The Sociology of Religion. by Thomas F. O'DeaReview by: Bernard LazerwitzAmerican Sociological Review, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Aug., 1966), pp. 574-575Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2090813 .

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574 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

from the Commonweal as proof that the findings were inaccurate. He would not have penned the chilling description of "typical" premarriage instruction without discovering how "few" were the dioceses in which married couples preside over premarital sessions (over one hundred dioceses have such programs, incidentally). Finally, he would not, one presumes, engage in the use of gentle personal smear words. The authors, for example, dismiss the present re- viewer as "young" (at thirty-eight?) and de- scribe him as the "company sociologist of the Catholic Church" and "the company priest of NORC" (if true, surely the most intense form of role conflict the fiendish mind of man has yet devised).

It might be assumed that the two sociologists are nativists or professional anti-Catholics, bent on doing as much harm possible to American Catholicism. But such an assumption, while plausible enough, would be quite incorrect. Both are Catholics and members of the faculty of Fordham University; the junior author is a Catholic priest; among the senior author's pre- vious work is a panegyric on Catholic higher education. It may be left to the sociologists of knowledge to analyze the peculiar phenomenon of a pseudo-sociological attack on Catholicism coming from two of the Church's salaried in- tellectuals, but three possible explanations may be offered:

(1) At this particular stage of the develop- ment of American Catholicism, self-criticism of the wildest and most undocumented variety is fashionable. As Edward Duff remarked, "This is a time of mass masochism."

(2) Since the time of the two Johns (Kennedy and Roncalli) the inside operation of the Catho- lic Church has been an object of great interest in the mass media; the more dirty linen (real or imaginary) which can be hung up the better. That the psuedo-sociology of American Catholi- cism is popular is evidenced by the appearance of chapters of the present volume in Harper's and the Saturday Review.

(3) The authors, like a good number of other American Catholics, are persuaded that the only way the Church will survive in the United States is to destroy completely the present ecclesiasti- cal structures and start anew. Viewed in this perspective, the work of Wakin and Scheuer is not the sociological analysis it pretends to be but a revolutionary pamphlet.

As journalism, The De-Romanization of the American Catholic Church is smooth and polished; as a political tract it is a powerful weapon. But it is not anything remotely resem- bling scientific sociology; and as scholarship it is shabby and disreputable. The ultimate judg-

ment which can be leveled at the present intel- lectual condition of American Catholicism is that it is capable of producing such a work.

ANDREW M. GREELEY National Opinion Research Center The University of Chicago

The Sociology of Religion. By THOMAS F. O'DEA. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966. vii, 120 pp. $1.50 (Paperback) $3.95 (Clothbound). This is a compact, stimulating, little book

covering the theoretical foundations and prob- lems of the sociology of religion. The author has done a fine job of condensing a vast array of classical and contemporary sociology into a meaty book which should prove valuable for a quick review of the field. The text comprises six chapters which cover functionalism, a sizable portion of the thinking of Weber and Durkheim, church-sect theory, magic, religious functions and dysfunctions, and what the author conceives to be the major roles for religion in modern society.

Specifically, the first chapter summarizes the contributions of religion to social systems, culture, and personality from the perspectives of functional theory. The author compares and contrasts the functions of religion and magic, and relates religion to social causation. Chapter two explores the nature and basis of religious experience. The chapter concludes by treating religious doubt, the attacks on religion as mani- festations of man's immaturity or faulty pro- jection, and the religious point of view. Next, chapter three builds upon Weber and church- sect theory to cover the process of religious institutionalization. Chapter four relates religion and its organization to the total society by con- sidering stratification and social change. Here the author employs both church-sect theory and an elaboration of the concept of conversion. There is also a discussion of quasi-religious movements as alternative fulfillments of re- ligious functions.

The last two chapters cover religious dysfunc- tions and dilemmas. Chapter five begins by elaborating the interactions between religious and societal ideas, values, and stratification schemes. The chapter moves on to a solid treatment of the development of secularization. Chapter six maintains the focus on dysfunctions in presenting religion as a major source of social conflict and as a crutch for immature personalities. The chapter's stimulating analysis of the role for "religions of transcendence" in democratic societies is a significant contribution. The book concludes on a strong note with a

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BOOK REVIEWS 575

discussion of the functions and dysfunctions of witchcraft, sorcery, and black magic.

The major contribution of this text is to cover the theoretical portion of a semester's course on the sociology of religion. It also can contribute to courses covering topics such as social change, race and ethnic relations, and sociological theory. Students should find it pro- vocative, clear, and on an "adult" level. Then, too, the well-educated layman interested in what sociology has to say about religion, will profit from this brief volume.

BERNARD LAZERWITZ Brandeis University

Memoir of John Mason Peck. Edited by RUFUS BABCOCK. Introduction by PAUL M. HARRI- SON, Foreword by HERMAN R. LANTZ. Car- bondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. lxxviii, 360 pp. $10.00.

Editor Babcock published John Peck's memo- randum in 1864, drawing upon Peck's fifty-three handwritten diaries and journals (subsequently destroyed), and some of Peck's correspondence. It is being re-issued under the auspices of the Perspectives in Sociology series whose General Editor, Herman Lantz has written a Foreword outlining the importance of Peck's contribu- tion towards a sociological understanding of frontier society and religion. Paul Harrison's pen- etrating Introduction has placed Peck's labors and observations in a fuller perspective than can be had from Babcock's original work which comprises the remainder of the volume. Harri- son uses Peck's books and addresses to provide more extensive insight than did Babcock, and Harrison counterbalances Babcock's tendency to omit Peck's secular views and activities, par- ticularly Peck's successful opposition to the calling of a pro-slave state convention in Illinois. For this and other similar activities, Harrison considers Peck to have been a frontier Rein- hold Niebuhr! Lantz points out that Frederick Jackson Turner drew extensively on Peck's Memoir in arriving at his own views of the significance of the frontier.

Peck's Memoir and Harrison's observations make it plain that, among the Baptists as well as other frontier churches, the term "Frontier Religion" is more accurate than any conven- tional denominational labels. Peck and others like him spent their lifetimes in strenuous and often far-sighted efforts not simply to bring re- ligion to the frontier but also to bring frontier religion (and society) into the mainstream of American civilization in the East.

For forty years (1817-1857) Peck fought frontier religious anarchy by promoting Baptist associations; fought parochialism by promoting

home and foreign mission; fought religion and secular illiteracy by promoting and editing Baptist papers and periodicals, establishing Sun- day Schools and seminaries, and distributing tracts and Bibles; fought immorality and irreli- gion by fervent evangelical preaching-person- ally criticizing and eschewing the more violent types of "revivalism"; fought slovenly forms of worship by publishing better hymnals; fought frontier myths and legends by promoting his- torical societies, gathering documents, and writ- ing accurate histories (including a biography of Daniel Boone whom he knew personally); and fought social injustice, particularly slavery, by a religiously motivated political activism. In short, he helped transform the religious, cultural and social wilderness of Missouri and Illinois. At his death these areas were neither as alien to, nor as estranged from Eastern society as was true when he first set out from Connecticut some forty years before. This poorly educated "home- missionary" to Missouri ended his career with a D.D. from Harvard and a charge from the State of Illinois to begin the collecting of ma- terials for a history of the state. He has won posthumous honors as a pioneer American soci- ologist of the frontier.

This latter distinction is due to his classifica- tions and descriptions of the waves of settlers and their styles of life together with his analysis of the causes of their extreme individualism, bordering on anarchy, which led to parochialism in religious, political and cultural matters. Their antipathy toward order, law, uniformity, strong government in either church or state, etc., was as much due to their fear of Eastern dominance as to their devotion to democratic ideals. They fought against the resumption of the ties which they had gone to so much trouble to escape-as they fought against duplicating that society out on the frontier.

One interesting item of sociological import (not seized upon by Lantz or Harrison) con- cerns the "squatter class" which was apparently as impervious to Peck's brand of frontier re- ligion as the modern "inner-city" class is to that of the urban church. Moreover, Peck seems to have avoided them in the same fashion and for the same reasons as some of his contem- porary clerical heirs (Memoir, pps. 149-150).

The authors of the foreword and the introduc- tion seem to feel that this Memoir offers a "fruitful base" for extending investigations into the role of religion on the American frontier. Interesting as the Memoir is, it seems to have been so well mined by these gentlemen that little ore remains.

H. GORDON VAN SICKLE

Thee fliff Sc/tool of T'lieology

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