CHRISTIAN
SMITH
Professor of Sociology and Director of
the Center for the Study of Religion and Society
Ph.D.: Harvard
Sociology of Religion
Christian Smith is the
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre
Dame, Director of the Center for the Sociology of Religion and Society,
and Principal Investigator of the National Study of Youth and Religion.
He recently served as Associate Chair of the Department of Sociology at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from 2000 to 2005.
Smith holds an M.A. (1987) and Ph.D. (1990) in Sociology from Harvard
University and has studied Christian historical theology at Harvard
Divinity School and other Boston Theological Institute schools. Before
moving to UNC Chapel Hill in 1994, Smith taught for six years at Gordon
College. Smith is the author, co-author, or editor of numerous books,
including Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American
Teenagers; Moral, Believing Animals: Human Culture and Personhood; The
Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization
of American Public Life, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and
Thriving, and The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and
Social Movement Theory. His current research projects in the Center for
the Study of Religion include: NSYR Wave 3, The Human Personhood and
Social Science Project, and Religious Financial and Charitable Giving
Project.
Books by Christian Smith
Books
Christian Smith, with Melinda Denton. 2005. Soul Searching: The
Religious And Spiritual Lives Of American Teenagers. Oxford University
Press.
From Publishers Weekly: "Encyclopedic
in scope and exhaustive in detail, this study offers an impressive array
of data, statistics and concluding hypotheses about American teenage
religious identity, with appendixes explaining methodology and extensive
endnotes. Sociologists of religion at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, Smith and Denton cover a range of topics: e.g., 'mapping'
religious affiliations, creating new categories to describe teenage
spirituality, exploring why Catholic teens are largely apathetic. All
the book's findings derive from interviews conducted with teenagers for
the National Study of Youth and Religion. Interestingly and against
popular belief, Smith and Denton conclude that the 'spiritual but not
religious' affiliation thought to be widespread among young adults is
actually rare among Americans under 18, and that the greatest influence
shaping teens' religious beliefs is their parents. Despite the personal
tone adopted in the first chapter and the topic's wide appeal, readers
should be prepared to wade through lengthy presentations of research
findings. Most helpful are summaries appearing in bullet form within
several chapters, providing accessible and succinct overviews of the raw
information and statistics. Regardless of whether this research will be
'a catalyst for many soul-searching conversations in various communities
and organizations" among parents and pastors, scholars will surely agree
that this study advances the conversation about contemporary adolescent
spirituality.'" (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division
of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Christian
Smith. 2003. Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
What kind of animals are human beings?
And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action
and institutions? This book advances a theory of human persons and
culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other
fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory.
Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and
proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on
this planet. Despite the vast differences in humanity between cultures
and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives
and histories, there remains an underlying structure of human personhood
that helps to order human culture, history, and narration. Drawing on
important recent insights in moral philosophy, epistemology, and
narrative studies, the book argues that humans are animals who have an
inescapable moral and spiritual dimension. They cannot avoid a
fundamental moral orientation in life and this has profound consequences
for how sociology must study human beings.
Christian
Smith (ed.). 2003. The Secular Revolution : Power, Interests, and
Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Sociologists, historians, and other
social observers have long considered the secularization of American
public life over the past hundred and thirty years to be an inevitable
and natural outcome of modernization. This groundbreaking work rejects
this view and fundamentally rethinks the historical and theoretical
causes of the secularization of American public life between 1870 and
1930. The authors boldly argue that the declining authority of religion
was not the by-product of modernization, but rather the intentional
achievement of cultural and intellectual elites, including scientists,
academics, and literary intellectuals, seeking to gain control of social
institutions and increase their own cultural authority. Writing with
broad intellectual grasp, the contributors examine power struggles and
ideological shifts in various social sectors where the public authority
of religion has diminished, in particular education, science, law, and
journalism. Together the essays depict a cultural and institutional
revolution that is best understood in terms of individual agency,
conflicts of interest, resource mobilization, and struggles for
authority. Engaging both sociological and historical literature, The
Secular Revolution offers a new theoretical framework and original
empirical research that will inform our understanding of American
society from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.
Christian
Smith. 2000. Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
In recent decades Protestant
evangelicalism has become a conspicuous- and to many Americans, a
worrisome- part of this country's cultural and political landscape. But
just how unified is the supposed constituency of the Christian
Coalition? And who exactly are the people the Christian Right claims to
represent? In the most extensive study of American evangelicals ever
conducted, Christian Smith explores the beliefs, values, commitments,
and goals of the ordinary men and women who make up this often
misunderstood religious group. The result is a much-needed contribution
to the discussion of issues surrounding fundamental American freedoms
and the basic identity of the United States as a pluralistic nation.
Based on data from a three-year
national study, including more than 200 in-depth interviews of
evangelicals around the country, Christian America? assesses the common
stereotype of evangelicals as right-wing, intolerant religious zealots
seeking to impose a Christian moral order through political force. What
Smith finds instead are people vastly more diverse and ambivalent than
this stereotype suggests. On issues such as religion in education,
"family values," Christian political activism, and tolerance of other
religions and moralities, evangelicals are highly disparate and
conflicted. As the voices of interviewees make clear, the labels
"conservative" and "liberal" are too simplistic for understanding their
approaches to public life and political action.
Smith also finds many more differences
between evangelicals than might be expected from the common image
portrayed in the media. Not only do evangelical leaders range across the
political and ideological map, but their constituents don't necessarily
follow them lock-step on every issue.
Moving beyond the characterizations of
evangelicals as seen from the outside, Smith gets inside their world and
listens attentively to its multitude of conflicted voices. What he
presents is a carefully assembled cultural analysis that does much to
explain who evangelicals are, what they want for America, and how they
hope to get it.
Michael
O. Emerson and Christian Smith. 2000. Divided by Faith: Evangelical
Religion and the Problem of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
In recent years, the leaders of the
American evangelical movement have brought their characteristic passion
to the problem of race, notably in the Promise Keepers movement and in
reconciliation theology. But the authors of this provocative new study
reveal that, despite their good intentions, evangelicals may actually be
preserving America's racial chasm.
In Divided by Faith, Michael O. Emerson
and Christian Smith probe the grassroots of white evangelical America,
through a nationwide telephone survey of 2,000 people, along with 200
face-to-face interviews. The results of their research are surprising.
They learned that most white evangelicals see no systematic
discrimination against blacks; indeed, they deny the existence of any
ongoing racial problem in the United States. Many of their subjects
blamed the continuing talk of racial conflict on the media, unscrupulous
black leaders, and the inability of African Americans to forget the
past. What lies behind this perception? Evangelicals, Emerson and Smith
write, are not so much actively racist as committed to a theological
view of the world. Therefore, it is difficult for them to see systematic
injustice. The evangelical emphasis on individualism, free will, and
personal relationships makes invisible the pervasive injustice that
perpetuates inequality between the races. Most racial problems, they
told the authors, can be solved by the repentance and conversion of the
sinful individuals at fault.
Combining a substantial body of
evidence with sophisticated analysis and interpretation, Emerson and
Smith throw sharp light on the oldest American dilemma. Despite the best
intentions of evangelical leaders and some positive trends, the authors
conclude that real racial reconciliation remains far over the horizon.
Christian
Smith with Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David
Sikkink. 1998. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Based on a national survey and hundreds
of personal interviews with evangelicals and other churchgoing
Protestants, this study provides a detailed analysis of the commitments,
beliefs, concerns, and practices of this thriving group. Examining how
evangelicals interact with and attempt to influence secular society,
this book argues that traditional, orthodox evangelicalism endures not
despite, but precisely because of, the challenges and structures of our
modern pluralistic environment. This work also looks beyond
evangelicalism to explore more broadly the problems and prospects for
traditional religious belief and practice in the modern world.
Christian
Smith. 1991. The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and
Social Movement Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Liberation theology is a school of
Roman Catholic thought that emerged in the late 1960s in Latin America.
Teaching that a primary duty of the church must be to promote social and
economic justice, liberation theologians have committed the
institutional church to the poor and created a radically new model of
church pastoral work. The movement has produced progressive and
revolutionary laity and clergy who have fostered active opposition to
political regimes in numerous Latin American nations, resulting in the
arrests, exile, torture, and murder of thousands of lay leaders, clergy,
and bishops. The liberation theology movement has also provoked a
restructuring of the church institution itself, a change which continues
to spread worldwide.
In this book, Christian Smith explains
how and why the liberation theology movement emerged and succeeded when
and where it did. He uses interviews, texts, historical documents, and
statistics, culled from research conducted in North America, England,
Central, and South America, to create the first comprehensive social
history of the movement from 1930 to the present. Using the political
process model- a theory explaining the emergence of social movements-
Smith analyzes the complex of social, political, organizational, and
ideological forces and events which generated and sustain liberation
theology.
Christian
Smith and Joshua Prokopy (eds.). 1999. Latin American Religion In
Motion. New York: Routledge.
Latin America is experiencing a genuine
pluralization of faith. This interdisciplinary volume tracks those
changes, from the perspective of such diverse fields as sociology,
anthropology, religious studies, political science, and Latin American
studies. The contributors tackle such issues as creolization, esoterica,
and Afro-Brazilian religion in a highly accessible way. Latin American
Religion in Motion provides not only a clear sense of the extent of the
transformations now under way, but also provides insight into some of
the most pressing issues surrounding these momentous changes.
Christian
Smith (ed.). 1996. Disruptive Religion: The Force of Faith in Social
Movement Activism. New York: Routledge.
Religion has long played a central role
in many social and political movements. Solidarity in Poland,
anti-apartheid in South Africa, Operation Rescue in the United States -
each of these movements is driven by the energy and sustained by the
commitment of many individuals and organizations whose ideologies are
shaped and powered by religious faith. In many cases, religious
resources and motives serve as crucial variables explaining the
emergence of entire social movements.
Despite the crucial role of religion in
most societies, this religious activism remains largely uninvestigated.
Disruptive Religion fills this void by analyzing contemporary social
movements which are driven by people and organizations of faith. Upon a
firm base of empirical evidence, these essays also address many
theoretical issues arising in the study of social movements and
disruptive politics.
