Abstract
The essay gives an account of David Martin’s use of the arts in his sociology of religion, in particular in his treatment of secularisation. Because he saw Christianity as lying ‘against the grain’ of social necessity, he regarded the inevitable accommodations of the faith to each particular social and political structure in which it became embedded as successive forms of secularisation. He saw this as the price Christianity paid in order to infiltrate its alternative message of transcendent hope into the culture, symbols and institutional life of any society. The essay discusses David’s conception of sociology as one of the humanities because of the importance of meaning in its analyses. It summarises his accounts of music and architecture as aspects of the dialectic between the social, or Durkheimian, ‘sacred’ and the Christian ‘sacred’ in the history of the Christian and post-Christian West and ends with an outline of his book on narratives of secularisation through the lens of English poetry published in January 2020.
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Notes
Review of The Education of David Martin: The Making of an Unlikely Sociologist (2013) by Mike Gane, in the online LSE Review of Books: blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2014/03/18/book-review-the-education-of-david-martin/
Among his own books the one which conspicuously failed to meet David’s own exacting requirement for euphonious English was A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), the fleshed out version of the preliminary essay from a decade earlier (‘Notes for a General Theory of Secularisation’, European Journal of Sociology 10:2, 1969, pp.119–210). The book was still in first-draft state, stiff with ‘sociologese’, when it appeared. It was written in odd moments snatched from the turmoil of the early 1970s at the LSE and the handwritten manuscript was found some years later in his desk drawer and typed on her initiative by his secretary. He always regretted never having had time or energy to revise it before publication: that decade was one of overwork and multiple stresses that resulted in two periods of hospitalisation. By contrast, his 1980 book, The Breaking of the Image: A Sociology of Christian Theory and Practice (Oxford: Blackwell), written under similar intense stress, is generally acknowledged to be one of his most poetic texts, and was, as he recalled, ‘written in a dream straight out of my subconscious’. (Personal conversation)
David Martin, Ruin and Restoration: On Violence, Liturgy and Reconciliation (London and New York: Routledge, 2016, p. 9.
Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller, How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis and Metaphor, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
David Martin, A Sociology of English Religion, London: SCM Press/New York: Basic Books, 1967.
David Martin, The Religious and the Secular: Studies in Secularization, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969, pp.79–99.
David Martin, Christian Language and its Mutations: Essays in Sociological Understanding, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, pp. 45–96 and pp. 97–124.
David Martin, ‘Changing Your Holy Ground: An Ecology of Sacred and Secular in Cities of the Centre and the Periphery’ in Stephen Barton (ed.), Holiness: Past and Present, London and New York: T&T Clark, 2003, pp. 68–92: ‘Inscribing the General Theory of Secularization and its Basic Patterns in the Architectural Space/Time of the City: From Presecular to Postsecular’, in Arie Molendijk, Justin Beaumont and Christoph Jedan (eds.), Exploring the Postsecular: The Religious, the Political and the Urban, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010, pp. 103–206; David Martin, Religion and Power: No Logos without Mythos, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, Part III Religion, Power and Emplacement, pp. 183–260.
David Martin, ‘Religion and Music: Ambivalence towards the Aesthetic’ Religion (14:2) 1984, pp.269–292.
David Martin, ‘Christianity and Western Classical Music (1700–2000)’ in Michael McClymond and Lamin Sanneh (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity, Oxford, Chichester and Malden MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, pp. 350–358.
David Martin, ‘Sacred and Secular in Handel’s Reception’, in Christian Language and its Mutations: Essays in Sociological Understanding, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, pp. 69–82; ‘The Sociology of Religion and Handel’s Reception’, in Elisabeth Arweck and William Keenan (eds.), Materializing Religion: Expression, Performance and Ritual, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 161–174; ‘Handel and British Protestant Nationalism’, in Wolfgang Flügel (ed.), Spurenlese: Kulturelle Wirkungen der Reformation, Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2013, pp. 363–378.
David Martin, ‘The Sound of England’, Poetry Nation Review (5: 4) 1978, pp. 7–10; ‘The Sound of England’ (English music), (an extended version of the previous essay) in Athena S. Leoussi and Steven Grosby (eds.), Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 68–85.
David Martin, ‘Thinking with Your Life’, in Hans Joas (ed.), David Martin and the Sociology of Religion, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 162–190.
David Martin, Christian Language and its Mutations: Essays in Sociological Understanding, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 83–92.
His final years were spent reading and thinking about secularisation narratives in the arts and his original intention was to include the other arts alongside English poetry in what became Christianity and ‘the World but the decline of his health truncated that ambition (See Footnote 16 below)
David Martin, Christianity and ‘the World’: Secularization Narratives through the Lens of English Poetry 800 AD to the Present Day, Eugene OR: Cascade Books/Wipf & Stock, 2020.
David Martin, ‘Axial Religions and the Problem of Violence’, in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and its Consequences, Cambridge MS and London: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2012, pp. 294–316, (p. 294)
Max Weber, ‘Religious Rejections of the World and their Direction’, in Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds’), From Max Weber, London: Routledge, 1957, pp.323–359; David Martin, Pacifism: A Sociological and Historical Study, London: Routledge, 1965.
David Martin, ‘Axial Religions and the Problem of Violence’, p.117.
This view has been generally accepted only since Talal Asad argued that the concept ‘religion’ is a western colonial coinage which misrepresents the reality among colonised peoples. I am indebted to Mirjam Kuenkler who points this out in her memorial for David for the Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion 28 November, 2019: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jssr.12636; Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
David Martin, Christianity and ‘the World’, p. ix.
David Martin, ‘Thinking with your Life’, p. 180.
David Martin, ‘Thinking with your Life’, p. 187. This phrase certainly described his own sermons, from which he published three collections..
See footnote 2.
David Martin, Christianity and’ the World’, Chapter 7, ‘War Poets’, p, 95.
David Martin, interview, in Canadian Broadcasting company radio ‘Ideas’ series, ‘The Myth of the Secular’, part 1, accessed October 3rd 2019: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-myth-of-the-secular-part-1.3143513
David Martin, ‘Inscribing the General Theory’
David Martin, ‘Thinking with your Life’, p.177.
David Martin, ‘Thinking with your life’ p.172.
W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKemzie eds., Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th Edition, Oxford, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 106.
David Martin, Christianity and ‘the World’, p. 66.
David Martin, Christianity and ‘the World’, p. xii.
David Martin, Christianity and ‘the World’, p. xiii.
David Martin, Christianity and ‘the World’, pp. xii-xiii.
David Martin, Christianity and ‘the World’, pp. xv-xvi.
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Martin, B. A Poetic Imagination and a Realist Eye: The Arts in David Martin’s Sociology of Religion. Soc 57, 164–172 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-020-00461-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-020-00461-y