Fall 2014

SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
Book Symposium

ADDENDUM

Nancy Davis and Rob Robinsons Claiming Society for God:

Religious Movements and Social

Welfare in Egypt, Israel, Italy and
the United States was the subject
of an Author Meets Critics session,
organized by Melissa Wilde, at the
2014 ASA meetings in San Francisco.
These are the revised comments
of Rhys Williams, John McCarthy,
and John Evans and the responses
of the authors. Transcription was
done by Karen Myers.
Rhys Williams Summary and Comments

Claiming Society for God: Religious Movements & Social Welfare from Indiana University Press is the most recent product of
a long and fruitful collaboration between Nancy Davis and Rob
Robinson, from whom we have learned much about religion
and politics both in the U.S. and abroad. In my remarks today I
will first present an overview and summary of the book, focusing especially on those aspects I find most intriguing, and then
conclude with some questions and comments of my own. Thus,
I will both summarize and criticize.
With this book, which one can see building through Davis and Robinsons publications over time for the last few years,
they've delivered a fascinating comparative study across four
societies, four different religious movements or organizations,
four different faith traditions, with interesting things to say to
those who care about religion, social movements, civil society,
and politics. The four cases are the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt, which of course has been much in the news in the last
two years; the Sephardi Torah Guardians, which often goes by
the shortened term Shas in Israel, Comunione e Liberazione or
CL in Italy; and the U.S. branch of the Salvation Army, which of
course was originally a British import, but they focus upon the
Salvation Army in the U.S.
Using those four cases, Davis and Robinson argue that a
major way in which these movements go about claiming society
for God is to contest the state by bypassing it. These four
movements are no less ambitious than many other religiously
inspired movements, no less dedicated to seeing their version
of a righteous religiously orthodox and devout regime and civil
society established in their nations. They seek to sacralize society, as Davis and Robinson put it, and permeate public space in
ways that fundamentally reject the differentiation of institution1

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al spheres and the public/private distinction which has grown
up around liberal democracies and modern capitalism, with a
fundamental logic of de-differentiation. But these groups' strategies to do thisto contest the regimeis to work through civil society and through provision of social welfare rather than direct actionnot partisan or party politics, for the most part, and
not violence. Although it's not that they completely eschew party politics, but that's not the main mode highlighted here.
Davis and Robinson show the four groups are comparable based on their foundational socio-moral logic. They prefer
to use the term orthodox to fundamentalist, a decision I
agree with, though their own personal logic for that is not completely spelled out and I'd be interested to hear why that
is. They argue that the movements are communitarian in ideology, logic, and action. That is, these movements pair a stern, often authoritarian cultural code that usually involves clear control
of women, women's bodies, sexual mores, and family life with
an economic logic that prizes the collective good, rather than
individual self-interest. This generally involves extensive movement efforts to serve, aid, and assist the disadvantaged and
marginal in their society, and shows some concern for egalitarian economic ideas. So, these movements go beyond just ameliorating the effects of poverty to addressing, to some extent,
the causes of poverty.
This is a very interesting point for two basic reasons. The
first is more theoretical and conceptual. They are rejecting the
notion of what they call the one-dimensional political space
that merely contrasts orthodoxy, usually presented as being on
the right, with modernism, which is usually placed on the left or
the liberal pole. This is a distinction between what was called
orthodox and progressive in James Davison Hunter's Culture
Wars book from the early 1990s; it animates the fundamental
distinction that can array political distinctions between those
people who hold orthodox ideas about moral authority from
those who hold, in Davis and Robinson's words, modernist beliefs.
In those terms, the groups that Davis and Robinson are
concerned with here confound that single continuum by being
both culturally and economically communitarian, thus offering a
distinct two-dimensional political map wherein culture issues,
particularly personal morality, sex, family, and gender, vary distinctly from positions on economic issues, particularly issues not
just of individual advancement, but also approaches to inequality. And, of course, this varies in particular from the current dominant array of U.S. politics in which we have the party of the
right that is culturally communitarian but economically individualist and the other party, which is not on the left any longer but
barely left of center, which tends to be culturally individualist
and economically more communitarian. The second point Davis
and Robinson make that emerges from their engagement with
these groups, is that their communitarianism on both cultural
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and economic issues helps explain their fundamental strategies
for claiming society for God. They are building social welfare
networkseverything from health to schools to sometimes
economic provision that care for the needy. They care for the
needy in their own particular way that bypasses or usurps many
of the functions, the processes, and the spheres of authority
that we often think are reserved for the modern nation-state. So
these groups rival the state, as Davis and Robinson say, but less
directly, less visibly, and more patiently than the movements
and groups who would sacralize the states authority by confronting or capturing it directly.
In four substantive chapters, one on each of these
groups in Egypt, Israel, Italy and the U.S., Davis and Robinson
show that the groups do this somewhat differently from each
other. There's not just one way to go about this, partly depending on the national context and partly their own orientation toward politics and state power. Particularly the Muslim Brotherhood but also to some extent Shas have built states within
states, alternative institutional networks hoping to ultimately
control the larger society, as a way of, particularly in the case of
the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, sacralizing the society from
the bottom up, from the inside out. Both the Muslim Brotherhood, as we know most recently, but also Shas, will play electoral and party politics if need be; that has not been their primary strategy. Of course, currently the Muslim Brotherhood has
been very involved in formal Egyptian politics since the Arab
Spring, in some ways assuming a role and in some circumstances having it thrust this upon them. I am sure that Davis and
Robinson would argue that one of the reasons the Muslim
Brotherhood has been influential in this is that they had a state
within a state already established when the Mubarak regime
came down.
On the other hand, CL in Italy is opposed to a strong
state, and imagines itself, and I don't say imagine in the sense
of a fantasy but the imaginary toward which they are working,
as a parallel Christian society where local-level service provision
makes a larger, more intrusive, and more powerful state unnecessary. And indeed Davis & Robinson evoke a sort of medieval
imaginary where a strong church is the fundamental way to organize social life and a weak state is in some ways a supplicant
to it. Particularly now, CL has very limited direct political involvement. At one time they were more involved in direct politics, trying to outlaw abortion and divorce in Italy. When that
strategy was not successful in public politics, this parallel state
strategy or parallel society strategy became predominant.
Then finally, the Salvation Army of the U.S. has most always been interested in services to those not served by what we
have historically thought of in the U.S. as a fairly weak state,
particularly in terms of social welfare, and has worked to fill in
the gaping holes in the safety netthe ever-larger gaping holes
in the safety netwith very little direct political involvement;
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they have limited their direct political outreach to those issues
that emerge in the context of the service provision with which
they are directly engaged. In a society that has no tradition of
an overtly, or a limited tradition I'll say, of an overtly religious
political party, the Salvation Army has largely stayed out of party politics.
So Davis and Robinsons exploration makes a case for
service provision as a social movement strategy, rejecting a tooeasy contrast between service and advocacy, that is, ameliorating need versus attacking the source that produces that need
through social change. They argue that these groups are doing
the latter, they are attacking the source by trying to go after
fundamental social change, by using the former as a strategy.
Service provision then is both an end and a means.
This reality on the ground and this conceptual argument
let Davis and Robinson move on to address another set of arguments that are often made about orthodox religious movementswhat might be about religious movements generally,
but are particularly aimed at those we call orthodox. They note
that the literature on social movements tends to see three potential liabilities to the success and longevity of orthodox religious movements. One is that they often have broad, multiissue agendas. There is a long-time debate in the social movement literature about the relative success of single-issue versus
multi-issue agendas, particularly if the latter are broad and farreaching. Given that social movements are often coalitions of
people, the argument goes, the more issues you embrace the
more potential there is for coalitions within the movement not
to agree on all issues or on the breadth of the agenda. And single-issue movements have the advantage of focus, rather than
diffusion, of attention.
Along with the problem of broad, multi-issue agendas is
that of ideological rigidityorthodox religious movements often refusing to recognize political reality on the ground, and often being unwilling to change an argument or change a set of
appeals to the public even when they are less effective than
they might be; there is an alleged unwillingness to adjust with
the times.
The final liability is described as an alleged reluctance to
compromisethat if one has a totalizing worldview and the difference between my way and your way is that my way is both
complete and right and yours is not, that makes compromise
difficult. Particularly in large, diverse and modern societies,
compromise often is the key to political success.
So, all of these things are liabilities that are thought to
undermine movement success and longevity. But in this case,
the strategy of social welfare provision helps to solve these dilemmas in ways that Davis and Robinson say make them not
complete liabilities. The service-providing social network brings
newcomers to the movement, people who are not necessarily
on board with the ideology, and allows them to try it
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[participation] on first. They can get involved in the organization perhaps, and with people who are more fully a part of the
movement or of the organization, and as they appreciate the
services, get more involved, get to know people, or become
more densely networked into groups that are committed, their
ideology can develop. So, as opposed to the idea that, particularly for ideologically driven, totalizing groups, that you have to
be on board with the ideology before you mobilize, Davis and
Robinson argue that the service provision model of a
graduated membership structure helps a participant to develop or grow into the ideology after having already started to
mobilize; mobilizing leads to ideology, not the other way
around. Also, having a broad, multi-issue agenda allows the
groups or the movements to shift priorities or shift issues as
they meet failure in some particular ventures. CL is one examplewhen they were beginning to fail trying to do direct political and legal change, they shifted to what became more important to them, provision of services to the needy. You can
certainly see the same thing with Shas.
Then Davis and Robinson make what I think is a very interesting argument that perhaps broad agendas, ideological rigidity, and reluctance to compromise may be typical liabilities
for religiously based social movements, but only if you have all
three. You can get by with two of the three because you can
easily do some of the shifting or the adjusting that is often required in modern society. One need not compromise if one is
only shifting among already articulated movement goals, for
example. That would have been an argument that I would have
liked to have seen developed further, but perhaps, given their
scholarly productivity, it may actually be addressed in an article
that is forthcoming.
Now, on to a couple of questions that I want to offer
about the book while not, I hope, diminishing all my appreciation for it. First about the argument that the model of a onedimensional political space is incomplete as a way of understanding public religious politics compared to the twodimensional model they propose. As I mentioned before, because modern U.S. politics combines cultural collectivism and
economic individualism in one party and cultural individualism
and economic collectivism on the other side, that is, crossing the diagonal rather than having these things supposedly
varying together, this is a good argument in the U.S. But I'm
wondering, on one hand, whether this may be changing in the
United States. Particularly when we think about the astounding
change just in the last decade (since the 2004 election) in attitudes towards same-sex marriage in the United States, and
when we see how much of that is, I don't want to say driven by,
but how much that has permeated into Protestant Evangelical
younger generations where they have adopted what is largely
a classical liberal approach of, that is not something I would
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do; I don't want you to force my church to have to do it, but if
other people do it, I don't see why this is my affair. It's sort of
the definition of classical liberalism, live and let live to the extent possible. So this may be changing the stable alignment of
the Republican and Democratic parties in the way that they
have been arrayed over the last four decades. But beyond the
question of change, I'm also wondering if the two-dimensional
structure of current American politics, as ironic as it seems, is
only ironic if we think that what is the most important thing in
politics is the socio-moral logic of communitarianism or individualism that is supposed to run through all issues. Maybe instead
our current situation is a product specifically of the interests and
needs of the groups who form the diverse party coalitions that
result from our two-party system. If you have a two-party system, coalition building is necessary and because the Democrats
have everything from secular liberals to African Americans (very
church-bound Protestants) to increasing numbers of Hispanic
social conservatives, maybe it's not surprising that there is a
combination of cultural liberalism but economic communitarianism. So I agree that the two-dimensional model is a more interesting way to think than the one-dimensional, but it may be
less a surprise than the argument claims here because what is
held up as normative the U.S. in the last 40 years is actually
kind of one historical period or a kind of contingent accident.
We've made the mistake of thinking, oh, that's the standard.
The second question I want to askand I think this is a
little bit more at the conceptualizing levelis while all these
groups want to claim society for Godthey are consciously religious groupswhat is it about religion that makes this particularly interesting? Or, what's the religion key here? Davis and
Robinson make a point that this strategy of social welfare provision as a social movement strategy, as an approach for a social
change group, is not necessarily a religious strategy. Well, if it's
not necessarily a religious strategy, what is religion doing for
these cases studied here other than we're interested in religion
and politics? What theoretically is it doing? Particularly in the
study of social movements over the last 20 years, I would say,
religion has often been seen as important, often because it is
seen as providing a totalizing worldview that then produces
movement ideologies that are quite encompassing, often quite
ambitious, and that can permeate both the public and private
sphere. So this is one thing perhaps that religion does. Some
movement scholars would argue that because religion itself is
necessarily rigid or authoritarian, which is not an argument that
I buy, but some might claim that the only thing religion is doing
here is contributing to these folks being somewhat authoritarian
and ideologically rigid. Or is what religion is about here just the
motives of people who are willing to get involved? I mean religion is a powerful motivator you think you are doing God's
will here on earth or you may think your immortal soul is at
stake in being involved or not being involved; that can be a
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powerful personal motivator. But both of those claims about
religion are ways of thinking about religion that are focused on
beliefs and ideology. What happens when we start thinking beyond that about religion as a set of practices and rituals? Religion has a particular form of community. Part of the argument
I'm making here is a claim that thinking of religion primarily as
beliefs or ideology seems to me to be inherently Protestant, and
I think that the fact that American sociology of religion has
thought so much about beliefs and ideology actually shows
what I think of as the cultural, not the religious, Protestantism of
American sociology of religion. So what about practices? Rituals? What about the embodied forms of community that we also think of as necessary for religion? I'm committed to having
to think of those as necessary for religion. But what about
these cases, and the argument being made here? Is there
something distinct about religion beyond the belief structure in
trying to understand these phenomena?
And then my last question: Should we think about social
movements as this catch-all phrase that embodies both these
formal, often quite institutionalized organizations that provide
services, as well as the more nascent, ephemeral, often passiondriven types of collectivities and mass involvements and
marchesthat, for example, we saw in Tahir Square in the Arab
Spring? There are many movement scholars who have been
careful to make distinctions between movement moments and
movement organizations and that these things have different
dynamics. Some people in fact even reject the idea that you can
call such institutionalized organizations movements at all. Because in Davis and Robinsons framework all these groups/
organizations are oriented toward social change, they are comfortable calling them social movements, because social movements are after all about social change. But I'm wondering if
there is something fundamentally different about these particular groups because of their orientation toward formal organization and institution building, and that this makes them distinct
from other forms of religious movements. And if so, what we
might learn from that distinction?
I am framing these more as questions than critiques. I
want to offer my congratulations for this interesting book. I will
admit I have already used it in a class once and, in fact, will in
teaching a course on American political culture again in the
spring. When you take American political culture from me, it has
a lot about religion in it and certainly this book will surface
again on my syllabus.
John McCarthys Comments
Let me also congratulate the authors of the Claiming Society for
God. I bought my own copy and read it before I was asked to
do this, so it was easy and I got an extra free copy as a result.
I'm going to try to take being a critic seriously here. I like the
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book, in some ways. It looks like a small book; it's actually an
intellectually very thick book. It's very dense, incredibly dense in
detail and very clearly structured, so it's easy to get your head
around their central arguments. The book was published in
2012, the original article was published in 2009 in theAmerican
Journal of Sociology. In that AJS article, they succinctly state
their most general thesis, which Rhys has alluded to. Let me
quote them:
Social movements with broad multi-issue agendas, rigid
ideologies and extreme reluctance to compromise
should have three strikes against them. Comprehensive
agendas can stretch personnel and resources too thin,
cause uncertainty in the public and membership about
what the movement's goals are, make schisms more likely, and turn off potential supporters who may not agree
with all of the movement's aims. Rigid ideologies can repel those who support a more pragmatic, less strict approach. And unwillingness to compromise with other
groups can make it nearly impossible to attract the
breadth of support needed to operate in the political
realm. The literature in social movements is replete with
theory and case studies illustrating why these liabilities
often lead to movement failure. . . (Davis and Robinson
2009:1302-3).
In both the paper and more extensively in the book the
authors draw on these case studies of religiously orthodox
movements with multi agendas, rigid ideologies and extreme
reluctance to compromise showing they're not necessarily liabilities for orthodox religious movements, these four that they call
religious movements. I'll get back to that in a second. That they
can succeed in spite of these kinds of liabilities and importantly
from my point of view, I'm going to focus more on the structure
of mobilization and membership in these organizations, by developing a range of membership options that Rhys alluded to
from very weak to very strictand by offering extensive social
and economic services, not necessarily restricted to members,
which is a key here and something that I think Rhys did not
mention. I'll get to this in a second. It's not clear until the Conclusion whether the authors intend the argument to apply to
social movements in general or just religiously orthodox social
movements in particular, though their initial statement of their
thesis suggests the former, in the conclusion of the book, they
make it clear that they intend this to cover other social movements, not necessarily only religiously orthodox movements.
To begin with, I'm not convinced that I believe the premise of their central thesis, that social movements with broad
multi-issue agendas, rigid ideology and extreme reluctance to
compromise have three strikes against them. The authors don't
make any concerted effort to generate systematic evidence to
support the claim that serves their rhetorical purposes. Maybe
they could, but I'm not sure that this thesis is so widely taken
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for granted as they claim. We shall see. I know they do cite a
number of studies. Immediately Bill Gamson's study comes to
mind and that is one of the keys, but that is only one study and
I think its conclusion may be more general, but I am not so sure
I agree with it yet. But it serves their rhetorical purposes as they
go on to analyze four movements that clearly qualify as being
multi-agenda, having rigid ideologies, and, if not as the authors
detailed analyses reveal, always a reluctance to compromise
since each of the movements prove to be incredibly adaptable
in the face of crisis and environment turbulence in their analysis. And all of the movements that they discuss are quite successful. I'll come back to that in the end here.
First, a comment on terminologyand Rhys alluded to
this. Properly speaking, the objects of analysis here are orthodox religious movement organizations, not movements. Typically we think of movements as encompassing a large number
of, some maybe not so large, but in general a number of different social movement organizations that interact with one another, sometimes compete with one another, sometimes cooperate with one another. Movement organizations like these are
typically numerous in a social movement. The Comunione e Liberazione movement is one of many Catholic renewal organizationsa huge range of Catholic renewal organizations across
nations. I don't know Italy so well directly. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is one among many orthodox Islamic movements, movement organizations, so if we're going to talk about
the orthodox Islamic movement in Egypt, we're going to talk
about a number of other movement organizations. For the
most part the authors ignore the larger movements that these
particular cases are part of. We might come back and discuss
that later on.
In my judgment, the most important contribution of
what they do here is their detailed analysis of the nature and
extent of social services that each of the groups provide, coupled with each organization's variegated membership structures. They call them graduated membership levels. I think
that's their term. And this is a very useful idea, I think, and it's
unique in their analysis and there's a major contribution here, in
my judgment. That combination is quite unusual for social
movement organizations, I think. But no one has I think done
any kind of comparative work systematically so it's not so clear.
I'll get back to that.
Let me briefly describe the array of social services. Rhys
has done more of this so I won't do so much of it. Let me focus
just on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and then the Salvation
Army USA and then explain in a little more detail their graduated membership structures. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
has built a large number of mosques and many, many schools;
provided far-reaching, organized medical services, an extensive
array of social welfare services and registered with the Egyptian
government as an Islamic Welfare Society. The Brotherhood al9

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so generated an extensive network of businesses, published its
own newspapers, and as far as I can tell in their description,
these many services are offered not just to members of the
Muslim Brotherhood but to many, many others. I don't know
what the criteria are for being qualified for the servicesthey
don't go into thatbut it's clear that these are provided more
broadly. The Salvation Army in the USA is very similar. And let
me quote them: The Salvation Army in the USA is the nations
largest charitable organizationfaith based or secularwith
assets of $8.76 billion in 2010 (Davis and Robinson 2012:113).
They go on to say:
The Army's extensive network of faith-based social services in the United States goes far beyond thrift shops. In
2010 the Army offered assistance of $3.1 billion to 29.4
million Americansalmost 1 in 10 Americansthrough
7,821 centers of operation, including worship centers;
hospices for the homeless; group homes for needy children, the elderly, single mothers, and babies; hospices for
HIV patients. . . (Davis and Robinson 2012:114).
And the list goes on and on and on. I thought I knew a lot
about the Salvation Army, but I learned a whole hell of a lot
more from their account here. And these services are provided
to citizens, especially poor ones, who are not members of the
Army, many of whom apparentlyand they cite some evidence
herearen't even aware that the Salvation Army is an orthodox
evangelical organization. So at the front door of these services,
there are not religious tests and these are widely available. The
Army is an evangelical Christian group in a predominantly
Christian nation. Same thing with the Muslim Brotherhood; its
an Islamic orthodox religious group in a predominantly Islamic
nation. I think this is important and therefore the potential adherents pool is huge in each one of these societies.
Now let me talk a little bit about the graduated membership in these organizations. The Brotherhood had a membership structure, and I'm quoting the authors mostly here: that
allowed potential recruitsthis was early on and it changed
over timeto become involved at very modest levels of ideological adherence and commitment, and then progress to successively greater levels of these. In 1935, the Brotherhood began identifying assistants, who merely signed membership
cards, related members, who were able to demonstrate familiarity with the movements principles, active members, who
demonstrated total involvement in the movement, and
strugglers, a category open to only a select handful of the
most dedicated (Davis and Robinson 2012:40). Later, membership structure was collapsed; they don't talk about the later period as much. And in Egypt the Brotherhood had to go underground for a long period of time, so it is not, I think, probably
so obvious how the membership structure evolved. But this is
clearly a case of graduated entry.

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The Salvation Army in 2010 claimed 3.4 million volunteers, over 400,000 members or adherents, more than 107,000
soldiers, 283 cadets and 3,557 officers. So we have again this
escalator to core membership. Movement organizational membership form has unfortunately not been the focus of much systematic exploration by movement scholars who study religious
movements or social movement organizations in general. I
don't know of another exploration, besides this one, that offers
such a systematic account, as I said before, of graded membership. This strategy, of course, has the great advantage that Rhys
referred to of letting potential hard core members slowly move
into ideological sync with the core ideas of an organization.
Moving from no knowledge of the core ideology to a true believer, that is a hell of a step, one that the Moonies or the Unification Church never figured out how to negotiate, as far as I
can figure out. I know that I read a bit about the Nation of Islam
in the United States in the Eightiesthat they were toying with
the idea of generating some kind of graded membership levels
to allow the vast middle-class African American adherent group
some involvement in the organization without having to adopt
the strict standards and beliefs of the core membership.
How widespread is this among the large number of social movement organizations in the U.S. that have been formed
since the 1960s? Social movement organizations have expanded dramatically in the U.S. since the Sixties. How widespread is
graduated membership structure? I don't know the answer to
that. I don't know that anybody's asked it. I know in the work by
Andy Andrews and Marshall Ganz on the Sierra Club, they don't
conceptualize it this way, but the Sierra Club has all kinds of
ways in which you can be involved in the Sierra Club without
being a leader and a believer in everything that it stands for. I'm
more familiar with the newer advocacy organizations and indeed we know that for many of these organizations, they don't
even have members, or if they have members, they're paper
members and so I think Davis and Robinsons analysis first
points at how important the idea of graduated membership is
but also raises the question of what its distribution looks like in
the pool of social movement organizations, both religious and
non-religious.
The questions that have dominated theoretical debates
about offering services by social movement organizations have
pivoted around the idea of selective benefits. And selected benefits are those that are given to people who join the organization or try to keep those who belong to the organization members. Davis and Robinsons four organizations have a totally different strategy of offering services to a large pool of potential
memberswhat I would call adherents, who have some familiarity and potential affinity for the ideology and opportunity to
take part, or an opportunity to be exposed, without having to
make a membership decision. The possibility of providing services to non-members has drawn little attention theoretically by
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social movement scholars. The case of the Black Panthers is an
interesting one, which the authors actually deal with in the Conclusion to the book, and the Panthers use such a strategy of offering services to a much wider constituency, although the Panthers probably didn't follow some of these other parts of the
successful approach outlined by the authors. But I think it is
that combinationthe importance of offering services to nonmembers, to potential members, in a very widespread way,
along with this graduated membership, that looks here to be a
winning formula, because all four of these movement organizations are successful. We can look at the CL case, it's basically a
Catholic organization in a Catholic nation. Shas is a Jewish organization in a Jewish state. So each case has this huge potential membership.
So all four of these orthodox religious movement organizations employed the two strategies, plus the others that Rhys
mentioned and that I haven't mentioned. But the basic flaw in
the authors' research design is that there's no variation on either the independent variables or the dependent variables. The
cases are chosen because they look alike and they're all successful. So the question is: Is this a successful strategy or did
they just pick four cases that are successful that display this set
of organizational characteristics? I'm prepared to believe they're
right, but I think their choice of cases does not really allow them
to conclude that it's this set of strategic choices that actually led
to their success. But I think that the analysis of these two dimensions, graduate membership structures and the offering of
services to wide adherent pools, and especially their combination, is in my judgment the major contribution of this book.
John Evans Comments
This critique is purely cultural sociology constructed. I want to
start by praising the book and recognizing the amount of work
involved with this and the analytic depth, particularly across all
these nations. So what I really want to do is to play the role of
the critic, like John said, with the idea that I think this isn't the
authors last statement, and as statements continue on, I hope
that they will consider what I have to say.
I am going to focus my comments on only one word in
this book, which is the word strategy. And the word strategy
appears repeatedly in this text and I think this might be something more broadly about social movement theory. But the
claim I'm most interested in is the claim that the social welfare
provision of these four movements is a strategic act done to
achieve other goals. Strategic assumes that there were a number of choices that could forward a goal and that the most efficacious one, the most strategic one, was selected. In other
words, social welfare provision by these movements was an instrumentally rational decision. So, what is the goal or the end
for which social provision is the means?
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The goal on page 1 is: claiming society for God or
installing religion at the center of society. The primary goal is
bringing religion to the fore. The means is bypassing the state
which, "allows religiously orthodox movements to accomplish
many of their agendas" (Davis and Robinson 2012:3). So as with
all instrumentally rational strategic decisions, this of course implies that if social welfare provision would not help them
achieve the end of installing religion at the center of society, it
would not have been done. For example, the use of the term
strategic then implies that if the Salvation Army concluded that
there was no hope of installing their religion at the center of
American society, they would have shut down their social service provision and done something else to meet that goal. So
what's the alternative to this instrumentally rational argument?
The alternative is that these movements could engage in social
welfare provision for substantively rational reasons; that is, they
might do it because the means is part and parcel of their ends.
To put it simply, they might engage what the authors call the
compassionate side of these movements, not to achieve some
goal, but because it is consistent with their general beliefs. In
fact, doing so may well be anti-instrumental but they do it anyway because they have to be consistent with their beliefs.
In a substantively rational argument, the Salvation Army
engages in welfare provision not to instill religion at the center
of society but because it's consistent with their vision of evangelical theology as expressed in the Beatitudes. I did not see
much evidence in the book that social welfare provision was
strategicthat it was an instrumental choice. Direct evidence
would probably have had something like the participants saying
that they do this to install religion at the center of society. Inferential evidence might show that they had choice x for social
welfare provision, they had choice y, and showing that y would
have been more consistent with their belief but they select x because it was strategic. There does not seem to be a moment
when these movement people selected the strategy of social
service provision over something else.
The evidence I see in the book is primarily that these
movements create institutions for social welfare provision for
non-instrumental reasons. They do it because their faith requires it of them and it's not a means towards another end. I
will use an example. When introduced the authors discuss how
Italy was a strong welfare state and then say a weak welfare
state is not a necessary precondition for adopting the strategy
of bypassing the state with a network of alternative institutions.
They then say why Comunione e Liberazione (or CL) created social welfare provision which is "to obviate the need for such a
strong state, an agenda that has been much shaped by its
struggles against secular communist and socialist parties" (Davis
and Robinson 2012:8). They then state the overall goal, which is
"to secure greater roles for the Church and pope in Italian society" (Davis and Robinson 2012:88). The conclusion is that Co13

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munione e Liberazione creates social welfare entities in order to
undercut religion in the secular state and reinstall the centrality
of Catholicism.
However, on the next page, the authorsto my readingreveal that social services have not provided strategic
means to achieving the goal of reinstalling the authority of the
institutional Church, but is undertaken because of the substantively rational reason that Catholic theology requires it. They
write: "As with the other movements whose stories we tell, CLs
institution building grew out of a strong communitarian theology that sees religious experience as fully realizable only in a
community that emphasizes mutual responsibility and encourages an active presence and an engagement with the
world." (Davis and Robinson 2012:89). So this sounds like CL
creates social service provision because it's consistent with their
theology, not because it achieves something else. The authors
then return to the instrumental claim which is that the caring
side of the movement is: "intended to show that largely nonstate social service agencies, schools and for-profit enterprises
can meet citizens' spiritual, cultural and material needs better
than can the state (Davis and Robinson 2012:89). Later, they
say that the caring side of the movements communitarianism is
realized through the adherent seeing his or her life as a calling
or a vocation to work in service to others. That is not trying to
instrumentally subvert the Italian state either. The founder of
the movement says: "Life must be total sharing but disattention,
fear, love of comfort, obstacles in the environment, maliceall
empty life of the value of charity. To create a mentality of charity, the most humble and effective way is to begin to live some
remnant of free time expressly, purposely as a sharing in the life
of others (cited in Davis and Robinson 2012:90). This does not
sound instrumental either.
So I do not take CLs motto of more society, less state
to mean that social service provision was set up to undermine
the state and expand the role of the church in public life; rather,
helping the poor was something Catholics were supposed to
do, whether it led to undermining the state or empowering the
Pope. The motto is probably better explained by their theological belief and subsidiarity that the authors talked about (Davis
and Robinson 2012:101), where decisions are best made as
close to the ground as possible.
Similar things can be said about the other cases. For example, regarding the Shas movement, the authors say the caring side of Shas communitarianism sees mutual support as a
fundamental Jewish value and one that must be implemented
in state policy. The Salvation Army is a bit more complicated.
They consider this movement to have the same goals as the
others: bringing religion to the center of society. The authors
say that the social service provision furthers the post-millennial
eschatological vision. I think it is a totally different goal than the
goal described with the other movements. It is a goal that is not
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a threat to anyone else because it will not impact them at all, as
they would presumably think it is silly. If you are not in this
world, the goal of creating an eschatological Second Coming is
purely metaphysical, unlike the secular agendas of these other
movements. So, I don't think the Salvation Army is actually in
the same category as the other three.
To return to the instrumental institutional rationality argument, the authors are aware of this tension that I raise, but
decided to emphasize the instrumental. They write in the Introduction that:
Is the compassionate side that religiously orthodox
movements display merely strategican effort to win
people over to the movement by offering services? This
may be part of the motivation, but because in our quantitative work we have found that this caring, justiceseeking side exists among orthodox individuals, most of
whom are not part of movements and who would seem
to have no strategic motivation for supporting such outreach to the marginalized, we argue that the economic
outreach of orthodoxy draws upon a genuine sense of
mutual obligation, shared humanity, and compassion,
and is not solely strategic (Davis and Robinson 2012:19).
The authors anticipate my critique when they write about CL:
While some will see this message as motivated by compassion
and faith in humanity, others will regard it as an attempt to
weaken the state to the point that all that prevents corporate
owners from pursuing purely self-interested goals is the community-mindedness or corporate social responsibility that faith
is believed to bring (Davis and Robinson 2012:110). But the
book chooses to emphasize the strategic component.
So now let's ask the question of: Who cares? Why does
this distinction that I am making really matter? The book is motivated toward understanding what, to the Western academic
ear, are unattractive, anti-liberal orthodox movements that
many people try to explain. And then the authors find this paradoxical sort of good side to these movements, which is that
they do all these activities that most Americans would approve
of: feeding the poor and so on. The implicit puzzle is: How can
these people who would take away our rights, and even engage
in terrorism for some of these groups, do something that we
approve of? The instrumental language makes these movements seem to be less challenging than they actually are.
The really difficult question for those who oppose these
movements would be: What if these movements both want to
install their religion at the center of society and share your values on something like an obligation to provide for the needy?
This becomes a bit more of a difficult challenge. But the instrumental assumption takes that question off the table. The instrumental choice assumption reassures us liberals that these
movements are not really sharing your values because they're
not helping people with their inherent goodness; rather, they're
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only helping others in order to forward their anti-liberal, theocratic takeover of society. So, the challenge I see here is comforting to opponents of these movements because they then
are totally unlike us. They are the Fox News to our MSNBC. They
are the Washington Times to our New York Timesthis fundamental Other.
But I think that the difference between them and us is
overblown. In a book I published a few years ago, I show that
people who believe that human life begins at conception and
those who do not, if you compare those two groups, were supposed to have totally different moral visions. But, they actually
use a lot of the same moral language when they talk about other issues. So, if we think that we cannot talk to our opponents
because they're truly Otherthat we share no discourse, no
values with themthen you really do have a situation that
James Hunter described in his second book on American polarization which was calledBefore the Shooting Begins. Why did he
say before the shooting begins? The idea is that there's an essentially discursive wall where you share no moral discourse
with your opponents whatsoever and therefore, why bother?
Why bother to talk to them? But I think if these movements are
not purely instrumental, it suggests that if I was an Egyptian,
that the Muslim Brotherhood is much more a challenge because on the one hand, they do have this illiberal, antidemocratic strain to them, but on the other hand, they seem to
share the same value of feeding the poor and so on and so
forth that I would.
So what if these movements both want to install their
religion in the center of society and share some of the same
values we Western liberals approve of? This is the much more
difficult, but more accurate task. Again, I for one would not be
supportive of the various anti-liberal movements and I like living in a pluralistic liberal democracy. If I were Egyptian, thinking
of the Brotherhood as sharing some values with me would
make it possible to engage the challenge they represent accurately. So I would describe these movements differently. The
orthodox movements have as one of their goals the anti-liberal
goal of putting their religion into the center of society. They
simultaneously engage in social service provision for the downtrodden to fulfill the obligations from their religion. This means
two things: one, opposing their anti-liberalism is more challenging because they are bad only in this one way. And second, because we do share some values, it is possible we could reach an
agreement with them in a more peaceful way.
Nancy Davis and Rob Robinsons Response
Nancy Davis (ND): First, Id like to thank Rhys Williams, John
McCarthy, and John Evans for their careful reading of our book
and insightful comments on it, and to make a comment that
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SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
may help clear up some things. Rob and I were not writing the
book exclusively for social movement scholars; we also wanted
to reach educated lay readers, students, and people like my
mother. I fully agree with John McCarthy's point that we are not
writing about social movements in a broad sense, but about
specific social movement organizations; in the very first footnote to the book, we state that we are writing about social
movement organizations, but will use the more common, vernacular term social movements.
Concerns about readability and audience also relate to John
Evans points about the word strategy. We were not using that
termand perhaps we should have been more careful in our
use of itin the way that a rational choice theorist might, as a
deliberate, instrumentally-rational choice aimed at achieving a
particular end, but rather as an approach which might well be
adopted precisely because it agreed with the fundamental beliefs of a groupbecause it was substantively rational. And we
certainly do not see these groups as primarily guided by rational instrumentalism. Rather, what they are doing is mainly a result of their communitarian beliefs. They have a genuine commitment to provide for the needs of the larger community, as
well to watch over and supervise the behavior of individuals in
that community. We do not think these groups are primarily
rational-instrumental sorts of movements. Usually, we get the
opposite reaction: readers who think we are minimizing the instrumental rationality of these movements and overemphasizing their communitarian beliefs as a source of their
actions. Moreover, we would argue that it is possible for an action, such as establishing a vast social welfare network, to be
instrumentally rational in attracting more supporters or members to a movement, but to have been undertaken primarily because the action is in line with the groups fundamental beliefs.
Rob Robinson (RR): In our earlier quantitative work, we found
that religiously orthodox people were more communitarian
(egalitarian) on economic issues than their modernist counterparts. This was true in 18 different countries with different Abrahamic religious traditions and political structures. And there's
no reason for orthodox individuals to be strategic in an anonymous survey. This leads us to believe that the communitarianism of orthodox movements is genuine and not merely instrumental. We would sayand I hope this came through in the
bookthat the efforts of these movements to reach out to
those in need in the community primarily comes from their
communitarianism. I think what happened is that movement
leaders at some point realized that establishing a network of
social services also worked on some level in gaining recruits.
We present evidence, specifically for the Muslim Brotherhood,
where an internal document written by the movements leader
notes that the Brotherhood is becoming known because of the
movements social service activism and our sincere efforts of
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SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
seeking to please God by benefitting people (Davis and Robinson 2012:47). The Brotherhoods statement seems very selfreflective. We would say that establishing a vast array of social
services, schools, and businesseswhich all of these groups
didderives from the compassionate side of their core beliefs,
but that it also turned out to have been very effective in helping
to install their religion at the forefront of their society. I like how
Rhys put this in his summary of our book, Service provision is
both an end and a means.
For new movements that are deciding whether this
would work for them, identifying the approach of bypassing the
state or recognizing that this kind of social service effort can
work is useful to know. In fact, a group of atheists contacted us,
asking: Could we use this approach to draw support for our
movement? And in Turkey, to give another example, there are
scholars who are concerned about the growing influence of the
Glen religious movement in their country and who think that
identifying the approach of bypassing the state through construction of a massive social welfare network might help Turkish
citizens realize that the Gllen movement is doing precisely this.
Theyve translated the book in the hope of making the Glen
movements strategy visible so that it might be combatted.
On the question of one-dimensional political space versus two-dimensional space, I think that what Rhys is saying
about the distinction between cultural communitarianism and
individualism disappearing in the U.S. is true, to some extent,
for marriage equalityas Rhys says there is a big shift among
younger U.S. evangelicals toward live and let live and toward
acceptance of marriage equality. Yet on other gender, sexuality
and cultural issues, I am not so sure. It seems that the religiously orthodox are fighting tooth and nail to limit abortion,
and even contraceptive rights every opportunity they
can. Abortion providers in some states now have to have admitting privileges in local hospitals, and their clinics are facing
new requirements for space and facilities that often force them
to shut down. So the distinction between cultural communitarianism and individualism may still be useful in the U.S. and no
doubt even more so in countries such as Italy, Egypt and Israel.
ND: The answer to Rhys question of whether the four groups
that we chronicle are movements or organizations depends on
how one defines social movements or social movement organizations. Some movement scholars, in the tradition of Frances
Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, view movements as collective
defiance. Such a definition suggests more temporary, ephemeral, militant, passion-driven kinds of protest than the groups
we study typically display. On the other hand, there are many
other definitions of social movements that focus on the importance of organization, generating resources, and maintaining longevity. The four groups we study might be considered
hybrid movements because they combine social service provi18

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SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
sionand the institutions that this requireswith the goal of
fundamentally transforming society. They all see the societies in
which they exist as alarmingly secular and materialistic. They
have a fundamentally different visiona communitarian one
that is quite at odds with the neo-liberal nation-states in which
they existof how human societies should be organized, and
they are working to implement their alternative vision. It is in
this sense that we refer to them as social movements (or social
movement organizations), but they certainly also have an institutional baseof school systems that are educating thousands
of students, worship centers, business enterprises, rotatingcredit societies, hospitals and clinics, clubs for young people,
hospices, rehabilitation centers for addicts, homeless shelters,
and so onthat also reflects their core beliefs and is key to
their endeavors and their success.
RR: With regard to John McCarthy's point about the three liabilities of these four social movementsbroad, multi-issue agendas, ideological rigidity, and reluctance to compromise, we did
cite in the book movement scholars who have shown or argued
that these are liabilitiesfor example, Bill Gamson (who John
mentioned), Verta Taylor, Elizabeth Armstrong, Marshall Ganz,
and Neil Fligstein, among many others. We devoted four pages
to the arguments of movement scholars that these are liabilities. For example, both Neil Fligsteins concept of social skill
and Marshall Ganzs concept of strategic capacitywhich they
each say are critical to the success of social movement organizationsinvolve ideological pragmatism, welcoming other
points of view, and openness to give-and-take with other
groups in order to bring them into the movementall of which
these religiously orthodox movements are reluctant to do. So
we were not setting up a straw man in arguing that social
movement theorists have considered broad agendas, ideological rigidity, and unwillingness to compromise to be liabilities. In
fact, we argue in the endand I think John McCarthy said this
as well that broad, multi-pronged agendas, ideological absolutism, and reluctance to negotiate with other groups probably are disadvantageous for movements (Davis and Robinson
2012:148). Nonetheless, the movement organizations that we
studied seem to have been able to overcome these obstacles
by creating vast social service networks, having graduated
membership structures, focusing on the grassroots, and reprioritizing agendas.
Ill also mention, in response to John Evans comment that
the Salvation Army has a post-millennial goal that makes it different from the other three movements: It is true that the ultimate goal of the Army is to advance the Second Coming of
Christ, but the Army believes that human society needs to be
changed first for this to occur. So the Army is establishing
Christian social service institutions in accord with their economic communitarianism and taking positions/actions against same
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-sex relationships in accord with their cultural communitarianism/authoritarianismchanges that are this-worldly enough
that GLBT groups are boycotting the Salvation Army because of
its refusal to support retirement and health benefits for samesex partners.
ND: I would like to respond to an important question that Rhys
Williams raised: What is distinctive or important about religion
for these groups, and specifically about religious practice or ritual? These groups represent the dominant religious tradition in
their country and this gives them a certain poweras John
McCarthy said and as we also acknowledge in the book. The
religiously-grounded narratives and symbols of these movements are culturally resonant. Their religion undoubtedly also
broadens cognitive plausibility structures in terms of what
members consider to be thinkable acts. Three of the four of the
movement organizations that we chronicle center their activities
around worship centers. The Muslim Brothers, for example, in
each village or town first built a mosque and later a boys'
school, then a girls' school, then clubs for boys and girls, and
later still food banks, medical clinics, and so on. Like the Muslim
Brothers, the Salvation Armys social services are also located
near their worship centers or corps. While the Salvation Army
provides aid to anyone, regardless of religious belief or lack of
belief, it is no accident that their social service agencies are centered around or nearby the corps. There is a clear hope and
push for people receiving aid to become involved in the religious practice of the corps. Likewise, Shas services are centered
around synagogues. We would argue that religious practice and
ritual create cohesion among practitioners a sense of belonging, shared purpose, and what Durkheim called heightened
emotionality. The centrality of religious practice in these
groups is an important way in which solidarity among movement members and the willingness to devote long hours to the
movements agendas are built. Movements not grounded in religion may have a harder time generating these essential components of successful movement mobilization. The religious
narratives, symbols, language, shared rituals, and coming together collectively in worship centers are all important features
of these movement organizations and certainly reflect their
communitarianism and contribute to their success as movement
organizations. So yes, we do think that religion plays a distinctive role for these groups.
RR: I like John McCarthy's point that a contribution of our book
is recognizing how these movements combine graduated membership and social service provision that extends even to nonmembers. Graduated membership means that the very bottom
level of the movement consists of volunteers who are not religiously orthodox for the most part, but may be thinking about
the possibility of becoming more seriously involved. Involve20

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ment at this level may even have nothing to do with religion.
These volunteers may simply want to help out the poor in their
community or build a local school or provide health services to
those who need them. The people to whom all of these services
are extended may also have a wide range of different religious
orientations, but may come to appreciate the fact that it always
seems to be the Muslim Brotherhood or Shas or the Salvation
Army or CL that is there on the ground helping them out. It
could be that it is a particularly potent combination for a movement to incorporate volunteers with minimal commitment to
the ideological principles of the movement, as well as provide
social services to people of all sorts, and then gradually to move
both volunteers and recipients of services up in the membership structure as they come to accept the ideology/theology
more or become more committed to the movement.
ND: I would like to point out that these movements sometimes
do have conditions attached to the services they provide. For
example, when the Muslim Brothers provide transportation for
university students, they require that women using their buses
dress appropriately in religious garb. And when they give free
clothing to university students, it is in keeping with their notion
of dress standards. There are ways in which the cultural stances
and religious beliefs of the movements do come in when offering social services.
One way these groups are especially effective in bringing
more people in is through their schools. For example, Shas offers a decent, inexpensive education to children, including those
from non-observant Mizrahi familiesin fact most of its students have either traditional (partially-observant) or secular
parents. These children learn Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) religious
beliefs and practice (e.g., lighting the Sabbath candles) and, in
turn, may subsequently bring their irreligious parents back to
the fold.
John Evans makes an important observation that sociologists can create a them out of the groups they study and this
may then lead to dismissing these groups as having no similar
values to usapparently meaning liberal-minded sociologistsand hence not being worth talking to or working
with. Rob and I acknowledge in the Preface of our book that
we do not support the cultural stances of the religiously orthodox, specifically their policing of gender, reproduction, and sexuality, but we are quite clear that there is much that we admire
about their care for the poor, the sick, the unemployed, and
otherwise marginalized. We see our portrayal of these four
groups as considerably more sympathetic than most sociological accounts and not one designed to create an us out of
modernists (who are quite individualistic, one might say selfish,
on economic issues) and a them out of the religiously orthodox. We see the economic outreach to those in need by the religiously orthodox as stemming from their communitarian mor21

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al cosmology and not simply an instrumental means of recruiting more supporters or bringing religion to the center of their
country.
RR: We have argued in previous work that because of the economic communitarianismthe egalitarian faceof the religiously orthodox, Democrats in the U.S. have much in common
with the orthodox and should work more than they currently do
to bring orthodox people into their party. So again, I dont see
us as creating a them out of the religiously orthodox.
ND: John McCarthy raises the question of how we chose our
four religiously orthodox movement organizations, suggesting
that we chose them because they were all similar in structure
and were all successful. We actually chose the four movement
organizations because they represented four different Abrahamic traditions in four different countries, and because, like
religiously orthodox individuals in those countries, these movement organizations were communitarian in outlook. In our earlier quantitative work, we had found that orthodox individuals in
these countries expressed culturally and economically communitarian attitudes. These movement organizations in particular
were examined because they were among the most prominent
of their type in their country. The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, is the largest Islamist movement organization in Egypt;
Comunione e Liberazione is the most prominent Catholic renewal organization in Italy, etc. With one exceptionthe fact
that they all offer an array of services, the significance of which
we had not recognized when we selected the cases, it was only after considerable study of these four movement organizations that we recognized the shared structures among them.
We did not choose our cases on this basis.
John McCarthy also wanted to see more variation in the
independent and dependent variables in our study, so that we
could test the factors leading to the success of a social movement organization. While certainly a worthy endeavor to be undertaken, ours was a comparative, historical study, rich in detailas many reviewers have noted. Our study was not a quantitative study designed to have independent and dependent
variables or the number of cases needed to conduct such a test,
but rather to offer an in-depth, cross-time look at four prominent, religiously-orthodox movement organizationsall with a
communitarian moral cosmology. We found that building a vast
social service network which bypasses the state, focusing on the
grassroots, re-prioritizing agendas, and having a graduated
membership structure are important features of these four
movement organizations.
RR: Let me end by addressing Rhys question about why we
didn't use the term fundamentalist in our book to refer to the
four groups that we chroniclea decision that he agrees with.
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We prefer to limit fundamentalist to the traditionalist, textbound side of the split within Protestantism that occurred in the
first decade of the 20th century. The word also can have a pejorative cast to it, so instead we use James Davidson Hunter's
term, religiously orthodox.
Note: Updates and news stories on these and other religiously
orthodox movements, as well as questions for teaching the
book, can be found at www.facebook.com/
ClaimingSocietyforGod

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