Author: Teresa Watanabe,
Times Religion Writer
Publication: The Los
Angeles Times
Date: October 18, 2000
Once largely ignored
in social research, religion-- and its powerful role in shaping individuals
and cultures--is now a hot field of inquiry.
In Pennsylvania, researchers
are documenting how religion keeps young people from drugs and delinquency.
In Cambridge, professors are pondering how faith propels environmentalism
and inner-city economic development. And in one of the world's most
religiously diverse laboratories--Southern California--scholars are visiting
such sacred sites as Sikh gurdwaras, Chinese Buddhist temples and Armenian
apostolic churches to scrutinize the powerful role that religion plays
in the lives of new immigrants.
Across the nation, scholars
have begun to promote a new paradigm in academia: Religion matters.
Once a largely forgotten
factor in social research, dismissed by those who believed that society
would inevitably secularize and cast spirituality aside, religion is now
a hot field of inquiry. Until recently, a long-standing academic
bias against religion has blinded many scholars to its powerful role in
shaping both private lives and the public culture.
"While millions, even
billions, of people view so many different human concerns through the lens
of religious faith, this crucial subject remains one of the most understudied
social phenomena of the 20th century," Princeton University President Harold
Shapiro said last year. That's changing. Driven by new funding
opportunities, a national spiritual resurgence and growing political interest
in faith-based initiatives, more people than ever are studying religion.
No longer confined to schools of divinity, religion is being increasingly
probed in departments of sociology, political science, international relations,
even business schools. The new research is expected to "significantly
reshape the social sciences," said Jon Miller, a USC sociology professor.
"We've started to legitimize the study of religion and help people acknowledge
it's a phenomenon people need to pay attention to," said Donald E.
Miller, executive director of the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture.
The American Academy
of Religion, for instance, reports a 34% increase in membership in just
the last six years, from 6,700 members to 9,000. Major academic organizations
have added religion subsections in recent years; the one established by
the American Sociological Assn. has gone "from nowhere to one of
the largest" in the last five years, Jon Miller said. More foundations
are funding religious research. The Ford Foundation, for instance,
launched a religion program in 1997 and has doled out about 50 grants totaling
$10.5 million. Foundation President Susan Berresford added the program
after she repeatedly encountered people in her global travels troubled
by "deep moral uncertainty" amid rapid modernization and globalization,
said Constance C. Buchanan, the foundation's religion officer.
Other major funders include the Lilly Endowment and Pew Charitable Trusts.
Pew recently launched a multimillion-dollar initiative to create 10 academic
"Centers of Excellence" to study the intersection between religion and
international relations, urban affairs, American democracy and other contemporary
issues. So far, centers have been established at Princeton, Yale
University, Emory University, Boston University and the University of Notre
Dame.
"Religion was often seen
as soft, too ephemeral to be included in serious scholarship," said Kimon
Sargeant, a Pew program officer. "We want to help provide a broader
public understanding that religion can be a remarkable force for common
good."
Interest Grows in Recent
Years
Interest in religion's
impact on social problems has grown tremendously in the last few years,
as policymakers have looked for new approaches and shown a greater willingness
to lower the wall between church and state to allow more public funding
of religious initiatives, scholars say. Both major-party presidential
candidates, Al Gore and George W. Bush, are pledging to expand the
involvement of religious organizations in public programs to combat poverty,
homelessness and other problems. Bush, for instance, has pledged
to establish an "Office of Faith-Based Action" with $8 billion in funding
for such initiatives. Whether faith-based programs are more successful
than secular ones has not yet been proved, but scores of scholars are now
exploring that question. Two of them are Byron R. Johnson and
John J. Delulio Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania and the
Manhattan Institute. In groundbreaking research on religion and juvenile
behavior, the two have shown that religious faith is one of the top three
factors in predicting a childhood free of delinquency, along with attachment
to parents and school. "Ten years ago, if you put religion in a proposal
to get [public] funding, you would have gotten immediately disqualified,"
Johnson said. "Now, the Department of Justice is saying that religion
is fair game to look at."
The bustling Center for
Religion and Civic Culture at USC is a leading player in the new research
efforts.
Scholars there have examined
religion's effects on health care, welfare, immigration and urban development.
They have also distinguished themselves nationally by venturing outside
the ivory tower to regularly bring together academics, faith leaders and
public policymakers to brainstorm solutions to pressing social problems.
"Most centers do wonderful work, but they tend not to get their hands dirty,"
said Diane Winston, a Pew religion officer. "USC does, in the best
sense of the word. In the move among scholars to make religion applicable
to real problems, USC is at the cutting edge." The center's dual commitments
to professional research and community activism keep scholars scurrying.
Consider this August calendar: peacekeeping duties for the Democratic National
Convention; co-sponsorship of a major Salvadoran religious feast day; suggestions
to USC, the Multicultural Collaborative and others on how to better embrace
faith groups; brainstorming sessions with the Cornerstone Theater Company
about a series of faith-based plays; plans for an economic development
conference with religious leaders and federal housing authorities.
One recent day found Greg Stanczak, a doctoral candidate in sociology,
sipping tea with a Buddhist nun from the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights.
He scribbled notes as the Rev. Man Yee mixed amusing stories of a
former life as a hotshot real estate agent with descriptions of temple
services for its members, most of them Chinese immigrants.
Yee detailed how the
temple does far more than bring Buddha's teachings to the flocks: It operates
as a lifeboat for new immigrants, offering English classes and seminars
in Chinese on U.S. tax laws and financial planning, dental care and
menopause. Across town on another day, Lezlee Suzanne Cox was interviewing
the Rev. Alvin Tunstill Jr. on how his Trinity Baptist Church
manages to produce a successful summer jobs program for South-Central Los
Angeles youth. Congregants pitch in $140,000 a year to pay about
30 youths for their time as free interns at local corporations. The
congregation's largess is rooted in the conviction that the 4th Commandment
to honor the Sabbath also obligates faith communities to provide the jobs
that enable people to work the rest of the week, Tunstill told Cox, a doctoral
candidate in political science. The minister shared ambitious dreams
to revitalize his community, discussing stock market returns, small-business
opportunities and economic incentives to lure doctors and other professionals
back to the area.
And on a recent Sunday
at St. Gregory the Illuminator Armenian Church in Pasadena, Father
Vazken K. Movsesian explained to Tim Fisher how the church offers
both ancient Armenian worship services and American social action programs
of food and toy giveaways.
Such research reinforces
the growing public recognition of religion's robust role in civic life.
Donald Miller said the 1992 Los Angeles riots were the seminal event in
raising his own awareness of that role as he watched news coverage and
saw inner-city ministers leading efforts to quell the tensions and reweave
the city's sheared fabric. In 1993, he and two colleagues won a one-year
grant from the Haynes Foundation to study the role of religious organizations
in post-riot Los Angeles. That led to other grants and the USC center's
formal establishment in 1996. The center is housed at USC but is
fully supported by grants from Pew, Haynes, the James Irvine Foundation
and other private and public funders.
A Surprising About-Face
The resurgent interest
in religion marks a startling turnabout for academia--sociology in particular.
Although many early sociologists were Christians active in the 19th century
social reform movements, religion lost its academic luster in the 1950s,
said Jon Miller of USC's sociology department.
The two theorists with
the most influence on sociology at that time, Karl Marx and Max Weber,
traveled different philosophical paths to reach similar conclusions--that
society would inevitably push religion to the periphery, he said.
"In real life, we know religion never went away, but people just stopped
paying attention to it," he said. Stanczak was one of those scholars
convinced that religion was obsolete. He came to USC to test his
hypothesis that religion was disappearing among youth. Almost immediately,
he said, he found out he was wrong. "I was looking mostly at Generation
X and Generation Y, and saw that religion was giving structure and meaning
to their lives," he said. "To these people, religion is the core
of what is radically transforming their lives."
Gaspar Rivera-Salgado
never paid attention to religion either, focusing on political and social
organizations of Latino immigrants. But the deeper the USC sociologist
looked, the more he discovered that many of the groups had a priest, a
church or a religious cause behind them. Now his work--along with
a slew of new national studies on religion and immigration--is likely to
prompt major theoretical revisions in the field of immigration studies,
said Jon Miller and others. Many previous scholars had ignored religion's
central role in new immigrants' lives, they said. The USC center's
community outreach also distinguishes its work--and wins high praise from
faith leaders across the spectrum. When Carole Shauffer, a lawyer
from the Bay Area, wanted to rally religious leaders for a foster child
support program, she went to the center for names.
When the Rev. Richard
Ramos wanted to launch an affordable-housing program in Santa Barbara,
the center's staff helped him find funding sources. When the Rev.
Eugene Williams wanted someone to evaluate his literacy programs for prison
inmates, he turned to the center, which now works with his Los Angeles
Metropolitan Churches on a range of other programs. "If anyone wants
to know anything about religious or church-based organizations, the center
is the place to start," Williams said. As religion gains renewed
respectability among scholars, more people are likely to be knocking on
the center's door.
"There has been a phobia
about religion, but the corner has been turned," Don Miller said.
"People's religious experiences are going to be taken much more seriously
in the academy, rather than being seen as something to be debunked and
discarded."