law, and careers open to talent.

This phase of the "Christianization" of secular society can, like others, be summed up in terms of a formula which has proved useful in other connections for the analysis of the progressive type of change in a social system.⁵ Given a base in an institutionalized value system (in this case in the church) there havebeen three main aspects of the process.

First there has been extension of the range of institutionalization of the values, above all through the influence on the laity through the secular clergy.

Secondly, there has been a process of further differentiation. The church itself has become further differentiated internally in that its sacramental system has been more clearly marked off from its administrative system, and its system of prescriptions for the ethical life of Christians through the canon law more clearly differentiated from both the others. At the same time the differentiation of the church from secular society has become more clearly marked. There has been a process of disengagement of the church from secular society through much more stringent control of the political and economic interests of bishops and clergy, and through sacerdotal celibacy. The beginnings of a revived Roman civil law have greatly aided in this process by more clearly defining the normative order of secular society.

Finally, third, there was a process of upgrading in terms of fulfillment of the requirements of the value system. Internally to the church itself this is the primary meaning of its internal reform, the strengthening of its administration, the elevation of standards in the orders and among the secular clergy. Externally, it was the gradual pressure toward a higher ethical standard among the lay population. The immense lay participation in enterprises like the building of the cathedrals is the most conspicuously manifest aspect of the general wave of 'religious enthusiasm" in the Middle Ages.

The Reformation Phase

Perhaps the most important principle of the relation between religion and society which was institutionalized in the Middle Ages was that of the autonomy of secular society, of the "state" in the medieval sense, relative to the church, but within a Christian framework. The Christianity of secular society was guaranteed, not by the subjection of secular life to a religious law, but by the common commitment of ecclesiastical and temporal personnel to Christian faith. The Reformation may be seen, from one point of view, as a process of the extension of this principle of autonomy⁶ to the internal structure of religious organization itself, with profound consequences both for the structure of the churches and for their relation to secular society. It may be regarded as a further major step in the same line as the original Christian break with Judaism.

The essential point may be stated as the religious "enfranchisement" of the individual, often put as his coming to stand in a direct relation to God. The Catholic Church had emancipated the individual, as part of its own corporate entity, from the Jewish law and its special social community, and had given him a notable autonomy within the secular sphere. But within its own definition of the religious sphere it had kept him under a strict tutelage by a set of mechanisms of which the sacraments were the core. By Catholic doctrine the only access to Divine grace was through the sacraments administered by a duly ordained priest. Luther broke through this tutelage to make the individual a religiously autonomous entity, responsible for his own religious concerns, not only in the sense of accepting the ministrations and discipline of the church butalso through making his own fundamental religious commitments.

This brought faith into an even more central position than before. It was no longer the commitment to accept the particularized obligations and sacraments administered by the Church, but to act on the more general level in accordance with God's will. Like all reciprocal relationships, this one could be “tipped’ oneway or the other. In the Lutheran case it was tipped far in what in certain senses may be called the "authoritarian" direction; grace was interpreted to come only from the completely "undetermined" Divine action and in no sense to be dependent on the performances of the faithful, but only on their "receptivity." In this sense Lutheranism might be felt to deprive the individual of autonomy rather than enhancing it. But this would be an incorrect interpretation. The essential point is that the individual's dependence on the human mediation of the church and its priesthood through the sacraments was eliminated and as a human being he had, under God, to rely on his own independent responsibility; he could not "buy" grace or absolution from a human agency empowered to dispense it. In this situation the very uncertainties of the individual's relation to God, an uncertainty driven to its extreme by the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, could, through its definition of the situation for religious interests, produce a powerful impetus to the acceptance of individual responsibility. The more deeply felt his religious need, the sharper his sense of unworthiness, the more he had to realize that no human agency could relieve him of his responsibility; "mother" church was no longer available to protect and comfort him.

An immediate consequence was the elimination of the fundamental distinction in moral-religious quality between the religious life in the Catholic sense and life in secular "callings." It was the individual's direct relation to God which counted from the human side, his faith. This faith was not a function of anyparticular set of ritual or semi-magical practices, or indeed even of "discipline" except in the most general sense of living according to Christian principles. The core of the special meaning of the religious life had been the sacramental conception of the earning of "merit" and this was fundamentally dependent on the Catholic conception of the power of the sacraments.

From one point of view, that of the special powers of the church as a social organization, this could be regarded as a crucial loss of function, and the Lutheran conception of the fundamental religious equivalence of all callings as secularization. My interpretation, however, is in accord with Max Weber's; themore important change was not the removal of religious legitimation from the special monastic life, but rather, the endowment of secular life with a new order of religious legitimation as a field of "Christian opportunity." If the ordinary man, assumed of course to be a church member, stood in direct relation to God, and could be justified by his faith, the whole person could be justified, including the life he led in everyday affairs. The counterpart of eliminating the sacramental mediation of the secular priesthood was eliminating also the special virtues of the religious. It was a case of further differentiation within the Christian framework.

Protestantism in its Lutheran phase underwent a process, analogous to that of the early church, of relative withdrawal from direct involvement in the affairs of secular society. With the overwhelming Lutheran emphasis on faith and the importance of the individual's subjective sense of justification, there was, as Weber pointed out, a strong tendency to interpret the concept of the calling in a passive, traditionalist, almost Pauline sense. It was the individual's relation to his God that mattered; only in a sense of nondiscrimination was his secular calling sanctified, in that it was just as good, religiously speaking, as that of the monk.

We have, however, maintained that the conception of the generalization of a Christian pattern of life was an inherent possibility in the Christian orientation from the beginning and it came early to the fore in the Reformation period in the Calvinistic, or more broadly the ascetic, branch of the movement. Here we may say that the religious status of secular callings was extended from that of a principle of basic nondiscrimination to one of their endowment with positive instrumental significance. The key conception was that of the divine ordination of the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. This went beyond the

negative legitimation of secular callings to the assignment of a positive function to them in the divine plan.

In terms of its possibility of exerting leverage over secular society this was by far the most powerful version of the conception of the possibility of a "Christian society" which had yet appeared.

First the stepwise hierarchy of levels of religious merit, so central to the Thomistic view, was eliminated by Luther.

Then the individual became the focus not only of secular but also of religious responsibility emancipated from tutelary control by a sacramental church. Finally, precisely in his secular calling the individual was given a positive assignment to work in the building of the Kingdom.

The consequence of this combination was that, with one important exception, every major factor in the situation converged upon the dynamic exploitation of opportunity to change social life in the direction of conformity with religiously grounded ideals.

The basic assumption is that for Protestants the Christian commitment was no less rigorous than it had been for Catholics, if anything it was more so. In both Lutheran and Calvinistic versions the conception was one of the most rigorous submission of the individual’s life to divine will. But in defining the situation for implementing this role of "creature," the Protestant position differed from the Catholic broadly as the definition of the preschool child’s role relative to his parents differs from that of the school-age child's relation to his teacher. Within the family, important as the element of discipline and expectations of learning to perform are, the primary focus is on responsibility of the parents for the welfare and security of their children the permeation of Catholic thought with familial symbolism along these lines is striking indeed.

In the school, on the other hand, the emphasis shifts. The teacher is primarily an agent of instruction, responsible for welfare, yes, but this is not the primary function; it is rather to help to equip the child for a responsible role in society when his education has been completed. To a much higher degree the question of how far he takes advantage of his opportunities becomes his own responsibility. Thus the function of the Protestant ministry became mainly a teaching function, continually holding up the Christian doctrine as a model of life to their congregations. But they no longer held a parental type of tutelary power to confer or deny the fundamentals of personal religious security.

If the analogy may be continued, the Lutheran position encouraged a more passive orientation in this situation, a leaving of the more ultimate responsibility to God, an attitude primarily of receptivity to Grace. (This is the exception referred to above - one of relatively short run significance.) Such an attitude would tend to be generalized to worldly superiors and authorities, including both ministers and secular teachers. Ascetic Protestanism, on the other hand, though at least equally insistent on the divine origins of norms and values for life, tended to cut off this reliance on authority and place a sharper emphasis on the individual's responsibility for positive action, not just by his faith to be receptive to God's grace, but to get out and work in the building of the Kingdom. This precisely excluded any special valuation of devotional exercises and put the primary moral emphasis on secular activities.

Next, this constituted a liberation in one fundamental respect from the social conservatism of the Catholic position, in that it was no longer necessary to attempt to maintain the superiority of the religious life over the secular. Hence one essential bulwark of a hierarchical ordering of society was removed. The Christian conscience rather than the doctrines and structural position of the visible Church became the focus for standards of social evaluation. This should not, however, be interpreted as the establishment of “democracy" by the Reformation. Perhaps the most important single root of modern democracy is Christian individualism. But the Reformation, in liberating the individual conscience from the tutelage of the church, took only one step toward political democracy. The Lutheran branch indeed was long particularly identified with “legitimism," and Calvinism was in its early days primarily a doctrine of a relatively rigid collective “dictatorship" of the elect in both church and state.

Third, far from weakening the elements in secular society which pointed in a direction of “modernism," the Reformation, especially in its ascetic branch, strengthened and extended them. A particularly important component was clearly law. We have emphasized the essential continuity in this respect between classical antiquity and modern Europe through the medieval church. Broadly, the revival of Roman secular law in Europe was shared between Catholic and Protestant jurisdictions; in no sense did the Reformation reverse the trend in Continental Europe to institutionalize a secular legal system. In England, however, as Pound has emphasized, Puritanism was one of the major influences on the crystallization of the common law in the most decisive period. This is very much in line with the general trends of Protestant orientation, the favoring of a system of order within which responsible individual action can function effectively. The protection of rights is only one aspect of this order; the sanctioning of responsibilities is just as important.

Perhaps most important of all is the fact that the change in the character of the church meant that, insofar as the patterns of social structure which had characterized it by contrast with the feudal elements in the medieval heritage were to be preserved, they had to become much more generalized in secular society. This is true, as noted, of a generalized and codified system of law. It is true of more bureaucratic types of organization, which developed first in the governmental field but later in economic enterprise. It is by no means least true in the field of intellectual culture. The Renaissance was initially an outgrowth of the predominantly Catholic culture of Italy, but the general revival and development of learning of the post-medieval period was certainly shared by Catholic and Protestant Europe. It is a significant fact that John Calvin was trained as a lawyer. And of course, particularly in science, ascetic Protestantism was a major

force in cultural development.

It is particularly important to emphasize the breadth of the front over which the leverage of Protestantism extended because of the common misinterpretation of Max Weber's thesis on the special relation between ascetic Protestantism and capitalism. This has often been seen as though the point were that Protestantism provided a special moral justification of profit-making as such, and of that alone. In view of the deep Western ambivalence over the conception of profit, the role of ascetic Protestantism in this context could easily be interpreted as mainly a "rationalization" of the common human propensity to seek "self-interest," which is the very antithesis of religious motivation.

First, it will be recalled that Weber was quite explicit that he was not talking about profit-making in general, but only about its harnessing to systematic methodical work in worldly callings in the interest of economic production through free enterprise. Weber was also well aware of a number of other facets of the same basic orientation to work in a calling, such as its basic hostility to various forms of traditionalism, including all traditional ascription of status independent of the individual, and its relation to science, a relation much further worked out by Merton.

Even Weber did not, however, in my opinion, fully appreciate the importance of the relation to the professions as a developing structural component of modern society, a component which in certain respects stands in sharp contrast to the classical orientation of economic self-interest.

The essential point is that private enterprise in business was one special case of secular callings within a much wider context. But it was a particularly strategic case in Western development, because of the very great difficulty of emancipating economic production over a truly broad front - on the one hand from the ascriptive ties which go with such institutions as peasant agriculture and guild-type handicraft, on the other hand from the irrationalities which, from an economic point of view, are inherent in political organization, because of its inherent connection with the short-run pressures of social urgency such as defense, and because of its integration with aristocratic elements in the system of stratification which were dominated by a very different type of orientation.

There is very good reason to believe that development of the industrial revolution for the first time could have come about only through the primary agency of free enterprise, however dependent this was in turn on prior conditions, among the most important of which were the availability of a legal framework within which a system of contractual relations could have an orderly development. Once there has been a major breakthrough on the economic front, however, the diffusion of the patterns of social organization involved need not continue to be dependent on the same conditions.⁷

Weber's main point about the Protestant ethic and capitalism was the importance of the subordination of self interest in the usual ideological sense to the conception of a religiously meaningful calling; only with the establishment of this component was sufficient drive mobilized to break through the many barriers which were inherent not only in the European society of the time but more generally to a more differentiated development or economic production. Basically this involves the reversal of the commonsense point of view. The latter has contended, implicitly or explicitly, that the main source of impetus to capitalistic development was the removal of ethical restrictions such as, for instance, the prohibition of usury. This is true within certain limits, but by far the more important point is that what is needed is a powerful motivation to innovate, to break through the barriers of traditionalism and of vested interest. It is this impetus which is the center of Weber's concern, and it is his thesis that it cannot be accounted for by any simple removal of restrictions.

However deep the ambivalence about the morality of profit-making may go, there can be little doubt that the main outcome has been a shift in social conditions more in accord with the general pattern of Christian ethics than was medieval society, provided we grant that life in this world has a positive value in itself. Not least of these is the breaking through of the population circle of high death rates and high birth rates with the attendant lengthening of the average span of life. Another crucial point is the vast extension of the sphere of order in human relationships, the lessening of the exposure of the individual to violence, to fraud and to arbitrary pressures of authority.

So-called material well-being has certainly never been treated as an absolute value in the Christian or any other major religious tradition, but any acceptance of life in this world as of value entails acceptance of the value of the means necessary to do approved things effectively. Particularly at the lower end of the social scale, grinding poverty with its accompaniments of illness, premature death, and unnecessary suffering is certainly not to be taken as an inherently desirable state of affairs from a Christian point of view.

Another major theme of developments in this era which is in basic accord with Christian values is a certain strain to egalitarianism, associated with the conception of the dignity of the individual human being and the need to justify discriminations either for or against individuals and classes of them in terms of some general concept of merit or demerit. Certainly by contrast with the role of ascriptive discriminations in the medieval situation, modern society is not in this respect ethically inferior.

Also important has been the general field of learning and science. Perhaps the educational revolution of the nineteenth century was even more important in its long-run implications than was the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century. It represents the first attempt in history to give large populations as a whole a substantial level of formal education, starting with literacy but going well beyond. Associated with this is the general cultivation of things intellectual and particularly the sciences through research. It is the marriage of the educational and industrial revolutions which provides the primary basis for the quite new level of mass well-being which is one major characteristic of the modern Western world. In both developments cultures with primarily Protestant orientations have acted as the spearheads.

The Reformation phase of Western development may be said to have culminated in the great seventeenth century, which saw the foundations of modern law and political organization so greatly advanced, the culmination of the first major phase of modern science, the main orientations of modern philosophy, and much development on the economic front. However important the Renaissance was, the great civilizational achievements of the seventeenth century as a whole are unthinkable without Protestantism. It coincided with a new level of leadership centering in predominantly Protestant northern Europe, notably England and Holland, and also with much ferment in Germany.

In spite of the very great structural differences, the essential principles governing the process by which society has become more Christianized than before were essentially the same in the Reformation period as in the earlier one. Let us recall that the Christian church from the beginning renounced the strategy of incorporation of secular society within itself, or the direct control of secular society through a religious law. It relied on the common values which bound church and secular society together, each in its own sphere, but making the Christian aspect of secular society an autonomous responsibility of Christians in their secular roles. My basic argument has been that the same fundamental principle was carried even farther in the Reformation phase. The sphere of autonomy was greatly enlarged through release of the Christian individual from the tutelage of the church. This was essentially a process of further differentiation both within the religious sphere and between it and the secular.

In all such cases there is increased objective opportunity for disregarding the values of the religious tradition and succumbing to worldly temptations. But the other side of the coin is the enhancement of motivation to religiously valued achievement by the very fact of being given more unequivocal responsibility. This process was not mainly one of secularization but one of the institutionalization of the religious responsibility of the individual through the relinquishment of tutelary authority by a “parental" church.

For purposes of this discussion the Reformation period is the most decisive one, for here it is most frequently argued, by Professor Sorokin among many others, that there was a decisive turn in the direction of secularization in the sense of abandonment of the values inherent in the Christian tradition in favor of concern with the “things of this world." As already noted, we feel that underlying this argument is a basic ambiguity about the relation of “the world" to religious orientations and that the Christian orientation is not, in the Oriental sense, an orientation of “rejection of the world" but rather in this respect mainly a source for the setting of ethical standards for life in this world. In line with this interpretation, the Reformation transition was not primarily one of “giving in" to the temptations of worldly interest, but rather one of extending the range of applicability and indeed in certain respects the rigor of the ethical standards applied to life in the world. It was expecting more rather than less of larger numbers of Christians in their worldly lives. It goes without saying that tie content of the expectations also changed. But these changes indicated much more a change in the definition of the situation of life through changes in the structure of society than they did in the main underlying values.

Let us try to apply the same formula used in summing up the medieval phase to that of the Reformation. The most conspicuous aspect of extension was the diffusion of religious responsibility and participation in certain respects beyond the sacramentally organized church to the laity on their own responsibility. The central symbol of this was the translation of the Bible into the vernacular languages of Europe and the pressure on broad lay groups to familiarize themselves with it. The shift in the functions of the church from the sacramental emphasis to that of teaching is directly connected with this. This extension included both the elements of worship and that of responsibility for ethical conduct.

With respect to the church itself as a social system, the Reformation clearly did not involve further internal differentiation but the contrary. But it involved a major step in the differentiation of the religious organization from secular society. The Reformation churches, as distinguished from the sects, retained their symbiosis of interpenetration with secular political authority through the principle of Establishment. But the counterpart of what I have called the religious enfranchisement of the individual was his being freed from detailed moral tutelage by the clergy. The dropping of the sacrament of penance, the very core of Luther's revolt against the Catholic church, was central in this respect. Repentance became a matter of the individual's direct relation to God, specifically exempted from any sacramental mediation. This was essentially to say that the individual was, in matters of conscience, in principle accountable to no human agency, but only to God; in this sense he was humanly autonomous. This development tended to restrict the church to the functions of an agency for the generation of faith, through teaching and through providing a communal setting for the ritual expression of common anxiety and common faith.

There were two principal settings in which this differentiation of lay responsibility from ecclesiastical tutelage worked out. One was the direct relation to God in terms of repentance and faith. This was paramount in the Lutheran branch of the Reformation movement. The other was the primacy of moral action in the world as an instrument of the divine will, the pattern which was primary in ascetic Protestantism. In a sense in which this was impossible within the fold of Catholic unity on the level of church organization, both these movements become differentiated not only from the "parent" Catholic church but also from each other. Hence the ascetic Protestant branch, which institutionalized elements present from the beginning in Western Christian tradition, notably through Augustine, was freed from the kind of ties with other components which hindered its ascendancy as the major trend of one main branch of general Christian tradition. Clearly this is the branch which had the most direct positive influence on the complex of orientations of value which later proved to be of importance to modern industrialism.

The third point of upgrading is most conspicuous in the placing of secular callings on a plane of moral equality with the religious life itself. In crucial respects this shift increased the tension between Christian ideal and worldly reality. This increase of tension underlay much of the Lutheran trend to withdrawal from positive secular interests and the corresponding sectarian and mystical phenomena of the time. But once the new tension was turned into the channel of exerting leverage for the change of conduct in the secular world, above all through the imperative to work in the building of the Kingdom, it was a powerful force to moral upgrading precisely in the direction of changing social behavior in the direction of Christian ideals, not of adjustment to the given necessities of a non-Christian world.

The Denominational Phase

A common view would agree with the above argument that the Reformation itself was not basically a movement of secularization but that, in that it played a art in unleashing the forces of political nationalism and economic development to say nothing of recent hedonism - it was the last genuinely Christian phase of Western development and that from the eighteenth century on in particular the trend had truly been one of religious decline in relation to the values of secular society. Certain trends in Weber's thinking with respect to the disenchantment of the world would seem to argue in this direction, as would Troeltsch's view that there have been only three authentic versions of the conception of a Christian society in Western history the medieval Catholic, the Lutheran, and the Calvinistic.

Against this view I should like to present an argument for a basic continuity leading to a further phase which has come to maturity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most conspicuously in the United States and coincident with the industrial and educational revolutions already referred to. From this point of view, the present system of "denominational pluralism" may be regarded as a further extension of the same basic line of institutionalization of Christian ethics which was produced both by the medieval synthesis and by the Reformation.

It is perhaps best to start with the conception of religious organization itself. Weber and Troeltsch organized their thinking on these matters within the Christian framework around the distinction between church and sect as organizational types. The church was the religious organization of the whole society which could claim and enforce the same order of jurisdiction over a total population as did the state in the secular sphere. The sect, on the other hand, was a voluntary religious association of those committed to a specifically religious life. The church type was inherently committed to the conception of an Establishment, since only through this type of integration with political authority could universal jurisdiction be upheld. The sect, on the other hand, could not establish any stable relation to secular society since its members were committed to give unequivocal primacy to their religious interests and could not admit the legitimacy of the claims of secular society, politically or otherwise, which a stable relation would entail.

This dichotomy fails to take account of an important third possibility, the denomination. As I conceive it, this shares with the church type the differentiation between religious and secular spheres of interest. In the same basic sense which we outlined for the medieval church, both may be conceived to be subject to Christian values, but to constitute independent foci of responsibility for their implementation. On the other hand the denomination shares with the sect type its character as a voluntary association where the individual member is bound only by a responsible personal commitment not by any factor of ascription in the American case it is, logically I think, associated with the constitutional separation of church and state.

The denomination can thus accept secular society as a legitimate field of action for the Christian individual in which he acts on his own responsibility without organizational control by religious authority. But precisely because he is a Christian he will not simply accept everything he finds there; he will attempt to shape the situation in the direction of better conformity with Christian values. This general pattern it shares with all three of the church types, but not with the sect in Troeltsch's sense.

Two further factors are involved, however, which go beyond anything to be found in the church tradition. One of these is implicit in the voluntary principle - the acceptance of denominational pluralism - and, with it, toleration. How ever much there may historically have been, and still is, deep ambivalence about this problem, the genuine institutionalization of the constitutional protection of religious freedom cannot be confined to the secular side; it must be accepted as religiously legitimate as well. With certain qualifications this can be said to be the case in the United States today and, in somewhat more limited forms, in various other countries. From a religious point of view, this means the discrimination of two layers of religious commitment. One of these is the layer which defines the bases of denominational membership and which differentiates one denomination from another.

The other is a common matrix of value-commitment which is broadly shared between denominations, and which forms the basis of the sense in which the society as a whole forms a religiously based moral community. This has, in the American case, been extended to cover a very wide range. Its core certainly lies in the institutionalized Protestant denominations, but with certain strains and only partial institutionalization, it extends to three other groups of the first importance; the Catholic church, the various branches of Judaism, and, not least important, those who' prefer to remain aloof from any formal denominational affiliation. To deny that this underlying consensus exists would be to claim that American society stood in a state of latent religious war. Of the fact that there are considerable tensions every responsible student of the situation is aware. Institutionalization is incomplete, but the consensus is very much of a reality.

The second difference from the church tradition is a major further step in the emancipation of the individual from tutelary control by organized religious collectivities beyond that reached by the Reformation churches. This is the other side of the coin of pluralism, and essentially says that the rite of baptism does not commit the individual to a particular set of dogmas or a particular religious collectivity. The individual is responsible not only for managing his own relation to God through faith within the ascribed framework of an established church, which is the Reformation position, but for choosing that framework itself, for deciding as a mature individual what to believe, and with whom to associate himself in the organizational expression and reinforcement of his commitments. This is essentially the removal of the last vestige of coercive control over the individual in the religious sphere; he is endowed with full responsible autonomy.

That there should be a development in this direction from the position of the Reformation church seems to me to have been inherent in the Protestant position in general, in very much the same sense which a trend to Protestantism was inherent in the medieval Catholic situation. Just as Catholics tend to regard Protestanism in general as the abandonment of true religious commit-

ment either because the extension of the voluntary principle to such lengths is held to be incompatible with a sufficiently serious commitment on the part of the church (if you are not willing to coerce people to your point of view are you yourself really committed to it?) or because of its legitimation of secular society so that church membership becomes only one role among many, not the primary axis of life as a whole. But against such views it is hard to see how the implicit individualism of all Christianity could be stopped, short of this doctrine of full responsible autonomy. The doctrine seems to me implicit in the very conception of faith. Asking the individual to have faith is essentially to ask him to trust in God. But, whatever the situation in the relation of the human to the divine, in human relations trust seems to have to rest on mutuality. Essentially the voluntary principle in denominationalism is extending mutuality of trust so that no human agency is permitted to take upon itself the authority to control the conditions under which faith is to be legitimately expected. Clearly this like the Reformation step involves a risk that the individual will succumb to worldly temptations. But the essential principle is not different from that involved in releasing him from sacramental control.

This is of course very far from contending that the system of denominational pluralism is equally congenial to all theological positions or that all religious groups within, the tradition can fit equally well into it. There are important strains particularly in relation to the Catholic church, to Fundamentalist Protestant sects, to a lesser degree to very conservative Protestant church groups (especially Lutheran), and to the vestiges of really Orthodox Judaism. My essential contention is not that this pattern has been or can be fully universalized within Judaeo-Christianity, but that it is a genuinely Christian development, not by definition a falling away from religion. But it could not have developed without a very substantial modification of earlier positions within Protestantism In particular it is incompatible with either strict traditional Lutheranism or strict Calvinism.

It was remarked above that the Reformation period did not usher in political democracy, but was in a sense a step toward it. There is a much closer affiliation between denominational pluralism and political democracy. But before discussing that, a comparison between the two may help illuminate the nature of the problem of how such a system of religious organization works. Legitimists for a long period have viewed with alarm the dangers of democracy since, if public policy can be determined by the majority of the irresponsible and the uninformed, how can any stability of political organization be guaranteed? There is a sense in which the classical theory of political liberalism may be said to play into the hands of this legitimist argument, since it has tended to assume that under democracy each individual made up his mind totally independently without reference to the institutionalized wisdom of any tradition.

This is not realistically the case. Careful study of voting behavior has shown that voting preferences are deeply anchored in the established involvement of the individual in the social structure. Generally speaking, most voters follow the patterns of the groups with which they are most strongly affiliated. Only when there are structural changes in the society which alter its structure of solidary groupings and expose many people to cross-pressures are major shifts likely to take place. There are, furthermore, mechanisms by which these shifts tend, in a well-institutionalized democratic system, to be orderly.⁸

I would like to suggest that similar considerations apply to a system of denominational pluralism. The importance of the family is such that it is to be taken for granted that the overwhelming majority will accept the religious affiliations of their parents - of course with varying degrees of commitment. Unless the whole society is drastically disorganized there will not be notable instability in its religious organization. But there will be an important element of flexibility and opportunity for new adjustments within an orderly system which the older church organizations, like the older political legitimacy, did not allow for.

If it is once granted that this system of religious organization is not by definition a "falling away" from true religion, then its institutionalization of the elements of trust of the individual has, it seems to me, an important implication. On the religious side it is implicit in the pattern of toleration. Members of particular churches on the whole trust each other to be loyal to the particular collectivity. But if some should shift to another denomination it is not to be taken too tragically since the new afflliation will in most cases be included in the deeper moral community.

But such a situation could not prevail were the secular part of the system regarded as radically evil. The individual is not only trusted with reference to his religious participation, but also to lead a “decent” life in his secular concerns. Indeed I should argue, therefore, that for such a religious constitution to function, on the institutional level the society must present not a less but a more favorable field for the Christian life than did the society of earlier periods of Western history; its moral standards must in fact be higher.

There is a tendency in much religiously oriented discussion to assume that the test of the aliveness of Christian values is the extent to which "'heroic"' defiance of temptation or renunciation of worldly interests is empirically prevalent. This ignores one side of the equation of Christian conduct, the extent to which the “world" does or does not stand opposed to the values in question. If one argues that there has been a relative institutionalization of these values, and hence in certain respects a diminution of tension between religious ideal and actuality, he risks accusation of a Pharisaic complacency. In face of this risk, however, I suggest that in a whole variety of respects modern society is more in accord with Christian values than its forebears have been - this is, let it be noted, a relative difference; the millennium definitely has not arrived.

I do not see how the extension of intra- and interdenominational trust into a somewhat greater trust in the moral quality of secular conduct would be possible were this not so. The internalization of religious values certainly strengthens character. But this is not to say that even the average early Christian was completely proof against worldly temptation, independent of any support from the mutual commitments of many Christians in and through the church. Without the assumption that this mutual support in a genuine social collectivity was the first importance, I do not see how the general process of institutionalization of these values could have been possible at all except on the unacceptable assumption of a process of emanation of the spirit without involvement in the realistic religious interests of real persons.

However heroic a few individuals may be, no process of mass institutionalization occurs without the mediation of social solidarities and the mutual support of many individuals in commitment to a value system. The corollary of relinquishment of the organizational control of certain areas of behavior leaving them to the responsibility of the autonomous individual is the institutionalization of the basic conditions of carrying out this responsibility with not the elimination, but a relative minimization of, the hazard that this exposure will lead to total collapse of the relevant standards.

Let us try to sum up this fourth - denominational - phase of the line of development we have traced in terms of our threefold formula. First, I would suggest that the principle of religious toleration, inherent in the system of denominational pluralism, implies a great further extension of the institutionalization of Christian values, both inside and outside the sphere, of religious organization. At least it seems to me that this question poses a sharp alternative. Either there is a sharp falling away so that, in tolerating each other, the different denominations have become fellow condoners of an essentially evil situation or, as suggested above, they do in fact stand on a relatively high ethical plane so that whatever their dogmatic differences, there is no basis for drawing a drastic moral line of distinction which essentially says that the adherents of the other camp are in a moral sense not good people in a sense in which the members of our own camp are. Then the essential extension of the same principle of mutual trust into the realm of secular conduct is another part of the complex which I would like to treat as one of extension of the institutionalization of Christian values.

So far as differentiation is concerned, there are two conspicuous features of this recent situation. First, of course, the religious associations have become differentiated from each other so that, unlike in the Reformation phase (to say nothing of the Middle Ages), when there was for a politically organized society in principle only one acceptable church, adherence to which was the test of the moral quality treated as a minimum for good standing in the society, this is no longer true. The religious organization becomes a purely voluntary association, and there is an indefinite plurality of morally acceptable denominations.

This does not, however, mean that Christian ethics have become a matter of indifference in the society. It means rather that the differentiation between religious and secular spheres has gone farther than before and with it the extension of the individualistic principle inherent in Christianity to the point of the “privatizing" of formal, external religious commitment, as the Reformation made internal religious faith a matter for the individual alone. This general trend has of course coincided with' an enormously proliferated process of differentiation in the structure of the society itself.

In this respect the religious group may be likened (up to a point) to the family. The family has lost many traditional functions and has become increasingly a sphere of private sentiments. There is, however, reason to believe that it is as important as ever to the maintenance of the main patterns of the society, though operating with a minimum of direct outside control. Similarly religion has become largely a private matter in which the individual associates with the group of his own choice, and in this respect has lost many functions of previous religious organizational types.

There seem to be two primary respects in which an upgrading process may be spoken of. Approaching the question from the sociological side we may note that the development of the society has been such that it should not be operated without an upgrading of general levels of responsibility and competence, the acquisition and exercise of the latter of course implying a high sense of responsibility. This trend is a function of increase in the size of organization and the delicacy of relations of interdependence, of freedom from ascriptive bonds in many different ways of the sheer power for destruction and evil of many of the instrumentalities of action.

Responsibility has a double aspect. The first is responsibility of the individual in that he cannot rely on a dependent relation to others or to some authority to absolve him of responsibility - this is the aspect we have been referring to as his autonomy in the specific sense in which the term has been used in this discussion. The other aspect is responsibility for and to, responsibility for results and to other persons and to coIlectivities. Here the element of mutuality inherent in Christian ethics, subject to a commonly binding sat of norms and values, is the central concern

That the general trend has been to higher orders of autonomous responsibility is, in my opinion, sociologically demonstrable.⁹ The central problem then becomes that of whether the kinds of responsibility involved do or do not accord with the prescriptions of Christian ethics. This is essentially the question of whether the general trend stemming from ascetic Protestantism is basically un-Christian or not. Granting that this trend is not un-Christian, the critical moral problems of our day derive mainly from the fact that, since we are living in a more complicated world than ever before, which is more complicated because human initiative has been more daring and has ventured into more new realms than ever before, greater demands are being put on the human individual. He has more difficult problems, both technical and moral; he takes greater risks. Hence the possibility of failure and of the failure being his fruit is at least as great

as, if not greater than, it ever was.

There is a widespread view, particularly prevalent in religious circles, that our time, particularly some say in the United States, is one of unprecedented moral collapse. In these circles it is alleged that modern social development has entailed a progressive decline of moral standards which is general throughout the population. This view is clearly incompatible with the general trend of the analysis we have been making. Its most plausible grain of truth. is the one just indicated, that as new and more difficult problems emerge, such as those involved in the possibility of far more destructive war than ever before, we do not feel morally adequate to the challenge. But to say that because we face graver problems than our forefathers faced we are doubtful of our capacity to handle them responsibly is quite a different thing from saying that, on the same levels of responsibility as those of our forefathers, we are in fact handling our problems on a much lower moral level.

Our time by and large, however, is not one of religious complacency but, particularly in the most sensitive groups in these matters, one of substantial anxiety and concern. Does not the existence of this concern stand in direct contradiction to the general line of argument I have put forward?

I think not. One element in its explanation is probably that new moral problems of great gravity have emerged in our time and that we are for very realistic reasons deeply concerned about them. My inclination however is to think that this is not the principal basis of the widespread concern.

The present discussion has by virtue of its chosen subject been primarily interested in the problems of the institutionalization of the values originating in Christianity as a religious movement, which have been carried forward at various stages of its development. But values - i.e. moral orientations toward the problems of life in this world - are never the whole of religion if indeed its most central aspect. My suggestion is that the principal roots of the present religious concern do not lie in relative moral decline or inadequacy (relative, that is, to other periods in our society’s history) but rather in problems in the other

areas of religion, problems of the bases of faith and the definitions of the ultimate problems of meaning.

The very fact that the process of the integration of earlier religious values with the structure of society has gone so far as it has gone raises such problems. The element of universalism in Christian ethics inherently favors the development of a society where the different branches of Christianity cannot maintain their earlier insulation from each other. The problem of the status of Judaism has had to be raised on a new level within the structure of Western society, one which came to a very critical stage in the case of German Nazism. It is a society in which all the parochialisms of earlier religious commitments are necessarily brought into flux.

But beyond, this, for the first time in history something approaching a world society is in process of emerging. For the first time in its history Christianity is now involved in a deep confrontation with the major religious traditions of the Orient, as well as with the modern political religion of Communism.

It seems probable that a certain basic tension in relation to the "things of this world" is inherent in Christianity generally. Hence any relative success in the institutionalization of Christian values cannot be taken as final, but rather as a point of departure for new religious stock-taking. But in addition to this broad internal consideration, the confrontation on such a new basis with the non-Christian world presents a new and special situation. We are deeply committed to our own great traditions. These have tended to emphasize the exclusive possession of the truth. Yet we have also institutionalized the values of

tolerance and equality of rights for all. How can we define a meaningful orientation in such a world when, in addition, the more familiar and conventional problems of suffering and evil are, if not more prevalent than ever before at least as brought to attention through mass communications, inescapable as facts of our world?

It is, the inherent tension and dynamism of Christianity and the unprecedented character of the situation we face which, to my mind, account for the intensive searching and questioning and indeed much of the spiritual negativism, of our time. The explanation in terms of an alleged moral collapse would be

far too simple, even if there were more truth in it than the evidence seems to indicate. For this would imply that we did not need new conceptions of meaning; all we would need would be to live up more fully to the standards familiar to us all. In no period of major ferment in cultural history has such a solution been adequate.

Notes

¹ Cf. Pitrim Sorokin, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956).

² The most important general statements of his position are in Social and Cultural Dynamics (New York American Book Company, 1937), Vol. I, Part 1, and Society, Culture, and Personality (New, York: Harper 1947) Part 7.

³ In this general interpretation I follow in particular Ernst Troeltsch, Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (New York: Macmillan, 1931).

⁴ H. C. Lea, The History of Sacerdotal Celibacy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957.

⁵ Perhaps the fullest statement of this scheme is contained in T. Parsons and W. White, "The Link between Character and Society;"" in S M. Lipset and L. Loewenthal (eds), Culture and Social Character (New York: .The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961.

⁶ By autonomy I mean here independence of direct authoritarian control combined with responsibility defined in moral-religious terms. It is close to “theonomy”, as that concept is used by Tillich.

⁷ This thesis is further developed in my two essays published as Chapters III and IV of Structure and Process in Modern Societies (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1960).

⁸ Basing myself on the studies of voting behavior by Berelson, Lazarsfeld, et al., I have analyzed this situation in “Voting and the Equilibrium of the American Political System," in Eugene Burdick and Arthur J. Brodbeck (eds), American Voting Behavior (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1959).

⁹ Cf. Parsons and White, op. cit., for a brief statement of the case for this view.