In Religion’s Power: What Makes It Work, Robert Wuthnow investigates the power dynamics of religion by studying the mechanisms by which it is practiced. Drawing on his ethnographic and historical experience in sociology and religion, he proposes that religion’s power to shape the rituals, discourse, institutions, identities, and politics of religious leaders and participants creates relationships of dominance and subordination.
In chapter 1, Wuthnow reveals how the religious rituals that leaders and participants engage can produce harmful power dynamics that often get masked by their theology. He shows how these rituals rely on resources and rhetoric, authoritative offices, and worship spaces that all work together to affect the perceptions of the participants. He also notes how the rituals center themes of transcendence that empower the participants by expanding their consciousness of their deity’s power. Because leaders and participants of different wealth and authority partake in these celebrations of power, natural hierarchies emerge, which are often obscured by focusing the attention on shared theology and purposes.
In the second chapter, Wuthnow shows how those in power use narrative and perceived sincerity in religious discourse to ensure the subordination of those below them. He demonstrates that non-religious cultural discourses can influence the way we read the narratives of religious texts by affecting how we understand human meaning and purpose, and by harmonizing events and motives that seem incompatible. The author argues that these narratives are meant to convey the sincerity of the storyteller. And he notes how these discourses are often cultivated through creeds and rules that are bolstered by parenting and education. Still, despite the power that religious narratives hold, narratives can change over time through stories of awakening.
Chapter 3 transitions into an examination of how religious institutions build power over their participants through acquiring financial resources, property, and technology. According to Wuthnow, the worship spaces they build dictate power over access and time. Within these environments, knowledge becomes power when religious leaders set goals and define the methods to accomplish the goals. As the members of the institution devote more of their time and finances to building up the institution’s resources, collective action becomes possible, either directed inward for reform and innovation, or outward toward society.
The fourth chapter focuses on how religious institutional power builds and shapes the way people identify and relate to one another. For example, while women are essential to these institutions, they often operate in the background, following the leadership of men. These men tend to set up gender roles and sexual identities in ways that typically lead to heterosexual male dominance. Another example Wuthnow discusses is how religious art, and an emphasis on growth (but only by attracting those who resemble one another), produce pride and suspicion toward others. Because of these connections to art and community, the author demonstrates how religious power becomes integrated with non-religious power in shaping the identity of everyone involved.
In the final chapter, Wuthnow brings these religious and non-religious integrations of power together to discuss the extent of religious political power. He writes that political relationships wield the authority of the state in order to gain privilege and entitlement over others. Through the signaling of symbolic words, acts, art, legal cases, or other methods of communicating, religious leaders can flex their presence and power. He shows how they often do this by utilizing the narrative-shaping power of storytelling to compel religious people to pursue their political goals. These goals tend to be self-interested, but can also be neighbor-oriented, especially in situations of racial injustice, either by participating in more visible marches and demonstrations or serving in less visible work behind the scenes.
The strength of Religion’s Power resides in Wuthnow’s extensive knowledge of the ways that religions promote hierarchy, either consciously or unconsciously. However, I think Wuthnow is mistaken when he writes that “religion’s political power to effect social change is usually quite limited” (217). While it is true that a particular religion’s capacity to affect change is limited by our democratic system, and that religious groups are divided, there has been enough unity in defining terms among them that a civil religion has emerged, one that influences politics more than any particular religion. For example, religions have so predominantly defined justice as retribution rather than as restoration that they have shaped society’s civil understanding of justice as retribution rather than as restoration. And this has shaped the way our society has built its justice system toward mass incarceration.
Pastors tend to be trained in theological narratives, while many worship leaders merely mention basic theological themes while playing an instrument. Awareness of the power they hold in religious spaces is severely lacking. Religion’s Power prompts religious leaders and participants to begin exploring how they need to come together with bonds of mutual belonging and wholeness, rather than through unequally distributed dynamics of entitlement.
Rick Pidcock is a religion writer.
Rick Pidcock
Date Of Review:
September 28, 2023
