Religious Organizations

Tambiah S J 1992 Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

2.1 Types and Subtypes The intellectual rationale for the pioneering and highly inuential studies written by Max Weber (18641920) and Ernst Troeltsch (18651923) had its roots in their respective interests in the interplay between modernity and religion. Having established the crucial but unintended contributions of Ancient Judaism and Christianity towards the forms of modern rationalization, Weber analyzed the ironic implications of rationalization for the dierentiation of religion from other institutions and value spheres. Secularization, bureaucratization, and the disenchantment of the modern world were all shown to have reduced the cultural and social signicance of religious organizations. Weber perceived clearly that church-type organizations (large, territorially based, and inclusive in membership terms) had the potential to exercise power but were constrained by their ties to the secular world from translating their Christian ethics into uncompromising programs of action. By contrast, sect-type organizations (voluntaristic, relatively small, and exclusive in membership terms) were capable of maintaining a distinctive and often radical version of Christian theology and ethics but were prevented from exercising much inuence on the world around them because they distanced themselves from it. Troeltsch was less preoccupied with relationalization as a process and more concerned with the historical evolution of the social forms of church, sect, and mysticism in which the New Testaments ethical message had found expression. Troeltsch was particularly exercised by the question of whether liberal Protestantism was robust enough and suciently well adapted to the conditions of modernity to serve as an eective vehicle for Christian ethics in an increasingly secular world. The concepts of church and sect, plus numerous variants and subtypes such as established sect and denomination, have played an important part in many attempts to explain patterns of change in Christian organizations throughout the twentieth century. Some scholars have tried to apply these concepts to the analysis of religions other than Christianity, but it remains questionable whether this is appropriate in the case of religions lacking strong notions of membership and corporate authority. Yet, renements of the sect concept have undoubtedly helped to explain the highly varied developments of minority religious movements, not only in Western societies but also in East Asia. Bryan Wilsons (1970) scheme of seven subtypes of sects has proved particularly fruitful and inuential. The concept of cult has also undergone extensive renement, coinciding initially with public interest in the new religious movements which became controversial in many Western countries and Japan in the 1970s. A further impetus for sociological studies of sects and cults began to develop in the 1980s when 13127

T. N. Madan

Religious Organizations
Religious organizations seek to establish, promote, and regulate relations between human beings and divinities, supernatural orders, or supreme metaphysical principles. This article explains why religious organizations have been distinguished from nonreligious organizations and why their distinctiveness lies mainly in their varied patterns of authority and leadership.

1. Di ersity
Religious organizations are immensely varied but they typically aim to promote worship, prayer, meditation, teaching, healing, and spiritual well-being in accordance with authoritative revelations, texts, codes, laws, and principles. They range from the groups of clients who regularly consult self-appointed healers, gurus, and shamans to worldwide ecclesiastical bureaucracies such as the Roman Catholic Church. Informal and irregular religious practices can be nested inside highly formal religious organizations. The distinctive products of religious organizations are equally diverse: sacred knowledge, transcendental experiences, prophecies, worship and meditation, rituals with the power to cleanse or heal, rites of passage, religious ethics, recruiting missions, political, welfare, and educational outreach, local fellowship, and so on. They also have much in common with nonreligious organizations in so far as they face the need to secure adequate resources, to train and control sta, to retain their authority, to cope with dissent and conict, to interact with other organizations in their environment, to defend their share of the religious market, and to deter free riders, and unwelcome takeovers. Religious organizations have therefore established schools, seminaries, hospitals, welfare agencies, publishing enterprises, and missionary orders in order to extend and protect their boundaries.

2. History
The history of studies of religious organizations can be divided into two streams. The rst is concerned primarily with the distinctiveness of religious organizations and with their subtypes. The second, which has ourished since the 1950s, deals with the internal dynamics and shifting fortunes of religious organizations in their social environments.

Religious Organizations proponents of rational choice theory claimed that previous usage of these concepts has been largely ad hoc and untheorized (Iannaccone 1988). On the assumption that people rationally try to attain their ends by the least costly means, in religion as in any other area of life, the theory holds that people incur the costs of participating in religious organizations in order to derive supernatural compensators which purport to give answers to questions of ultimate meaning. In this theoretical perspective, churches are believed to oer answers which conform with prevailing norms, whereas sects and cults allegedly deviate from the norms and incur sanctions or costs which are nevertheless experienced by their followers as selective benets unavailable to members of lax churches. The historical formation of sects (by schism) and cults (by innovation) can be accounted for in rational choice terms as a never-ending process of competition between religious organizations standing in dierent degrees of tension with society. By comparison, the sociological concept of church underwent relatively little change in the twentieth century. Moreover, little interest has been shown in rening or even applying the kind of cognate concepts of ecclesiola in ecclesia, fraternitas, and order that Joachim Wach (18981955) and others elaborated. Nevertheless, studies of Christian organizations in Africa, Asia, South America, and the former Soviet Union have brought to light the importance of such organizational forms as independent churches, base ecclesial communities, and underground churches. The continuing signicance of relations between religious organizations, nations, and states in some countries has also preserved a place for church in analyses of, for example, civil society (Casanova 1994) or international relations (Johnston and Sampson 1995). And extensive research in North America has thrown light on numerous aspects of denominations as distinctive organizations. Beginning with the embeddedness of denominations in social classes (Niebuhr 1929) and ethnic groups, studies have analyzed the organizational conditions of schism, the ambiguous position of theological seminaries, the dierential responsiveness to female clergy, the increasingly complex webs of interorganizational elds in which denominations operate, and tensions between religious hierarchies and functional agencies. Another rich vein of research has investigated the contributions of denominations towards ideologies of pluralism, pluralistic provision of social welfare, social movements, and the independent sector. The study of religious organizations has been understandably less important in relation to religious traditions which tend to lack the formality, corporate authority structures, and membership principles characteristic of Christianity. Nevertheless, common foci of scholarly interest have emerged in the study of Muslim orders, brotherhoods, and charitable endownments (waqf ); Buddhist monastic institutions 13128 (sangha); Hindu devotional groups (bhakti) and nationalist organizations; Jewish and Sikh communal organizations; and Shinto parishes.

2.2 Dynamics of Religious Organizations The emerging concern with the organizational dynamics of religion in the 1950s was partly a reection of the growing salience of organization theory in the burgeoning social sciences, and partly a function of Christian theological interests in ministry as a modern profession and in churches as complex organizations responding to rapid social change (Harrison 1959, Winter 1968, Beckford 1975). Yet the impact of these analyses of religious organizations on the development of organizational theories in general was modest. This state of aairs began to change slightly in the mid-1970s when notions such as organizational climate and organizational culture directed attention towards the signicance of cultural factors which had always loomed large in analyses of religious organizations but which were emerging as important inuences in virtually all kinds of organization. Investigations of communes gave a further impetus to research into the force of strong commitments and normative beliefs among organizational participants. Subsequent discoveries about the importance of rituals, retreats, exibility, and networking in many organizations have only enhanced the interest that religious organizations now have for some organizational analysts (DiMaggio 1998). This minor rapprochement between the study of formal organizations and the study of religious organizations received a further boost in the 1980s when so-called New Age and quasireligious business began to attract attention for their practice of combining prot seeking with ethical business practices and of contributing towards the spiritual development of their sta and clients. And fresh insights into the tensions between the religious and agency structure of US denominations (Chaves 1993) oer the prospect of explaining comparable tensions between the normative and functional bases for coordination and compliance in other organizations as well. Two inter-related aspects of religious organizations stand out as the central foci for past and present research: authority and leadership. This does not mean that issues of organizational eectiveness, eciency, and complexity are irrelevant in the case of religious organizations. It simply means that organizations purveying allegedly timeless truths and the highest normative commitments tend to be relatively more preoccupied than nonreligious organizations with establishing, reproducing, and defending their teachings and practices against corruption, subversion, or apathy.

Religious Organizations

3. Authority
Like prot-seeking organizations, religious organizations are engaged in competition with purveyors of rival versions of ultimate truths and in conict with opponents, but they are also obliged to monitor and police their own members or followers. This is why questions of authority are central to religious organizations and why change often meets with strong resistance. In this sense, religious organizations are distinctive, if not unique, for the extent to which the connections between their founding truths and their organizational structure and everyday activities are constantly rehearsed in rituals, symbols, exegesis of sacred texts, preaching, prayers, teaching, meditation, and the training of leaders.

organizational tapestry of Islam. This high degree of complexity makes it dicult for any single organization to claim convincingly that it represents all Muslims. Now that tens of millions of Muslims live as religious minorities in the predominantly Christian countries of Europe and North America, pressure may be increasing for would-be representative organizations to seek to represent all Muslims in their collective relations with nation states, nongovernmental organizations, and the European Union.

3.2 Forms of Polity The variety of organizational forms and processes which translate these concerns with authority into action is bewilderingly wide. They range from loosely structured fellowships to vastly complex and formal organizations which require their members to accept centrally imposed dogmas and rituals mediated by authoritative ocials. In practice, most religious organizations fall somewhere on a continuum between these two extreme positions, but their precise location may change in response to factors internal or external to the organizations. Moreover, the time-honored distinction between church- and sect-type organizations cannot be mapped on to the distinction between religious organizations with either strong or weak systems of authority. The convention of classifying the polity of Christian churches as Episcopal, Presbyterian, or congregational relates to the distribution of authority as laid down in their respective theologies and legal constitutions. In particular, the distinction between ordained clergy and laity is given theological justication, and the dierential authority accorded to dierent grades of religious professionals is explained in the same terms. Yet this classication can only be a starting-point for social scientic analysis, since the readiness of subordinates to comply with authoritative commands form their superiors is variable, and pressure from outside the churches may make it necessary to modify the practical implementation of the ecclesiastical principle. For example, the Episcopal polity of churches in the worldwide Anglican communion conceals a wide diversity of relations between bishops and other church members. Presbyterian and congregational polities have also come under pressure to adapt the exercise of authority to prevailing sociocultural values and conditions. Thus, critics of the patriarchalism allegedly underpinning many forms of Christian organizational polity have challenged the gendered distribution of authority in churches and tried to infuse them with feminist, antihierarchical values (Wallace 1992, Nesbitt 1997). Moreover, the ideal of congregational autonomy nds itself in tension with political or economic pressures to extend the authority of regional or national ocials. 13129

3.1 Sources of Authority Christianity is virtually unique among the worlds religions for the extent to which its practice has been controlled by centralized, formal organizations cutting across ethnic, tribal, and political groupings. By contrast, Hinduism, Judaism, and Shinto crystallized slowly out of predominantly tribal and ethnic cultures, giving rise to temples, synagogues, and shrines as centers of rites and ritual worship rather than as agencies of civil administration. Diasporic Judaism, lacking the authority previously vested in the Temple at Jerusalem and its hereditary priests, regrouped around rabbis as teachers of the law and around synagogues as ritual centers. Communal organizations have played a major role in preserving the ethnic and religious identity of Jews under persecution, but centralized organizations to control Jewish beliefs and rituals are relatively weak. Buddhism and Islam emerged from more deliberate attempts to cultivate religious and philosophical systems partly at odds with prevailing culture and social arrangements, and this feature of their historical emergence may help to account for the fact that they have been closely allied with political regimes at various times. Thailand and Japan, for example, have had something approaching Buddhist parish systems. Modern Japan has also seen the rise of massive, hierarchical organizations of Buddhist laypeople such as Rissho , Ko , sei-kai and So , ka Gakkai. But elsewhere in Asia, Buddhism functions like a diuse folk religion supported by monastic institutions and temples. The organization of Islam is subtle, multistranded and variable by region of the world. As a conversion faith Islam has been interwoven with political regimes, but it does not have a single, authoritative organization. There are multiple, competing sources of theological, legal, spiritual, and moral authority in Islam, for the authority of learned experts, jurists, hereditary sheikshs, leaders of brotherhoods and clergy (among the Shiites) are all part of the complex

Religious Organizations 3.3 Fundamentalism The increasing popularity and inuence of so-called fundamentalist forms of religion roughly since the 1950s in many parts of the world and in most of the major faith traditions has prompted social scientists to pay greater attention to religious authority (Marty and Appleby 1991). Fundamentalism centers on faith in the authority of certain principles, usually enshrined in sacred texts, to generate unequivocal guidance for the conduct of personal and public life, and it favors assertive leadership and a strong suspicion of anything outside the group of committed believers. Yet the organizational bases of fundamentalism are diverse and subtle. There is no single, monolithic organization in any faith tradition or country which promotes fundamentalism. Instead, it has spread by personal witness, small group discussion, and the use of computerized mailing lists, terrestrial and satellite television and radio broadcasts, video cassettes, email, and the World Wide Web. Fundamentalists utilize modern technology and organizational forms in order to transform the world, and are not traditionalists, antimodern, or withdrawn from the world. On the contrary, their aim is to make the world conform with their authoritative principles, and this calls for forms of organization which are exible and responsive to local circumstances. redemption. Monks, nuns and holy men, as the virtuosi in some religious traditions, exercise leadership on the strength of their extraordinary discipline, devotion, and selessness. The sangha, or monastic community, remains at the heart of Buddhism in many parts of the world; monastic institutions were the bulwark of Christianity throughout the European Middle Ages; Catholic religious orders were in the forefront of missionary work in Africa, Asia, and South America in the modern era; and monks continue to occupy the highest leadership positions in Orthodox churches. But religious traditions which locate authority in the spiritual freedom of individuals to cultivate their own, relatively independent path to the sacred tend to resist strong notions of leadership, preferring at best to have spiritual exemplars, teachers, or gurus.

4.2 Local Groups It is common for religious leaders to be attached to a particular building or social center where they conduct teaching, preaching, meditation, workship, prayer, or pastoral functions. Some also have responsibility for the spiritual oversight of institutions such as schools, seminaries, orphanages, hospitals, refuges, and pilgrimage sites. Christianity went further than other religious traditions in establishing a comprehensive system for delivering religious and pastoral services to geographically demarcated areas known as parishes, which represented subdivisions of national or international churches. The idea that the residents of a locality would belong to a parish and form a congregation of regular worshipers under the leadership of local clergy was especially eective in European regions where the dominant church was closely aligned with political regimes.

4. Leadership
4.1 Roles Leadership roles, structures, and training vary widely between faith traditions, between their dierent schools or denominations and between dierent parts of the world. The precise pattern of leadership at any level is shaped mainly by prevailing ideas about the source and nature of sacred power. Leaders of religions which identify sacred power exclusively with scriptures and laws derive their authority mainly from the capacity to read and interpret them. Judaism and Islam exemplify this pattern of leadership by scholars, teachers, and jurists. Priesthood, by comparison, is found in religions such as Hinduism, Shinto, Christianity, and Sikhism which combine reverence for sacred texts with belief in the capacity of priests to perform rituals allowing humans to interact in various ways with divinities and sacred power. The oce of a priest enables this power to be eective through properly conducted rituals. Prophets and charismatic religious leaders may reform religion by opposing institutionalized practices and beliefs with radically new or dierent ones. Ministers of religion in most of the Protestant traditions oer leadership mainly through their preaching, exposition of scripture and, at least in evangelicalism, eorts to persuade individuals of their sinfulness and urgent need to seek 13130

4.3 Congregations Congregations are the basic unit of most Christian organizations in the sense of being the social group with which their members in particular localities feel most closely associated. The precise status of congregations varies with the theology and authority structure of the larger religious organizations to which they belong. The congregations of hierarchical churches are local outlets of ideas and practices controlled by regional, national, and international authorities such as bishops, cardinals, and the Pope. By contrast, religious organizations which have little or no theological justication for hierarchy or central control tend to regard local congregations as relatively autonomous units. This is common among, for example, independent fellowships of conservative Protestants, the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain, and the Christadelphians. The implications of the balance that Christian organizations achieve between centrali-

Religious Organizations zation and local autonomy have been extensively researched because it reveals dierences in the extent to which congregations can generate resources, mobilize members in campaigns, respond to internal problems, and inuence public life (Hong and Roozen 1979). As Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism are not structured on the basis of inclusive, unitary organizations at national or international levels they have not generated congregations or systems of parishes. Yet, temples, mosques, synagogues, and gurdwaras do function as ritual and pastoral centers for people living in their vicinity or choosing to visit them. Lacking strong integration into higher level organizations, however, these local centers are accountable either to their private owners or to their management committees. Consequently, their religious leaders are retained as professionals or qualied volunteers by local groups rather than as employees of ecclesiastical organizations at a higher level.

5. Questions About the Future

Three emerging trends in religious organizations call for special comment. The rst concern settlers in countries of large-scale immigration who seek to establish their own faith communities or congregations (see Warner and Wittner 1998). How far will these communities conform with prevailing forms of religious organization in their new setting? How far will their forms of organization come under pressure to meet the criteria laid down by stage agencies if they wish to deliver health, welfare, or educational services? And to what extent will their forms of organization inuence longer established religious groups? The second concerns the eect of new information technologies on the capacity of religious organizations to extend their inuence to virtually all parts of the world. Will satellite broadcasting, video recordings, and the Internet increase competition between religious organizations? And will they cultivate a globally standardized form of these organizations? The third emerging trend is for the appeal of special purpose agencies to cut across the boundaries between Christian congregations and between denominations in the USA, thereby making ideological dierences within religious organizations more challenging than the dierences between these organizations (see Wuthnow 1988). Is there evidence of this kind of restructuring in other world religions? Does this repositioning of organizational fault lines facilitate or hinder transnational religious developments? See also: Civil Religion; Education: Cultural and Religious Concepts; Religion: Denition and Explanation; Religion: Evolution and Development; Religion: Morality and Social Control; Religion, Sociology of

4.4 Recruitment and Training In advanced industrial societies the attractions of work in positions of religious leadership are weakening, and the rate of applications for training as religious professionals has been declining since the middle of the twentieth century. At the same time, the characteristics of recruits to religious leadership in Christian churches have also changed. They now include a much greater proportion of women, of people over the age of 30, of people retiring early from other occupations, and of people from a wider range of ethnic and social class backgrounds. The feminization of religious leadership is occurring in many churches in so far as the proportion of women entering theological training and Christian ministry has been rising steadily since the 1960s (Wallace 1992). Yet the upper echelons of most churches are still controlled by men, and there is evidence that various mechanisms still prevent women from enjoying genuinely equal opportunities for professional advancement. Women are even more strongly excluded from leadership roles in the other world religions, although they have been admitted to the rabbinate in some traditions of Judaism. It is only in developing countries that there is still a relatively strong supply of young men and women for theological training and preparation for the ministry or monastic vows. The disproportionately large numbers of trainee priests and ministers originating in developing countries may mean that the organizational center of gravity of some large Christian organizations is in process of shifting away from Europe and North America. In eect, the new international division of labor is aecting religious organizations as well as transnational businesses.

Bibliography
Beckford J A 1975 Religious Organization. Mouton, The Hague Casanova J 1994 Public Religions in the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Chaves M 1993 Intraorganization power and internal secularization in Protestant denominations. American Journal of Sociology 99: 148 DiMaggio P 1998 The relevance of organization theory to the study of religion. In: Demerath N J III, Hall P D, Schmitt T, Williams R H (eds.) Sacred Companies. Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations. Oxford University Press, New York Harrison P M 1959 Authority and Power in the Free Church Tradition. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ Hoge D R, Roozen D A (eds.) 1979 Understanding Church Growth and Decline 19501978. Pilgrim Press, New York Iannaccone L R 1988 A formal model of church and sect. American Journal of Sociology 94: 24168 Johnston D, Sampson C (eds.) 1995 Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft. Oxford University Press, New York

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Marty M E, Appleby R S (eds.) 1991 Fundamentalisms Obser ed. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Nesbitt P D 1997 The Feminization of the Clergy in America. Oxford University Press, New York Niebuhr H R 1929 The Social Sources of Denominationalism. Holt, New York Wallace R A 1992 They Call Her Pastor. SUNY Press, Albany, NY Warner R S, Wittner J (eds.) 1998 Gatherings in Diaspora. Religious Communities and the New Immigration. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA Wilson B R 1970 Religious Sects. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London Winter G 1968 Religious Identity. Macmillan, New York Wuthnow R 1988 The Restructuring of American Religion. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

J. A. Beckford Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Religious Specialists
Religious specialists is a generic term referring to select individuals or a category of individuals within dierent world faiths who undertake a particular responsibility for religious functions such as teaching, contemplation, transmission of scriptures, leadership, pastoral care, or ritual, on behalf of the religious community they serve. The nomenclature used to describe religious specialists diers according to the various religious traditions, but the idea of prophets, teachers, a priesthood and\or contemplative monastic orders is common to many world religions. Most religious specialists either will have inherited their role or will have responded to a sense of Divine calling to a particular and often strict way of life and adherence to religious disciplines.

1. The Scope of Dierent Religious Specialists

A community of people who share a particular ontological understanding of the world have often been inspired by prophets or religious teachers who have acted as intermediaries between the Divine and earthly realms. The prophetic role has often involved receiving revelations, and acting as an exemplar of these revelations. As religious communities grow in size numerically and geographically, and become increasingly complex, a need arises for individuals with particular knowledge and authority to oversee the religious belief and practice of the group. The need for a range of dierent religious specialists may become apparent, e.g., to regulate religious activities, to preserve and recite scriptures, or to lead worship, and in time, a hierarchy of dierent specialists with a specic authority and leadership may emerge. Access to particularly signicant holy sites and shrines, or sacred texts, may be limited in some traditions to 13132

religious specialists only. In many ways, prophets are the direct opposite of priests, since the former are often a force for change in society, challenging existing practices and beliefs, while the latter serve as representatives of a religious community and seek to maintain existing practices. Charismatic religious specialists in some ways stand between prophets and priests, since they are often the source of new ideas and practices, but within existing frameworks of community and belief. In the major monotheistic religions of the world today, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, there is a range of religious functionaries. Despite the common link between these three faiths, there are some signicant dierences in the various types of religious specialists that have emerged in each. In Judaism, a rabbi does not, strictly speaking, have a priestly role, but rather a responsibility for teaching and spiritual guidance. Historically, alongside the Hebrew prophets, were sages or wise men whose writings comprise, among others, the Book of Proverbs. In Christianity, there are two principal avenues for professional religious activity, namely pietistic contemplative, and priestly. Amid the diversity of Christian traditions, the Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglican denominations in particular have a history of contemplative monastic orders for both men and women. These orders have often been inspired by the examples of saints such as St. Francis of Assisi, and members of these religious communities aspire to follow the exceptional qualities of their founders. Other religious specialists in Christianity include priests or clergy whose role often combines a range of functions, such as pastoral care, leading worship, and teaching, generally focused around a church or place of worship. In Islam, there is no such priestly equivalent, but there is nevertheless a range of religious specialists. An imam may be regarded primarily as a ritual specialist with particular responsibility for leading congregational prayers in a mosque. The title also has honoric connotations, perhaps in denoting the leader of a particular community or group. Among Shiite Muslims, the term imam has yet another meaning as an intercessor between Allah and humanity. The framework for Islamic life and conduct, individually and communally, is shaped by the Shariah, or Islamic law. Scholars with a particular knowledge of Islamic law and teachings, known collectively as ulema (singular alim) assist with the development of Islamic thought, while muftis are legal functionaries empowered to make fatwas or legal rulings. In the Su or mystical tradition of Islam, the spiritual leader of a community is often known as a sheikh. Even between the three major monotheistic traditions, there is a clear diversity in the type and remit of dierent religious specialists. Indian religions, especially Hinduism and Sikhism, share the concept of a guru or teacher. Sikhism is

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