THE EMERGING CHURCH: RELIGION AT THE MARGINS. By JoshPackard. Boulder, CO: Lynne‐Reinner/First Forum Press, 2012. x + 200 pp. $59.95 cloth.

Abstract

This is an important, indeed a crucial book. Frustratingly incomplete, it lives up to the first gerund of its subtitle: it de-centers the sociology of religion in four distinct ways. It challenges: (1) the discipline's excessive focus on American religion; (2) its implicit favoring of Protestant Christianity in defining religions as matters of meaning and belief; (3) its focus on institutional religion and specifically on the voluntary congregation as the religious location par excellence; and (4) its focus on religion's benefits for groups and individuals. The editors do not claim that America, Protestantism, or congregations are sociologically irrelevant, nor that religion is necessarily a bad thing. They do, however, claim that the major theoretical streams of the last 40 yearssecularization theory, the focus on individual religious choices in competitive markets, and the emphasis on local religious communitiesall wear blinders and thus miss much of the religious scene. The chapters demonstrate this theoretically and empirically. This is a huge accomplishment. The book's failure to produce the subtitle's second gerund-a convincing recentering-is thus forgivable. Indeed, it may be inevitable, a matter to which I shall return.The editors open the book with a detailed and theoretically acute essay that lays out the four foci listed above in great depth. They then present seven chapters that focus on theory and five that present empirical cases, though this division is not strict. All are far too deep to summarize justly in a short review.The theoretical section opens with a piece by Manuel Vasquez that traces early sociology's intellectual effort to constitute itself as a science, set against religious world visions. The costs, he says, were two. First, sociologists identified religion with a benighted (and disappearing) religious world; this was an "orientalizing" as severe as were the contemporaneous colonial efforts of which Edward Said has written so well. Second, this view cast rational, individual, anti-authoritarian Protestantism in the role of the "best" religion for modern times. The results: secularization theory plus Protestant-normativity; Vasquez says that neither has been helpful in the long run.Next, David Smilde critiques "the strong program" in the sociology of religion for its tooautonomous notion of culture-one that makes religion too often an explanans instead of an explanandum. He advocates a more measured approach, in which religion can be grasped as both causal and caused. His end point is good, though his venture into critical realism is probably not the best way to get there. Michal Pagis similarly stumbles while making an excellent case for rethinking how religious selves get constructed. She advocates a microinteractional approach (based in Mead rather than Blumer) that sees the self as a process rather than an object. She uses this to illuminate core aspects of learning Vipassana meditation-a social process of religious selfconstruction that no belief-centered sociology of religion can...