Sociology of Religion: Week Seven

Stark, The Rise of Christianity

I. The Class Basis of Early Christianity

A. Rational choice theory...

1. Instructor:brief summary.... people will act in a way that maximizes their rewards and minimizes their costs, in light of their available knowledge... rewards can be material, ideal, or both

2. Stark: 2 types of deprivation

a. missing out on rewards that are available to others because you rank low in power and privilege

b. missing out on rewards that seem absolutely unavailable to anyone, at least in this world

3. Three propositions, p. 36, and a fourth on p. 37, as well as Stark's distinction between sects and cults, p. 33

4. So what does all this lead to in terms of Stark's analysis of the class origins of early Christianity?

a. Class composition of more recent new religions.

1) Mormons

2) Christian Science

3) "Cults" ... see chart, p. 42

b. Jesus movement had been a sect, in Stark's terms, before the crucifixion, but he argues that afterwards, it turned into a cult movement... admits that his argument in chapter two is only suggestive... cute comment, bottom p. p. 45

II. The Mission to the Jews

A. What is the point of Stark's comment about Glazer and Moynihan and the perstence of Little Italies and Little Polands?

B. Marginality: "People are marginalized when their membership in two groups poses a contradiction or cross pressure such that their status in each group is lowered by their membership in the other." (p. 52

1. Cognitive dissonance theory(not Stark's angle)

2. Proposition from earlier chapter of Stark: "New relgious movement mainly draw their converts from the ranks of the religiously inactive and discontented(notice!), and those affiliated with the most accomodated (worldly) religious communities."

3. Jews in the United States, 19th century

a. Reform movement: a "nontribal, nonethnic religion" "We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community."

(Jews in Europe: Marx: his father "converts" to Lutheranism; Durkheim: a brief interest in Catholicism as a teenager, followed by a nonreligious adulthood)

b. Secularization: New religious movements and the "religiously inactive and discontented"

c. Intermarriage with Christians

4. Proposition 2: "People are more willing to adopt a new religion to the extent that it retains cultural continuity with conventional religions with which they are already familiar."

a. e.g. Mormons... adding a third testament

5. Proposition 3: "Social movements (which includes new religions) grow much faster when they spread through preexisting networks."

To what is he leading here? (see pp. 57-71, especially 62-63)

6. The evidence of burials until the third and fourth centuries(p. 68)(John Hamlin in our department)

In a way, a very odd kind of history: "I have tried to show what should have happened..."

III. Epidemics, networks, and Conversion

A. Epidemics that swept the Roman Empire in 165 and again in 251 (You probably remember the flu epidemic of 1918, that killed an estimated 50 million people)... William McNeill, Plagues and People, estimated a death rate of 1/4 to 1/3... 5,000 a day in Rome alone

1. No satisfactory explanation or response in Paganism or Hellenic philosophies... contrast with the Christians

Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, 251: Christians have nothing to fear. "The just are called to refreshment; the unjust are carried off to torture." "...by contempt of death they are prepared for the crown."

Bishop Dionysus: "schooling and testing" "Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves... Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick... The heathen behaved in the opposite way. At the first onset of the disease, they pushed sufferers away and fled from their dearest..."

(Thucydides' account of a plague in Greece 700 years earlier: "No fear of god or love of man had any restraining influence... they died alone.")

2. Christian values of love and charity created a selective advantage in terms of survival... As Johnson put it in A History of Christianity, "they created a miniature welfare state in an empire which for the most part lacked social services." Stark marvels at "the power of this new morality when it was new."

McNeill: "When all normal services break down, quite elementary nursing will greatly reduce mortality."

3. Higher death rate among pagans would have loosened the bonds that helped to hold them to their old beliefs

IV. Video: "Mother of the Year"...Instructor: Religion grows by contagion, and here's a family that eventually became the center of a veritable epidemic.