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But Christian monotheism can indeed provide the impetus for such risk-takers, says Stark. "Just as monotheists know the identity of the One True God, they also know the One True Way in which their faith should be practiced." Thus there lies an "urge for monopoly…with all, or nearly all, monotheistic factions." Whether a religious monopoly actually develops depends entirely on the strength of power structures. When no one faction has sufficient power, religious pluralism is likely. But when any one monotheistic faction consolidates power, state churches, with all of the attendant history of repression, are the normal state of affairs.

Stark's analysis of the "Reformation" (he uses quotation marks because the Protestant movement was unsuccessful in its direct attempts at the theological and structural reform of the Catholic Church) focuses on a variety of factors that contributed to the adoption of Protestantism in some areas and its rejection in others. Stark believes that Protestantism's theological appeal "mattered enormously." But that appeal was a constant across Europe. So Protestantism's adoption or rejection in various areas has to be correlated with other, more variable factors:

How responsive was the government to popular pressure? Responsive governments in 16th-century Europe tended to go Protestant. How strong was Catholic influence in a given area? Beyond the Rhine, where evangelization had often consisted of adding a Christian gloss to a pagan culture, there was little popular resistance to the Protestant message. But below the Rhine, where the people had been thoroughly Catholicized, the peasants resisted Protestantism despite its adoption by some élites. What was the economic benefit of adopting Protestantism? What was the degree of royal interest in remaining Catholic? Such information would have helped a dispassionate observer predict whether a country would accept Protestantism.

Orderly God, orderly universe
Starks's second case is the rise of science. The argument that Christian theology provided the framework for the rise of science is a familiar one: Medieval scholastics laid down a philosophical base of belief in an orderly universe created by an orderly God. In the centuries that followed, keen minds observed that order, described it mathematically, and articulated the laws of the physical world. Some of these minds (Isaac Newton, especially) were as occupied with the study of religion as they were of science.

What will be less familiar is Stark's argument that Christian theology was a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for the rise of science. As Stark points out, "science arose only once in history—in medieval Europe" and "science could only arise in a culture dominated by belief in a conscious, rational, all-powerful Creator." Other civilizations with different religious frameworks also produced keen observers of the natural order.

The Chinese, for example, had an advanced civilization and were keen observers of the stars. But neither Chinese philosophy nor grassroots Chinese religion prompted that culture's scholars to ask why things happen and to look for a rational and predictable order.

The Greeks as well were observers of the natural order, but once again their conceptions of the gods prevented them from imagining a conscious Creator, and their animism and polytheism prompted them to attribute motives to inanimate objects rather than to search for physical theories. Islamic philosophy essentially devoted itself to elaborating Aristotle and classical Greek learning, thus missing the opportunity that Christian thinkers took.

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July (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47