MODELO DE ANALISIS DE REGRESIÓN LINEAL

Christians in the Progressive Era (1880s–1920s) who desired to alleviate human suffering. However, the professional orientation of American sociologists shifted after World War I and drowned out Christian voices. By the 1960s—when David Barrett worked on his Ph.D. in religion at Columbia University—American sociology was completely secularized and professionalized in academic institutions. This chapter argues that the history of missionaries working in the social sciences helped shape American sociology in the 1960s.¹ The first generation of American sociologists included Christian, data-gathering missionary researchers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who studied the role of the church in society and produced some of the best social scientific studies of their time. They helped forge a strong link between the social sciences and religion. The second generation of American sociologists in the

mid-twentieth century were largely scientifically-minded, secular, fact-driven academics who wanted to dismiss their discipline’s religious past. However, this chapter’s analysis of the social gospel, the missionary movement, and Protestant theological liberalism illustrates

1 Although David Barrett was British, he was removed from British sociology because his working contexts were Kenya and the United States. Thus, this chapter is restricted to sociological developments in the United States. On British sociology, see G. Steinmetz, “A Child of the Empire: British Sociology and Colonialism, 1940s–1960s,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 49, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 353–

378; A.H. Halsey and W.G. Runciman, eds., British Sociology Seen from Without and Within (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005); Birgitta Nedelmann and Piotr Sztompka, eds., Sociology in Europe in Search of Identity (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 47–48; Chris Renwick, British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); A.H Halsey, A History of Sociology in Britain: Science, Literature, and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

that the Christian roots of American sociology had a long-lasting impact on shaping the discipline.

Defining “Science”

Christian sociology and American sociology developed against the backdrop of shifting interpretations and definitions of the scientific enterprise. “Science” did not start to exist in its contemporary form—observation and experimentation of the physical and natural world—until the mid-seventeenth century. The complete institutionalization and professionalization of science took place over a long period and was firmly established only in the mid-nineteenth century.² The conceptualization of science shifted as scientists and philosophers grappled with the core question that drove scientific inquiry: how can we know what is true?³ This question proved circular as it continuously led to new forms of scientific inquiry, scientific methods, and quests for certainty.⁴

In the early seventeenth century, the Aristotelian understanding of science and the cosmos dominated. Scientists could “show” relations between properties in a deductive fashion, using reason and logical analyses of available facts. Sets of propositions

2 Paolo Rossi, “Bacon’s Idea of Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 25. The Royal Society of London and the Parisian Académie des Sciences—both founded in the 1660s—exemplified the institutionalization of modern science. Each was devoted to the promotion of the new science of the seventeenth century. They shaped the scientific community to create continuing and stable scientific debate and communication, as well as stressed the usefulness of science to make positive contributions to society. See John A. Schuster,

“The Scientific Revolution,” in Companion to the History of Science, ed. R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R.

Christie, and M.J.S Hodge (London: Routledge, 1990), 218.

3 Andrew Ede and Lesley B. Cormack, A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 130.

4 Ibid.

recognized as true in their own right and demonstration were dependent on one’s intuition, which enabled an individual to see the truth.⁵ Aristotle went beyond mere deductions in that he explained facts in relationship to other facts. That is, science was considered a tool to explain the unknown by explaining that which was better known.

The Scientific Revolution (1500s–1700s) represented a reform period led by philosophers and scientists to change their social, political, and intellectual worlds—to gain more freedom of thought and social equality.⁶ One of the most profound historical shifts in scientific understanding was the replacement of both Aristotelian natural philosophy and the Ptolemaic system of astronomy.⁷ By 1700, a new mechanistic philosophy and the Copernican system of astronomy laid the conceptual foundation of modern science. Medieval worldviews and Christocentric science and philosophy were superseded by changed perceptions of the attainment of proper “scientific” knowledge.⁸ The Copernican shift brought important changes not only to understandings of astronomy and physics, but also natural philosophy. Knowledge was now based on empirical facts rather than church authority.⁹ For the first time, the results of science were in apparent

5 Erman McMullin, “The Development of Philosophy of Science, 1600–1900,” in R.C. Olby et al., eds., Companion to the History of Science, 816–817.

6 J.R.R. Christie, “The Development of the Historiography of Science,” in R.C. Olby et al., eds., Companion to the History of Science, 7.

7 Schuster, “Scientific Revolution,” 217.

8 McMullin, “Philosophy of Science,” 816.

9 J.R. Ravetz, “The Copernican Revolution,” in R.C. Olby et al., eds., Companion to the History of Science, 202. Society was slow to accept Copernicus’ findings. Kepler and Galileo produced evidence in the direction that Copernicus was right, or, at the very least, that Aristotle and Ptolemy were wrong.

conflict with the teaching of the Catholic Church.¹⁰ Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton served as exemplars of a movement toward intellectual liberation. Isaac Newton’s scientific and philosophical work solidified Copernican

astronomy and, along with Galileo’s contributions, helped lay the foundation for classical mathematical physics.¹¹

Englishman Francis Bacon (1561–1626) heavily shaped the new science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹² Neither a scientist nor philosopher, but a lawyer, Bacon sought to completely redefine how to determine truth in a new scientific era.¹³ He believed that all human knowledge was flawed because of preconceived prejudices and the lenses through which humans viewed the world. The only way to avoid these lenses was to look at isolated pieces of nature in controlled settings, away from larger,

10 Official Catholic Church teaching held that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei’s books essentially argued that the Bible was wrong. To the Church, belief in heliocentrism was sinful. See Nicholas P. Leveillee, “Copernicus, Galileo, and the Church: Science in a Religious World,” Inquiries Journal 3, no. 5 (2011): 1–2.

11 Schuster, “Scientific Revolution,” 217. Descartes, Pierre Fermant, Newton, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were credited with the creation of the first modern field of mathematics.

12 See James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D. Health, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon, 14 vols. (London: Longman, 1857–1874). René Descartes (1596–1648) wanted to redefine scientific methods, but took a different approach than Bacon. Descartes questioned the ability of one’s senses to produce knowledge and doubted the validity of human observation. His deductive style was based on pure skepticism, laid out in A Discourse on Method in 1637. Descartes peeled away layers of knowledge until he came to the one thing he knew was true: his own thinking and doubt (cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am). From this point he developed, through deduction, a series of universal truths that he found to be self-evident. See Brian L. Silver, The Ascent of Science (New York: Solomon Press, 1998), 11. According to Ede and Cormack, “Bacon answered the question of how we can know what is true in a careful,

conservative way, involving a hierarchy of knowledge made to appear as a democratic republic of scholars.

Descartes answered it in an individualistic anti-communal way, which gave more power to individual thinkers but did not, in the final analysis, create a community of scholars.” Ede and Cormack, History of Science, 131–132.

13 Bacon was a lawyer for most of his life. He served as an advisor to Elizabeth I and then Lord Chancellor for James I. Ede and Cormack, History of Science, 130.

uncontrolled environments. This approach was the foundation of Bacon’s inductive method that began with observations of nature to create laws and general theories.¹⁴ Bacon’s most important works on the inductive method were Novum Organum (1620) and The New Atlantis (1627), both of which served as mouthpieces for the new modern science. Bacon wanted to fully replace Aristotelian science—which focused on

contemplation and eternal truths—with science as the discovery of things unknown.¹⁵ He wanted to unite rationalism and empiricism—theory and practice—to create what he described as “active” science. His thinking fundamentally changed the way science functioned in society.¹⁶ He did not believe in utility as guarantor of truth, but he did believe in the possibility of knowing truth through experience. Aristotelian logic jumped from empirical particulars to first principles to form the premise of deductive reasoning.

However, Bacon wanted reason to go the other way: general observations formed at the end of scientific inquiry, not the beginning.¹⁷ Bacon also stressed the power of science for freedom of thought and to transform society.¹⁸

14 Ibid.

15 Markku Peltonen, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 14.

16 Both the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution emphasized personal experience and challenged the authority of the Pope. The Reformation was concerned with experience of the Bible and Christian faith, and the Revolution was concerned with experience and observation as means of discovering the truth about the world. The Reformation encouraged philosophers to think beyond traditionally accepted boundaries of science. As an Anglican, Francis Bacon and his ideas about inductive reasoning were very Protestant notions and based on personal experience. See John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science, 3rd ed. (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 15.

17 Peltonen, “Introduction,” 16.

18 Roy Porter, “The History of Science and the History of Society,” in R.C. Olby et al., eds., Companion to the History of Science, 33. Bacon and his followers had a global, futuristic concern with science. Christie, “Historiography of Science,” 6.

Bacon’s inductive method served as the foundation of the modern scientific method. His developments helped bring a wide range of disciplines under the umbrella of

“scientific” investigation. In the nineteenth century, philosophers and scientists generally agreed that science was largely empirical. Scientists organized, tested, and confirmed hypotheses based on knowledge of the natural world. At the same time, natural

philosophy and science divided into two separate disciplines. Science was concerned with the truth revealed in experience and the discovery of natural laws while philosophy’s concern was with the world beyond experience.¹⁹ Social science methodology in the nineteenth century was also heavily influenced by the inductive method. Social scientists preferred the inductive method and quantitative methods. By the end of the nineteenth century, quantification overtook the social sciences to the extent that anything quantified was considered empirical fact. Thus, the line between inductive reasoning and numerical analysis was blurred.²⁰

The main story in the twentieth-century philosophy of science was the rise and fall of logical positivism.²¹ The philosophers of the Vienna Circle started meeting in 1907

19 Robert E. Butts, “Science, 19^th Century Philosophy of,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed January 6, 2017, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/science-19th-century-philosophy-of/v-1. Despite the split between philosophy and science, philosophy still played a significant role in thinking about science. A new discipline was created: philosophy of science.

20 Quantification was so successful for the study of nature that it became highly desirable for the study of human behavior as well. Quantification in social science was used to translate ideas into empirical observations and to look for relations between variables. See Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), ix;

Charner M. Perry, “Inductive vs. Deductive Method in Social Science Research,” The Southwestern Political and Social Science Quarterly 8, no. 1 (June 1927): 69; O.R. McGregor, “Social Research and Social Policy in the 19^th Century,” The British Journal of Sociology 8 (1957): 146–157.

21 The term “logical positivism” was used interchangeably with “logical empiricism.”

to discuss issues of philosophy of science and epistemology—and promote logical positivism. Led by Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), they helped spread logical positivism to the United States and Britain. Logical positivism was essentially mathematics grounded in logic. Hudge and Cantor explained that in “any theory in physical science, logical structure can be distinguished from empirical content; whereas, by contrast, in mathematics which is more or less reducible to logic, there is no empirical content.”²² Logical positivism was not only a philosophy of science but also an ideological

characteristic of the Enlightenment in that it advocated for the philosophical teaching of morality.²³ The philosophy had a major following until the 1950s.²⁴ In the 1960s, it received critiques for its claims of no absolutes and the worthlessness of metaphysics.

Further, logical positivism held that the scientific method was the only method that could produce valid results and that the order of reality that science studied was the only reality in existence.²⁵

22 M.J.S. Hudge and G.N. Cantor, “The Development of Philosophy of Science Since 1900,” in R.C. Olby et al., eds., Companion to the History of Science, 838.

23 Ibid., 842.

24 C.E.M. Joad, A Critique of Logical Positivism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 10.

25 Peter Achinstein and Stephen F. Barker, eds., The Legacy of Logical Positivism: Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); Alan Richardson and Thomas Uebel, The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);

Michael LeMahieu, Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1945–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 14. In 1973, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy stated, “Logical positivism, then, is dead.” See John Passmore, “Logical Positivism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 5, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 56.

In the twentieth century, “science” was clearly defined as the “organized

methodical investigation of nature’s capacities.”²⁶ Scientists tried to maintain boundaries between “pure” and “applied” knowledge, but at the same time saw science in service to society. The century also saw the establishment of other kinds of “softer” sciences such as food science and sports science.²⁷ American sociologists in the 1960s viewed their field as an emerging “hard” science, complete with observations, experiments, and empirical research. However, the roots of the discipline grew in a “softer” past—in the applied research of Progressive Era, Christian social scientists.

Christian Roots of American Sociology

The history of American sociology is typically told from the perspective of university departments, academic guilds, and leading theorists.²⁸ While these viewpoints are important to document the history of the discipline, they often omit the important

26 Simon Shaffer, “What is Science?” in Companion to Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Krige and Dominique Pestre (London: Routledge, 2003), 27.

27 Ibid.

28 See Craig Calhoun, ed., Sociology in America: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Robert Bierstedt, American Sociological Theory: A Critical History (New York: Academic Press, 1981); Aldon D. Morris, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Jennifer Platt, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America: 1920–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Anthony J. Blasi, Diverse Histories of American Sociology (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Christian Smith, The Sacred Project of American Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). In their 23 theses on the sociology of religion, Christian Smith and colleagues commented that scholars overlooked the field’s complicated history with religion. See Christian Smith et al., “Roundtable on the Sociology of Religion: Twenty-Three Theses on the Status of Religion in American Sociology—A Mellon Working-Group Reflection,” Journal of the

American Academy of Religion 81, no. 4 (2013): 903–938.

contributions of religion.²⁹ The Christian roots of American sociology tend to be

interpreted solely through the lens of social gospel thought. While social gospel thinking was ideologically important for early sociological practice—in particular, applied

sociology—it needs to be considered in a larger context of the religious milieu of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century America.³⁰ The mainline Protestant missionary enterprise, global movements of Christian unity and cooperation, and an emerging liberal Protestant theological tradition in the United States also shaped American sociology.

The phenomenon of “Christian sociology” emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and helped give birth to American sociology as an academic discipline. It was bent heavily toward quantitative methods and exemplified by Protestant missions-minded researchers such as James Dennis (1842–1914), Harlan P. Beach

(1854–1933), and H. Paul Douglass (1871–1953). The questions early sociologists asked did not necessarily start with the social or the relationship between individual and

29 The exception to the omission of religion was the connected history of missions and

anthropology. This chapter is limited to the development of American sociology as an academic discipline, but there was an even stronger connective strand between anthropology and missiology. Both disciplines were historically concerned with indigenous cultures and societies around the world. See Charles R. Taber, To Understand the World, To Save the World: The Interface between Missiology and the Social Sciences (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000); Louis J. Luzbetak, The Church and Culture: New Perspectives in Missiological Anthropology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988); Michael J. Rynkiewich, Soul, Self, and Society: A Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World (Eugene, OR:

Cascade Books, 2011); Howard W. Law, Winning a Hearing: An Introduction to Missionary Anthropology and Linguistics (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1968).

30 Another important trend in the history of American sociology was the social survey movement.

The social survey movement emerged in the 1890s and extended into the 1920s. Religious leaders were influential in shaping the content of early community surveys. The social survey movement served as a model for the future polling industry that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. George Gallup developed the first national poll of American religion in 1935. Within a few years, polling was the standard for understanding public opinion on religion. Further, within a few decades of Gallup’s first poll, pollsters dominated the interpretation of American religion. See Robert Wuthnow, Inventing American Religion:

Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 15, 3.

community, as is assumed for the contemporary sociology of religion. Instead, sociologists started with what they perceived as social problems, both “secular” and

“religious,” and asked how communities could address them for the general improvement of society. Christian sociology was an effort to combine religious motives with the scientific method.

Protestant Theological Liberalism and the Social Gospel

Protestant theological liberalism did not appear in the United States until the nineteenth century. Its roots lay in the previous century, in the idea that the foundation of Christian faith was modern knowledge and experience. Gary Dorrien described liberal theology as “the idea that Christian theology can be genuinely Christian without being based upon external authority.”³¹ He argued that liberal theology in nineteenth-century America developed within a Victorian framework that conceptualized religion as a

“civilizing” endeavor. That is, liberal theology was attuned to social salvation and was considered a third way between conservatism and radical rationalism.³² Defining features of late-nineteenth-century American liberal theology included acceptance of Darwinian theory, historical Biblical criticism, the union between God and humanity, and the

“kingdom-building social mission of the church,” all of which transcended

31 Gary J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), xiii.

32 Ibid., xiv.

denominational lines.³³ It was distinct in its openness to intellectual curiosity—including natural and social sciences—its commitment to reason and experience, and its inherent conviction that Christianity was an ethical way of life relevant to modern people.³⁴

The Christian social gospel in the United States began in the late nineteenth century and peaked in the 1920s.³⁵ The social gospel’s major thrust was that Christians

The Christian social gospel in the United States began in the late nineteenth century and peaked in the 1920s.³⁵ The social gospel’s major thrust was that Christians