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Religious Elites in Advanced Industrial Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

James Davison Hunter
James Davison Hunter
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Extract

In primitive and nonindustrialized societies the typical (and in many cases, the exclusive) tasks of religious elites have revolved chiefly around the creation, modification, and maintenance of the symbolic universe of society. Such work invariably implied privilege and various kinds and degrees of political power. But with the expansion of the modern world order, the situation of religious elites has altered dramatically. For one, religious-knowledge workers make up a very small percentage of the ranks of a much larger knowledge sector. For example, while the percentage of religious-knowledge workers (including clergy) relative to the entire economically active population in the United States has remained relatively constant since 1870, the percentage of religious workers to the knowledge workers has declined by one half in the period between 1950 and 1970—a period of dramatic growth of the knowledge sector (see Table 1). By 1970, the percentage of religious-knowledge workers to knowledge workers generally had shrunk to one sixth of its proportionate size a century earlier. Between 1970 and 1984, this proportion has leveled off somewhat. In Western Europe and Japan the same patterns have become firmly established as well.

Type
The Limited Power of the Clergy
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , April 1987 , pp. 360 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1987

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References

1 The actual figures are as follows:

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35 I would like to thank David Martin for providing the marginals on an unpublished survey from the British Opinion Research Centre entitled “Attitudes of the Church of England Clergy. ” This survey was conducted in 1981.

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61 I make no presumption that knowledge workers in advanced capitalist societies are, out of some sort of structural necessity, left-liberal or even adversarial. Such arguments have been made but they are irrelevant to the present argument. I only note the large amount of evidence showing that the political and ideological configuration of knowledge elites has been (from the post- World War II period to the early 1980s) both adversarial and left of center. Religious elites are merely responding to this configuration. For evidence on the political and ideological values of knowledge elites generally, see Gouldner, Alvin. “The New Class Project I,” Theory and Society, 6 (09 1978a), 153–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “The New Class Project II, ” Theory and Society, 1 (November 1978b), 343–89; Ladd, Carl E., “Pursuing the New Class: Social Theory and Survey,” in The New Class? Bruce-Briggs, B., ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1979)Google Scholar; Brint, Steven, “Stirrings of an Oppositional Elite?: The Social Base and Historical Trajectory of Upper White Collar Dissent in the United States, 1960–1980” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1980)Google Scholar.

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64 See Hunter, J. D., “The Liberal Reaction to the New Christian Right,” in The New Christian Right, Liebman, Robert and Wuthnow, Robert, eds. (New York: Aldine, 1983), 149–63Google Scholar.