I appreciate your feedback, I think the same holds true in Rexburg and I think it goes to show the influence that religion can hold in the creation of community and identity.

It started out as just a university, but a developer offered free land if the university would be the anchor of a new town.

It is now the best-selling new development in Collier County in this down Florida market. Its not too hard to imagine why people who embrace Catholic beliefs and ideas would be drawn to live where they don’t have to keep their light under a basket all the time and can receive support and understanding from their neighbors (and give it right back to them).

I lean towards the controlling variable being something like the mean belief in a culturally implicit and moralistic vision. I am still trying to find some good descriptors for such a fuzzy concept though.

Stark (2001) has a good research paper from the rational choice perspective. I think you piety question fits in here. The results show that belief in a moral god, not superficial actions demonstrating religious commitment, correlate to the strength with which individuals enforce group morals. I just suspect leaving belief at the overt level (Stark), instead of opening the door to more implicit processes is what prevents extending discussions into non-religious institutions. People in secular organizations just don’t articulate things in religious terms, even if many of the same group adapted organizational tendencies push in the same places.

Stark, R. (2001), Gods, rituals, and the moral order, Journal for the Scientific study of Religion 40(1), pp. 610-636.

I think one way to start is to show how paying attention to religion changes the story. A great example is Seth Jacob’s America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia. Although his narrative is kind of clunky at times, Jacobs makes a compelling case for why paying attention to Ngo Dinh Diem’s Christianity matters–he argues that it should matter to the historian because it mattered to the policy makers of the Eisenhower Era. I think this is how scholars of race, class, and gender begin to get others to pay attention–they showed the historical world the stakes of not taking these particular analytical constructs seriously.

Chris,

I agree that another way to study religion is to look at the way it affects institutions–though I’m not sure exactly how to control for individual piety in non-religious institutions.

Wilson’s (2002) religion from a multi-level adaptation perspective would probably be a very good way to look at the religious suburb question.

Another interesting approach is to broaden the religion category to include quasi-religions and then investigate how group dynamics manifest in religions or quasi-religious organizations affect organization learning and management.

Personally, I’m coming at some of the circular issues in educational change from this angle. There is a lot from complexity theories of management that mesh nicely with a religious or quasi-religious angle.

Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, religion and the nature of society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thanks for the Thomas Alexander reference. I ordered the book from the library today. It’s sad that it was relegated to such a small publisher and was written before the current revitalization of the field of Urban History.

As for your comments about religion as an analytical category, I would venture to guess that the majority of historians already see religions as a social construction created to wield power–they simply argue that religions are created to wield classed, raced, and gendered power instead of granting them some type of autonomous pull on human action. At some level I disagree with this conceptualization–thus my initial question

Jonathan,

Thanks for the validation. In my more skeptical moments I think that academia simply provides a forum for a ton of intellectual posturing.

Chris,

The full reference is:
Hayden, Dolores. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.

That being said, the book really doesn’t have a very good historical sensibility about the historical development of suburbs. I would instead recommend a book like Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Robert Self’s American Babylon, or Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight as a basic introduction to the development of the suburb.

As for your other comments–I still wonder if we sell religion short by making it simply an analytical modifier for supposedly more powerful societal forces.

RG,

I haven’t read any more of Fitzgerald’s work than the summary that you provided, but it seems that everything that he says about religion emerging out of the throws of an imperial world could be made about the emergence of race out of a capitalist world system.

SC,

It’s obvious that I have to do some more reading along these lines–thanks for the suggestions.

Overall, I am not trying to downplay the importance of the analytical categories of race, class, and gender as well as the emerging importance of sexuality. Sometimes it just seems to me that there are more respected historians with a stake in these categories–hence their almost hegemonic transcendence in the academy. What really makes me think about the importance of religion as a category of analysis is my own religious experience. The LDS Church has been the impetus for much of the action in my life. Thus, while some historians might downplay such personal experience as manifestations of other types of power shrouded in religious garb, I find myself critical of their skepticism.

By the way, everyone make sure to read Heidi’s riveting essay
which I think captures the kinds of questions historians miss when they underestimate the importance of religion within daily life.