This article by Terry Scambray first appeared in the May/June 2024 issue of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity and is reprinted with the permission of the author. Scambray “lives and writes in the ‘Other California’: the Great Central Valley of California.”

Rodney Stark, the widely read sociologist turned historian, died on July 21, 2022, at age 88.  His journey from progressivism to Christianity is reflected in his large body of work.

When I began reading Stark, about the year 2000, I discovered that his long-standing goal was to crush the dominant progressive narrative of the West, which he called “one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in Western history.” This tall tale, as narrated by Darwin, Marx, and Freud and perpetuated by progressives, offers only material causes for the sublime success of the West, formerly Christendom.

When Stark reminisced about his background, he made it clear that he valued having been born and raised in a small town in North Dakota and having been in the military. After earning a journalism degree at the University of Denver, he worked as a journalist in Oakland, California. This work experience made him keyboard friendly—he eventually authored 40 books and over 160 articles—but it also made him experienced and confident enough to challenge his professors when he returned to school for advanced degrees.

Nevertheless, during his early academic career as a graduate student and then a fledgling professor at UC Berkeley, Stark was a promoter of progressive views. For example, he co-authored books on “police brutality” and the putative correlation between conservative Christians and racism.

His habit of taking surveys and drawing correlations from them turned him into a sociologist, and in 1971 he earned a doctorate at Berkeley in the sociology of religion. Afterwards, he took an appointment at the University of Washington, where he remained for 34 years. In 2004 he was appointed the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor, a university more aligned with his ripening conservativism, empiricism, and interest in history.

Following an Axiom

As his views matured, Stark found himself more and more opposed to the nineteenth-century positivist founders of social science, Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, who distrusted the explanations people offered for their behavior, especially for their “religious behavior.” 

Comte, who coined the word sociology, aspired to make this field into a “positive science” like chemistry and physics. He saw sociology as “social physics” and predicted that it would replace religion, which he said was based on “hallucinations.” Durkheim, for his part, thought religion was “social camouflage,” behind which people hid their feelings of doubt. Marx famously wrote that people are chumps, drugged by the “opiate” of religion so that the bourgeoisie could fleece them.

In his penetrating 2001 book, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism, Stark admitted that he, too, had once been skeptical of religious claims. But he later changed his mind and suggested that social scientists should “suspend their disbelief” about such claims so as to more fairly assess them. About a hundred years earlier, Durkheim had done likewise, saying that remaining mired in skepticism about religious claims is “like a blind man talking about color.” As Stark admitted, “Just as Durkheim came to a more mature outlook, so have I.”

Ironically, Stark was led to this mature view by, as he wrote, adhering to an “axiom of social science which posits that only if we know what people think they are doing can we evaluate why they are doing it.” And he followed this up by measuring his respondents’ statements against their actions.

Thus, Stark determined that when people explain why they follow a certain religion, it becomes apparent that they have made their choice based on a cost-benefit analysis, much as they do when making other choices. In Stark’s words: “People value religion on the basis of cost, and they don’t value the cheapest ones most. Religions that ask nothing get nothing.” His conclusion is supported by the increased growth of more demanding churches.

In a further irony, adherence to this axiom led Stark to introduce theology into a discipline explicitly founded to destroy theology, to replace the medieval “queen of the sciences” with “Science,” understood as providing totally material answers to all questions.

Correcting Caricatures

As Stark began applying his sociological training to his growing interest in history, he found that seeing history through a positivist, materialist lens reduces its complexities to caricatures. Three historical episodes distorted by this lens are the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Galileo affair. And these caricatures are so woven into the fabric of our culture that even popes and presidents repeat them.

For instance, contrary to the received wisdom, the Crusades were not expeditions for land and loot, but one of the most selfless pursuits in history. As Stark explains in his 2009 book, God’s Battalions, European knights journeyed at great personal expense to rescue the holy land from Muslim predations.

As for the Spanish and Italian Inquisitions, when compared to the punishments meted out by secular authorities of the time, they were lenient, executing about ten people per year over their 300-year existence. Henry VIII, by contrast, executed as many as 2,000 people during his 36-year reign.

Historians today know much more about the Inquisition than their predecessors because of the release of the records of 44,674 cases covering a 150-year period. These are Dominican in-house records, meaning they were not photo-shopped for public-relations purposes. They illustrate once again that listening, in this case, to those accused of witchcraft, reveals that the accused were asking for spiritual favors much as priests were doing with prayer under the auspices of the Church. So, invariably, those accused of witchcraft or sorcery were absolved of any crime if they promised to repent. In fact, the Spanish and Italian Inquisitions dealt most harshly with those who themselves had tortured and burned witches, which is why the witchcraft craze was confined to northern Europe and did not reach Spain and Italy.

As for Galileo, it is hilarious to watch the cognoscenti on PBS still cast him as a victim of sinister Vatican forces that opposed scientific progress.  In reality, Galileo was only a victim of his own ego when he irresponsibly pushed too far on the yet-unproven heliocentric theory.  And his punishment was merely to be confined to his Florentine villa, replete with servants, and even so, he was not denied occasional outside excursions.

Science, Freedom & Faith

During the so-called Dark Ages, Europeans invented banking, chimneys, eyeglasses, steel, more productive farming methods, and many other things that greatly improved life for ordinary people. Indeed, the distinguished medieval historian Jean Gimpel calls the European medieval period “one of the great inventive eras of mankind.”

The northern Italian city-states revived the traditions of Greek democracy and Roman republicanism, which provided the environment of freedom that allowed such progress to be made. Though this freedom is clearly shown by the sublime art and literature produced in this period, as epitomized by Dante and Giotto, our histories often ignore the technological advances also made at the time, an omission Stark was keen to rectify.

In fact, the first universities began in Italy, and from these, modern science was born. The celebrated mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead astonished a Harvard audience in 1925 when he claimed that the West created science because its God was informed by Jewish wisdom and Greek reason; thus, the Christian God was “not only eternal and immutable but also conscious, concerned, and rational.” Jesus Christ embodies this rational principle as “the Word (Logos) made flesh,” reason incarnate.

Since the world is structured on reason, there must be an order, a design, to it. With this assurance, thinkers in the West set out to find this order. As Stark realized, science and religion are therefore not only compatible, but they are indispensable to one another.  This is in contrast to religions which picture the world as something to be pondered but not understood, bound to endless cycles where things never change.

The True Singularity

Stark, like many of us, was surprised that he had never learned this history.  As a social scientist who had been taught to avoid value judgments—itself a value judgment—he began to ask, “Why did these sublime improvements occur in the West and not elsewhere?”

Learning the answer to this question led him to realize that “Gods are the fundamental feature of religions.” In other words, the God that a culture embraces is comparable to what physicists pine for, an elusive “Theory of Everything,” a “Singularity.” Stark used social science to demonstrate that a culture’s vision of God is its Singularity.

As he wrote in 2003, “the Jews were the very first to believe that God took a minute interest in the moral behavior of humans.” The gospel of Christ made this moral concern explicitly universal. As Paul of Tarsus wrote, “You [believers] are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Slavery clearly contradicted this unparalleled and unstoppable proclamation. Thus, perhaps the greatest moral advance in history took place as the institution of slavery began to decline in Europe by the sixth century. By the end of the first millennium, it was abolished, to be replaced by feudalism. And although slavery began again in Christendom with the discovery of the Americas and cruelly lasted for another 300 years, re-abolishing it was once more the work of Christians.

Stark often said he was “a cultural Christian,” based on all the great and humane advances achieved by the West.  From there he became a profound admirer of Jesus, for as he said, “Without Jesus, Western society would not exist.” Finally, in 2007, he told Massimo Introvigne, an Italian sociologist, that as he continued to devote attention to Christian history, “I found one day . . . that I was a Christian.” Though he didn’t formally join a church but remained what he called “an independent Christian,” he did fulfill an earlier expressed desire to become “a believer before it’s all over.”