Sodobgy of Religion 2007, 68:2 165-178

Why Christianity Works: An EmotionsFocused Phenomenological Account*

Christian Smith
University of Notre Dame

Why has Christianity as a religious tradition survived for two millennia? What makes Christianity "work"? Many social scientific answers to related questions focus on structurai forces shaping religion ar\d on factors that explain variance across belief and practice. This article takes a different approach, seeking to explain the ongoing existence of the phenomenon itself before analyzing variance within it. The idea is to address basic causes of what exists as distinct from more superficial causes of variation within it. To do so, I take a phenomenobgical approach that focuses particularly on emotions, seeking to explicate the recurrent, characteristic, and subjective experiences of many Christians that help to explain their ongoing commitment to and invoivement in the faith. I also reflect the subjective focus on emotions in the tone of the article, which introduces a strong sense of subjective experience and affect. B51 compiementing typical sociobgical analyses of religious variance with this kind of causal arudysis of its existence, this article seeks to expand our range of explanation and understanding in the sodobgy ofreli^on.

It has been three centuries since Voltaire launched his attacks on the Christian Church, 160 years since Marx reduced religion to a narcotic of the oppressed, 125 years since Nietzsche proclaimed the death of Cod, and nearly 80 years since Freud exposed the illusion of faith as erroneous wish fulfillment in projecting a father figure. The Enlightenment and modernity brought with them profoundly anti-Christian voices and forces, and generations of these same intellectuals have debunked Christianity, deconstructed the church, and foretold the demise of the Christian faith. Today, more than a few heirs of this secular and secularizing tradition carry on this skeptical cause, inhabiting, in particular, knowledge class enclaves in higher education, the media, and various highly credentialed professions. Remarkably, however, Christianity has survived and in places thrived, despite these challenges and sometimes onslaughts (Casanova 1994; Smith 1998;

*Direct corresponcience to: Christian Smith, Department of Sodobgy, 816 Flanner Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556 (chris.smith@nd.edu). Thanks to George Thomas, Kraig Beyerlein, and Steve Vaisey for critical feedback on an earlier version of this paper. [I asked Professor Smith to submit this essay to Sociology of Religion in the hope that it will stimulate creative thinking and debate about how we understand and study religion in modern society Ed.]

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166 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION Jenkins 2002). For instance, the majority of most Western Europeans appear to have become secularized, but a committed Christian minority still survives and sometimes flourishes in many parts of Europe. Meanwhile, Christian churches, both Orthodox and otherwise, are reviving and growing in many nations of the former Soviet Union. Further south, in many African and Asian countries, Christianity is growing faster than the populations of their countries. In Latin America, the vast majority of people adhere to their traditional Roman Catholic faith, the primary religious challenge to which turns out to be not secularism but an animated Pentecostal Christianity. In the United States, about one-third of Americans regularly attend religious services, mostly in Christian churches. Committed secularists in the U.S. look out from their enclaves over a vast nation that seems, astonishingly, to be awash in a sea of popular faithincluding a great deal of evangelical Christianity, which represents about one in every four Americans. The current President of the United States is himself openly an evangelical Christian, and conservative Protestants are an indispensable constituency for and exercise significant influence in the Republican Party. Certain fast-food chains operated by Christians, like Chick-fil-A, do not open for business on Sundays in honor of the Sabbath. Christian colleges and universities around the U.S. are growing in size and quality. Christian pop musicians are producing CDs of quality comparable to the best that secular labels produce. And the hottest selling book nationally for weeks on end, about the Christian Cod's purpose for our lives, was authored by the head pastor of an evangelical megachurch (Warren 2002). Far from having shriveled up and blown away, Christianity in very many places is enduring and sometimes vibrant. No wonder an amazed Jeffrey Rosen (2002) asked with consternation in a recent New York Times Magazine column, "Is Nothing Secular?" Sociologists are prone to look for broad social and cultural forces to explain major religious trends, revivals, and movements (Thomas 1989; Finke &. Stark 2005). The moral and emotional uncertainties of the transition from communist order to now-emerging market societies, for example, might be thought to explain the growth of Christianity in China and Russia. The social dislocation resulting from the mass migration of Latin Americans from rural to urban areas is believed to explain the powerful appeal of Pentecostal faith in that region. The competition and "product" richness of America's de-regulated religious economy are theorized as explaining its high rates of theism and churchgoing. Such sociological accounts are valid as far as they go. They often can illuminate the social processes influencing the extent and shape of religious practices. But in the end, such sociological accounts possess limited abilities to explain the persistence over millennia and into the modern world of religion generally andfor my purposes hereChristianity in particular. Finally, it is difficult to explain the persistence of a major religious tradition over thousands of years in many parts of the world by pointing to various changing social structural forces. Something more fundamental must also be at work.

WHY CHRISTIANITY WORKS 167 Sociologists of a more quantitative bent analyze variables that significantly associate with variance on measures of religion such as affiliation, retention, and participationa worthy task. But much of that work does not explain the "basic" causes of the phenomenon per se, but simply shows factors related to variance within or across it (Lieberson 1985:185-195). Knowing, for instance, whether sex or education predict higher levels of church attendance does little or nothing to explain the continued existence of churches and their belief systems and practices in the first place. The latter is the focus of this article. I therefore wish to consider here another kind of explanationone focused on the internal power of religious traditions to compel the assent and commitment of billions of people. The approach here combines (1) the philosophical framework of critical realism (Archer 1995; Danermark, et al. 2002); (2) sociological phenomenology (Schutz 1999; Moustakas 1994); and (3) recent work on the crucial importance of emotions in social life (Coodwin, et al. 2001; Turner and Stets 2005) to suggest an approach and style of explanation that is not typical in the sociology of religion. My basic argument, wbich will focus on Christianity, is that the belief content of the Christian faith gives rise to certain practices and experiencesparticularly emotional onesthat many people find highly engaging, compelling, persuasive, and convincing. That is, I will suggest that the very internal logic of doing Christianity persistently produces events, interactions, and feelings in and among people compelling enough to keep the tradition flourishing despite many countervailing forces. In academic terms, the account I offer here is one focused on social-psychological causal mechanisms (Hedstrom and Swedberg 1998). My account may complement social structural explanations, but it is not reducible to them. My account here is also entirely compatible with the perspectives of Christian believers and unbelievers alike. What follows is explanatory both if Cod exists and Christianity is true and if Cod does not exist and Christianity is not true. In other words, the following argument itselfalthough it presents experience from a Christian point of view does not take a side about the actual validity of Christian truth claims. What then is it about Christianity itself that makes the faith tradition work? What particular properties or capacities in Christianity itself can help us understand its remarkable persistence and often vitality, even in the modern era? The following account suggests a number of factorsconsidered from the point of view of Christian belief and experiencethat strike me as crucial in answering these questions.

SOMEBODY AT HOME IN THE COSMOS

At a most primordial level, Christianity gives its believers a universe that is not cold and empty. A certain terrifying realization can dawn on the person who grasps the prospect that beyond our planet no life or consciousness or person

168 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION exists to know that we exist, to answer our calls, to care about and remember our lives. When both parents go out and, through a miscommunication accidentally leave their toddlers alone at home, this kind of terror envelops the children as nobody answers their plaintive calls and they realize that they are all alone, left behind, on nobody's mind at all. Fortunately for the toddlers, mommy or daddy will realize their blunder, flash home, and sweep their children up with hugs, kisses, and many apologies. At a cosmic level, when people do not have something like the Christian God in whom to believe, the difference is that no one is ever out there to realize our human solitude, nobody is ever coming home, there are no apologies to be said or even anything to be sorry about. Humans simply existalone, everlastingly isolated, and stranded on the surface of this remote and unstable planet that is suspended in an empty cosmos. Beyond our feeble earthly humanity there exists only an unimaginably vast expanse of impersonal deadness. The condition is like one of solitary confinement in an eternally abandoned and forgotten prison. Nobody is at home out there and nobody ever will be. There simply is nobody. There is only humanity, until we too are gone. One response to this otherwise potentially terrifying isolation is simply to ignore it, to keep the television on and headphones in and submerge oneself in the distractions of everyday life. Some add drugs, alcohol, and wild parties to the mix. For many, this seems to workbut it does not finally make the reality of our isolation go away. Another response is to honestly and bravely assume a grim, Sartrean defiance of the emptiness, determining to conquer the terror through the willful exercise of unfettered choice. This too is a theoretically plausible option, though not many ordinary people seem to use it. A few other people take a more Nietzschean approach, realizing that since no parent is home or is ever coming home, the children can make the rules as they wish and do exactly as they please. The absolute individual sovereignty afforded by this response can make people giddy, at least for a while, but it also does little to comfort the lonelyMany more people, by contrast, find the Christian reality or others like it to be more compelling. For the Christian, the universe is not an empty, dead expanse of rock, gasses, and fire extending to infinity or nothingness. Rather, reality at its heart is living, warm, and personal. In and beyond the cosmic expanse exists a conscious, engaged, remembering, answering Person who cares deeply about the earth and its frail inhabitants. There need be no desperate scientific compulsion to find intelligent life in far-off galaxies, to find creaturely others with whom to communicate. Everything existent is already held in the lovingly cupped hands of a personal, attentive God who listens, who knows, who remembers, who answers, who is coming home and who will in time make all things right. From one perspective, much of this is highly abstract and philosophical. But it would be hard to overstate the powerful emotional effects that such a difference

WHY CHRISTIANITY WORKS 169 in ontological visions can have in and on people. In this and in many of the factors discussed below, emotional impact is central to the capacity of internal Christian beliefs and practices to makes that faith compelling and believable. Of course, many religion critics from the modem era have cynically discounted religious faith as a mere emotional crutch, a system of deluded subjective feelings. Consequently, many modem Christians have underplayed the centrality of emotions in the workings of faith, emphasizing instead cognitive beliefs and rational apologetics. But emotions are actually central in human personal and social life generally, and often fundamental in religious faith and experience as well. Emotions, of course, are not free floating, spontaneous, self-determining subjectivities; they are nearly always causally connected to social contexts and to human beings' cognitive and volitional capacities. Christians can feel deeply secure in the cosmos, for example, precisely because that feeling is derived from an intellectual belief about the facts of reality as understood and embraced by Christians, and because they belong to churches. Considering these issues, then, will involve attending to the power of emotional forces in people's lives without falling into the skeptic's trap of automatically discounting anything involving emotions as a sure sign of escapism, delusion, or weakness. (If anything, we might also ask religious skeptics and atheists about the deep emotional sources of their unbelief, perhaps rooted in problematic parental relations, family experiences, negative interactions with religious believers, etc.) In any case, for Christians, the emotional consequences of believing that the cosmos is not empty but rather alive with the personification of attentive life are often potent and gripping. This is one factor that helps to explain what makes Christianity work.

A SIGNIFICANT LIFE
Human beings, we know, are significance-spinning creatures who universally make and are made by complex cultural meanings, definitions, narratives, and moral orders (Smith 2003). To have an identity, a place, a life project, and agency as human persons requires living in and appropriating significant meanings. Without some sense of life's meaning, humans are lost. Human suffering, for example, is cruel absent of meaning, but bearable and sometimes even ennobling when made meaningful by some larger significance. Christianity possesses innate and powerful capacities to make life meaningful in immanent and ultimate terms. Christianity tells a grand narrative to which every person's life can be meaningfully joined through belief and commitment. For the Christian, every problem, every decision, every act, every outcome can hold or reflect some larger moral, theological, or personal significance by virtue of its connection to the Christian story. In the end, nothing is meaningless. Nothingincluding defeat, pain, and deathis ultimately purposeless. The

170 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION experiences of each life, no matter how happy or dreadful, can be fraught with ultimate import because they are connected to God's creation, providence, redemption, growth, salvation, and healing. Furthermore, with Christianity, the often weighty obligation people feel to discover and bear an "authentic" meaning is also lifted from the shoulders of believers, because Christianity de-centers the individual subject by centering God instead. It is not finally people's job to make meaning. Meaning flows from God and people merely drink deeply of it. In the end, human life is also not about being important and fulfilled, but rather about loving and glorifying God. By displacing individual selves from the center of attention and obligation, Christianity relieves believers of the burden of discovering and upholding the entirety of life's significance. Christians are free to be and bear no more or less than they are intended to, for it is God who finally is and does the bearing. The yoke, as Jesus said, is easy and the burden is light. Christians can therefore go about the routines of ordinary life with an assurance that all reality is significantsometimes obviously more so, sometimes so mysteriously as to be understood only by faith. Life, therefore, needs never collapse into a pointless recurrent cycle of Birth-School-Work-Death. One's life finally matters. It is actually going somewhere of consequence. One's choices and habits are truly significant, shaping outcomes with eternal consequences. As individual persons, our lives, our achievements will not in the end be lost to oblivion, extinguished and forgotten by the forces of entropic energy and matter. We are significant enough, the Christian believes, for God to redeem us at great cost. There is surely coming a resurrection of the dead and a divine judgment when good will be rewarded and evil given over to its just deserts. The story is unfolding. Our lives are providentially woven into it. Again, the emotional consequences of these beliefs simply cannot be overestimated. Of course, in everyday life Christians often take the faith-defined significance of life for granted, not reveling daily in conscious gratitude over the deep Christian meaning of existence. More than occasionally, too, Christians lose sight of the bigger picture. But the primordial, baseline security, significance, and purpose that the Christian story provides believers hold an innate power to reinforce belief and sustain commitment, even, or especially, under highly adverse circumstances. For many people, the prospect of losing all of this significance to a meaningless existence through unbelief would simply be ridiculous to consider or allow.

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
Human beings wither with indifference, neglect, dislike, and hatred, but flourish when they are the objects of genuine love. From their earliest days of life.

WHY CHRISTIANITY WORKS 171 human persons require immense attention and care in order to thrive. Throughout all stages of life, humans universally need some sense of belonging, recognition, affirmation, and care from others in order to grow and sustain health. Unfortunately, the world is in short supply of love, sometimes dreadfully so. In life, people are continually subject to various kinds of impersonality, rivalry, animosity, neglect, apathy, and sometimes abuse from other people and social institutions. Some social theories even suggest that humans are incapable of full, genuine love for others, but really only play strategic cooperative games affecting love and altruistic behavior in order to enhance their own personal welfare and interests. For many, this is not a comforting prospect. Christianity tells a very different story. The center and sustainer of all reality is a thoroughly loving God. God is Love. God showers gratuitous love on His children beyond measure or merit. God knows when a sparrow falls to the ground. But even more so, God intimately knows and cares about every unique human self. The Christian God does not love the idea of humankind. God loves actual individual people themselves, real persons just as they are. God does not only love people when they are nice and good, but even in their failings, ugliness, and willful wrongdoing. The Christian God's love is not conditional, contingent, qualified, or partial. It is total, self-giving, unmerited, absoluteoverflowing from God's boundless goodness and tender loving-kindness. How does an awareness of this kind of love make a Christian believer feeU What kind of personal experience does it evoke? Is such a personal divine love something that many people yearn for? Do mothers adore their babies? Do children covet attention? Do performers want recognition? Clearly, yes. Breaking through the struggle, banality, and tedium of everyday life to the realization of God's total, constant, passionate, personal love for them as individuals can be for Christians an overpoweringly moving, affirming, humbling experience. Words simply cannot convey, Christians say, the power of the intellectual and emotional earthquake and quiet stillness that believers basking in the pure love of God can experience. Movingly deep peace, gratitude, security, affirmation, and confidence often flow from even fleeting realizations that the God of wonders beyond all galaxies knows and cherishes us unconditionally as individuals, no matter who ever and whatever we have been or now are. What is it that makes Christianity work? What has enabled it to survive and often thrive for millennia in places all over the world? Social and cultural structures and processes surely have something to do with it. But more fundamentally, the simple intellectual and emotional effects of people's personally absorbing the relentless, gratuitous love of God Almighty goes a long way in explaining Christianity's staying power in many people's lives and in human history.

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SIN AND CONFESSION It may seem weird to nonbelievers that some people find Christianity attractive and credible in part because of its doctrine of sin. Isn't sin a negative, gloomy idea that naturally tums people off to Christianity? For some. But for many others, sin is simply reality, an inescapable fact which Christian faith enables one to confront directly and deal with effectively. The belief in sin may not actually be so intellectually far-fetched. Nearly everyone appears to sense that the world is not only not what we want it to be, but also not what it seems that it ought to be. Things are not quite right. Sometimes things are horrendously wrong. Except for psychopaths, all people also know that they sometimes do wrong, that at times they hurt others, that they do not always feel, think, desire, and live as they should. Feelings of guilt, regret, remorse, and shame are not limited to theists, but are normal among most peopleand often for good reasons. People can be quite cruddy. So many people not only recurrently experience guilt and remorse with negative affectas heavy, disheartening, nagging, troublesomebut also often believe or know that those feelings reflect an objectively true condition of being guilty, of having acted shamefully, of actually having done wrong things. Christianity names those experiences and feelings in precise terms. Christian faith tells a story about what is wrong with the world, with other people, with us. It gives believers a meaningful framework and a language for identifying the ways in which the world and our lives are in various ways and degrees broken, malformed, even sometimes shameful and deeply regrettable. Christianity enables people to own truly and fully their transgressions without denial or flight, to name the darkness within for all of its potential ugliness and horror. It forbids people to dismiss easily the wrongs and grievances of life and humanityfrom our petty malevolence to our barbaric crimesas mere misfortunes, happenstance mistakes, morally neutral misunderstandings, or blunders. Instead, Christianity employs strong words of damnable guilt, depravity, responsibility, judgment, and desert of condemnation. Whatever else Christianity is, it is not naive or optimistic about the human condition. In its doctrine of sin, it is unflinching and brutally honest about the "fallenness" of humanity. Of course, such strong language can be and sometimes is manipulated, abused, and wrongly attributed. For these and other reasons, some people simply do not want to hear any talk about sin at all. But very many others are perhaps oddly content to "face the music," to admit their guilt, to own their failings, to confess their sin. To sincerely speak Christian prayers of confession without defense or excuse"Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone; we have not loved you with our whole heart, we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves; we are truly sorry and we humbly repent"is for Christian believers an act of immense realism, honesty, and courage. It candidly states reality as it truly is, ending the making of excuses, denials, and obfusca-

WHY CHRISTIANITY WORKS 173 tions. Such confessions of sin can bring a searing clarity and calm surrender to souls who have, to that point, been desperately fleeing their brokenness, their liability, their shame. The taking of such personal ownership of guilt relieves confessors from having to continue to live in denial and from always blaming those around them for all that has gone wrong. In short, the Christian doctrine of sin and practice of confession enable believers to confront, name, comprehend, and find resolution for the brokenness and darkness in the world andas Christianity understands itin people's hearts and lives. It fosters a responsibility-taking that can be personally very difficult but, perhaps strangely, also deeply satisfying in the frankness of its personal ownership and surrender. It is in part Christianity's capacity to do these things in and for people that explains why it continues to be such an attractive faith for so many believers.

GRACE AND FORGIVENESS Christianity is not only about a constantly affectionate God or about human sin. It is more fully about God embracing without reservation this desperately sinful, defiant world. It is about a holy God of burning moral purity dealing with the cancerous evil that has, through willful human pride and rebellion, polluted the world and human hearts. The Christian God does not simply love goodhearted people with a happy-go-lucky abundance of benevolence. God himself must at an unspeakable price overcome the hateful, hideous power of sin that has overcome creation. God's love for people comes at a cost beyond measure: divine incarnation, humiliation, rejection, crucifixion, execution, and the grave. It comes at the price of the murder of God, of the unutterable separation of the Son from the Father. For all of the world's deceit, hatred, anger, cowardice, betrayals, and brutalitieswith which all of us, Christianity teaches, as members of the human race are collectively bound by the power of sinall that was and is perfect and beautiful and true was slain to redeem and rescue. The entire flock was left behind to find the one lost sheep. The floor was swept over and over to find the one lost coin. The amount offered to pay for the healing of the attacked Samaritan was without limit. The Son of God was scourged and tortured and executed to deliver the one lost sinner. Unbelievers can find such ideas and images bizarre, irrelevant, confusing, and sometimes repulsive. This is understandable, though not relevant for the argument here. What is relevant is the effect that such beliefs and experiences have on those who-do believe and experience them. As with God's love, the Christian experience of God's grace and forgiveness can be moving beyond description. Having owned, named, and confessed personal sin and recognized solidarity with the sin of all humanity, the believing confessor looks for relief, release, absolution. God's grace and forgiveness beyond measure come full way to meet the

174 SOCIOLOGY OE RELIGION repentant sinner. All wrongs are cast into the deepest sea. The blood of guilt is washed away and the offender emerges from baptism clean and pure. The forgiving divine father rushes from his watching post with tears and open arms at the distant sight of his returning prodigal son, caring nothing of the son's past rebellion and squandering. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound! Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing! Such overwhelming, euphoric lightness, freedom, and brilliance lift sin-sick Christian souls from the darkness and clothes them with God's own righteousness and friendship. The burden is removed. The sun shines again. The future is open and free. These are the kind of liberating experiences that Christianity offers its believers, experiences which confirm, bond, and validate the faith for the faithful.

TRANSCENDENT WORSHIP The personal and collective experience of worshipping God as one's life-giving creator and strong redeemer can be deeply moving and strengthening for many Christians. Of course, worship in a lot of Christian churches can be pretty lackluster. Plenty of churches simply go through the motions or may not even have the people with gifts to, for example, play music or sing well. Not all Christians reap the benefits of deeply moving worship experiences, and no Christian enjoys such experiences all the time. But many Christians do engage in awe-inspiring worship at different times and in various waysfrom the intensely private in solitude to the overwhelmingly collective in immense gatherings, from formal "high church" liturgy to spontaneous outpourings of personal devotion. In "good worship," Christians believe, the self opens up and mystically pours itself out to and unites with the transcendent source of all life, being, and truth. Christian worship often involves strongly expressive, stirring, cathartic elements. Something about such powerful worship experiencesthe reverence, devotion, and focus on the Othercombines a simultaneous diminishment and bold expression of oneself that believers often find magnificent, inspiring, tender, cleansing. People who believe that theirs is an awesome God delight in glorifying God. It simply feels right, truthful, and declarative of reality. Some such "Durkheimian" worship experiences, many Christians will say, are matchless. Even rough approximations of such experiences can do things to people's bodies and spirits that are deeply emptying and fulfilling, challenging and affirming. Something about the expression of genuine humility, gratitude, adoration, and praise to their Maker and Lord of the Universe for many Christians strips away the ordinariness of everyday life and unites the believer with the holy, the sacred, the overwhelming. Such personal and collective worship experiences of many kinds are part of what bonds many Christian believers to their faith and keeps them coming back for more.

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MORAL BEARINGS Except for the occasional psychopath, human beings are inescapably morally oriented creatures (Smith 2003). Humans nearly universally take it to be the case that moral standards and obligations exist independent of individual ideas, desires, and feelings which possess the authority to motivate and judge human actions, ideas, desires, and feelings. Normal people, it turns out, really believe that some things are truly good, right, true, just, obligatory, and desirable, while other things are bad, wrong, evil, unjust, forbidden, and reprehensible. And not, in people's phenomenological experience, because people think they are, but because they really are so. Various cultures differ on specifics, but all human cultures presume some moral reality that transcends individual thoughts and inclinations. This fact makes many people interested in gaining some right moral bearings by which to live or at least by which to maintain some loose reference. Ordinary people simply cannot go through life operating in a framework that is totally amoral, purely functional, evaluatively neutral. Peoplereligious and secular alikeultimately want to know what is right and wrong, good and bad, admirable and contemptible. That's just the way humans are. Christianity provides its believers with such moral bearings. Clearly, Christianity is only one among many religious and philosophical systems providing moral direction. But it is also apparently a quite compelling one among the options. Christians believe that they know where right and wrong come from, what makes things good or badthe holy character and commands of God the Creator. Christians possess sacred Scriptures which teach moral commandments, practices, and wisdom. They embrace the Ten Commandments, the moral teachings of Jesus, and the ethical and practical teachings of the apostles. They also inherit millennia of reflection and argument about moral virtues and obligations. All of this provides Christians with moral foundations, instructions, and sensibilities by which to navigate their actions and choices in life. Christian discipleshiphowever feebly it may be pursuedimprints in believers mental categories and emotional structures that order and reinforce a distinctive moral worldview. Christians who are serious about faith find themselves embedded in moral universessome conservative, some progressivethat order their thoughts, feelings, desires, habits, and actions and so keep moral confusion and emptiness at bay.

COMMUNITY BELONGING
Humans, finally, are social creatures. One of the deepest, primordial human needs is simply to belong, to have a place among others, to feel secure in some tribe, village, or people. People need to belong to communities of others to know who they are and how they ought to live. In various ways, communities provide

176 SOCIOLOGY OE RELIGION their members with histories, identities, sustenance, physical protection, psychological security, and the pleasures of social interaction and achievement. The isolated person, the socially alone individual isas we well knownormally less healthy and happy than the one who belongs. Good communities are the ecosystems in which people thrive. Christianity provides its believers social belonging in morally-significant communities in many ways and at multiple levels. Most broadly, a Christian identity situates the believer in a massive tradition shared with other believers which spans the globe and traverses thousands of years of history. Membership in more specific Christian traditions and denominations also ties believers to similar other believers of diverse nations and languages. For instance, the Catholic believer in Milwaukee belongs to the world's oldest, largest, and most extensive trans-national organizationsharing beliefs, practices, and a basic identity with other members living in virtually every nation on the earth. Locally, Christianity situates believers in face-to-face communities of churches, parishes, Bible studies, religious orders, fellowship groups, and so on. For many Christians, the local congregation provides a wellspring of friendships, activities, and social support. Members may participate in activities as wide-ranged as potluck dinners, weekend retreats, Sunday school classes, book reading groups, church league basketball and Softball, delivering hot meals during an illness or after childbirth, annual picnics, bingo nights, praying for one another's needs, pastoral counseling in times of trouble, youth groups for teenagers, choir rehearsals, gossip with friends in the church kitchen, missions or service trips out of state and overseas, vacation Bible school, Christmas caroling, men's prayer breakfasts, church group outings to the baseball game, soup kitchen service together, and attending one another's weddings and funerals. Some Christians literally order their entire schedules and activities around the social and spiritual lives of their churches. Church for many Christians is their extended family, their next community out beyond their home. It is part of what makes them who they are and it defines how they live. Again, we know full well that no church is a paradise. Some churches are positively dysfunctional and alienating. But many apparently aren't, at least not very seriously so for most members. If they were, churches would not continue to attract and involve so many millions of people. Rather, most Christian church congregations provide their members with enough of the right kind of community belonging, social security, group identity, relational networks, material resources, rewarding activities, interesting responsibilities, and mental and spiritual stimulation to keep a lot of people attached and invested. For many Christians, a loss of faith would also mean suffering the loss of an important community of belonging, a sense of secure location in the worlda prospect that for many would be stupid, if not inconceivable, to consider.

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CONCLUSION My goal in unpacking these ideas has been to try to explain some of what I think actually makes Christianity "work" for many of its believers. Why and how is it that Christianity sustains such a powerful appeal to have endured for nearly two thousand years (and counting) and still be surviving the acids of modemity? To summarize, I suggest that Christianity works in part because it meets many basic mental and emotional human needs and desiresfor significance, security, love, ownership and confession of wrong, forgiveness, bearings for moral living, and belonging. This kind of explanation applies both to liberal Christianity and to fundamentalist Christianity. Although much of their content and style differ, many of the underlying dynamics of credibility and attachment described here are similar. Furthermore, the account offered above does not apply exclusively to Christianity. It goes without saying that many of these same factors and processes also help to explain the appeal of other religious traditions. In addition to explaining Christianity as a sustained entity, 1 also wish to highlight the value of critical realism and emotions. Sociologists, 1 think, have much to learn from critical realism as a philosophical framing of social science (Archer 1995; Dannermark et al. 2002). And sociologists of religion in particular I think have much more work to do regarding the role of emotions in religious life (but see Nelson 2004; Fish 2005). If my general account here is correct, then to think that some scientific theory, philosophical critique, or cosmopolitan disdain for religion would or could bring an end to Christianity is, I think, to crucially misunderstand people and the human condition. The kind of forces and dynamics, explained above, that make Christianity workeven sociologically setting aside the possibility that Christianity is actually true and God has something to do with its longevity and vitalityare often simply much more potent than the strength of allegedly incompatible philosophical ideas or scientific claims. For this reason, I do not believe Christianity will become extinct any time soon. Christianity certainly is and will be influenced by surrounding ideas and institutions, as it has always been. And many forces of modemity do exert a corrosive effect on Christian belief and practice. But Christianity also seems to possess a genius for adapting to its environment, selectively resisting opposition, and creatively initiating new moves. The modem prophets of secularization have largely been proven wrong. Christianity is alive and well, for better or worse, and if my analysis is correct, it will likely continue to endure into the future. In which case, it might help to understand better some of what makes Christianity and many Christians tick. To do so, we will do well to tum to critical realism, phenomenology, and the study of emotions for insight.

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REFERENCES
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