Abstract
Many years ago, students who were part of the chaplaincy at my college approached the chaplains to ask if we might have a service ‘for peace’. I fail to recall which war precipitated the request. The chaplains agreed, with the exception of Father Alexander, the Orthodox chaplain: he said it was wrong to have any act of divine worship for any purpose other than the worship of God, even for a cause as laudable as asking for peace. God was to be worshipped, and not to be manipulated into any worldly action. We see here the importance of theology and ecclesiology to the actions of ‘religious people’, and an importance that is seemingly incomprehensible to Richard Pitt and his interviewees in the world of American ‘religion entrepreneurs’.
The problem is demonstrated most clearly in a passage quoted approvingly by Pitt in his last chapter: religion can be best studied by being shorn of its ‘sacerdotal, sectarian and spiritualistic implications’. Once it has been shorn, it can be used to describe ‘a wide range of social experiences’, in which, of course, Father Alexander would say, it is no longer religion (p. 264). If we remove everything that is ‘spiritualistic’ from a human endeavour, then all we have is the human endeavour, analogous to every other human endeavour. And if that human endeavour is undertaken within a capitalistic, post-industrial, post-Freudian, and individualistic society like contemporary America, then, strangely, it will appear to be all those things, like any other social or commercial enterprise. Pitt is honest about his intentions, in the description of his methodology, his interactions with his interlocutors (giving them a ‘safe’ space in which to be religious), and his goals (the final chapter is bluntly called ‘De-Sacralizing Religion Entrepreneurship’).
The book is divided into four unequal sections, the focus being parts I and II, becoming and being religious entrepreneurs. Two prefatory chapters describing his motivation to study this sector of ministry, a discussion of how to properly describe ‘church planting’, and a concluding argument mentioned above actually contain the more interesting passages: the theology and ecclesiology are implicit, but no less present for that.
Pitt demonstrates his debt to Rodney Stark, the sociologist of religion who died in 2022. He quotes from Stark's book with Roger Finke, with its telling subtitle ‘Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy’: new ‘churches’ come into existence because ‘religious goods and services [produced] may be better than yours and therefore more worthy of patronage’ (p. 13). It is a competition to provide ‘products, services or opportunities’ (p. 12). In this way, Stark's theory of religious economy, sometimes described, tendentiously, as ‘rational choice theory’, permeates Pitt's methodology and assumptions. Church plants work if church plants can meet the needs of people, sometimes needs that have been already identified by the target audience, sometimes needs that the target audience don’t even know they have (see the work of Laurence Iannaccone, and others, cited by Pitt). If this is so—and ‘if’ ought to be more contested than Pitt allows—then no wonder ‘entrepreneur’ is a good way to describe the providers of goods and services: they are people who will pursue ‘opportunity beyond the resources … [they] currently control’ (Howard Stevenson, a professor of business, quoted on p. 164).
One weakness of Pitt's model is that the varying definitions of entrepreneur are buried in single-sentence complementary/contradictory definitions in the introduction to Part II ‘Being Religious Entrepreneurs’. Joseph Schumpeter's insistence on technological innovation (unmentioned) doesn’t cohere with Scott Shane and Sankaran Venkataram's enthusiasms for synthesis, and neither with Matthias Benz's assertion that entrepreneurship is at its purest a non-profit-seeking undertaking (p. 104). (Incidentally, the unindexed reference to Schumpeter points to the 1911 edition of The Theory of Economic Development, but the bibliography cites the shorter English translation of the fourth edition (1934). Neither citation gives a page number.) The book would have benefited, for sociologists of religion, from a more sceptical interrogation of the usefulness of ‘entrepreneur’ as a commercial phenomenon, let alone its applicability to ‘churches’. Pitt is able to apply such scepticism, but he does so against his interviewees: if they deny that they are actually in competition with other churches for customers, as such language is hard to reconcile with the ‘sacerdotal, sectarian and spiritualistic’ traditions of Protestant biblical hermeneutic, then Pitt merely asks the question in another way (‘Why did Houston need your church?’) to gain an understanding ‘into what they actually believed’ (p. 16). Bidden or unbidden, the gods of the free market are present.
There is an elision in Pitt's methodology. He interviewed 135 men and women, all ‘church founders’ and all within what might be broadly called American ‘Protestantism’. The interviewees were selected by mail recruitment and snowball sampling. The question arises, how much of this recruitment was self-selection? This question is important, because Pitt is concerned to show that religious entrepreneurship actually works, and works in terms of American economic materialism. ‘Religion entrepreneurs’ risk losing financially, in their careers, their social standing, and in the psychic costs (p. 13). Pitt admonishes those who don’t have the courage to risk these costs. Victor, a ministerial aspirant for a Church of God assembly, admits that he doesn’t want to become a full-time minister because ‘maybe I like wearing my three-piece suits and my gators and driving my Chrysler 300. If I stop working and do more ministry, that's going to hurt’ (p. 260). But, as Pitt points out, Victor's minister himself wears three-piece suits and expensive shoes, and has a chauffeur-driven Mercedes SUV. What is missing in Victor to prevent him from having the faith of his own minister? Does he lack faith in the risk-rewarding gods of entrepreneurship? Especially, as Pitt points out, every one of his interviewees faced similar financial and social risks but ‘in every one of these 135 cases, things worked out’ (p. 263, original emphasis), which strikes me as a wonderful example of survivorship bias. Would it have been possible for Pitt to identify failed church founders, and interrogate what the differences are between them and, say, Joel Osteen, T.D. Jakes, and Craig Groeschel (all of whom Pitt mentions as exemplars)? Is the world divided into (successful) religion entrepreneurs and (failed) part-time Christians?
In the final chapter, Pitt discloses his position within the body of Christianity in the United States: he claims to be a Christian who has participated in a variety of religious communities, with a variety of organizational consistency (pp. 266–67). But he recognizes his responsibility to question his interlocutors from the outside, accepting that this might lead to a kind of Durkheimian profanity. But Pitt's understanding of the varieties of Christian experience does not appear to be truly varied: like Bob's Country Bunker he demonstrates familiarity with both kinds of music, country and western. This is important to the universality of Pitt's thesis: does ‘Religion Entrepreneurship’ mean anything to anyone outside a very narrow range of non-denominational Christianity? As someone who has worked within a very different model of ministry for thirty years, the problem for me with Pitt's work is the thorough-going lack of an ecclesiology, which may not be entirely connected with the para-ecclesial communities he has studied. For example, in the second part of the book (‘Becoming Religion Entrepreneurs’), Pitt poses the question ‘Are Churches Social Clubs or Social Movements?’ (p. 111). To which, surely, the answer has to be ‘neither’? Or, at least, if those are the only things you are counting then you are, surely, going to miss the thing that counts? Pitt takes the United States IRS definition of tax-exempt social organizations (501(c)(3)) as his starting point: is the organization in question a public service or a mutual benefit corporation? We are a long way from ‘the catholic or universal Church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the head thereof’ (Westminster Catechism of 1647), or ‘“The Church” is the People that God gathers in the whole world. She exists in local communities and is made real as a liturgical, above all a Eucharistic, assembly. She draws her life from the word and the Body of Christ and so herself becomes Christ's Body’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §752). What does a ‘client-’, ‘comrade-’ or ‘convert-orientation’ have to do with Athens or Jerusalem?
In the end, I suppose my judgement of Pitt's work is that it is thorough (within the limits identified above), sociological, entirely secular (appropriately so, given his assumptions), and almost completely misses the point. Pitt has set up to measure the weight of blue, or the fluid dynamics of a Mozart piano sonata, or the synthetic collateralized debt value of a baby. It is fun to see it tried, but it doesn’t tell us anything worth knowing about blue, Mozart, or babies. Pitt tells us nothing about the content of religion or the way in which those committed to religion have in the past and in the present understood their commitment. Honestly, wouldn’t it be easier for Pitt's religion entrepreneurs to make a living as the manufacturers of widgets?