Sociology of Reli~on /993, 54:2 127-146
The Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture m 1991
Liberals and Conservatives, Religious and
Political: A Conjuncture of Modern History
Randall Collins
University of California, Riverside
W h a t is the difference between a liberal a n d a conservative? Around
1965, if you were an American intellectual, the difference was obvious. A
conservative was like a southern sheriff: racist, authoritarian, anticommunist, intolerant, fundamentalist in religion. The liberal was the civil rights
worker, the opposite of the conservative on every political point; in religion,
she or he was an atheist (possibly a secular Jew) or a cosmopolitan such as
Unitarian or an adherent of nonsectarian Hindu spiritualism. Religious
and political liberalism were congruent, as were religious and political conservatism. Sociologists like Talcott Parsons connected the distinction more
abstractly to the dimension of universalism and particularism .
By the end of the 1980s, the difference had become confused. In the period
of glasnost reform in the USSR, and concomitant movements in Eastern
Europe culminating in the revolutions of 1989 and 1991, it was common for
both observers and participants to use the terms "liberal" and "conservative." But now the meanings were almost the opposite of those twenty
years earlier in the United States. The Soviets who attempted a reactionary
coup against the reformers were called "conservatives." But were they
conservative in the same sense as Ronald Reaqan or Jerry Falwell? On the
other side, Gorbachev was considered a liberali Yeltsin a radical, and others
were considered even more extreme as reformers. The "radicalness" of this
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In the twentieth century, religious and political liberalism have generally been congruent,
as were religious and political conservatism, along the dimension of universalism and particularism. In recent years the terminology has grown confused, when communists in the ex-Soviet
re,~on are described as conservatives, and proponents both of market capitalism and of ethnic
nationalism are described as liberals. Changes in content of liberalism and conservatism are
also found in religious history. The issue of married priests today is considered to be a liberal
reform within Catholicism; whereas in the twelfth century, reformers attacked married priests
as corruption and abuse; at the Protestant Reformation, it was presented as church reform to
abolish clerical celibacy. The rhetorical contrast "liberallconservative" ties the concepts to the
mobilization of conflict irrespective of its content. Our familiar congruence of liberalism ancl
conservatism in religion and politics is historically specific; it emerged at the exhaustion of the
religious wars in the late seventeenth century, and developed along with secularization into
the early twentieth century. As particularism along ethnic and ge,uter lines becomes a major
grounds of mobilization in the late twentieth century, the classic liberal/conservative contrast
appears to be eroding.
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dimension of reform consisted in how far one wanted to move toward private
property and the unimpeded rule of the marketplace. Here again one is not
likely to confuse a pro-capitalist "radical" with Che Guevara, and the
moderate "liberal" version does not remind one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's
cabinet.
At the turn of the 1990s, it also became popular to refer to "liberals" and
"conservatives" on issues of ethnic freedom. The rights of nationalities to
independent self-determination is contrasted with the conservativism of
their opponents who uphold older trans-ethnic political units such as the
USSR or Yugoslavia. Here the universalists are the "conservatives," the
particularists the "liberals."
The contrast liberal/conservative continues to make sense only if we
employ it to refer to the struggle of the underdog versus the establishment.
The liberals, at least in their self-image, are opposed to existing authority,
and favor greater freedom and rights for some oppressed group. This usage
ties the concept to the mobilization of conflict irrespective of its content.
The distinction becomes purely relativist in its application. The older concepts Left and Right could be mixed in any combination with "liberal"and
"conservative." Strictly speaking, we ought to refer to "Leftist conservatires" in the ex-Soviet bloc, and "liberal Rightists" taking power, although
current usage fails to grasp this, and we hear of the Soviet "Right" as referring to the Communists.
The same confusion crops up in the religious sphere. Take for instance
the issue of married priests: today this is considered to be a liberal reform
within Catholicism. But in the twelfth century, it was the opposite; reformers like St. Bernard inveighed against married priests as corruption and
abuse, and led the way to a "purified" celibate church. The issue flip-flops
again at the Protestant Reformation, when Luther touts it as liberal church
reform to abolish clerical celibacy. This begins to suggest an endless cycle of
reforms and counterreforms, each reform negating the previous one.
In what follows I will develop two themes. One is that the liberal/conservative distinction with which we are familiar is a historically specific
combination of ingredients. The various components of what we consider to
be "liberalism," in religion as in politics, carne together in the 1700s, and
their "conservative" counterparts came together soon after. We will ask
ourselves whether the lineup is now breaking down in the late twentieth
century; whether the period of "liberals vs. conservatives," having lasted for
about 200-500 years, is now disappearing and being replaced by something
else.
The second theme is an analytical one. The liberal/conservative distinction causes trouble because it is a unidimensional distinction imposed upon
a multidimensional reality. To develop a more useful theory we must separate the different dimensions. I will start with the latter point first.
LIBERALS A N D C O N S E R V A T I V E S , R E L I G I O U S A N D P O L I T I C A L
129
THE TRIANGLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL CONFLICTS
The simple opposition between liberals and conservatives does not clarify
because social conflicts do not boil down merely to who is on top and who is
fighting from below for change. Political organization more resembles a
triangle, as in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1
mass
participation
democracy
dc~centralization
balance of powers
arimx:racy/republic
At the apex we can put centralized authority. Here there is unity of
command; orders are given at the top and are carried down through a hierarchy. One typical form of "liberal" movement is the opposition to
centralized power in the name "the people" or "democracy." Organizationally, what is being demanded here is mass participation. But mass
participation is not al ways liberal. It can easily go in the direction of
exalting the authority of the community, the control of the group over the
individual. A powerful community is often traditionalistic; and mobilized
masses are often particularistic--for instance, defending the primacy of
their ethnic identity against others.
There is another way that centralized authority can be opposed. That is
by decentralization, limiting the power of the center. This is the model of
the republic, the assembly of equals who decide together as a body, while
guarding their own rights and spheres of action. In European history, this
decentralized rule has its origins in the aristocracy; the late medieval version was the standestaat, the balance of power by the estates, from which
modern parliaments and independent judiciaries derived. Democratization
vŸ the route of mass participation and limitation on central authority vŸ
the route of decentralization are two quite different things; they occupy different poles at the base of the triangle, and have often been in opposition to
each other. The mass community sweeps everything from its path, inc[uding
the rights and privileges of individuals; the decentralized balance of powers
is anchored on autonomous centers of power, and tends towards aristocracy.
Any of the three points of the triangle can represent either liberalism or
conservatism, depending on which form has previously had the greatest
power and where opposition to ir is mobilized. Whenever opposition comes, it
always sets forth the abuses of its enemies and casts itself in the light of the
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centralization - bureaucracy
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SOCIOLOGYOF RELIGION
bringer of benevolence and reform. The centralized state can cast itself as
the liberator from bigoted local communities and from the selfish authority
of the barons; this was the claim of the early "modernizing" state. Mass
participation flies the banner of democracy when it fights to widen the
franchise against the aristocrats or to overthrow the despotism of the center.
Decentralizers claim to uphold freedom against both the regimentation of
the center and the leveling of the crowd.
church hierarchy,
codified doctrine
sect
enthusiasm
mystics, pietists
spiritual elite
The same triangle maps the rival forms of religious organization (see
Figure 2). At the apex we can put the centralized church, with its ecclesiastical hierarchy, its codified liturgy and doctrine. At the corner of mass
participation is the sect, the community of enthusiasts, drawn actively together in the spirit. At the other comer, decentralization, are the mystics,
exalting the rights of private spiritual experience; like political aristocrats,
mystics are an elite, and monastic religions based on mysticism set off an
aristocracy of the spirit. Religious reforms, like political ones, have gone
around the triangle in every direction, l_.uther destroyed the monks as a lazy
and privileged class; the medieval papacy often struggled against the superstitious excesses of the enthusiasts; the mystics fought for spiritual freedom
against the hierocratic dogmatists.
The three points of the triangle do not usually exist in pure form.
Alliances are possible among adjacent sides (see Figure 3). Soviet
Communism arose as an alliance of mass participation with a centralized
administration. Anarchism, on the other hand, proposes to combine decentralization of power to the local level with the mass participation in the collective unit. The centralized authoritarian state in alliance with the privileged aristocracy produced the period of Absolutism in early modern Europe.
One might even seea grand 3-way alliance as the basis of Anglo-American
liberal democracy: a centralized rule of law, balanced by independent centers
of authority, with leaders elected through mass participation.
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FIGURE 2
LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES, RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL
131
FIGURE3
centralization
communism
3 /
/
~
~
N f
,q
absolutist/
aristocratic
mass
participation
autonomous
powers
anarchism
With the use of this triangle, we can see why the liberal/conservative
dichotomy is so hard to apply consistently outside of a particular period in
modern history. In ancient Greece, was Plato a liberal o r a conservative? By
modern standards, he appears as an authoritarian conservative in politics,
though he claims a meritocratic and altruistic justification for his dictatorship of the philosopher-kings. In religion, on the other hand, Plato is a
liberal, opposed to the traditional community practices for whose violation
Socrates was executed. Similarly in China, it is hard to decide wh&her the
Confucians were liberals or conservatives. They favor a benevolent rule and
restrictions on the arbitrary authority of the despot; at the same time they
are reactionaries in upholding ancient religious ceremonial, and when
political and economic reformers appeared during the Sung dynasty
(eleventh and twelfth centuries), the neo-Confucians staunchly opposed
them in the name of tradition.
If we are to continue to use the terminology of "liberal" and "conservative," we need to be aware that these have no fixed points on the structural
triangle, either in politics or religion. We can continue to mean by "liberal"
the fighter against authoritarianism, the defender of the underdog. In
religion, the "liberal" position can be described as that which is antidogmatic, favorable to spiritual freedom and innovation. By extension, secularism can be put into the array of religious stances; secularism is the version of antidogmatism which stresses intellectual flexibility and discovery
in realms that had previously been determined by religious doctrine. But we
cannot prejudge from which point of the triangle of religious organization a
"secular" move may be made. "Secularism" in belief, like "liberalism" in politics, is essentially oppositional; it is a movement against one of the points
of the triangle. But just as "liberation" can come by moving in any direction
away from an established lineup of power, any move toward another comer of
the triangle has the prospect of setting u p a new authority. Every revolt
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liberal
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S O C l O L O G Y OF R E L I G I O N
pares the way for a new orthodoxy, hence for future revolt in a different
direction.
In the interest of showing how we have arrived at our own situation in
the late twentieth century, I will confine the rest of the illustrations to the
Christian context. I will sample three periods in modern history.
FROM THE REFORMATION TO RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE
I Documentation for what follows comes largely flora a chapter on "The Secularization of the
lntellectual Base" from my work in progress, The Causes of Philosophies: A Sociological Theory of
lntellectual Change.
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Our conventional view of the 1500s and 1600s is that this was a time
when liberalism surged forward both in religion and in politics. 1 The
Protestants, especially in England and Holland, are the heroes, fighting for
religious and political liberty; the Catholics are cast as authoritarians and
dogmatists, epitomized by the Spanish Inquisition and the condemnation of
Galileo. We ought to recognize this as Protestant ideology. It has penetrated
deeply into the American scholarly world, since most of our historical
authorities were British and German Protestants.
What this picture misses is the authoritarianism and intolerance found
on the Protestant side as well. Insofar as the Reformation was a revolt
against the centralized power of the papacy, it moved the center of religious
authority either to the local community or to the national state. In either
case new forms of authoritarian coercion were applied. Calvinists favored
very strong community control over the individual; Calvin's Geneva became
a kind of early totalitarian state, and the Calvinist communities in the
Netherlands were coercive to local nonconformists. Our image is of the
Dutch fighting heroically for freedom against the Spanish Hapsburg
empire, but domestically they were violently intolerant of opposition. The
leader of the Arminian party was executed in 1618 by the Calvinists, and
his supporter, Grotius, was sentenced to life imprisonment; when Grotius
escaped, he fled not to another Protestant country but to France and the protection of Cardinal Richelieu.
The Protestant national churches were more efficient and better controlled than the old international Papacy; they were also more authoritarian. Thus we find, somewhat to our surprise, that it was the Catholic theologians, especially in Spain and Italy, who opposed the divine right of kings;
the Jesuits Francisco Suarez and Cardinal Bellarmine argue for the limitation of the state, while it is the English theologians who support the religious claims of King James I. As the absolutism of the state grew, it was the
Spanish Catholics who were among the first to put forth a claim for inalienable human rights; ir was by the extension of the Thomist doctrine of
natural law that the concept of international law was formulated by
Cisneros, Las Casas, and Vitoria. It is these who articulated the rights of
the Amerindians against the conquistadors, just as they claimed limits on
LIBERALSAND CONSERVATIVES, RELIGIOUSAND POLITICAL
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the power of the state to go to war. These are the leading Spanish theologians of the 1500s, contemporaries of the Reformation. Catholicism played
the role of universalism because organizationally it was the more centralized
and less parochial. The Protestants, mobilizing their local communities,
were more caught up in local interests; at the extreme, community enthusiasm translated into dogmatic intolerance.
Formally, the Catholic church represented the apex of the triangle, the
centralized organization with the fixed doctrine. But it was also the weaker
organization and the more complex one. The Papacy was a sprawling international organization, riven with internal conflicts. The papal chancery and
the legates sent as papal representatives throughout Europe represented
central authority. At the same time a good deal of church property was
locally held, and de facto accommodations had been reached by the 1300s
with powerful kings over lay power to tax church property (as in France,
England, and Spain). Central control of appointments had been expanding
since the antisimony reforms of the high Middle Ages, but de facto regional
powers held sway here too. The monastic and mendicant orders provided
another element of decentralization. They elected their own generals, held
their own councils, and managed their own property. The orders thus
operated within the church as the counterpart of the aristocracy and its
parliamentary structures in the state, providing a balance of power in
clerical poiitics. During the early 1400s, there had been an explicit move to
turn the entire church into a kind of republic, governed by regularly
convening councils. But the conciliar movement failed after the great
councils at Constance (1415-1417) and Basle (1431-1449); liberal reformers
like Cusanus, Bessarion, and Piccolomini went over to the side of papal
centralization because the councils of prelates were deadlocked in factional
bickering. At this point the decentralizing option appeared under the aspect
of corruption, and centralization looked to be the wave of reform.
By most modern criteria, the Catholic church was more liberal than the
Protestants until nearly 1700. This not to deny that Catholics could also be
extremely authoritarian. The Inquisition, the forced conversion and execution of Jews in Spain, the torture and burning of heretics were features of
this period as well as earlier. But such practices were not specific to
Catholicism. The Protestants, too, burned their heretics; the execution of
Servetus by Calvin at Geneva in 1553 is the counterpart to the burning of
Bruno at Rome in 1600. Judicial torture was used on both sides. Witch
burning blazed up during the conflicts of the religious wars, most luridly in
Germany during the 1500s, but such executions continued to be common in
England until the late 1600s (Thomas, 1971: 451-56). By modern standards
of individual rights, the entire period would be considered horrible; there was
little to choose between Catholics and Protestants in this respect.
If one were to stop the clock around the year 1520, which side would an
impartial observer say looked more modern? If one means by this which side
was reducing the authoritarianism of the state and the compulsory traditionalism of belief, the answer would almost certainly be the Catholic world.
The Renaissance popes were notable fi}r supporting the humanist revival of
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S O C I O L O G Y OF R E L I G I O N
2 By the time this appeared in 1543, the Reformation had intervened, making it much more
dangerous to be a scientiflc innovator; Catholic reactionary traditionalism grew in response to
Protestant neo-traditionalism.
3 There were of course many other factors involved in the Reformation (Cameron, 1991; Wuthnow,
1989). The Papacy was constantly in financial difficulties, both because of its military efforts as a
political power in ltaly, and to some extent because of the artistic patronage at the papal court, which
kept Michaelangelo constantly in arrears of his pay. Luther mobilized resistance in Germany to the
fund-raising campaigns of the sale of indulgences. This kind of financial crisis at the center, and
resistance to any further financial impositions by the oppositional centers, is a typical catalyst of state
breakdown and political revolution, as Goldstone (1991) shows; the same holds in catalyzing religious
revolutions.
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classical learning, and sponsored neopaganism in art and Platonist philosophy in the late 1400s. Leonardo da Vinci worked for Cesare Borgia, the
military adventurer who was son of Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503). The
infamous Pope Julius II (1503-13) was the patron of Raphael and
Michelangelo; Copernicus lectured on astronomy in Rome in 1500, and later
dedicated his new system to Pope Paul III (1534-49). 2 The Popes during the
outburst of the Reformation (Leo X,1513-21; Clement Vil, 1523-34) were
Medicis, from the Florentine family most strongly identified with patronage
of the secular arts and paganizing philosophies. It was just this worldly
munificence of the Papal court that aroused the Protestants and motivated
Luther to call the Pope the "Antichrist. ''3
The Jesuits, founded in the 1530s, continued those very themes that
raised the ire of the Protestants. By the 1600s, English-speaking Protestants regarded the Jesuits in approximately the same way that their
twentieth-century descendants regarded the KGB. In fact, the Jesuits were
rationalistic, innovative, and flexible. The Jesuits were antitraditionalistic
reformers, criticizing magic, legends, and the worship of saints. They carried
out a drastic reform of monastic life, abolishing choir, prayers, seclusion and
distinctive uniforms, in favor of activism to transform the world. They constructed a modern educational system, establishing free secondary schools
open to all social classes and teaching the latest curriculum, including
science. It is just these "modernist" qualities that made them so suspect by
the Protestants, who were advocating scriptural dogmatism and enthusiastic faith.
In politics, too, the Jesuits were at the liberal edge of their period. The
Spanish Jesuit theologian Molina in the 1580s formulated an ethics of
probabilism. Cognitions are less true, the more general they are; r
activity in the world always involves choices among mixed consequences of
greater or lesser evil. This implied a politics of moderation; crusades and
holy wars could not be justified, since no convictions could be certain enough
to support a no-holds-barred conflict. The Jesuits thereby became critics of
the divine rights of kings and of the absolute authority of the state. By contrast, the doctrine cuius regio, eius religio, which ended the German religious
wars in 1555 was an explicit denial of the separation of church and state;
LIBERALS A N D C O N S E R V A T I V E S , R E L I G I O U S A N D P O L I T I C A L
135
4 To forestall questions of personal bias, let me go on record to say that I am not a Catholic, and was
reared in the Presbyterian church. The foregoing analysis gradually dawned on me in recent years while
researching the medieval and early modern period. The following argument is documented in my "The
Weberian Revolution of the High Middle Ages" in Collins, 1986, and in Collins, The Causes of
Philosophies .
5 In the political dimension, Catholicism has little to do with the triumph of parliamentary
democracy, but neither does Protestantism. As indicated in previous paragraphs, the Catholics tended to
be more concerned to limit the power of the state, while the Protestants tended to support it. But the
main dynamic here is the clash of king against aristocracy and the ability of each to raise revenues from
the rest of the population; the effect of the church on this aspect of modernization is rather peripheral.
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Calvinist theocracy was even more extreme in fusing both spheres into a
single community of faith and compulsion.
Through the early 1500s and even later, it is the Catholics who are the
liberalizers and secularizers; the Protestants are the reactionaries in most
spheres. One is tetnpted to speculate that the West would have modernized
more rapidly if the Protestant Reformation had not occurred. This is no
doubt a shocking judgment; since we have been brought up on a social science
formulated by Protestant and Jewish scholars, both with a strong antiCatholic tradition. This includes Max Weber, who inherited much of the
viewpoint of German pietism. If by modernity we mean the complex of formalized bureaucracy in organization, market capitalism in economy, parliamentary democracy in politics, and scientific secularism in culture, one
can make a case that these had more roots in Catholicism than in
Protestantism. 4 The bureaucratization of the West begins with the papal
bureaucracy of the Middle Ages; the Church's universities are the base from
which educated officials, originally clerics, spill over into secular administration. Market capitalism, especially in its rationalized forms, has its first
big upsurge again within the Middle Ages, and within a sector of the
Church: the round of expansion of the monasteries from 1050 to the 1200s
was the cutting edge of economic development in Europe, setting off the first
wave of agricultural capitalism as well as the first wave of mills and
foundaries; again, in its later phase the market economy outgrows its
church origins and expands into the secular sphere. 5
Protestants are not especially antimodernist on these dimensions, but
they are not very promodernist either. The Protestant shift toward mass
community participation in the church is a debureaucratizing move, which
had relatively little effect on the main trend toward bureaucratizing secular
organization. The old Weberian issue of whether Protestant theology gave
impetus to entrepreneurial motivation has now been largely transformed by
the recognition that capitalist market structures existed very widely by the
1600s, and that the expansion of capitalism was especially in agriculture
and in rural industries; capitalist participants in these were as likely to be
aristocrats as bourgeois, and to belong to various religious faiths (Goldstone,
1991: 78-79, 141; Wallerstein, 1989: 3-53). There is no reason to believe that
Protestantism was an essential ingredient either in the development of
modern capitalism or in any of the other features of modernity. Historical
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SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
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thought experiments are rather hard to make, insolar as our conception of
past history is filled up with what actuaUy happened; nevertheless one can
imagine that something like modern social and economic structures could
have come about by the continuation of Renaissance Catholicism, minus the
detour of the Reformation.
But what about modern science? Our prevailing conception, again under
the influence of Protestant historiography, is that science comes from the
Protestant world and was opposed by Catholic conservatives. Here we have
another version of the simple imagery of Protestants as liberals in the realm
of thought, opening the way for freedom of inquiry and breaking down traditionalism. Nevertheless there was plenty of Protestant opposition to scientific innovation; Copernicus was not very widely accepted by anyone,
Protestant or Catholic, until well into the 1600s (Westman, 1980); and the
Protestant leaders were more concerned with returning to Biblical origins
than with scientific innovations. The wave of enthusiasm for scientific discovery that began around the 1590s is largely centered in the Catholic
world, although it picked up supporters among the Protestants fairly
rapidly too. Since Copernicus (himself a canon of a Catholic cathedral) was
largely ignored for 60 years, the initial takeoff of sustained discovery in
science came primarily in mathematics; and here the leading innovators m
Cardano and Tartaglia (1540s, Italy), Viera (1590s, France), Descartes and
Fermat (1630s/40s, France) were all Catholics. Galileo, who popularized new
research methods in physics, got in trouble with his church patrons in 1616
and again in the 1630s; nevertheless his own work originated in Catholic
networks, and especially under the influence of predecessors in the Jesuit
college at Rome. The Jesuits were active on the forefront of investigation
from Clavius (1570s) to Cavalieri (1630s); and Galileo's main disciples,
TorriceUi and Viviani (1640s/50s), like Descartes, were Jesuit pupils.
As counterpoint to this movement of Catholic scientists we can muster
Protestant names as well" Tycho Brahe and Kepler at Prague; Napier,
Gilbert, and Harvey in Britain; Stevin and Snel in Holland. But the
Catholic world was the center of the scientific revolution, at least in its
early phase. The social networks that make up the movement came together
in Paris in the 1630s, around two priests, Mersenne and Gassendi; they
established a circle of correspondence that became the basis for the first
system of scientific publications, and propagandized the works of Galileo,
Descrates and their followers. The famous "Invisible College" that formed in
England during the Commonwealth in the 1650s was an offshoot of this
Parisian network. Our Protestant-centered image emerges only ir we focus
on the late 1600s, when the Invisible College became the Royal Society, and
Boyle and Newton became the famous Protestant scientists. But to project
this picture backwards is an anachronism.
I am not proposing the influence of a Weberian cultural ethos in favor of
science but reversing its source to the Catholic side. I am not suggestŸ
there was a "Catholic ethic" that favored scŸ
to substitute for the
Mertonian Puritan ethos. The key features of the Catholic world were not
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ideological but structural. In the triangle of organizational forms, the
Catholics are the cosmopolitans; I have suggested that they balance between
the centralizing and rationalized doctrines of the Papacy and the aristocratic decentralization of the Orders. The Protestants rebel in the direction
of mass participation by the local community; this tends to make them more
emotional and also more traditionalistic; in addition, the Protestant tendency to fuse with the political organization of the state eliminates another
space for freedom of intellectual action.
The Catholic world was more open to science notas a matter of official
policy, but because it was the more complicated organizational structure. It
had more internal contradictions and conflicts. Wielding long-established
administrative powers, the Catholic leaders tended to be more worldly, less
dogmatic, more flexible. In the eyes of emotionally aroused opponents, this
smacked of cynicism. Thus Cardinal Richelieu, virtual ruler of France
during the years 1624-42 when he served as prime minister to a weak king,
appeared in Anglo-Protestant eyes a s a diabolical figure. For reasons of
state, Richelieu could oppress the French Protestant minority while
surreptitiously giving military aid to the Protestant armies who fought his
own enemy, Catholic Spain. Richelieu was a patron of the avant-garde
intellectuals; he supported the Descartes circle, and his personal employees
(.including his librarian, Naud› belonged to a circle called the Libertins
Erudits consisting of skeptical freethinkers. Richelieu made Paris the home
for refugees evading religious persecution: Grotius escaping from the life
sentence of the Calvinists in Holland was given aid by Richelieu; so was
Campanella escaping from a Spanish prison in Naples. Richelieu was liberal
in religion as far as doctrinal matters go; he opposed the Huguenots because
they were an organizational enemy of the centralized control of the Church
as well as troublemakers for the secular state. In politics, one would be
tempted to label Richelieu a conservative, since he was the main architect of
the centralizing French monarchy against the decentralizing opposition of
the nobles; our judgment comes from the tradition of French aristocrats like
Montesquieu and Tocqueville,who saw centralized control as a threat to
liberty.
What we have come to think of as the modern connotation of "liberal"
and "conservative" w• established only at the end of the 1600s. Richelieu
seems to be a conservative in politics and a liberal in religion; the great
English propagandist of science, Francis Bacon, is another Machiavellian
state minister, a supporter of royal absolutism. The coalition of parliamentarist liberals in politics with secularizers in religion emerges around the
1690s. Now the center of "modernization" shifts to England; the great figure
is John Locke. The reason this comes about in a Protestant country, however,
is not because the intrinsic trajectory of the religion is toward tolerance,
separation of church and state, and political democracy. England was no
center of toleration early in the century. Queen Elizabeth's physician, the
Portuguese Dr. Lopez, was tortured, castrated, disemboweled and quartered
in the year 1594, the standard punishment of the time, for alleged conspiracy with the Spaniards (Strachey, 1971: 48-62). Bacon imagined science
138
SOCIOLOGYOF RELIGION
THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND MODERN
LIBERALICONSERVATIVE POLARIZATION
When we reach the 1700s we are on familiar terrain. In the French
Enlightenment we meet the "modern" coalition. The philosophes and their
supporters are liberals in politics, critiquing the Old Regime and preparing
the way for the French revolution. In religion they are secularizers, often
materialists and atheists, or at least Deists, rejecting scriptural tradition
and substituting a Supreme Being of Reason.
Even here there is some ambiguity in the meaning of political liberalism. That is because the Old Regime was a mixture of organizational forms,
aristocratic plus monarchical; oppositional reform could push toward any of
the points of the triangle. We can see this by looking briefly at several key
figures.
Montesquieu was the great advocate of constitutional government and
the enemy of monarchical despotism. His doctrine of the separation of
powers had great influence on Jefferson and on the formulation of the
United States Constitution. But Montesquieu was n o t a democrat in the
sense of mass participation. His base is the aristocracy, and it is the
independent centers of power in the form of aristocratic privileges that
provides his model for the ideal state. Montesquieu combines this decentralizing liberalism with a universalistic rationalism in the sphere of
religion. He relativizes Christianity by writing from the point of view of a
Persian visitor to the West, simultaneously relativizing Islam by exposing
the arbitrary differences in customs. His religious message is implicitly
toward secularization, or at least simplification of religion down to its
transcultural essentials.
Voltaire holds a similar attitude about religion. He satirizes the anthropomorphism and the arbitrary customs, of the Christian scriptures, and
battles against religious persecution. Voltaire's purified religion is Deism,
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not as freedom of inquiry but as a centralized state directory of knowledge,
and sent opponents like Sir Walter Raleigh to be beheaded at the Tower of
London. Nor were the Puritans much better. Their dominance in the
Commonwealth of the 1640s and 1650s was n o t a democracy but a military
dictatorship. Toleration carne when the religious wars were over; not because
either side had wiUed it, but because neither was able to force Ÿ doctrine on
the others. It was the exhaustion of religious conflict that became institutionalized in British toleration; secularization triumphed because religious
compulsion was stalemated. This took place in Britain not because it was a
Protestant country, but because it was the site where struggles over religious organization happened to become stalemated first. Organizationally,
this meant that none of the three vertices of the triangle was able to destroy
the others; we get instead a grand compromise among elements of each. Out
of this compromise the modern conception of political/religious liberalism
was born.
LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES, RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL
139
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the worship of Reason. In politics, Voltaire is a reformer, but his ideal is the
enlightened monarch. Voltaire regards the aristocracy as upholders of unjust privilege and traditional prejudice. Often in exile from ParŸ Voltaire
found patronage from Frederick the Great. A s a Deist, the Prussian King
supported not only Voltaire but more extreme materialists such as La
Mettrie. Frederick was struggling to bring his Prussian aristocracy under
the control of the central state; his efforts to build a rationalized bureaucracy involved pressing the Lutheran clergy into government service as local
records-keepers and schoolmasters. All this epitomized Voltaire's ideal of rationalized Absolutism, reform by centralization under the rule of law.
Montesquieu and Voltaire, despite their common "liberalism," are at
opposite corners of the triangle in the organizational structure they
expected to be the vehicle for reform. Not surprisingly, they fell into conflict;
Voltaire accused Montesquieu of being a mouthpiece for the privileges of the
aristocracy, and Montesquieu regarded Voltaire a s a facile courtier. The
third pole of the triangle was also represented, although it received less
attention. Jean Meslier, a country priest, fulminated against the privileges
of all hierarchies - - ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and monarchical alike. He
regarded scriptural religion asa tool invented to oppress the poor, and hoped
for a revolution in which "all the great ones of the earth, all the nobles,
should be hanged and strangled in the entrails of the priests" (Hazard, 1963:
55).
The revolution of 1789 brought together the critiques emanating from
all three points of the triangle. Aristocrats revolted against the king, then
lost their heads on the guillotine when power shifted to the crowd. The
moment of revolt was organizationally unstable; the leaders of the crowd
could not maintain power; Napoleon established a centralizing dictatorship,
which in turn was followed by restoration of king and aristocracy.
Christianity was abolished and then reestablished. The main political
legacy of this period was that it established the ideal of the Left a s a
combination of all three lines of critique. Libert› egalit› fratemit› combined
respectively the slogans of aristocratic decentralizers (liberty of individual
rights), centralizing absolutists (equality under the law), and mass
participation (fraternity of the entire community).
The French Revolution also marked the emergence of conservativism in
the modern sense. Aristocratic opponents of the revolution like
Chateaubriand and de Maistre were traditionalists in every dimension.
They were authoritarians in politics, not in order to impose a uniformity of
law, but because they advocated tradition for its own sake. Conservatism
goes romanticist, opposed to the rationalism of the libemls; the conservatives now uphold variety, arbitrariness, conventionality as it exists with all
its historical peculiarities. They are similarly conservative in religion, upholding precisely its mysteriousness, its opposition to mtional understanding. The French conservatives support the Pope, not because the Papacy is a
center of universalism and codified doctrine, as a medieval reformer like
Nicholas Cusanus had done, but because the Pope represents authority and
tradition.
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SOCIOLOGYOF RELIGION
LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATIVISM
A T THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Let us skip ahead another 100 years. In the late 1800s and early 1900s
the liberal/conservative dimension is congruent between religion and politics. Moderate religious reformers become welfare state activists. In England
the proponents of Idealist philosophy turn religion into a generalized spirituality and moral activism; T. H. Green, Bonsanquet, and Toynbee become
spearheads of the welfare mission to the poor. Those further left in politics
are also further left in religion. The Marxists were militant atheists and
militant opponents of class privilege. The same is true of left intellectuals
short of the revolutionary extreme. Bertrand Russell was a famous atheist
and a famous liberal. This package holds together through the 1930s and
1940s. The Vienna Circle of logical positivists were militant critics of
everything that smacked of religion; they aimed their weapons of purified
reason against the vestiges of faith still found in the halfway house of
Idealist philosophy. The logical positivists were perhaps the apex in Western history of militant secularism; their reform in the realm of belief was to
replace every vestige of God with the methods of science. In politics, the
logical positivists were lar to the left. The Vienna Circle leader, Neurath,
was an active socialist. With the rise of the Nazis, the opposition was made
even more explicit: on one side militant conservativism in politics and
antirationalism in belief; on the other side, militant liberalism in politics
a n d a militant attack on nonrational belief. With Karl Popper, writing
explicitly with the Nazis in mind, nonscientific thinking is equated with
the road to fascista.
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One might ask how modern conservativism stands with respect to the
triangles of political and religious organization. The answer, peculiarly, is
that it has no obvious home base from which to implement its stance.
Modern conservativism is romanticist, not least because it is an antirationalist opposition to all existing conditions; ir likes neither the greater
participation of the masses, the uniformity imposed by the central state, nor
the autonomous rights of the individual. It is not surprising that modern
conservative movements have temporarily embraced each organizational
alternative: the authoritarian state, the fascist mass movement, the
disdainful aristocrat. Modern conservativism exists in purity only in the
realm of ideology; its anchor is not an organizational structure but rather
the existence of liberal opponents. Modern conservatism crystallizes later
than modern Iiberalism, because it is a reaction against liberalism. And
since modern liberalism consists in the omni-alliance of all three points of
the triangle m centralized rule of law, decentralized autonomous rights,
mass participation m modern conservativism has nowhere to go except to be
a pure opposition, negating wherever it can, while in practice it is forced to
use the organizational weapons of its opponents.
LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES, RELIGIOUSAND POLITICAL
141
AND NOW WHAT?
In the 1980s and 1990s, the "modern" liberal/conservative dimension
that was created in the Enlightenment is in disarray. Avant-garde intellec-
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The conservativism of this period tends to shadow the liberals at every
point. In the nineteenth century, as philosophical Idealists were turning religion into moral activism, Kierkegaard reacted by stressing the arbitrary
and miraculous in religion. In keeping with the symmetry of political and
religious positions, Kierkegaard was a reactionary in politics (Eagleton,
1990: 191-92). He wrote just at the time that Denmark had adopted a liberal
constitution allowing male suffrage, freedom of speech, and religious tolerance. Kierkegaard took his stand against these concessions to "the mob," extoUing censorship, monarchy, and the established church. Kierkegaard was
adopted as precursor by the twentieth century existentialists, particularly
in their conservative branch. Here the leading figure was Heidegger, who
wrote just at the time of the Vienna Circle and was a prime object of their
attacks. Heidegger was a former Catholic seminarian who adopted modern
philosophical tools of phenomenology to produce a philosophy of genuine
human existence. Heidegger regarded science and technology as a mechanical surface that hides the authenticity of existential experience; the core of
that experience is profoundly antirational, a negation of any reason for itself
to exist, sheer arbitrary thrownness in the world. Heidegger was a political
conservative, who dallied with the Nazis and entertained the belief that
their antirationalism represented a breaking through modern inauthenticity. Heidegger was saved from all-out fascism by his pessimism; no mere
social movement satisfies the deep incompleteness that conservatives now
see as the human condition.
Another branch of the existentialists, the group around Sartre, Camus
and de Beauvoir, maintained the classic combination of liberalism in both
politics and religion. These existentialists are militant atheists, determined
that the human individual must create his or her own meaning of life. In
effect they fuse religious and political action; the existentially authentic
way of creating oneself is by making choices, and these are the choices for
political combat. This Parisian existentialist circle was at its height during
the Nazi occupation, and this setting shaped their position. Now the Left no
longer has to depend upon science or reason; these are limited, unable to
arrive at real human existence. Sartre recognized that reason can give no
grounds for itself, nor can reason answer Heidegger's question as to why
anything should exist at all in the first place. But the upshot is to go back
neither to political nor religious tradition. Instead the trajectory of opposition becomes a value in itself. Sartre and Camus organized the anti-Nazi
underground; after the war Sartre threw his political energy into building a
revolutionary Left, de Beauvoir into creating a feminist movement. Camus
made opposition into a self-grounding Cartesian formula: I rebel, therefore
we exist. His work The Rebel became one of the favorite books of the
American civil rights workers in the early 1960s.
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SOCIOLOGYOF RELIGION
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tuals consider themselves "postmodernists." There is no basis for reason, no
foundation for thought of action. "Postpositivism" is in vogue. Logical positivists in the style of the Vienna Circle are now considered to be authoritarians of the mind; their leftist position in politics is forgotten, and they are
lumped with their enemies as statist tota[itarians. In their critique of modern omnicommercialism, the postmodernists maintain some continuity with
the themes of the Left, which is not surprising since the movement
originated among disillusioned Parisian ex-Marxists. But the main oppositional dynamic is to repudiate the "grand narratives" such as the political
eschatology of Marxism. What is put in their place is a generalized dissatisfaction with contemporary society in which everything is regarded as false.
Such a stance would seem to continue at least an agnostic attitude
toward religion. But the major theme of today's intellectuals is to prove that
one is not intolerant of other positions; the positivist critique of religion is
undermined, and faith is extolled as an authentic mode of life. The postmodernist intellectual is by no means a fundamentalist, but she or he is determined to offend no one's right to be fundamentalist in religion or chauvinistic in ethnicity, provided that the religion or the ethnicity is not a dominant Western one. The correct Western intellectual today believes strongly
in nothing so strongly as the critique of Western rationality. The intellectuals of the most popular left-oppositional movement, feminista, tend to
adoptan essentialist stance that explicitly condemns moral universalism
(e.g., Gilligan, 1982). In the long run, we are apparently seeing a swing of
the intellectuals away from their "modernist" opposition to religious traditionalism. Late twentieth century intellectuals have come around to the
arguments put forward by conservative intellectuals since the time of the
French revolution. Ir is not surprising that philosophical admiration has
turned to those existentialists who were most politically conservative and
most antimodernist, Nietzsche and Heidegger.
This swing of the intellectuals goes along with a general shift to the
right. The politics of the 1980s saw the dominance of aggressively marketoriented regimes in the United States, Britain, Japan and Germany, and
the fall of the welfare-state socialists from power in Sweden. With the
collapse of the socialist regimes of the Soviet bloc, the Left is on the defensive everywhere. The underlying structural issue is not merely that capitalism rules the roost unabashedly, but that no alternatives ate seriously envisioned to the dominance of private wealth in the market. There is a
collapse of faith in the government to take effective action for the well-being
of the people. Government is widely regarded as a clumsy, self-interested
bureaucracy that strangles initiative. We have come almost to the complete
negation of the views of Voltaire, aiming to use the laws of the enlightened
state to defend all citizens against the inequalities of private privilege.
In terms of the triangle, the centralization point represents the stateadministered economy; this is the socialist of welfare state conception that
has become delegitimated today. Mass participation represents the ideal of
local self-sufficient economic communities; today this alternative is little
LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES, RELIGIOUS A N D POLITICAL
143
FIGURE 4
socialism/
welfare state
local
subsistence
economy
capitalist
corporation
The world of corporations asa plurality of independent despotisms is an
ideal type, not yet the dominant reality. It remains limited, partly because
the laws of the central state still intrude, less and less to support the rights
of workers, but still in the form of regulation to protect ethnic minorities
and women, and to some extent consumers and the environment. The conservative mood at the end of the twentieth century idealizes private business, in large part because the alternative forms have been tried and failed
to deliver on their ideological promises. No doubt there will be a further wave
of disillusionment in the future as the privileges of the new business aristocracy attract enemies, and their efficiency turns out to be no greater than
other organizational forms.
In the religious realm, the one organizational form that is thriving is
the community of mass participation. The activist period of the 1960s
among leftist youth left its heritage primarily to the religious right. The
participatory style includes the adoption of popular music, an antihierarchic liturgy, the emotional emphasis of devotion, even the deliberate use of
psychological group-dynamics techniques. The structures that have lost
ground are the centralized churches, with their more professionalized staffs
and more rationalized theologies. The third point of the religious triangle,
the spiritual aristocracy of mystics, survives only marginally. Although
there was an upsurge of interest in Hindu and Buddhist mysticism during
the period of "counterculture" mobilization in the 1960s, religious mysticism is hard to institutionalize without a monastic base; and modern
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more than a romanticist image of the family farm or premodern village, although some utopian communes have attempted precariously to put it into
practice from time to time. What remains is the decentralized economy of
multiple centers; as in the political version, this arrangement is highly
stratified, an economic aristocracy rather than a feudal-military one. The
rights and privileges that are guarded against centralizing control are those
of the business corporation; claiming autonomy from outside interference,
today's corporation attempts to exert unrestricted authority over its subordinates within.
144
SOCIOLOGYOF RELIGION
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Western society is structurally inhospitable to monasticism. Thus it
appears one point alone of the religious triangle is becoming dominant: the
enthusiastic community of mass participation. The thrust of such
communities is toward conservatism in the realm of doctrine, even if they
are antitraditionalist in liturgy; and they ally with conservatives in
politics.
This appears to be the pattern not only in Christianity but in the other
thriving religions of the world, Islam and extremist Hinduism. Islam has
always been a religion without a centralized hierarchy, even without a
consecrated priesthood; it is based on the community participation of all
(male) believers, led by the most learned, pious, and enthusiastic. The local
community authoritarianism of Islam exemplifies the ambiguities of the
religious democracy of mass mobilization, unmitigated by the centralizing
rule of law or autonomous rights anchored in a decentralizing balance of
powers. Because of this structural democracy of believers, Islam has one
aspect that looks liberal in terms of Western traditions, while at the same
time it reinforces extremely conservative positions in terms of individual
rights and cultural freedom. The structural mixture in Islam is quite
different from the classic liberalism and conservatism of Europe since the
Enlightenment.
The religious future of the world seems to be a contest between rival conservativisms. The flourishing parts of both Islam and Christianity uphold
scriptural particularism, and thus seem destined to fuel mutually hostile
nationalisms. The major structural difference is that fundamentalist Islam
fuses religion with politics, whereas participatory communities in Christianity, despite their tendency to conservative politics, tend to remain enclaves in the private sphere. Given the organizational structures of the
Western state and economy, this privatized religion seems likely to continue. The bureaucratic state, for all its unpopularity, is not easily penetrated by religious enthusiasm; any political gains for the religious right in
enforcing their doctrines by government action are likely to undermine
religious faith in administrative banalities. In addition, there is a mismatch between the prevailing organizational forms of conservative religion
localized mass participation communities - - and of conservative economy
the dominance of the autonomous, hierarchic corporation. Structurally,
contemporary conservatism is split among incompatible organizational
forms.
The history of liberalism has been the history of opposition by the underdogs, the unprivileged, against established power. Modern conservatism
emerged as the opposition to that opposition. Conservatism became popular
in modern times because of the structural domination, by the liberals. Al1
three poles of the triangle have been tried as vehicles for overcoming domination; all three turn into modes of domination in their own right (see
Figure 5).
Have we now learned the lesson of history, that liberal reforms never
deliver what they promise? But the victories of conservatives do not wipe the
LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES, RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL
145
FIGURE 5
equality
regimentation
OR
liberty ethn~x:entrism
privileged
elite
slate clean of problems; they just set up the next round of the fight.
Liberalism, despite its tendencies to self-destruct, also undermines its own
self-destruction. Essentialist feminists nevertheless have to appeal to the
universal rule of law fi)r protection of women's opportunities; despite the rejection of alleged white male rationality and abstract rights, the interests of
feminists put them in opposition to re[igious conservatives over issues like
abortion and new reproductive technologies. In another area in which the
liberal tradition has caught itself in contradictions, affirmative action
tracks appear to be permanently institutionalizing segregated career channels at the same time that they lessen inequalities. The liberal device for
expanding minority educational opportunities, culturally specific tracks
such as ethnic studies programs, prornote another version of separatism,
along with ideologies of ethnic particularism and anti-Westernism.
But although late twentieth-century liberalism undermines its own
universalism in contents, the structures through which it operates are the
classic liberal ones. It is through the rule of law, enforced by the centralized
state, that these programs are put into effect. Moreover, conservatism,
despite widespread popular agreement with its dislike of bureaucracy and
centralization, seems to be making little inroad against just these kinds of
laws and programs. Surprisingly, liberals and conservatives are less far
apart than they have been for centuries. Liberals have lost their faith in a
superior rationality and in a reforming path to put it into effect; they keep
on using the old liberal organizational techniques, but their hearts are not
in them. Conservatives seem to have won the philosophical battle, but they
have no organizational device for putting their beliefs into practice. The
inertia and inevitability of bureaucratic structures seems destined to dominate the public realm, entangling the ascendancy of the capitalist corporation. The utopŸ of mass participation is viable only in the intermittent
assemblies of private life, where this structure supports the prevalence of
religious conservatism. Liberalism and conservativism alike appear to be
becoming little more than romanticist sentiments, moods of sporadic
opposition without realistic hopes of being able to embody their airas in a
social form.
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community
146
SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
The disillusioned feeling of deadlock is what appears to be distinctive to
the ideological situation of the late twentieth century. This is what gives
the sense that we are at the end of the "modern" epoch.
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