Religion and Inequality: the Role of Status Attainment and Social Balance Processes

Religion is an important determinant of social and economic inequality, but the mechanisms that underlie this relationship are not well-understood. Early scholars recognized this connection, but their ideas do not adequately explain contemporary stratification patterns. Recent research documents robust empirical relationships between religion and material outcomes but has not yet begun to identify causes of these patterns. We fill this gap by providing a theoretical explanation of the religion-inequality link that synthesizes ideas from early and recent sociology. We propose that the process is inherently multilevel. We draw on ideas from status attainment theory to develop a micro-model and ideas from social balance theory to aggregate the Social Thought & Research 142 model’s outcomes. The synthesis of ideas from these theoretical traditions provides a unique, and potentially useful way to understand the relationship between cultural orientation and material resources. Religion plays a central role in creating and maintaining social and economic inequality, but the mechanisms driving this relationship are not well-understood. Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002) contains the most famous early argument for a link between religion and inequality, but the ideas that he and other early theorists proposed have garnered significant critique. At the heart of Weber’s thesis is the contention that changes in the religious orientation of Europeans through the influence of Protestantism, especially Calvinism, led to fundamental changes in the economic system. Scholars have challenged Weber’s thesis on several grounds. Economic historians have argued that in many parts of Europe, the transition to capitalism preceded the emergence of reformed Protestantism (Bainton 1985; Samuelsson 1964). Therefore, it is equally plausible that the emergence of new forms of economic behavior produced changes in religious beliefs, or that religious and economic change are interdependent and often difficult to disentangle. Coleman (1990) criticizes Weber for positing a theory that claims individual beliefs straightforwardly aggregate into societal-level values. Such a simple process fails to account for how stratification develops, and how individual-level beliefs aggregate into different cultural orientations depending on one’s social position. Even if we disregard these internal problems, the religious landscape and the processes that account for stratification have changed considerably since Weber and his contemporaries developed their ideas. Looking only at patterns in North America, these theories cannot accommodate the decline of so-called mainline Protestant denominations, the proliferation of conservative Protestant groups, the impact of immigration on the composition of the Catholic Church, and the increased presence of other religious traditions. It has also become increasingly clear that the relationship between religion and stratification is not a function of large-scale shifts in the mode of production but rather reflects Religion and Inequality 143 changing individual and group approaches to human capital, work, entrepreneurship, saving, and investing. In the 1960s, researchers revived questions about religion and inequality. However, these debates lost momentum when the convergence of the socioeconomic status (SES) of mainline Protestants and Catholics came to dominate the literature (Glenn and Hyland 1967; Lenski 1961; Roof and McKinney 1987). The more recent years have witnessed something of a renaissance in the study of religion and inequality. However, although contemporary research is empirically rich, it has paid relatively little attention to the causal processes linking religion and material outcomes. Modern data provide powerful evidence that religion affects education for adults (Chiswick 1988; Darnell and Sherkat 1997; Lehrer 1999b, 2004) and adolescents (Muller and Ellison 2001; Sherkat and Darnell 1999), gender roles in the home (Ellison and Bartkowski 2002; Read 2004) and in the labor market (Lehrer 1999a, 2000; Sherkat and Darnell 1999), fertility and family formation (Glass and Jacobs 2005; Lehrer 1996b, 1996c; McQuillan 2004), wages (Keister 2010; Smith and Faris 2005; Steen 1996; Wilder and Walters 1998), work and occupational outcomes (Smith and Faris 2005), and saving behavior and wealth (Crowe 2008; Keister 2003, 2007, 2008). Researchers have understandably taken advantage of modern data and methods to provide careful empirical support for key relationships that eluded prior generations of scholars. However, the resulting body of research contains a large amount of evidence for bivariate relationships but minimal discussion of how the interactions among variables produce social stratification. The theoretical discussion accompanying most of the empirical evidence contains an implicit status attainment model but rarely articulates or demonstrates causal processes linking religion and inequality. Moreover, contemporary researchers do not always adequately attend to the problems inherent in using individual-level data to draw inferences about group-level outcomes. Our objective is to provide a contemporary theoretical explanation of how religion affects inequality. The first step in understanding this relationship is clarifying that there are separate but related processes operating at the individual (micro) and group (macro) levels. This starting point allows us to integrate ideas from Social Thought & Research 144 early and contemporary research while moving beyond the challenges faced in both. We propose that micro-level processes connect religion to individual and family material well-being following a status attainment logic. We articulate the details of this model, discuss how important behaviors and processes are interrelated, and address how various processes interact to affect inequality. We pay particular attention to integrating the large amount of empirical evidence available from contemporary scholarship. Next, we show that ideas from social balance theory can explain how individual and family processes combine to produce group-level patterns. Finally, we specify the details of the balance model and discuss the implications for aggregate indicators of social inequality. Religion and Social Stratification: Two Levels of Aggregation Most efforts to explain how religion affects social stratification attempt to isolate either individual or group outcomes. Effective isolation of this sort is challenging because, under most circumstances, it requires focusing on one level of aggregation without invoking behaviors or outcomes at the other level. Early theorists attempted to isolate macro-level outcomes by addressing how national patterns of religious affiliation affected national patterns of economic organization (Sombart 1911; Weber 2002). Only a limited number of cases exist at the macro level, making comparison difficult. Additionally, it is difficult to collect data at the macro-level. Thus, in most cases, early theorists resorted to discussing how individual behaviors lead to aggregate patterns (Coleman 1990). More recent research focuses more narrowly on micro-level outcomes (e.g., individual income, family wealth) because these processes are essential to understanding contemporary stratification processes. Moreover, data are often collected at the level of individuals or other levels below that of the social system. Although contemporary explanations focus on micro-level explanations of micro-level outcomes, it is common to invoke macro-level causes (e.g., neighborhood, generational effects) or to draw conclusions about macro-level issues (e.g., group differences in income, work, wealth) from micro-level data without carefully specifying how the levels interact (Coleman 1990). Social Thought & Research 146 ideology to micro-level material outcomes (Figure 2). Status attainment refers to the process by which individuals arrive at socioeconomic standing over their lives, and the status attainment approach has become one of the most widely used theoretical perspectives in sociological research on social and economic wellbeing. Work in this tradition specifies individual traits or attributes, usually family background, education, and work behaviors that contribute to adult attainment. Although other theoretical models may potentially relate religious ideology and micro-level material outcomes, a growing body of related empirical evidence supports the status attainment model. Equally important, the status attainment model includes most of the important behaviors and processes that affect attainment, allows for interactions among these processes, effectively describes how family characteristics affect adult outcomes, and retains the appropriate time-ordering (e.g., family background affects education, which affects adult occupation). Because the status attainment model incorporates both individual/family and contextual influences on micro-outcomes, it also efficiently and accurately represents the macro-micro and micro-micro links pictured in Figure 1. In the status attainment model, childhood religion refers to affiliation, belief, practice, congregation traits, and the broader religious environment. Affiliation is the religious denomination or tradition with which an individual is associated. In the United States, persuasive evidence shows that members of religious groups behave similarly in consequential ways (Burstein 2007; Glass and Jacobs 2005; Keister 2008; Lehrer 2009; Smith and Faris 2005). A long history of research shows that affiliation with mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant, black Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish, or other religious groups affects wellbeing (Herberg 1983). The proliferation of Protestant denominations in recent decades and fluctuations in the sizes of some denominations and traditions suggests that it is becoming increasingly important to also consider more precise information about religious affiliation (Smith and Faris 2005). For instance, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Although our research focuses on how religion affects individual and family SES, we realize that other processes are at work. For example, research has documented that SES affects religious affiliation, particularly for adults.! Religion and Inequality 147 Figure 2. The Individualand Household-Level Attainment Model Fa m ily /s oc ia l+b ac kg ro un d Fa m ily 's tru ct ur e Pa re nt s’ oc cu pa tio ns Pa re nt s’ ed uc at io ns Pa re nt s’ in co m e Pa re nt s’ w ea lth