Abstract
At least since the work of Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu, scholars have claimed that established and newcomer groups may compete for resources and power in religious fields. Remarkably, even though the religious field concept rests in important ways on the relationships between religious suppliers, there have, to date, been few quantitative studies that describe these fields on the congregational level. Using a representative National Congregation Study (NCS), we measure and compare the activities and resources of established and newcomer congregations across all major religious traditions in Switzerland. As expected, establishment status is linked to strong privileges for the established groups. Despite diminishing numbers of official members and diminishing attendance, established groups are much wealthier and have more staff than newcomer groups. Other than expected, established groups do not seem to compete with newcomer groups by using exclusion strategies. On the contrary, established groups explicitly seek ecumenical and interreligious contacts and are very tolerant concerning individual social and religious diversity. We suggest that this does not contradict the Weberian/Bourdieusian field theory, but can be viewed as a strategy by established groups to preserve their threatened establishment status.
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Notes
- 1.
Körs (2018) maps and describes congregations in the city of Hamburg. Many of her findings are strikingly similar to ours. See the next chapter of this present volume.
- 2.
We thus take up the invitation to engage in congregational studies made in Ammerman et al. (1998). There are, of course, various interesting European studies on the congregational level: see for example Rebenstorf et al. (2015), Hero et al. (2008), and Giordan (2013). We are not, however, aware of any other congregational study that allows comparisons to be made over the whole religious field of a given country.
- 3.
For an interesting view on the complexity of “varieties of establishment”, see various chapters in Sullivan and Beaman (2013). Much of the relevant literature can be found under the heading of “State-Religion Relations”. For an overview of such relationships in the countries of the EU see Robbers (2005).
- 4.
See Verter 2003 152–153.
- 5.
For a critique of Bourdieu’s approach to the definition of religion and the religious field see Pollack and Rosta (2015, 57f.).
- 6.
Other literature that treats the importance of the established/newcomer structure in religion in a different way is to be found under the category “economics of religion” (Iannaccone 1998). Here, the relationship between different religious groups is not called a “field”, but a “religious economy” or “religious market”. For a recent appraisal and critique see De Graaf (2013).
- 7.
As Verter underlines: “In order to see Bourdieu’ relevance for sociologists of religion, one must – paradoxically – turn away from his writings on religion.” (Verter 2003:150).
- 8.
The one empirical application of the theory of religious field that Bourdieu contributed himself concerned the French Catholic hierarchy (co-authored with Monique de Saint Martin). Bourdieu and de Saint Martin (1982) argue that the image of unity of the episcopate hides a struggle between bishops from a modest social background (“oblats”) and others from an upper-class social background (“héritiers”). These findings are also discussed in a more theoretical manner in Bourdieu (1998). It may be important to note that we do not apply the Bourdieusian approach in its entirety, but only insofar as he speaks of religious fields of groups with different power (just as Weber or other field theorists would), see: Wood and Altglas (2010).
- 9.
Historically, the intermediate church-state system (Landeskirchentum) grew out of a strong church-state system (Staatskirchentum) that was still in place in the eighteenth century. Vischer et al. (1994, 182ff.). When going over to an intermediate church-state system, cantons naturally initially recognized only their own traditional denomination; but during the twentieth century the “other” large denomination was recognized in all cantons as well (and sometimes the Christ Catholic denomination, too).
- 10.
In this paper, we do not focus on the causal effect of the strength of establishment, but instead compare established and non-established congregations on a variety of dimensions. For an investigation of the causal effect of strength of establishment see Stolz and Chaves (2017).
- 11.
By 2008 there were other groups that enjoyed some form of public recognition. Christ Catholics enjoy strong establishment, comparable to the Reformed and Roman Catholic Churches, in nine cantons, while specific Jewish congregations have degrees of recognition in six cantons (see Appendix). All these groups are small and for the sake of clarity we exclude them from our analysis. Non-established Jewish congregations are included. Our results are similar with or without this exclusion.
- 12.
Twenty percent of the Swiss population has no affiliation (de Flaugergues 2016).
- 13.
Very often, this is now expressed as the “Judaeo-Christian heritage”, thus including the Jews in the group that represents the roots of Swiss culture. This is, of course, a very new kind of thinking. On the difficult history of the integration of Jews in Switzerland see Kupfer and Weingarten (1999).
- 14.
The National Congregation Study Switzerland (NCSS) was conducted by Christophe Monnot and Laurent Amiotte-Suchet and directed by Jörg Stolz and Mark Chaves. For a detailed account of the methodology of the NCSS, see Monnot (2013). For more details about the U.S. NCS, see http://www.soc.duke.edu/natcong (Accessed 4 Feb 2016).
- 15.
The American and Swiss NCSs used different sampling strategies. A notable difference with the American study resides in the fact that, in Switzerland, a mapping of all the congregations in activity has been undertaken, see Monnot (2013, 243–254) for more sampling details of the Swiss case.
- 16.
- 17.
For a key informant survey, the obvious question is if the key informant will give valid and reliable answers to our questions. The literature has shown many possible biases, e.g. the false consensus effect (the informant falsely believes that other members of the group have similar opinions to him or her), effects of limited information of the key informant, and so on. Our solution to this problem is not to ask the key informant any questions on the values and beliefs of the congregation members or on the goals or missions of the congregation, but only questions concerning directly observable facts. It has been shown that the answers to such questions are normally very valid and reliable. For example: key informants are normally well able to answer the question: Including you/the leader, how many people currently work in this congregation as full-time paid staff?
- 18.
The response rates correspond to RR1 calculated according to the standards defined by the AAPOR (2011).
- 19.
This last question permits multiple responses.
- 20.
See Stolz and Chaves (2017) for details of the scale. For a recent overview, comparison, and evaluation of different scales of church-state relationships – including the one used in this article, see Traunmüller (2012). We chose an adapted Chaves/Cann scale, since it allows the central church-state variation in Switzerland to be conceptualized and measured in a very straightforward way.
- 21.
Swiss cantons have either a Reformed, a Roman Catholic, or a mixed religious tradition. This goes back to the time of the Reformation (Maissen 2010; Vischer et al. 1994). During that time, the big city cantons and their territories became Reformed, while the rural cantons stayed Roman Catholic. There was, in other words, a “cuius regio, eius religio” (“who rules the land determines its religion”) system. This was abolished in 1848 and freedom of religion introduced.
- 22.
We do not show the models here for lack of space. Note that we did not introduce the number of regular participants and participants with any link at the same time for reasons of collinearity.
- 23.
An interesting reaction to such exclusion practices was the foundation of a group of excluded religious movements that formed an interreligious organization (CLIMS) in 1997, bringing together LDS, Scientology, the Unification Church, Sukyo Mahikari, and the Fraternité Blanche Universelle. For more information on CLIMS see http://www.clims.ch/index.php (Accessed 4 Feb 2016).
- 24.
This is an example that one of the authors has personally witnessed during his time as dean of a Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies.
- 25.
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This chapter is a revised version of an article “The Established and the Newcomers. A Weberian-Bourdieusian View of Congregations in the Swiss Religious Field” first published in the Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuse, vol. 97 (1), p. 69–90. This chapter is dedicated to Jean-Pierre Bastian, Professor Emeritus of the University of Strasbourg.
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Stolz, J., Monnot, C. (2018). The Established and the Newcomers. A Weberian-Bourdieusian View of Congregations in the Swiss Religious Field. In: Monnot, C., Stolz, J. (eds) Congregations in Europe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77261-5_6
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