Introduction

The literatures on religious and family change in the West are strikingly similar.Footnote 1 Both contain theorizations of a golden age that came to an end with the advent of modernity through macro-processes of structural-functional differentiation, privatization, rationalization, and individualization that are interpreted respectively as secularization and deinstitutionalization. Likewise, both literatures also contain important critiques of this view and seek instead to understand how religion and family are lived in everyday life—concluding that reality is more complex, that people often balance the demands of tradition and the privilege of choice, that religions and families exist in manifold ways beyond the typical institutional definitions and indicators used to measure their vitality, and that the pluralization of religious and familial fields point instead to the resilience of the two domains, if not their strengthening. In this paper, I review the ways in which theorizations of religion and family share parallel trajectories in modernity to suggest fruitful cross-fertilizations that would help scholars of both fields to better speak to each other and ultimately conceptualize their own respective domains with greater theoretical clarity and empirical precision.

Recent work has suggested the need for such an endeavor. Speaking of conceptualizing religion and family together, Mahmood (2015:9) tells how “their delineation as quintessential elements of private life under secular modernity has created an explosive symbiosis between them that is historically unique” (see, for example, Friedland’s, 2002 and, 2011 work on the erotic logic of religious nationalism and, relatedly, Whitehead & Perry, 2019). In an article testing the extent of secularization in the U.S., Voas and Chaves (2016:1548) find that generational differences are the main factor in the aggregate decline of religious commitment in the U.S. and make a call to investigate the causal mechanisms that lie behind them—suggesting that changes in family structure might reveal some of them.Footnote 2 And, Eberstadt (2013) offers a prolegomenon to a new way of theorizing religious change in the West that specifically links family decline with secularization, in that order. While the empirical connections between the two domains are becoming increasingly clear and important to understand (see also Edgell, 2013; Smith et al., 2019; Smith and Adamczyk 2021), the interpretations of such changes have not been compared in a systematic way. Doing so allows us to see what different theories of religious and family change contribute, where each fall short, and opens the door for a synthesis of current scholarship.

The present paper seeks to do this and is organized into three parts. In the first part, I present the standard modernization thesis common to both religion and family. I give a brief definition of modernity, describe the character of premodern religious and familial life, discuss its key process of differentiation, and detail the supposed final ending points of modernization for religion and family—secularization and deinstitutionalization—which are said to occur in spite of potential countertrends. In the second part, I discuss alternative interpretations of modernization that challenge the assumptions of the standard modernization paradigm. These emphasize the contingent nature of culture and history, the inherently relational nature of human life, and the somewhat paradoxical benefits of choice. I argue that both the standard modernization paradigm and the alternatives offer useful insights into understanding religious and familial change, but that they do so in inconsistent ways. In the third part, I give a brief discussion on the relative merits of the competing paradigms and suggest a way to integrate them with an approach informed by Weber’s value sphere perspective and recent work in institutional logics. This approach shows how differentiation happens through people, not to them; and while grounded in the subjective meanings that motivate people’s practices, it retains the ability to say when some types of practices are more religious or familial than others. I conclude by discussing how this approach could improve our theorizations of religious and family change in modernity and lead to a promising new avenue of study for both scholars of religion and family as well as those who study institutional change, generally.

Part I: Standard modernization theory

Defining modernity

In detailing the trajectories of both religion and family in response to modernity, it is helpful to start with a basic definition of what modernity is and the claims around religion and family that pertain to modernization. Steve Bruce, one of the last and most fervent supporters of the standard modernization theory in the field of religion defines modernization as the following:

Modernization is itself a multifaceted notion, which encompasses the industrialization of work; the shift from villages to towns and cities; the replacement of the small community by the society; the rise of individualism; the rise of egalitarianism; and the rationalization both of thought and of social organization (2002:2).

Others include additional useful, though abstract, concepts such as differentiation, specialization, segmentation, autonomization, societalization, systematization, relativization, privatization, generalization, detraditionalization, and pluralization to describe the process of modernization (Bellah et al., 1985; Berger, 1967; Dobbelaere, 1999; Heelas et al., 1996; Luckmann, 1967; Martin, 1978; Parsons, 1967; Tschannen, 1991; Wilson, 1969). All these terms, and the trends they describe, map similarly across both religion and family—though, in specific, the term secularization is used in religion and the term deinstitutionalization will be used for our discussion of family, following Cherlin (2004).

The central claim that comes with the standard modernization theory, as pertains to religion, is that “modernization creates problems for religion” (Bruce, 2002:2). Or, in other words, the more of the modernizing processes listed above have occurred within a given society, the less religion there will be (e.g., less individual belief, less collective involvement in religious practices, less identification with organized religious bodies, less authority of religion in relation to other societal spheres, etc.). For family, the claim about how modernization affects family is largely the same. The transition to modernity sets in motion a series of processes that undermine family structure, function, solidarity, and eventually the norms, meaning, and institutional vitality of family all together (evidenced by declining and delayed marriage and childbearing, increases in divorce, non-marital cohabitation and childrearing, and the rise in the acceptance of alternative lifestyles within marriage based on cultural shifts around gender and sexuality). A fully modern world would be a world without religion or family, at least as traditionally understood. Yet it is this last caveat that is an all-important consideration when examining modernization and its implications for religion and family today. Without a reference point of what the world was like before modernity, we can’t evaluate the changes that modernization is said to bring about. Thus, it is helpful to set the context of modernization by describing the most common accounts of religious and family life in pre-modern times.Footnote 3

Premodern religion and family

The character of the pre-modern world, and the extent to which it differs from the present, is always a matter of starting and end points. If in previous times, people were not as religious as we thought, or if in the present people are not as irreligious as we think, the whole secularization via modernization thesis is thrown into question. But it partly depends on how far back you go. At one point in history, religion and family were understood to be inseparable (Bodel & Olyan, 2012). Gauchet (1999) observes, “Life in religious society involves a very different way of being than we know in our secular age: we must imagine prehistoric times where ever-present gods controlled every aspect of daily reality, and where ancestor worship grounded life’s meaning in a far-off past.” Similarly, Durkheim’s mentor Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges (1874:51) notes the role of ancestor worship and how the religious and the familial were co-constitutive of each other:

The members of the ancient family were united by something more powerful than birth, affection, or physical strength; this was the religion of the sacred fire, and of dead ancestors. This caused the family to form a single body, both in this life and in the next. The ancient family was a religious rather than a natural association.

These far back accounts give a picture of a world in which religion, family, and other societal spheres were all housed under a similar tent, or for Berger (1967), a “sacred canopy.” As Weber also describes, premodern life was organized around the family unit and the “Gods of Household” (Weber, 1993); Bellah, 1999:279) observes that the family was indeed “the baseline from which all later development begins.”

The most common debates over whether there was a golden age of faith or family typically take their starting places in a relatively more recent past. For religion, late medieval Europe till the time preceding the industrial revolution is the most disputed benchmark for pre-modern religious vitality. Before the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, religion played a transnational role in providing an overarching frame between states. And even after religion became the property of nation states (Thomas, 2007), the church still dominated the political, economic, and social landscapes of people’s lives (Bruce, 2002:56; Gorski, 2000). Yet, the extent to which the historical, and rather undisputed, dominance of the institutional church translated into actual religiosity among individuals is still very much contested. Stark (1999), for example, notes how aristocrats, masses, and even clergy were not faithful attendees in religious services as the golden age mythos would suggest. Churches were unheated and pews were hard, making worship uncomfortable and unenticing. Masses were in languages foreign to most, including clergy (who were often far undertrained). And the relatively few people who did attend services often acted very inappropriately—gossiping, spitting, sleeping, knitting, farting, and publicly scoffing (Thomas, 1971)—, betraying the seriousness to which true religious worship would seem to require. However, Bruce (2002:51) counters, no one ever lives up perfectly to the standards set before them:

We might find such behaviour disrespectful and see it as proof of slight commitment, but we would miss the more important point that people still felt obliged, by God as much as by social pressure, to be there even when there was so little for them to do [given the nonparticipatory nature of the masses then].

There was still a widespread concern for the soul. The wealthy would leave large sums of money upon their deaths for burial masses. Theology was treated as the highest of disciplines. Art, architecture, music, and literature were almost always of a religious nature. And people were highly superstitious, or irrationally religious, such that people were, Bruce concludes, “indubitably religious” (47; see also Bruce, 1995).

Regarding the family, many debates have revolved around the structure of family relations in pre-modern society, whether they were mainly nuclear or extended. If extended, as was the long-held orthodoxy, then the isolated nuclear families of modernity, even if a functional adaptation (Parsons & Bales, 1955), could be conceived of as a type of loss in terms of overall family solidarity (Popenoe, 1993). However, if families have always been nuclear, then the extended families of the Victorian Era (which nuclearized upon further industrialization and importation to America) are the anomaly that need explaining (Ruggles, 1987). These are largely empirical questions, but matter when trying to examine the extent to which modernity brought about a substantive decline in the family—which, as stated before, always depends on a historically specific point of reference as well as a definition of what family is (Coontz, 2000). What also matters though is not the particular nature of the familial household but how the family interacted generally with the rest of society, or the role the family played prior to modernization.

Historian Demos (1970:183–184) tells how in the Plymouth Colonies, circa 1620, the family played the central role as society’s organizing principle. He tells how the family was a business in that it was the center of production and exchange, a school in that parents were the ones bound by law to educate their children (especially in the reading of the scriptures), a vocational institute in that apprenticeships almost always occurred in domestic settings, and a church in that families were obliged to actively participate in forms of “family worship” alongside more formal community devotional activities (see also Christiano, 2000). As well, the family was also a “house of correction” and a “welfare institute.” Criminals would be sentenced to live in the homes of reputable citizens to work as servants (in hopes of bringing about needed character reform), and the sick, the parentless, and the poor would also be helped primarily through the direct care of the family, becoming a permanent or a temporary part of a given family’s household. A person’s place within society and place within a family were often seen as synonymous. The family was not a part of society, or even the “backbone” of society but, as Cherlin (2009:40) writes, “it [the family] was society.”

Differentiation

As can be seen, the backdrop by which one makes sense of modernization constitutes, in large part, the subsequent theorization of religious and family change. Standard modernization accounts of both secularization and the deinstitutionalization of the family start off from a perceived state of holistic unity that became fragmented with the advent of modernity. This process is known in the literature as differentiation and is most often conceived of in structural-functional terms. Bruce (2002:8) defines structural differentiation as “the fragmentation of social life as specialized roles and institutions are created to handle specific features or functions previously embodied in or carried out by one role or institution.” Like Demos’s account of the premodern family, Bruce tells how before modernization, institutional religion played multiple roles. Clergy, for example, could be “schoolteachers, historians, propagandists, public administrators and military strategists” (14). With differentiation, educational, media, state, and military operations all become functional outside of the realm of the religious sphere. This does not mean that religion disappears, Bruce argues, but that “religion diminishes in social significance, becomes increasingly privatized, and loses personal salience except where it finds work to do other than relating individuals to the supernatural” (30; emphasis in original). Thus, according to the standard modernization thesis, the loss of the societal functions of religion equates to a loss of the status of religion in society.

For family, the story is similar. Alexander (1990:1) tells how with differentiation, “Familial control over social organization decreases. Political processes become less directed by the obligations and rewards of patriarchy, and the division of labor is organized more according to economic criteria than by reference simply to age and sex.” As a result, the family becomes an autonomous sphere in society with a reduced set of functions, namely childrearing and providing its members affection and companionship (Popenoe, 1993:527). It goes from being society itself to being just one part of the larger societal system. It loses both its privileged status and authority to organize the rest of social life and becomes privatized, both barring it from direct influence in the public sphere (as seen by laws against nepotism) but also protecting it from the harsh and impersonal realities of work and politics (Lasch, 1995). Like what happened with religion, as other societal spheres became better at performing the functions that previously belonged to family, the family became restricted to performing a relatively few functions and lost status as an organizing principle within society generally.

This part of the modernization thesis, which deals with the macro-level reduction in the scope of religious and familial authority by structural-functional differentiation, is largely accepted or taken for granted by most scholars who fall within the standard modernization paradigm (Chaves, 1994; Dobbelaere, 1999)—and is what I will rethink later in the paper. After general differentiation, though, the story gets more complicated and contested. Some, like Bruce, see differentiation as uniformly bad for religion. Though religion still has a unique (mostly private) role to play, people, by the very design of what might be considered a secular society, make less frequent contact with religious institutions and authorities, which causes a decline in “the extent to which people engage in religious practices, display beliefs of a religious kind, and conduct other aspects of their lives in a manner informed by such beliefs” (Bruce, 2002:3). Therefore, differentiation goes hand in hand with secularization on both the macro and micro levels.

Others, however, acknowledge the changing role of religion, but see this as no less vital to the functioning of society or as detrimental to religion. Fowler (1989), for example, tells how religion, by the very fact of being privatized, makes it a refuge from modern liberal society, suggesting that the alienating aspects of differentiated society actually drive people to religion rather than away from it (which is similar to Christopher Lasch’s (1995) argument about how the family has become a “haven in a heartless world”). Stark and Finke (2000) tell how by separating religion from the state—making it a private choice rather than an inherited reality— allows for religions to better meet people’s needs and leads those religions who do to flourish (for the classic rational choice perspective in family, see Becker, 1981). And, relatedly, Smith and Emerson (1998) show how the pluralism that comes by privatization allows for religious subcultural engagements to thrive both symbolically and substantively from intergroup differentiation on the meso-organizational level of specific religious traditions. Each of these perspectives complicate the simple narrative that differentiation and privatization of religion is a net bad for religion and religious people generally.

In a similar manner, Parsons saw differentiation as increasing, rather than decreasing, the importance of the family for society. He wrote, “The family is more specialized than before, but not in any general sense less important, because the society is dependent more exclusively on it for the performance of certain of its vital functions” (Parsons & Bales, 1955:10–11). In a society structured by functional differentiation, all the separate spheres existed in interdependency with one another, making up a total system that could self-regulate on the whole, assuming each part fulfilled its important functions. Moreover, differentiation also occurred within families. Men took on instrumental roles while women took on expressive ones; but both sexes, like all the spheres of society, were seen as essential to the well-functioning of the nuclear family unit (Parsons & Bales, 1955). Therefore, differentiation was not a sign of family decline, but family adaptation to the exigencies of rapid industrialization. Family, and specifically the nuclear family form, was expected to thrive in modernity and spread uniformly throughout the earth as other countries industrialized (Goode, 1963).

In hindsight, these predictions were overly ambitious. In a review of Goode’s (1963) convergence hypothesis fifty years later, Cherlin (2012) tells how industrialization did not spread everywhere in the same way, that the nuclear family did not match up with it where it did spread, and that in some places the nuclear family spread even where industrialization did not. If anything is spreading uniformly today, it is perhaps more a post-modern individualistic view of family embedded in the developmental idealist paradigm of the West (Thornton, 2005; see also Meyer et al., 1997). In the next and last section of my review of the standard modernization paradigm, I consider the ways in which religion and family, even when they persist, are still argued to be in decline. Whether in the form of a radical individualism equally disruptive to both domains, an “internal secularization” of religion (Luckmann, 1967), or a deinstitutionalization of the family, the claim is that, in the end, modernity conquers all, even itself.

Secularization and deinstitutionalization

Modernization is a process. As such, it occurs in stages (see Fig. 1). Beck et al. (2003) refer to a distinct second stage they call “reflexive modernization.” By this, they mean “the modernization of modern society.” “When modernization reaches a certain stage,” they write, “it radicalizes itself. It begins to transform, for a second time, not only the key institutions but also the very principles of society. But this time the principles and institutions being transformed are those of modern society” (1). The products of the first stage of modernization (such as independent religious institutions or cohesive nuclear families) become the disposables of the second.Footnote 4 Differentiation doesn’t only occur between spheres, but within them (Wuthnow, 1988)—ad infinitum (Alexander, 2019). And, the privatization of religion and family on a macro level privatizes individuals within religions and families themselves (Sennett [1977], 2017), such that engagement in both realms, as traditionally understood, increasingly become matters of choice, or “constitutive of the reflexive narrative of [the] self” (Giddens, 1992:75).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Depicts two stages of the modernization process, or the cause (differentiation) and consequences (secularization and deinstitutionalization) of religion and family becoming separate spheres

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Inasmuch as the modern differentiation process detailed previously was “functional” (according to secular standards), it brought about improved material conditions for those within its purview. This alone, Norris and Inglehart (2004) argue, undermines religiosity. When “survival is secure enough that it can be taken for granted” (4), people have less of a need for religion and therefore turn to it less for existential security. However, they also note, “The need for meaning becomes more salient at high levels of existential security so that, even in rich countries, although church attendance is declining, spiritual concerns more broadly are not disappearing” (75). Modernity is thus a double-edged sword. While it takes much away from religion, it also gives it a new meaning and purpose.

Roy (2014) similarly argues that although modernity destroys traditional modes of religion, it creates new ones that are more exportable to other cultures and palatable with modernity’s other institutions, namely the market. He claims that “secularization has worked: what we are witnessing today is the militant reformulation of religion in a secularized space that has given religion its autonomy and therefore the conditions for its expansion” (2). The deregulation of the religious market, rather than providing an authentic pluralism, instead homogenizes religion’s products (160) and rewards the religions that best adapt (162). Thus, while certain religions appear to flourish, or persist, some would question how religious these religions actually are, even when housed in and promulgated by what were once traditional religious institutions (Bruce, 2002:203; Luckmann, 1967; Yancey and Quosigk 2021). By becoming a mere psychological resource (Fowler, 1989), taking the form and strategies of any other institution in the capitalist market (Stark & Finke, 2000), or becoming the source of religious identity markers (Smith & Emerson, 1998)— “which are worn exactly as if they were cultural identity markers” (Roy, 2014:140)—, religions become substantively different than before, even secularized (Bruce, 2011).

Like religion, families adapt to changes in material and social conditions and, in doing so, give rise to new modes of understanding and organizing family life. Horwitz (2007:2) tells how, “The evolution of the modern family is the story of its central functions being transformed from those associated with needs at the bottom of the [Maslow] hierarchy to those at the top as a result of the opportunities and wealth created by market capitalism.”Footnote 5 The entire process of family deinstitutionalization, like modernization, is theorized to occur in two general phases directly related to the state of economic and existential well-being (see Fig. 2). First is the transition from an institutional to a companionate model of marriage and family (Burgess and Locke 1945), which transition began in America during the early 1900s and reached its pinnacle in the prosperous and peaceful times of the 1950s and 60s—in the highly emotionalized and “equal” form of the male breadwinner nuclear family discussed earlier. The second was a transition from this to the individualized form of marriage and family that emerged after and supposedly dominates the contemporary world. The thriving economy of the 50s and 60s was said to be not only the result of a utilitarian ethic of individualism, but also the cause of an expressive type of individualism (Bellah et al., 1985; Cherlin, 2004, 2009). The individualism of the latter type is what has led to the full and final deinstitutionalization of marriage and family.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Shows a simplified version of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs and the corresponding terminology, both separately and together, used by scholars in theorizations of religion and family

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Cherlin (2009:111) tells specifically how both religion and family were victims to the rise in expressive individualism:

I think both religion and the family were swept up in the larger, more fundamental cultural change, the rise of expressive individualism. It encouraged the pursuit of personal growth, whether through church or family, and the search for self-identity, whether through spirituality or intimacy. What happened, I would suggest, is that the changes in religion and family reinforced each other. If you were focused on your self-development, an individualized marriage and a church that helped you to grow as a person might both be appealing. Or if you were searching for a partner, you might be drawn toward a parallel search for a church.… The American version of the rise of expressive individualism produced not a secular society but rather a questing one in which individuals searched, sometimes again and again, for the kind of spirituality and family ties that fit their needs.

He tells how this situation of an individualized search for both faith and family is unique to America, arguing that in secular Europe the search is typically just for the latter, and pairs Wuthnow’s “spirituality of dwelling” with the companionate model of marriage and family and Wuthnow’s “spirituality of seeking” with the new individualized form (Cherlin, 2009:72–78, 103–115; Wuthnow, 1998). Americans have not abandoned their churches nor their families, to the extent Europeans have, but they have secularized and deinstitutionalized them (Bruce, 2011:160). By valuing both cultural ideals of marriage and individualism, contemporary Americans, with both their high levels of divorce and remarriage, find themselves on a continual “marriage-go-round” (Cherlin, 2009), and perhaps also a “church-go-round” as well (Lim et al., 2010).

Though modernity has not proved the entire destruction of religion and family, it has changed the form of each such that some degree of secularization and deinstitutionalization exist, even while religions and families persist. Those who adhere to the standard modernization thesis would say that the difference in degree of the changes in religious and family life are such that they constitute a difference in kind. Bruce, as the paradigmatic example of this view in the field of religion, acknowledges that secularism isn’t necessarily universal or inevitable, but that it is irreversible (2002:38). And Cherlin sees a return to the highly institutionalized, let alone undifferentiated, families of the past as unlikely (2004:858; see also his more recent 2020 piece evaluating the original deinstitutionalization thesis). Therefore change, for them, equals irretrievable loss. And, the only way to say that it doesn’t is to change the meanings of religion and family themselves (Bruce, 2002:203). In the next section, I present the views of scholars of religion and family who do just this, who, like the people they write about, question the hegemonic understandings of religion and family and come to different interpretations about the fate of both in modernity.

Part II: Alternative interpretations of modernization

While standard modernization narratives start from the place of a golden past and end in a troubled present, alternative accounts seek to either demythologize the past or complicate the present. Ammerman (2006:4) notes, for example, that in evaluating religious change, “If the strength of religion is measured by orthodoxy of belief, regularity of attendance, and the ability of traditional religious institutions to enforce their norms, much of the world is very secular indeed.” Similarly, in appraising the current state of family, Smyth (2016:5) observes, “If we regard institutions as static and determining ‘things’, then the family has indeed been de-institutionalized, as the gendered nuclear form has lost legitimacy.” But both disagree with the standard starting points from which theories of religious and familial change are judged. Thus, by expanding the scholarly lens as to what constitutes religion or family in the first place, or today, we can see the presence of both in previously overlooked places and people (Asad, 1993; Bender, 2013). Secularization and deinstitutionalization, and the standard modernization theory generally, simply assume too much. Alternative accounts take into consideration, amongst other things, three crucial features of modern life: cultural and historical contingency, relational embeddedness, and the positive aspects of choice.

Cultural and historical contingency

The first assumption alternative accounts take issue with is the way in which the standard modernization thesis presents an overly deterministic and linear view of cultural and historical change. Eisenstadt (2000:23–24) argues that there is no “end to history” of the modernist project nor any sort of global convergence around its uniform ideals and processes, but that “trends of globalization show nothing so clearly as the continual reinterpretation of the cultural program of modernity.” This, he continues, leads to the “construction of multiple modernities [and] attempts by various groups and movements to reappropriate and redefine the discourse of modernity in their own new terms.” Thus, modernity is multiple. Since there is no homogenous modernizing process that all societies pass through in the same way, changes in religion and family must also be understood in the plural (Browning, 2006; Thornton, 2005).

Ammerman (2006:6), for example, writes about religion on the micro-level, “Paying attention to everyday experience quickly explodes any assumption that religion is always (or ever) one thing, either for individuals or for groups” (see also Ammerman, 2020). By attending to the nuances of everyday life, the category of religion, whether understood historically or in the present, becomes more representative of a wider variety of people’s actual understandings of it and less likely to become the artifact of a (supposedly) privileged outsider’s point of view. Similarly, family scholars also recognize that “family is a more processual concept, changing from person to person, according to time and space” (Levin, 1999:94) and argue that family always ought to be understood in the plural—not just as a matter of scientific accuracy but as a way of doing normative justice to the diverse ways people throughout all times have done and “do family” (Bernardes, 1999; Morgan, 1996; Stoilova et al., 2017).

Relationalism

Second, the typical modernization narrative overemphasizes the degree of individualization. Ammerman (1997) describes a significant population of Christians who adhere to what she calls “Golden Rule Christianity.” These people are sometimes classified as “lay liberals.” They have a strong this-worldly orientation, do not believe in a Christian monopoly on truth, and attend church less frequently than their Christian counterparts. By the standards of traditional modernization theory, they would appear to be emblematic of a thoroughly internally secularized religiosity. However, this does not make them radically individualistic, as the typical modernization narrative might predict. Rather, Ammerman finds that they place a heavy emphasis on compassion and care for one another. And even though their circles of care are quite narrow, and seemingly more chosen than ascribed, Golden Rule Christians manifest a degree of genuine relationality that the individualization thesis overlooks (see also Fischer, 2008 on the “Paradoxes of American Individualism” and Cadge and Davidman, 2006). Likewise, Smart and Shipman (2004:493) warn that, regarding modernity’s effect on the family, “the individualization thesis can slide into becoming less a form of sociological analysis and more a moral rant,” since, empirically, most people’s choices in family, even in nontraditional arrangements, are not free, but “taken in the setting of attentiveness to others.”

The pros of Choice

Third, traditional modernization theories unnecessarily view choice as inherently anti-religious and anti-familial (Berger, 1979). Yet, in many cases, choice can be a sign of, or factor in, religious and familial commitment. Davidman (1991:83), in her study of women who returned to Orthodox Judaism, found that the presence of choice did not weaken the plausibility of their own religious worldviews but rather helped to affirm them. Similarly, in Mary Jo Neitz’s (1987:257–258) study of charismatic Catholic communities, she found that the awareness of alternative belief systems acted as a test, which, if passed, strengthened people’s commitment to their own religion. These sorts of findings challenge the assumption that the presence of more choice equates to less religiosity without having to resort to rational-choice religious economies explanations which are vulnerable to critiques of internal secularization.

For family, the emergence of romantic love is often seen as a quintessential modern phenomenon—as opposed to the marriages of the past arranged by economic and political criteria—and is thus seen as destructive of or opposed to traditional familial relationships (Wurm, 2022). However, as Swidler (2001) shows, the myths around romantic love are in fact constituted by the institutional demands of monogamous marriage and act to strengthen one’s commitment in marriage since a person has only “one true love” whom they are to be with. Moreover, on the other side of marriage is the prosaic love that requires countless tiny choices if that marriage is to succeed in terms of quality and duration. Not only must one choose their love, they must also love their choice, in word and deed (Regan, 1993:18). Therefore, choice is essential, and always has been, in forming and sustaining even strongly institutionalized forms of family.

In sum, alternative interpretations of the effects of modernization on religion and family look at the contingencies of culture and history, consider the inherent relationality common to human beings, and recognize the potentially beneficial aspects of choice. In doing so, they offer a different evaluation as to the strength of religion and family in modernity—seeing both domains as largely resilient. However, their different evaluations may be in large part due to their differing conceptualizations of what counts as religion or family. Rather than any inherent disagreement about the trends unique to religion or family themselves, the debates are primarily over their meaning, resulting in scholars talking past each other when trying to assess the trends. While standard modernization theory tends to generalize from the top down, the alternative approaches seek to particularize from the bottom up. By attending to the nuances of daily life, the latter approaches help to challenge the theoretical overreach of the big theory of the former. Yet, in focusing primarily on the micro-level, alternative interpretations of modernization do little in terms of offering their own accounts of macro-structural changes and are unable to say what exactly constitutes the very domains they wish to study.

Part III: Synthesis through institutional logics theory

Assuming both the standard modernization thesis and the alternative interpretations presented here both have something to offer, is there a way to make sense of the inconsistencies in the conclusions each draw about the contemporary state of religion and family? And would this help us to explain what Ammerman (2006:4) describes as “the seeming paradox of religion’s simultaneous presence and absence in the modern world,” which could apply equally as well to family (Gillis, 2002)?Footnote 6 In this final section of the paper, I offer an outline to an approach to studying religion specifically that seeks to recognize the contingent nature of lived religion while also accounting for the ways that some micro-level social practices can be deemed to be more religious than others—based on an inter-institutional analysis of the macro-level logics which motivate them. I first describe the need for a new approach to differentiation, introduce the theory of institutional logics as this new approach, and then analyze the case of Golden Rule Christianity from the institutional logics perspective in order to show how it draws different but complementary conclusions. Though I focus below only on religion, due to space constraints, I point the reader to Knapp and Wurm (2019) for a similar type of analysis done in regard to family.

The need for a new approach to differentiation

Similar to Ammerman’s observation about the simultaneous presence and absence of religion, Smith (2003b) notes that “America is often observed as being at once the most religious and the most secular nation on earth” (7). The explanation for why, he suggests, is that “the strength of religion ‘on the ground’ may itself have encouraged its removal by secular elites from the institutions of public life” (8). Secularization, he argues, “was not a natural, inevitable, and abstract by-product of modernization; rather it was the outcome of a struggle between contending groups with conflicting interests seeking to control social knowledge and institutions” (vii). In other words, there can be discrepancies between “religion on the ground” and the (non)religious character of a societies public institutions which are best understood not by tracking abstract processes of differentiation, but by seeking for answers to such questions as “who made it happen, why they made it happen, and how they made it happen” (29). Doing so brings the actor back into secularization theories.

Moreover, Smith tells how focusing on the “role of power, agency, and elites in the differentiation process” (13) shifts the attention to the “goods of persons, not ‘society’” (40) and provides a much-needed link between the micro- and macro-level phenomena involved in differentiation. However, though he acknowledges the deficiencies of the structural-functional view of differentiation, he accepts it at least for the purposes of his present analysis, stating that it perhaps contributed to the general context through which the secular revolution—with its “proximate whos, whys, and hows” (viii)—played out. Ultimately, though, he argues, “We need fundamentally to rethink macro-level secularization—as others have already reconsidered individual-level secularization—in order to develop a more satisfactory theoretical account of the historical evidence” (7; see Gorski, 2000 for a similar call, specifically along the type of Weberian lines I present here, as well as Casanova, 2008Footnote 7), which is precisely what I intend to do by offering a Weberian institutional logics perspective.

The institutional logics approach

In brief, the institutional logics perspective follows Weber’s (1948) concept of modernity as a world of competing value spheres, goods, or “gods” (Calhoun, 2013; Terpe, 2020)—which include the economic, political, intellectual, religious, aesthetic, erotic, and even a kinship sphere (though this is often omitted by most who draw upon the approach – see Bellah, 1999:6 footnote 12). Each sphere is instantiated in a typical institutional site—the market, state, university, church, studio, club, or home, respectively—and operates according to its own inner-logic or ultimate value—wealth, power, truth, salvation, beauty, romance, and love or loyalty—that is autonomous from the logics of the other spheres.Footnote 8 However, this does not mean that the spheres do not interact. They are constantly coming into conflict. Value sphere conflict is, in fact, the primary engine of social change in Weber’s approach. Gorski (2000:161) tells how the differentiation of the world into different value spheres brings conflict which causes spheres to rationalize in response. This then causes the spheres to differentiate further, come into increasing conflict again, and repeat the process—every round becoming more differentiated and more rationalized.

Though this perhaps sounds about as abstract and agentless as structural-functional differentiation, the values themselves depend upon actors to substantiate them just as actors depend upon them for their own subjectification. There is a concomitant relationship between the individual and the institutional logic one possesses and is possessed by (Friedland, 2014:244). Take, for example, Smith’s (2003b:58) characterization of a secular activist:

America’s secularizing activists were not only people seeking status mobility and enhanced cultural authority by any means possible. They also really believed in the particular causes they championed-Science, Progress, Reason, Liberation, the Nation, and so on. These activist secularizers not only instrumentally drew upon Enlightenment cultural tools to construct for themselves strategies of action; more fundamentally, they were possessed by the Enlightenment tradition, encompassed and carried forward by its vision of moral order. The activists were in fact themselves constituted in the Enlightenment’s image as particular historical actors with agency, interests, dreams, animosities, ends, and means. Having drunk deep from the wells of the Enlightenment, these secularizing activists pressed out its moral order, as if on a mission, in their own careers and professions (58).

Thus, phenomenologically, individuals don’t only act instrumentally, but also become the instruments of the “gods” of certain values or goods that they value or see as good. This is therefore consistent with Smith’s (2003b:40) focus on the “goods of persons” rather than on society as well as suggests how secularization needs to be thought of as a “presence” rather than an “absence” (Calhoun et al., 2011). The secular, in a variety of forms, is a good that people seek, not just an empty space that is created when people stop seeking religion (Campbell et al., 2020).

The institutional logics approach therefore offers an alternative account of differentiation that addresses key limitations in the literature on secularization. Differentiation is not an automatic process where society naturally sorts itself according to what is ultimately most functional. Instead, it is a contested process that occurs in ways that are sometimes not functional, at least for everyone. Powerful actors and groups can shape the differentiation process to serve their own interests and “gods”, sometimes at the expense of others and other gods. In other words, differentiation occurs through people not to people. Functional differentiation occurs if and only when functional values reign supreme. Otherwise, differentiation will occur according to another logic or logics. There is thus more contingency, like the alternative accounts of modernization propose, but there is also a way to incorporate the insights from structural-functionalism into this paradigm without becoming blind to how social change really works: through people (see Smith, 2010: Ch. 6).

The case of golden rule christianity

To see the differences and merits of the institutional logics approach more clearly, we can consider the case of Ammerman’s (1997) “Golden Rule Christianity” in more detail. As discussed previously, Golden Rule Christians seemingly defy the standard modernization individualization thesis by the high level of relationality within their congregations—although, by this, they could also potentially be seen as embodying the middle of the Maslowian hierarchy such that it is just a matter of time before, developmentally, their way of “doing religion” becomes individualized and then obsolete. The question here, though, is whether this way of “doing religion” is religious, or if it is as religious as the more traditional ways of doing religion that it is compared against. Though on traditional measures of religion around belief, behavior, and belonging, Golden Rule Christians are perhaps lacking compared to what we would expect for highly religious people, this is not, at least at first, where the institutional logics approach would start in its assessment.

For the institutional logics approach, the primary scholarly interest is in the reasons that are given for why a practice or set of practices should be considered religious, for that is how you get at the rationality or the “logic” of a particular sphere of activity, such as the religious sphere (Alvehus & Hallonsten, 2022). People can claim belief in God, attend church, and identify with a particular denomination for a variety of reasons, some of which may be more or less religious than others. Specifically, for Ammerman’s Golden Rule Christians, there is something religious in the practice of care and compassion for one another, but on what grounds can this claim be evaluated? In theory, anyone could say anything is religious, and even sincerely believe it is, but to get at the core of the religious you have to distinguish, in an Aristotelian fashion, between religion’s essential and accidental properties. Just because something occurs in a religious site, doesn’t make it religious. And just because something occurs in a non-religious site, doesn’t make it non-religious. Secular and religious logics are transposable across domains (Sewell, 1992) and often even co-exist within the same domains (Van der Tol and Gorski 2022). Analytically, then, it is helpful, though never definitive, to consider the other sites in which a logic occurs, as this could give clues as to the home or source domain for a given logic.Footnote 9

Several other institutional domains in which the practices of care and compassion take place include sites such as hospitals, among social workers and humanitarian aid workers, and even could include countries with generous social welfare policies. However, most notably, they take place within the family. Ammerman even notes how older people she interviewed described their church precisely like a family, “a place where people care for each other in times of need” (1997:204; see also Becker 1999).Footnote 10 And, the other institutions arguably developed from or are expressive of familial logics, although at different levels of social reality (Dromi, 2016; Esping-Andersen 1990).Footnote 11 Weber (1948), for instance, tells how a religious “ethic of brotherliness” emerged in which religion challenged the exclusivity of the caring bonds of kinship—which required “solidarity in dealing with the outside and communism of property and consumption of everyday goods within” (1978:359)—and transferred them to the whole religious community. When this happened, all within the faith were now seen as part of the same family—the family of God—and thus deserving of equal care and protection, according to the familial logic. Bellah (1999: 297) then extended Weber’s analysis by telling how this transfer of the familial logic then went beyond the religious community to become the foundation for universal human rights, which gave all people similar obligations to treat one another the same regardless of both family and religion now too, as all people were now seen as part of the same human family, or family of Man. On the surface, then, it appears that Golden Rule Christianity, with its focus on care and compassion, is emblematic of a this-worldly familial logic that has infiltrated the sphere of religion, amongst other societal spheres, and is thus arguably in tension with a distinctively religious logic which, most simply, could be understood as practices oriented to superhuman powers (Smith, 2017).Footnote 12

However, the analysis does not stop here. The Golden Rule ethos, which is similar to the extended familial logic of treating all people the same, itself can be understood as a religious mandate, both within Christianity (e.g., Matthew 7:12; 22:37–39) and across other religious traditions. Thus, it is an empirical question as to the reasons for why people in those types of congregations care for one another. Is it because they love God? Or is it because they love Man? And this, of course, gets even more complicated in the context of Christianity when the love for one is theologically inseparable from the love for the other (e.g., 1 John 4:20–21; Matthew 25:31–46) as well as when the love of the family and the love of the stranger could themselves be considered as different types of logics (e.g., familial vs. civil). Love of the stranger, for instance, and the ethical call of responsibility that comes from seeing the neediness and suffering of others, itself could be considered a transcendent experience, one that is oriented not to the other-worldliness of a God but to the other-worldliness of an “other” person with whom one shares nothing in common (Levinas, 1969). This civil logic of radical inclusivity across difference could also therefore be driving the religious practices of Golden Rule Christians.

The institutional logics approach can therefore help to integrate insights from both the alternative accounts of modernization and the original standard modernization theories they critiqued. By disentangling the motivations and justifications for why people do religion in the way they do, alternative approaches that seek to understand people’s lived experiences in religion can be descriptively interesting (Ammerman, 2006, 2020; Browning, 2006). But without a larger framework in which to situate these experiences, and how they cohere around a potentially limited number of ordering logics in society (Mutch, 2018), the findings from these micro-level studies will remain unable to speak to, evaluate, or forecast about broader trends about the strength of religion (or family) in the contemporary world.Footnote 13 And, on the flip side, while looking at who does what, when and where and how, is necessary in order to understand the various forms and functions that religion plays (or does not play) today (or in the past), without looking at why certain people do certain things at certain times and places and in certain ways, we’ll never be able to understand the micro-foundations of institutional differentiation. By looking at the logics or reasons behind human action, and how these logics are institutionally specified (rather than idiosyncratically constructed), the institutional logics approach provides an analytical bridge between both micro and macro accounts of institutional change.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have reviewed two competing accounts about the fate of religion and family in modernity and offered an alternative approach that considers both the micro-level understandings of individual actors and the macro-level forces present in a world of differentiated and competing values. Davie (2006:22) notes that:

[T]he tools and concepts of social science must evolve as the realities themselves mutate. Indeed, many mistakes have been made in the sociological study of religion, as outworn concepts or theories are imposed onto subject matter that has clearly moved on but not always in the directions anticipated by earlier generations of scholars.

We are perhaps past the time to move on with the standard modernization thesis, as most already have (at least in religion). But it is time now to also move past the structural-functional view of differentiation that is at its core (Casanova, 1994)—which most scholars accept grudgingly but only because they don’t see a viable alternative (Gorski, 2000). A Weberian-inspired institutional logics perspective, I argue, could be this alternative. It gives us a different lens by which to evaluate religious and family change.

Moreover, the institutional logics approach can help us to specify what is distinctly religious, or familial, about religion, or family (see Smith, 2003a; Wurm et al., 2018). Definitions of religion and family are hotly contested within both scholarly domains and are essential for the progress of both subfields (Tweed, 2006). The analytic advantage of the institutional logics version of differentiation over the structural-functional version is that religion or family are not reducible to their forms or functions. Religion and family are always more than how they appear or perform. They, like other spheres of modernity, are ultimate goods that people live for, die for, fight for, and strive for, which promise certain bestowals of superhuman powers (Smith, 2017) and their own unique promises of salvation (Reisebrodt, 2010) upon obedience to their “gods” (Friedland, 2014:219).Footnote 14 Future research would work to specify, both theoretically and empirically, the logics of religion and family in contrast to each other and other institutional spheres in order to bring greater clarity to the question of what counts as religion and what counts as family. Until we can answer that, all theorizing about the decline or persistence of religion and family today is futile because all comparisons require a standard by which they are to be made. The institutional logics approach can help to provide such a ground and allow us to theorize the modernization process in both fields of religion and family in a new and interactive way.