The God Problem: Expressing Faith and Being Reasonable by Robert Wuthnow

Author:Robert Wuthnow
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-10-01T06:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.2. Belief in heaven and religious attendance.

Although it makes sense that religious organizations might compete to offer the best assurances of an afterlife, this part of the supply-side argument is particularly difficult to pin down. The problem is that competition can be defined in almost any way that might suit a researcher's arguments. For example, in the case of Jewish Americans, it could just as well be argued that older Jews saying “Jews don't believe in heaven” was a reflection of the competition they felt between Christians and Jews and was a way in which Jews maintained their distinctiveness. In contrast, younger Jews expressing belief in an afterlife could signal less competition between Christians and Jews. A similar difficulty arises in arguments about the relative attractiveness of conservative or liberal Christian groups. If conservative groups grow, a scholar can argue that they must be championing views about heaven. But if liberal groups grow, a scholar can suggest that they are imitating conservatives. The same ambiguity pertains to the observation that belief in heaven runs high in monolithically Islamic countries. A defender of the competition theory could argue that Muslims' belief is nevertheless conditioned by their sense of competitiveness with the Christian world. The trouble is that competition can be found anywhere it happens to be convenient to find it. Whether it is present or not, the point should be to look at what religious organizations actually teach and how they teach it, not to draw inferences from meager information about percentages and growth rates.

Apart from these questions, the institutional approach runs into several other logical and empirical difficulties. One problem emerges when scholars argue that religious organizations are like entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on new markets. For example, when new religious movements began appearing on the West Coast of the United States and Canada in the 1970s, an explanation was that this was a particularly good niche because church going was low in these areas. But if that is the case, why are there so few aggressive religious groups in Denmark seeking to persuade Danes to believe in heaven? Another difficulty is the view that religious organizations promulgate ideas about heaven that are self-serving in terms of generating resources for those organizations. Yet, as we will see, it is very common for people to believe that everyone goes to heaven, or nearly everyone, and this is true even in countries like the United States, where the institutional argument would suggest that religion is strong because its leaders jealously guard conceptions about who gets into heaven and who does not. It is also the case that religious organizations are not the only sources of ideas about heaven. With as many films and television programs dealing with the topic as there are, one has to question whether religious organizations truly have a monopoly on beliefs about heaven, and if they do, how specifically they maintain this monopoly.

On balance, the institutional approach is most helpful in reminding us that ideas about heaven

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