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How do professional historians react to a social scientist writing about great historic movements?

I was very anxious about that when I did it the first time [The Rise of Christianity (HarperCollins, 1997)]. The only negative reviews I got were from two modernists, one a historian and one a social scientist. The historians, other than that, were wonderful—people like Owen Chadwick and the reviews in the Times Literary Supplement.

Since then, I have discovered that the grousing comes from social scientists, not from historians. Historians seem delighted to have someone try his hand at their stuff.

Do the social scientists have a problem with your focus on history or your emphasis on religion?

The religious emphasis. They tend to say things like, He certainly doesn't appreciate Marx properly. I don't think Marx deserves to be appreciated very much.

At the end of the chapter on slavery, I really did tear into the Marxists who made the pretense that the Quakers were acting out of false consciousness or trying to open the road to real capitalism. This is idiotic stuff. It presupposes that people can't think. The whole notion of false consciousness seems to me to be nothing but an easy intellectual out.

What first caused you to pay attention to the role of religion in social change?

I was a reporter at the Oakland Tribune before I started graduate school. And I went out to cover something called the Oakland Spacecraft Club, where there was a fellow speaking who was going to talk about his trip to Mars, Venus, and the moon on a flying saucer. I wrote a Sunday feature and had the maturity, where it came from I don't know, but I had the maturity to just write it straight. I figured the humor was there, and you didn't need to pound it.

The people I wrote about were so pleased I hadn't mocked them, while most of Oakland got a good chuckle. The problem was that I was then considered "the goofy writer." Anything odd that came along, whether it was calendar reform or some new religion, I would get assigned to it.

And so when I started graduate school, I had that background and had been wondering how these groups recruit. The first week of school, I met a guy transferred from Columbia who was very interested in how people join movements.

We decided to look for somebody to study. After about a year, we found the first 13 Moonies and did a study of conversion, which has stood up through the years. We said that friendship ties were in the first instance much more important than theology. That people learned the theology, but they learned it only after having already learned to trust it because their friends did.

That's the same pattern that's been established in more mainstream groups.

Sure, why do the evangelical churches grow? Well because they invite their neighbors to church. I mean it really does come down to that a lot of the time.

The other thing that happened to me about that time was that when we took our first exam in the methods course and I got the top grade, I was recruited by Charles Glock to be his research assistant. He was one of the world's very few sociologists of religion at the time. The main reason that he recruited me is that I was the star student. But the other reason was that he picked up that, unlike almost everybody else in my cohort, I knew what people actually did in churches on Sunday morning. I had been baptized and confirmed a Lutheran, and it turns out he was a Lutheran. So I've been a sociologist of religion, really, since my first year of graduate school.

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July (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47