Conditions of religious belonging: Confessionalization,de-parochialization,and the Euro-American divergence

Three approaches to the Euro-American divergence

There are persistent and significant variations in ‘religious vitality’ between and within the North America and Western Europe. Initially, orthodox secularization theories paid little attention to them (Berger, 1969; Dobbelaere, 1981; Luckmann, 1967; Parsons and Jackson, 1977; Wilson, 1966, 1982), partly because the variations were not yet that great (Brown, 2003; Greeley, 1989, 2003; Greeley and Baum, 1973; McLeod, 2007). By the mid-1980s, however, the constellation had changed (Greeley, 1989, 2003). The United States was experiencing a ‘Fourth Great Awakening’ (Martin WC, 2005: 426). In Europe, meanwhile, especially Northern Europe, church attendance was falling rapidly.

The debate was opened by proponents of a ‘new paradigm’ in the sociology of religion (Warner, 1993). The dominant version of this new paradigm was, of course, the religious economies approach (Finke and Stark, 1988, 1998; Finke et al., 1996; Iannaccone et al., 1997). By now, its basic assumptions and key ‘predictions’ are well known and easily summarized. Religion is (tacitly) conceived in terms of individual beliefs (e.g., in God) and religious practices (e.g., church attendance). The demand for religion is presumed to be constant because religion is the sole source of certain valuable ‘goods’ that cannot be obtained from other sources (e.g., otherworldly salvation). The total consumption of religious goods will therefore be a function of the quality of ‘religious supply’ in a given context, which is, in turn, a function of the structure of the ‘religious market.’ Specifically, in ‘free markets,’ where ‘religious entrepreneurs’ are allowed to establish new ‘religious firms’ and numerous ‘religious firms’ compete for ‘market share,’ religious ‘consumers’ are more likely to find a high-quality product that suits their (socially conditioned) religious ‘tastes.’ Where there are significant ‘barriers to entry or exit’ and/or a single ‘religious firm’ more or less monopolizes the market, the quality and range of religious products will be lower, as will overall levels of ‘religious consumption.’

The strengths and weaknesses of the new model soon became apparent. Empirically, its fundamental flaw was an inability to account for Catholic vitality. On the positive side of the ledger, the new theory seemed to provide a simple explanation for the Euro-American divergence. In the US, it appeared, free markets had led to high levels of ‘religious vitality,’ while in Europe, uncompetitive markets had led to low levels of ‘religious participation.’ But there were major deficits as well. For instance, the model proved unable to account for regional variations within the US and cross-national variations within Europe (Gorski and Altınordu, 2008; Land et al., 1991). In both cases, one of the confounding factors was Roman Catholicism. Contrary to the expectations of the model, predominantly Catholic regions of the US and predominantly Catholic countries in Europe tended to have higher levels of religious vitality than Protestant ones, even relatively pluralistic ones, despite the fact that their religious markets were fairly monopolistic. To make matters worse, it was soon discovered that Stark and his collaborators had massaged away this empirical anomaly by means of statistical trickery, namely, by controlling for percent Catholic (Olson, 1999).

In recent years, the Euro-American divergence has garnered increased attention from European scholars, some of whom have tried to rejigger the classical theory to account for the American ‘anomaly.’ Steve Bruce, for example, has now taken three runs at this problem (Bruce, 1996, 2002, 2011). In his latest effort, he argues that the size of the Euro-American divergence has been greatly overstated and that such differences as there are can be mostly attributed to the role that religious communities play in immigrant assimilation in the United States. However, close observers of the American scene will probably not find this interpretation convincing. Organized tradition continues to claim far more active adherents in the United States than in Western (and especially Northern) Europe and a considerable proportion of them are native-born (Putnam and Campbell, 2010). What is more, Bruce’s analysis begs the question of why religious communities play such a prominent role in immigrant assimilation in the first place. Why, for example, have the Protestant churches of Scandinavia had so little success in converting Muslim immigrants to Christianity, while the evangelical churches of American have been quite successful in converting many Latino Catholics?

Another well-known effort to reconstruct the orthodox theory has been mounted by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inghlehart (Norris and Inglehart, 2004). They argue that the root cause of varying levels of popular religiosity in all times and places is ‘existential insecurity’ or, in plainer terms, fear. On this account, the fundamental driver of secularization throughout the world today is growing affluence. But the US has one of the highest levels of per capita income in the world. So, how can the Euro-American divergence be explained? By the porosity of its social safety net, they claim. But if that were correct, then one would expect to find a strong and negative correlation between religion on the one hand and income and education on the other, and one finds no such thing. Indeed, several major studies suggest the exact opposite (Chaves, 2011; Greeley and Hout, 2006; Putnam and Campbell, 2010). They find that higher levels of income and education are associated with higher levels of religious belief and participation.

Historicist accounts of the sort advanced by Hugh MacLeod and David Martin suggest a number of possible answers. One focuses on religion and politics. In many parts of Europe, the old regime was built on a tripartite alliance between throne and altar, nobility and clergy, and religious and political conservatism (Gorski, 2009; Kuru, 2009). In such cases, popular movements for political democracy, social equality, and civil rights tended to take on an anti-clerical or even anti-religious cast. In the North Atlantic region, by contrast, relations between political, religious, and social elites and institutions were not yoked together quite so tightly. There, churches often took the lead in the movement for reform and progressive politics did not necessarily take an anti-clerical form.

A second version of the historicist account focuses more on pastoral care (McLeod, 1992, 1996; McLeod, 1984). The industrial revolution sparked rapid urbanization. The new working-class districts that sprang up in many European cities were often underchurched or understaffed. (The reverse was generally true of middle- and upper-class neighborhoods.) This was because church authorities were usually slow to build new churches or assign additional clergy in these areas. Several generations might pass before adequate levels of pastoral care were achieved. It is therefore hardly surprising that popular religiosity often declined during these years, and often never recovered. The cross-generational transmission of the faith had undergone a fatal disruption.

But not everywhere. In the major cities of the United States, for example, new churches were quickly built and staffed. In 1900, argues American historian John Butler, New York City had a higher level of religious vitality than the rural hinterlands (Butler, 1997). A number of studies by the supply-siders produced similar findings: a positive correlation between population density and ‘religious vitality’ in the United States (Finke et al., 1996). Explanations are ready to hand: a working-class family in 19th-century New York would have been within easy walking distance of a quite of number of different churches. This is still true today. Their counterparts in Paris or Stockholm or Berlin confronted a very different situation. The religious ecology of these cities was nowhere near as dense or diverse.

Why? The proximate causes of these differences are clear enough: red tape. In the heavily regulated religious economies of France, Sweden, and Germany, the construction of churches and the training of clergy were regulated or controlled by the state. In the United States, by contrast, the religious economy was much less regulated. In North Atlantic Europe, on the other hand, the religious economy was a mix of public and private. But the deeper causes of these variations lie further back in history, in the establishment of the parish form during the Middle Ages, the nationalization of religious organization during the Confessional Era, and the emergence of de-parochialized and transnational forms of religion in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is to that story – our story – that we now turn.

The crisis of the 10th century and the development of the parish form

In the 10th century the future of Latin Christendom was far from assured. Rival religions and polities were busily raiding it from all directions. How, then, did (Latin) Christian belief become the ‘default option’ by 1500, as Taylor notes? Part of the answer is an extraordinary burst of creativity and dynamism that emanated from the Carolingian heartlands beginning sometime around the year 1000.

It was not just technological; it was also institutional (Bartlett, 1993; Moore, 2000). It created a new set of interlocking social building blocks that could be adapted to varying circumstances. The essential components were landed fiefs, chartered towns, and, of course, parish churches. Additional elements included craft guilds, universities, and monasteries. The other element in the new parochial package was a stock set of social types. The lead actors were the parish priest, the urban burger, and the feudal lord; supporting characters included the monk, the jurist, and the bowman.

Europe was still thinly populated at the dawn of the Middle Ages, particularly on its northern and eastern peripheries. This meant that the diffusion of the parochial package was not only outward, but inward; it involved infilling as well as expansion. Depending on the context, parochialization could take various forms. Cooptation was the usual mechanism in ‘pagan’ regions, such as Scandinavia. Christianization conferred access to civilizational goods – and military allies. In Muslim controlled areas conquest was the usual route. In unclaimed regions, the mechanism was entrepreneurial and the initial settlement could take various forms: the military outpost of a fighting order; a ‘planned community’ staked by a well-heeled merchant; or the newly established fief for the cadet son of a nobleman.

The parish system was a ritual system above all (Gorski, 2000; Karant-Nunn, 1997, 2003). Creedal affirmation was not the principal expression of Christian unity. Accordingly, the Latin church and its secular protectors were far more concerned about the emergence of rival ritual communities than about the existence of doctrinal deviants (e.g., Cathars) and communal others (e.g., Jews) (Moore, 2007).

It is also important to note the role that parishes and endowments played in ‘social provision’ of all kinds, from poor relief to health care – functions gradually assumed following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

One of the central features of the parochial package is precisely that it was a package: it bundled religious community together with local solidarity, civilizational identity, property relationships, political authority, and territorial divisions. The ties that bind were thereby bound together to a remarkable degree. If unbelief was ‘inconceivable,’ then this had as much to do with conditions of belonging as with Taylor’s ‘conditions of belief.’ For belief was mediated by belonging.

The crisis of the 16th century and the development of the confessional form

Some social scientists argue that the Protestant Reformation unbundled this package – that it led to a ‘functional differentiation between the religious and political spheres’ (Luhmann, 1977, 1985, 1989) or even a ‘separation of church and state’ (Rawls, 2005); and that it forged a system of ‘secular’ states (Philpott, 2009).

These arguments are anachronistic. One could just as easily argue that the Reformation led to a de-differentiation of religion and politics and even a sacralization of the state (Gorski, 2000). Of course, Protestant magistrates did ‘secularize’ (i.e., seize) church properties. And Latin Christendom was ‘differentiated’ into competing ‘confessions’ (Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist) and ‘sects’ (Baptist, Unitarian, etc.) But this is not the sense in which ‘secularization’ and ‘differentiation’ are intended by Luhmann et al.

Rather, early modern historians are more apt to speak of ‘confessionalization’ (Klueting, 1989; Schilling, 1988), a recursive process whereby a sharpening of doctrinal differences within Christianity led to a sharpening of communal boundaries and vice versa, eventually resulting in the increased political salience of religious uniformity and tightened binding of church and state (Reinhard, 1997). One important result of confessionalization is that doctrine now mattered more. It was better understood by parishioners, better taught by clerics, and more rigidly enforced by the worldly authorities.

Nor was this the only difference. The social imaginary also changed. The old, parochial imaginary was a ‘hierarchical complementarity’ between the three divinely ordained social estates: those who pray, those who fight, and those who labor. By contrast, the new, confessional imaginary, as envisioned by reformist clerics and pious laypeople, involved doctrinal and ethical purity and homogeneity modeled and enforced through harmonious cooperation between worldly and churchly leaders.

Still, the parochial ideal cast a long shadow. Even Confessional Age Protestantism retained core parochial characteristics. This, despite a long tradition in social-scientific and historiographical interpretation which identifies the Protestant Reformation with the advent of voluntarist, individualist and belief-centered religiosity. In the ‘magisterial’ reformations of England and Lutheran Europe, for instance, reform was for the most part superimposed on pre-existing parochial infrastructures. Even throughout much of the communal reformations of Reformed Protestantism, beginning in Geneva, the levers of Calvinist sacramental discipline – the mechanisms of sorting the elect from the unregenerate – and of consistorial-presbyterian church government, still operated through the pre-existing geographical divisions of the landscape into parochial units (Kingdon, 1979).

Indeed, far from weakening the parochial system, the magisterial reformers actually strengthened it. How so? First, by abolishing extra-parochial forms of religious organization, like monasticism and mendicancy. Second, by re-envisioning the (now non-celibate) pastor as a pater familias of his congregation (Dixon and Schorn-Schütte, 2003). The Reformation thereby turned the more diverse organizational ecology of the Middle Ages into a parochial monoculture.

‘Invasive species’ were quickly weeded out and brandmarked. Luther and Calvin both faced down antinomian – and anti-magisterial – uprisings from within the ranks of their would-be supporters. The politico-theological projects of the ‘radical’ or ‘left’ reformation (e.g., the Münster Insurrection) resulted in an enduring association of roaming preachers with theological heterodoxy and political sedition. But organizational monoculture also had its ecological downsides. The hyper-parochialization rendered Protestantism vulnerable in confessional battlegrounds and on underchurched territorial frontiers where mobile and parochially unencumbered Catholic orders were more capable of improvising and ministering to hard-to-reach populations. It was a harbinger of troubles to come during the modern era.

Emergence and diffusion of the de-parochialized form

The 18th century witnessed the (re)emergence of de-parochialized forms of religious community within Protestant Europe. Methodism is the textbook example. It first arose as a revivalist movement within the Church of England during the 1730s and 1740s. Organizationally, however, the Methodist movement was always somewhat outside the formal infrastructure of the established church. It supplemented regular parish worship with devotional association centering on its elaborate system of societies and chapels, and superimposed an extra-parochial circuit system staffed by a regular, highly mobile itinerant ministry (Lovegrove, 2004). In Britain, Wesleyan Methodism quickly extended its circuit system into regions of England lacking in adequate parochial coverage, and spread into Wales, where the Church of England, though formally established, never mounted to much more than a superficial presence. The movement also made inroads in Ireland and in Scottish North Britain – that is beyond the jurisdiction of the Church of England. Though Methodist advances in Britain’s Celtic periphery were at first minimal – especially in Scotland – here as elsewhere Methodist extra-parochial models of evangelistic organization found analogs in local revival movements. The extension of Methodism to America prior to the Revolution began during the ‘Great Awakening’ of the 1740s and continued through the 18th century, establishing footholds in the mid-Atlantic, in Nova Scotia, and the Caribbean; Methodism’s most impressive phase of growth across the Atlantic followed American Independence (Hempton, 2006).

Of particular significance is the historically unprecedented confidence with which Methodism and other revivalist offshoots identified and exploited imperial Britain as a field of organized, evangelical intervention – on the greater British Celtic fringe and in the American colonies, no less than in England itself. Of equal importance is the relative ease with which trans-Atlantic revivalism not only opened a two-front revivalist campaign domestically and abroad, but among Europeans and non-Europeans alike – African slaves in North America and the Caribbean, for example. Within an imperial environment, it was a truly transnational movement. There was considerable communication and coordination linking revival movements in England, Scotland, and colonial America (Crawford, 1991). Everywhere – and this is crucial to our argument – Methodism, and the wider culture of evangelical revival of which it was part, went hand-in-hand with missionizing.

Scholars commonly emphasize the shaping force of evangelicalism on 18th- and 19th- century Protestant ‘missionary awakening’ in which evangelical missionary societies played an instrumental role. What is less understood – but historically decisive – is the influence of heightened Protestant involvement in the missionary fields on evangelical revival itself.

The leading lights of early evangelicalism were, for example, intimately familiar with a small, but nonetheless highly publicized missionary venture in and around the Danish and English East India Company settlements in southern India which began in 1706. This ‘Malabar Mission,’ staffed largely by Lutheran Pietists from Prussia, quickly began to draw on a cosmopolitan network of clerical and lay missionary patrons, especially in the Anglo-American Protestant world (Nelson, 2013).

The details of this mission bear emphasis because they represent an early and paradigmatic example of Protestant de-parochialization. In contrast to earlier missionary experiments, the Malabar Mission was organized in a fully extra-parochial manner. There were no designs for political and ethno-national incorporation of ‘native’ converts via the communally integrative organ of the parish. Instead, the south India missionaries sought to found indigenous, and in time, self-sustaining Indian Protestant communities, chose native languages as the best conduit of conversion, and understood the pastoral obligations of missionaries as fundamentally different than that of ordinary Protestant clergy (Jeyaraj, 1996; Liebau, 2008), they were to go out and about and gather converts, the effectiveness of mobile, expansive evangelistic strategy, not local parochial authority, amounting to the true embodiment of the apostolic, missionary office. Contemporary champions of the Malabar Mission identified it as the exemplar of a true, revived, apostolic Christianity and a model for emulation among nominal Protestants (Benz, 1951); it provided the organizational template used by the first generation of evangelical revivalists in Britain and America (Nelson, 2013).

In Britain, evangelical revivalism spread across sympathetic subcultures in Methodism, the Churches of England and Scotland, and Protestant Dissent. Analogous developments can be observed in the American colonies. The gathered community of the re-born marked a sharp break with the ‘New England Way’ which had centered on the community of the town. On both sides of the Atlantic, and in cooperation with one another, itinerant revivalists built new communities and congregations around the edges and in the interstices of the old parish system (Hall, 1994).

The influence of overseas missionary innovation on domestic de-parochialization continued through the 18th and into the 19th centuries. When much of the Indian subcontinent fell to Britain in the decades following Clive’s ‘victory’ in Bengal, an evangelical lobby began to campaign for a more formidable missionary presence there. Following failed efforts on the part of evangelical Anglicans to force the East India Company to allow an ecclesiastical establishment in India, a host of ecumenical and denominational voluntary missionary societies were formed on the premise that a confessional state would not be made of Company Rule (Carson, 1990): first, the Baptist Missionary Society, then the ecumenical London Missionary Society, the establishment (and evangelical) Church Missionary Society, followed by the Methodist Missionary Society. Perhaps most significantly, even as they defended the parochial model at home, the Churches of England and Scotland acclimated to post-confessional, post-parochial evangelistic models in the empire (Cox, 2008; Porter, 2004), suggesting that empire amounted to a legitimate environment for rather radical organizational change even among establishmentarians.

The new de-parochialized model of religious life was eventually reimported into the metropole via ecumenical evangelical ‘home’ missionary societies such as the Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society – bodies founded by the same inter-denominational network of evangelical activism forged amid the lobbying effort to force the East India Company to admit missionaries (Roe, 1965). And among Methodist, Dissenting, and Establishment evangelicals alike, the voluntary missionary model spawned a variety of education and evangelistic undertakings among unchurched urban and rural poor, including the Sunday School movement and Christian educational initiatives in rural Wales and the Scottish Highlands.

In America, the equivalent importance attached to outer and inner missions, organized on similar premises, saw, by the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the founding of missionary societies on the eastern seaboard and the expanding unchurched, and empire-like, western frontier, alongside proselytizing missions to Native Americans and enslaved and freed African-Americans (Foster, 1960).

In the long run, then, foreign and home missions in the empire and on the frontiers were the crucial catalysts for the de-parochialization of Protestantism in core regions. And insofar as de-parochialization spawned new forms of para-church organizations, it also enabled the recovery of forms of extra-parochial religious organization that had been foreclosed by the Protestant Reformation.

Of course, no such ‘recovery’ was necessary in the Catholic regions of Europe. There, counter-Reformation neo-mendicancy had already created a distinctively Catholic ‘revival’ tradition that played an instrumental role in missionary conversion within and beyond the frontiers of Catholic imperial power, beginning with Spain and Portugal. The lion’s share of missionary work among non-Europeans fell to itinerant mendicant orders, first the Dominicans and Franciscans, who often staffed mission outposts far ahead of European colonial settlement and the diocesan-parochial institutions of the Patronato. Almost as soon as the Jesuit order was founded in 1534, its priests and brothers entered a foreign mission field not dissimilar from the confessional battle grounds of the counter-Reformation in Europe, with a mandate to improvise as necessary and to establish themselves irrespective of any diocesan-parochial presence (O’Malley, 1993). In the 18th and 19th centuries, new Catholic missionary orders would arise on the mendicant and Jesuit model of inner-/outer-missionary equivalence, regarding both as frontiers in which neither the support of the state nor a diocesan-parochial infrastructure could be relied upon. Much like British and American evangelicals, orders such as the Lazarists, founded in the mid-17th century, and the Redemptorists, founded in mid-18th century, sent missionaries abroad and to preach and educate among underchurched urban and rural populations in Catholic Europe (Gentilcore, 1994).

In the late 18th century, then, the prospects for organized Christianity in the European heartlands looked surprisingly bright. What happened?

Explaining the Euro-American divergence

How do we account for the Euro-American divergence? We cannot give a definitive answer here. However, we will attempt to identify meso-level causal mechanisms that can explain a good deal of the variation. Stated in the most general possible terms, our working hypothesis is that the ‘great transformations’ of the long 19th century sparked a reproduction crisis in the religious field and that the varying fates of organized Christianity in western countries were largely determined by the severity of the resulting crisis and the adequacy of the ecclesiastical response.

By the ‘great transformations,’ we mean the various processes of social change that defined the ‘long 19th century’ (1776–1914) often assembled under the (overly) general rubric of ‘modernization’: first and foremost, industrialization and urbanization, and the attendant changes in relations of status and inequality, but also the extension of manhood suffrage and electoral democracy, along with rapid advances in science and technology. By ‘religious reproduction,’ we mean the inter-generational transmission of religious belief and practice and their biographical stabilization across the individual life-course. In contrast to phenomenological approaches to religious belief which emphasize an unmediated relationship between the individual and the divine (Taylor, 2007), we here adopt a more sociological approach which sees religious belief mainly as the result of childhood socialization and social embedding.

Note that the parochial package contained a formidable set of reproductive mechanisms. Specifically, it linked religion with identity (local, national, civilizational), security (material as well as psychological), education (church controlled schools), and revivalism. The Confessional Era weakened some of these mechanisms, while strengthening others, and in variable ways. For example, where confessionalization ‘failed,’ and religious pluralism took root (e.g., the Netherlands, western Germany, Switzerland), the link between religious and political identity, local and national, was often attenuated, with Catholics and ‘sectarians’ relegated to second-class citizenship. Likewise, in Lutheran polities, where social provision came under state control, the link between security and religion was potentially weakened, insofar as material incentives for religious engagement were weakened. The link between religion and education, on the other hand, was strengthened across the confessions. As regards revivalism, it was the Protestants, those who invoked the evangelium, who were disadvantaged through the abolition of those bodies that had contributed most to evangelization, namely, the mendicant and teaching orders. On balance, then, it seems fair to say that Protestantism entered the modern era at something of a disadvantage, as concerns the robustness of its reproductive mechanisms, providing a first clue to the puzzle of confessional divergence.

In the orthodox account, the great transformations always and inevitably lead to unchurching and uniformly so. Thus, extra-religious variables such as demography (Norris and Inglehart, 2004) and ethnic conflict (Bruce, 2002) are invoked to explain intra-European differences. By contrast, in the alternative account proposed here, the link between ‘modernization’ and ‘secularization’ is assumed to be contingent and variable. Specifically, it is hypothesized that the severity of the reproduction crisis will vary with: (a) the robustness of the reproductive system put in place during the confessional era; (b) the speed and intensity of the great transformations; and (c) the speed and adequacy of the ecclesiastical response to the crisis.

Catholic countries generally do better than Protestant ones at holding on to their members for several reasons. First, as already noted, they entered into the modern era with a more robust system of religious reproduction, due to their stronger traditions of missionary work and to their greater control over social provision; second, industrialization tended to be later and less intensive in these countries, and urbanization proceeded more slowly; third, and finally, Roman Catholics not only proved enormously effective at constructing a confessional subculture to replace the traditional parish, but also at playing the game of electoral politics via Christian Democratic parties, thereby knitting together religious and political identities and interests.

This is more or less the pattern that we observe in Austria, Bavaria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. What about France, though? France is the historical exception that proves the Catholic rule. As a result of the de-Christianization policies of the Revolutionary era, the Catholic Church entered the 19th century in a gravely weakened state. Industrialization and urbanization, meanwhile, proceeded more quickly than in, say, Spain or Italy, if not as rapidly as in Germany or Scandinavia. Finally, while French Catholics did succeed in creating an embracing milieu in some regions, they failed in their efforts to form a viable political party.

The approach limned here also generates a number of possible solutions to the problem of ‘American exceptionalism’ in religious history, while also providing some clues concerning its possible futures. First, in contrast to many European countries, particularly those with monopolistic state churches, the United States entered the modern era with a system of religious reproduction that had already adapted to religious individualism and spatial mobility. Key features of this system included federalistic forms of church government and a tradition of self-called and self-taught clergy. Consequently – and this is the second point – American churches were well prepared to meet the challenges of the great transformation. For instance, through its incorporation into the nascent mission circuits of the Atlantic world, as well as its own experiences with the western frontier, the United States had developed a fully de-parochialized form of religious life, whose paradigmatic expression were the circuit rider and the log-cabin church. These mechanisms were easily adapted to a city setting by means of urban revivals and store-front churches. The American response to the ‘urban problem’ was as rapid and as innovative as many European responses were slow and sclerotic. This is probably the single most important reason why church memberships in the United States increased during the late 19th century, at the very time when they were in decline in much of Europe.

Our argument is easily summarized: the great religious divergence between the US and Europe initially arose out of the intersection of the great institutional disembedding of evangelical Christianity with the great social transformations of the 19th century. Where, and to the degree that, de-parochialization preceded urbanization and industrialization, strategies developed in imperial mission fields, the Celtic fringe of Britain and the American frontier and elsewhere were quickly and easily deployed in the inner missions of the new industrial cities. The result was continued religious vitality. By contrast, where a confessional state and parochial church remained firmly in place, as in Scandinavia and much of Germany, a powerful coalition of established clergy and religious bureaucrats resisted such efforts at working-class evangelism; likewise, traditional ecclesiastical infrastructures which continued to adhere to the parochial principle lacked the organizational flexibility and expansive missionary capacities necessary to keep up with the disembedding forces of industrialization. Here, the result was mass unchurching.

While these outcomes are broadly consistent with the religious economies model, the continuing vitality of Roman Catholicism in much of Europe poses a deep puzzle for the supply-side approach – but one that is easily solved in terms of the present account. In Protestant Europe, the Reformation movement did away with many extra-parochial forms of religious organization. In most Catholic countries, by contrast, the old forms of extra-parochial organization survived and often grew. New religious orders were established, especially for women. New lay organizations were created, particularly for the middle and working classes, including Catholic political parties and labor unions. And the church continued – and still continues – to be the main conduit for social provision in many Catholic countries. As a result, the Catholic Church was much better equipped to respond to the challenges of the great transformation than were the state churches of Protestant Europe.

In both southern Catholic Europe and the Protestant North Atlantic (Britain, the US, and the Netherlands), the comparatively high degree of popular religiosity through and beyond the 19th century is best explained by exposure to the inner-missionary designs of de-parochialized religious organization. Acclimated to a pastoral vision, the integrity of which is sustained and even strengthened in the absence of either political support and/or parochial infrastructures, de-parochialized Christianity better weathered the upheavals of industrialization, urbanization, and the political challenges to the ancien régime confessional state than did churches left to rely solely on the parochial package. In the more enduringly churchly Protestantism of Germany and Scandinavia, for example, the absence a formidable voluntary para-parochial tradition or the metropolitan benefits of the frontier learning-process in empire prior to the onset of industrialization and democratization left religious establishments more vulnerable.

The supply-side analysis is inadequate here, and in two ways. First, it presumes that the missionary prowess of the North Atlantic countries was purely a result of ‘market structure.’ That is hardly the case. In truth, the strategies of the ‘inner missions’ to the industrial cities had been invented and perfected in the external missions to native peoples in Europe’s colonies and America’s frontiers, as were the ‘de-parochialized’ versions of religious communities qua voluntary associations. The organizational advantages of Methodism in the American ‘religious market,’ of which the supply-siders make much – growing from negligible numbers in the mid-18th century to the largest Protestant denomination on the eve of the Civil War – were shaped in the context of trans-Atlantic imperial British revivalism and missionary inroads in South Asia and elsewhere. Second, it implies that effective evangelism could only arise within ‘competitive’ markets. This ignores the long-standing advantage enjoyed by the Catholic Church in the missionary field. In the Catholic world, it was often religious orders that took the lead in revival efforts. Likewise, the organizational formidability of evangelical Protestant movements was not merely, or even principally, the outgrowth of the competitive pressures brought by disestablishment and the advent of formal pluralism; rather, de-parochialized organizing strategies owe their genesis in large measure to the innovative contingencies of empire and the mission field.

In this our narrative differs in crucial ways from the supply-side account of the rise and decline of religious ‘vitality.’ Theoretically, the fatal defect of the new paradigm – inherited from neoclassical economics – is a congenital inability to plausibly account for the structure or, indeed, the existence, of ‘the firm.’ Our account, in contrast, offers an explanation for changes in organizational disposition of religion by identifying the sources of legitimacy that attached to de-parochialized forms of evangelism and the unique environments in which legitimate innovation first developed. In both Protestant and Catholic contexts, among the most important yet systematically overlooked arenas of the rise of forms of revivalism commonly ascribed by the supply-side school to the exceptional market circumstances of America, and, to a lesser degree, Britain, were imperial environments of religious change and foreign missions.

We thus relativize the importance of competitive, voluntary denominational regimes which followed disestablishment and the rise of formal religious pluralism in the context of nation-state formation. In fact the generative context of what we here call de-parochialization was the colonial failure of traditional parochial reproduction and the contingent necessity enforced on religious actors to operate outside the church/state framework of the early modern confessional state. This was especially clear in the case of the rise and rapid diffusion of voluntary mission societies following on the secularization of British colonial governance in India and elsewhere, not to mention the confidence with which early Methodism and the evangelical movements in older Anglo-American and Scottish religious bodies sized up the British empire as an arena of revivalist expansion, including the American colonies. It is likewise clear in the waves of neo-mendicancy and the emergence of missionary and teaching orders in the contexts of the Catholic mission abroad. All of these imperial experiments in extra-parochial religious organization engendered analogous extra-parochial organizing confidence domestically and illuminated urban and rural inner-mission fields not easily accessible to traditional forms of religious organization.

If comparative vitality reflected the mere existence or absence of religious monopolies, as advocates of the new paradigm maintain, then virtually all of Western Europe would in time have evidenced the diffusion of a competitive revivalist market; this is because almost all Western European polities at least relaxed most restrictions on religious non-conformity and voluntary denominationalism over the course of the 19th century. Moreover, the persistence of formal religious monopolies as such did not prevent the spread of revivalism, as is clear from the example of 18th- and early 19th-century Protestant revivalism in Britain, which spread both within and outside the established church.

Above all, these patterns call attention to the sources of religious change which transcended the dynamics of nation-state formation central to supply-siders, and for that matter to the historicists as well. We illuminate an alternative framework which incorporates imperial and transnational fields of religious innovation qua de-parochialization, and, in turn, examines the patterns of, and obstacles to, domestic diffusion of de-parochialized forms. Methodism may have catalyzed denominational competition in the early America republic, but one must remember that the movement cut its teeth organizationally amid the trans-Atlantic revivals prior to American disestablishment. The spread of voluntary home mission societies on both sides of the Atlantic was likewise a product of empire, not merely of domestic adaptation to the weakening of traditional forms of religious authority or the innovative pressures of Darwinian denominational competition.

Described as such, de-parochialization may itself be seen as a form of secularization, not in the sense of unchurching but in the sense of ‘differentiation.’ The power of the parochial package that crystallized out of the 10th century largely derived from the way it bundled religion together with a specific set of social identities and institutions: homeland and parish, Christendom and civilization, social estate and divine providence, and so on. Far from unbundling the package, the religious reforms of the 16th century further added to it: state and church, confession and nation, empire and eschaton. De-parochialization unbundled the parochial package and replaced it with a less spatialized and more porous form of religious community, one based on the voluntary principle and entered through conversion, one defined in terms of individual belief more than communal identity, one that paid less respect to the immediate communal salience of the parish and the politically and nationally incorporative capacities of confessional-state religiosity.

Western modernization created many frontiers which expanded at a rate outpacing the adequate reproduction of medieval and confessional-age mechanisms of popular religious incorporation. The migrations of thousands from villages to swelling cities, and to mining and commercialized agricultural regions, created large communities living outside the shadow of the parish church and its influence on the rhythms of daily life. Even in the presence of older or newer parishes, uprooted populations, severed from immediate kinship ties and the mechanical solidarity of face-to-face village life, were no longer living lives resonant with the parochial package. De-parochialized Christianity – whether of the Catholic or Protestant variety – was not merely more organizationally equipped to access and embed among disembedded populations. The religious emphasis of de-parochial Christianity – a ‘heartfelt’ individualized spirituality – alongside its educational and charitable initiatives, amounted to a re-packaging of Christian belief and practice more commensurate than churchly religion with the life-worlds of those disembedded from traditional life.

Extra-parochial religion was also in a better position to compete with secular ideologies and political movements when they arose as attractive alternatives to traditional religion. Whereas traditional ecclesiastical institutions and the authority of parochial clergy might be compromised in the eyes of would-be adherents by association with discredited elites and the state, the relative autonomy of extra-parochial Christianity from state and church establishment, by extension, attenuated such damning associations with, or direct influence of, distrusted authority.

Our account is not able – and does not purport – to explain the divergence within the North Atlantic world that began in the 1960s. One explanation, proposed by Callum Brown (2003), is that the upheavals during and after the World Wars severely disrupted the inter-generational transmission of religious belief via childhood socialization, due to the loss or absence of fathers in combat and the extraordinary demands that fell on women and mothers back on the home front. Extrapolating from Brown’s account, which focuses on Britain, one might argue that the wars had less of an impact on religious reproduction in the American home front. Another explanation, according to Hugh McLeod (2007), focuses on the social upheavals of the 1960s, which were much more severe in the United States than in Britain or the Netherlands, due to the Civil Rights movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War. The result was a massive backlash against the counter-culture during the 1970s, partly under the auspices of a massive religious revival. Recent work by David Campbell and Robert Putnam adds further plausibility to this account.

We would add a third possible explanation as well: immigration. Responding to nativist agitation, the American government imposed national quotas on immigration to the United States, whose goal was to fix the ethnic composition of the population. These quotas were lifted in 1965, touching off an era of mass immigration from all parts of the world. Throughout this period, as in earlier eras, religious communities have been an important vehicle of cultural integration. Moreover, because most immigrants come from predominantly Christian countries (e.g., in Latin America), are disproportionately drawn from the Christian population of the sending country (e.g., in East Asia and the Middle East), or convert to Christianity following their arrival (presumably for social reasons), anti-immigrant sentiment has few religious overtones, and vice versa, in the case of Islam. In Western Europe, the situation has been very different. The immigrant population – considerably smaller in any event – is mainly drawn from Muslim countries (e.g., North Africa and the Middle East) and Muslim populations (e.g., North India). Consequently, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment tend to reinforce one another, leading to deeper and more intractable forms of social exclusion. The path to cultural integration, meanwhile, is not via relatively moribund, Christian communities, but rather via assimilation to national and European cultures which increasingly defines themselves in self-consciously ‘secular’ terms, cultures in which religiosity is widely understood as a mark of backwardness and marginality.