Discussion Archive

Viewpoints from Across the Spectrum- A Table of Contents

Latin Americanist-Historian Views: Rational Choice

An Economist-Non-Latin Americanist's Viewpoint

A Religion Professor's Viewpoint

Professor Gill's Rejoinders

Tim Steigenga (Florida Atlantic University)

Manuel Vasquez's Rejoinder

Edward T. Brett's Rejoinder

Daniel H. Levine (University of Michigan)

Phillip Berryman's Comments

Kenneth Serbin (University of San Diego)

Stathis N. Kalyvas (New York University)

John Francis Burke (University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas)

Latin Americanist-Historian Views: Rational Choice

Edward T. Brett, Professor of History at Laroche College, Pittsburgh

    I base my critique on Anthony Gill's chapter, "The Economics of Evangelization," in the forthcoming book, Religious Freedom and Evangelization in Latin America, ed. by Paul Sigmund. I realize that Gill may have addressed some of my concerns in his broader study, Render Unto Caesar, which I have not read. 

    My problem with Gill's chapter is not based so much on whether or not Rational Choice theory is a valid theory. It is based on the fact that Gill, in my opinion, ignores historical realities which do not fit into his system.
    I am also concerned that his approach reduces religion to pure economics--the equivalent of buying and selling commodities (for example he talks of religious markets regulated and deregulated) and I think this shortchanges religion by leaving out the moral dimension.

    To be more specific:
    1. Gill does not differentiate between the various religious players. He treats them all generically. He seems to have interviewed only evangelical Protestants. Consequently, he does not differentiate between their mindset and that of Catholics and mainline Protestants. One would think from his
paper that Catholic missionaries and clergy have the same modus operandi as Pentecostals. They don't; neither do more traditional Protestants. On page 1, for example, his "image of the missionary" may be correct for evangelicals, but to apply it to Catholics after 1968, one would have to add the option for the poor.

    2. This option, of course, developed from Vatican II and Medellin. Yet Gill doesn't even mention these. How can one do a serious article on a topic of this nature and totally ignore Vatican II and Medellin? 

    3. Indeed, Gill seems to be in a pre-Vatican II time warp. He states that the Catholic Church began to involve itself with the poor only after the Evangelicals began to make large scale conversions. I think such large scale conversions took place in the late 1970s and the 1980s. But Gaudium et Spes, which was the seed for the church's option for the poor and which spawned Medellin, came prior to this Protestant success. Thus, Gill seems to be chronologically out of order here.

    4. Gill gives too much credit to the "Protestant challenge" to Catholicism. Any historian of the Latin American Catholic church in the 20th century would probably agree that the Catholic hierarchy was much more fearful of communist influence and expansion in Latin America and that this fear caused church leaders to focus more on the poor. This is not to say that Catholic leaders were not concerned with the "Protestant challenge." They were, but this was by far secondary to communism.

    5. If Gill's thesis is correct, then how does one explain the post-Medellin cooperation between progressive Catholics and mainline Protestants on issues of social justice? Gill seems to have no recognition of ecuminism in post 1960s Christianity.

    6. Gill doesn't differentiate between the pre- and post Vatican II Catholic mindset. This causes him to neglect social justice as a factor in Catholic work with the poor and oppressed, and, as I said above, this social justice factor is rooted in Gaudium et Spes which came from Rome, not Latin America Catholic bishops.
 

    7. On page 2, Gill states that Monopolistic (Catholic) religion neglected the poor due to the economic necessity of funding a large bureaucracy. I think the extreme shortage of priests, especially after the liberals came to power, had more to do with this neglect.
 

    8. The author's contention (page 15) that Protestant efforts to convert the upper class in the 1890s to 1910s failed because "the elite were solidly educated in Catholic doctrine" is incorrect. What are his sources for this? At that time the elite class (with the exception of a small conservative remnant) were unconcerned with Catholic doctrine. They were concerned with economics and that meant stripping the church of its property. The liberals didn't attend church; if anything they were anticlerical and the elites in power at this time were the liberals.
 

    9. Gill says that CEBs are an attempt to fight Pentecostal success. Althouth there is some truth to this, it is too simplistic. If that were the primary reason for establishing CEBs, then why has the Vatican and the conservative members of the hierarchy been so suspicious of them? Why have
they tried to shut them down or replace them with charismatic groups? In truth, there were many reasons for creating CEBs, most of which do not fit into Gill's religious economec thesis.

    Thus, although Gill's may be a noble effort, I think he needs to pay more attention to historical factors, which seem to go against his thesis. Certainly he can not just ignore them. Secondly, he would do well to realize that sometimes the church makes reforms primarily for moral reasons. Economics is not always the bottom line for all change.
 
 
 

An Economist-Non-Latin Americanist's Viewpoint

William Marquis, O.P., Assistant Professor and Treasurer, Providence College.

    My general impression is highly positive about the use of economic models to deal with explanations of religion.  Gill has done an excellent job in the general presentation of the argument.

    There remains much work to be done by Gill.  His treatment of economic preferences lacks an adequate development.  Nonetheless, I believe Gill is certainly on the right path for developing a theory which helps us to understand religios behavior.

Manuel Vasquez, University of Florida and Wesleyan University's Center for the Americas

    First, let me start by saying that I agree with Prof. Gill's general assumption that rational choice approaches are a useful tool for the study of religious behavior. He is right to challenge the untenable notion that religion is irrational or, at the very least, non-rational and that it is purely other-worldly. As Gill states: "although religious belief per se may be placed outside the realm of rationality, leaders of religious institutions are subject to many of the same concerns and constraints as their as their secular counterparts (e.g., politicians, labor leaders). Primary among these concerns is the need for their church to survive and expand –i.e., to preserve the institution and increase membership" (1998:11). If anything, the fact that capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal forms, has become one of the dominant ordering forces in Latin American society should force us to take seriously the notion of "religious economies."

    Having said this, I have some serious concerns about the long-term pay-off of rational choice approaches, especially when they are presented as the only rigorous and scientific way to study religion (as in the case of Stark and Finke in The Churching of America). For the sake of space, I will limit myself to two critiques.

    1. Can the rational choice model and its associated religious market approach, which claim particular strength in dealing with micro-behavior, really capture the complexity and polyvalence of religion as it is experienced in everyday life? In a recent essay in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, 1998), Leigh Schmidt recognizes the importance of rational choice in the study of American religion. However, according to him, "this supply model, focusing almost exclusively on the vending of faith and thus privileging denominational winners in this free market, allows us to see finally only a small part of the complexity of American religious life" (p.72). Focusing largely on "the cultural producers," the "entrepreneurs of faith," rational choice models have "proven of limited use when it comes to the study of popular or lived religion, the everyday exercises of faith within congregations and families, at shrines and grottoes, or in Sunday schools and on the streets" (ibid.). 

    As an alternative, Schmidt, drawing from the work of Marcel Mauss, proposes a "gift economy model." Such a model "suggests the more complex motivations of religious actors as they meet, associate, sacrifice, struggle, jostle, and contend –with each other and God. The practices and pieties surrounding gifts lead to charged moments of encounter, exchange, and relationship and away from an all-too-rationalized, segmented, individualistic religious market place. The gift economy, far from pointing to a realm independent of the market or somehow above competition, encapsulates the tensile notions of rivalry and altruism, mass commodity and personal inventiveness, calculation and offering" (ibid.). 

    In other words, it is not that rational choice models are wrong or impious in their insights; it is more that these models provide an extremely limited, one might even say shallow and simplistic, understanding of religious behavior. To quote Schmidt, "the construct of open religious marketplace is not canceled by the gift economy, since competition, display, status, and rivalry are common parts of exchange, but the gift economy, unlike the market model, is not narrowly beholden to the values of salesmanship, growth, and market share. Gifts then, as with any religious practice, are supple and hybrid, positioned on the overlapping borders of self-interest and self-denial, festive play and strategic purpose, spirit and materiality, public and private, sacred and secular" (ibid.). 

    Now, one does not have to buy Schmidt's gift model to acknowledge his critique of rational choice and religious market models. As a matter of fact, in the Latin American context, the works of John Burdick and Rowan Ireland are models of a fuller, richer approach to "popular" or "lived" religion. In both Burdick's Looking for God and Ireland's Kingdoms Come competition figures prominently but always against the backdrop of complex processes of identity formation and hybridization. Why is this line of critique relevant? Because popular religion (in the shape of traditional popular Catholicism, Pentecostalism, and African-based and New Age religions) is definitely the most common form of religious life in Latin America. I think many scholars of Latin American religion (myself counted!) have made the mistake of concentrating too much on religious movements (base communities and Pentecostal congregations) and institutions (especially church-state relations) and not enough of the more diffuse popular religiosity (and its multiple relations with institutions and movements). 

    As a result, we have a very partial understanding of religion in the area. Because of their often simplistic, abstract, and ahistorical assumptions, and its exclusive focus on "entrepreneurs of faith," rational choice and religious market models run the risk of reproducing and exacerbating this pattern.

    2. Is rational choice all there is to "religious economies"? Not only are rational choice models limited vis-à-vis popular religion, but they also have some serious problems when dealing with collective actors (i.e., institutions). The religious economy model as deployed by Prof. Gill is built on neo-classical assumptions that free markets are not only normatively better, more efficient, but that they are the default condition of economic practice. Non-free market conditions like monopolies or oligopolies are seen as distortions of a tendency towards the competitive construction of equilibrium. 

    This assumption is, as the institutional and regulation schools of economics argue, questionable at best. In two papers that will appear in a special issue of the Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Afffairs (Winter 1999), Phillip Berryman and I both argue for an alternative approach to the economics of faith that takes into account institutional habits, modes of regulation, regimes of accummulation, and technologies of production, dissemination, and consumption of religious goods that determine religious strategies beyond the sheer drive to maximize profits (be it membership or market share). While Berryman uses Manuel Castells's recent work on networks, I draw from Aglieta, Lipietz, Harvey, and A. Amin (particularly their discussion of Fordism vs. flexible production and accumulation) to analyze the manner in which religious institutions in Latin America are functioning in an increasingly pluralistic and globalized context. 

    The point is the same, though: rational choice models are just one approach to religious economies (although in "The Economics of Evangelization," Prof. Gill makes it appear as if rational choice is economic theory!?), and, further, they are one-dimensional and fairly naïve when it comes to the complex processes of institutional production and distribution of religious goods. In other words, scientific rigor need not be sacrificed by the adoption of alternative approaches to religious interests. 

    Quite the contrary, I find rational choice theory not flexible, comprehensive, or robust enough to make sense of the changing Latin American religious field. We need approaches that situate religious practice within interlocking, overlapping institutional, structural, and systemic logics which include globalization, economic restructuring, transnational migration, transitions to democracy, and the Vatican's new evangelization initiative. I doubt that rational choice's methodological individualism can cope with all this complexity (even if strengthened by game theory, which supposedly addresses "constraints"). 

    In sum, while I think rational choice approaches can help us elucidate some aspects of religious life in Latin America, I am fairly skeptical about the long-term significance of the model. My skepticism is due to epistemological and methodological problems at the heart of rational choice theory, problems that cannot be corrected by the simple "adoption of insights from cognitive psychology, cultural perspectives, or complexity theory," as Prof. Gill optimistically claims (1998: 201). Of course, it is still too early to predict anything and I think we should let this "reseach programme" (Lakatos) test its validity and range. 

    My sense, however, is that the main pay-off of rational choice will be to confirm and perhaps revise some of the insights already gained through qualitative, ethnographic research and the now classical institutionalist works (See footnote below). Thus far, I don't see rational choice approaches as breaking any new ground. At it stands now, this is a case of much ado about not much. 

1 For example, the idea that the preferential option for the poor and the promotion of CEBs was a deliberate strategy from the Brazilian episcopate to shore up work and membership among the growing urban poor is already present in Bruneau (1982). Re. the variable of religious competition, I think it is debatable to assign it the strong causal weight that Prof. Gill gives it. In El Salvador, for instance, while it is true that many of "liberal" pastoral reforms took place around the same time that Protestantism was beginning to make some headway in urban areas, it is wrong to conclude that religious competition caused or even conditioned the iglesia popular's vigorous defense of the poor during Archbishop Romero. As Philip Williams has shown, the Protestant "sects" become a concern later, during and after the civil war, as the Catholic church retrenched from oppositional politics in the wake of Romero's assassination, and as dislocation, transnational immigration to the U.S., and intense missionary work fueled a rapid growth in evangelical Protestantism. Here, paradoxically, religious competition led to the (re)deployment of conservative pastoral strategies (the Charismatics) rather than to the development of progressive Catholicism. Still, I think it is worth exploring some interesting correlations and elective affinities between religious competition and the rise of progressive Catholicism in certain countries. But this is stuff for another discussion.

Professor Gill's Rejoinders: 

General Response: There is a tendency to view economic analyses as sterilizing religion of its spiritual and moral dimensions, or commodifying religion. 

Specific points (related to the number comments):

1. At a certain level, Brett's critique is true. I treat both Catholic clergy and evangelical ministers the same in the following terms: I assume that they are all truly committed to their faith and interested in communicating their faith to as many people as they possibly can, often despite grave risk to their lives. This goes to the heart of my comment above - I do believe that many, if not most or nearly all, people involved in evangelization have very pure, spiritual intentions. While there are many difference between Catholics and evangelical Protestants, they are mostly minor for my analysis which seeks to explain how religious actors who are motivated to "spread the Word of God" go about doing that in a world of scarcity. As far as adding "option for the poor" to Catholics after 1968, I would also say that a large number of evangelicals also have an "option for the poor" (after all, that is where they are expanding the most). They may disagree on the specifics of how to help the poor from their plight, but I think that the implication that only Catholics has this "option" is disingenuous, especially when one considers that Protestant missionaries were quite involved in literary campaigns and other social improvement crusades in the early part of this century. Moreover, there were several Catholics who had an "option for the poor" prior to 1968, and even prior to 1962 (see below)!

2. The role of Vatican II and Medellín have been discussed extensively in the literature on Latin American religion and there is a strong tendency to attribute the rise of the progressive Catholic Church almost solely to these two events. Other chapters in the Sigmund volume cover this, so I minimized my discussion of it. However, there are a couple methodological problems associated with the general claim that progressive Catholicism was strictly (or even primarily) the result of these two conferences. First, all bishops, and probably most clergy, in Latin America were exposed to the teachings of Vatican II and Medellín. Exposure to these ideas is thus a constant. However, not all Catholic clergy (or national episcopal conferences) adopted a progressive stance congruent with the more progressive teachings of these meetings. Thus we have variation in terms of what we are trying to explain - i.e., whether Catholic clergy became progressive or not during the 1970s. Methodologically speaking, a constant cannot explain variation. The question arises as to why some clergy were predisposed to adopt progressive teachings while others were not. Moreover, the ideas presented at VCII did not pop out of thin air; they were held by many of the organizers thus we need to figure out where they got them. Other factors were clearly involved and my paper and book are an attempt to find out these other factors. I argue that Protestant competition was a key factor in Latin America. Another possible explanation could be the psychological make-up of individual clergy, or the social norms and values within the networks various clergy associated. My intent was not to test these latter hypotheses, though they would make for interesting theses. Finally, it should be noted that progressive Catholicism and an "option for the poor" did exist in Latin America well before VCII or Medellín. I refer to Padre Alberto Hurtado in the paper (and extensively in my book) as one of the precursors of progressive Catholicism. He wrote a book in 1941 that really anticipated much of what would become known as progressive Catholicism. Catholic Action and labor unions in the early part of the century were also precursors to progressive Catholicism. Also see Hannah Stewart-Gambino's excellent book on the Catholic Church in Chile. 

3. Being in a "time warp" is advantageous in this case. Too often we only assign causal significance to events that "explode" on the scene, prompting us to lose sight of deeper historical causes. While Protestantism "exploded" in the 1980s and '90s (a natural effect of geometric expansion rates - see Rod Stark's The Rise of Christianity), evangelical Protestantism was growing at a rapid clip in many parts of Latin America as early as the 1930s. Books talking about rapid Protestant growth in Chile and Brazil were written by Lalive d'Epinay and Willems in the 1960s and referred to expansion in the '40s, '50s and '60s. While this phenomenon may be new to North American scholars (thanks to Stoll and Martin), it was readily apparent to many in South America and affected the religious landscape in important ways. In my own research, I was surprised to find out how much discussion in Catholic circles there was about this topic prior to the 1970s (and even the '60s). Again, Hurtado's 1941 book has a whole chapter on Protestant growth in Chile. At a 1954 conference of Maryknoll priests in Chimbote, Peru, it was declared that "What a bulwark they [Catholic Action movements] would be against the inroads of Protestantism and communism" (see Rendering Unto Caesar, p. 101 for full citation). Guillermo Cook, in a book published by Orbis, went as far to connect the growth of Protestantism to the Catholic base community movement as far back as 1956! (See Cook, The Expectation of the Poor, p. 64). 

4. Communism did matter a great deal to Catholic leaders. Much of the Catholic unionization ("workers' circles") in the early 1900s is a reaction to socialist and syndicalist efforts to unionize industrial (and later rural) labor, mostly in the Southern Cone countries. However, my intention in this paper was to focus on church-church interaction. The "communist threat" presents a slightly different dynamic on the part of Church leaders in that they are more willing to get the state to "take care of the problem." Perhaps one of the biggest surprises of my research is how much the Catholic Church has reacted to the Protestant challenge. In my book, I document the reaction in more detail than is presented in the paper.

5. The case of ecumenical relations between Catholics and mainline Protestants is not contrary to my thesis, but indeed proves my point. Note that ecumenism is strongest among non-competing religions. Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Anglicans and most other members of the World Council of Churches are not aggressively expanding in Latin America. The more aggressive a denomination is in recruiting Catholics (or nominal Catholics), the less likely there will be any ecumenism. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Adventists and Pentecostals are not involved in ecumenical dialogue with the Catholic Church in Latin America (with a few rare exceptions). A similar pattern is true in U.S. history (see Finke and Stark, The Churching of America). This is not the "fault" of the Catholic Church any more than it is the other denominations.

6. As noted above, there was a significant concern for social justice prior to Vatican II (cf., Rerum Novarum). Catholic Action, workers' circles, and other organizations in the pre-1962 era show this to be the case. Again, I am suspect of explanations that attribute VCII to a wholesale shift in the "mindset" of Catholics. It did have an impact, no doubt. However, I see VCII more as a catalyst than a cause. Those predisposed to its teachings found it useful to have Vatican endorsement for their social agendas.

7. Agreed. The shortage of clergy (or "crisis sacerdotal" as Renato Poblete has called it) is a major factor in the Church's neglect of many people within Latin America. This is also symptomatic of a monopoly. There is a strong correlation between the market share of Catholicism and the number of priests per 10,000 Catholics (see Rendering Unto Caesar, p. 87). Indeed, since personnel are an economic resource, diverting money to sustaining a large bureaucracy means higher dead weight costs and less money available to recruit, train and pay priests. CELAM has even noted this as one of Protestantism's "unfair advantages" in Las Sectas en América Latina, p. 35-36.

8. Actually, Liberals frequently sent their children to Catholic schools in the 1800s and early 1900s, this is noted widely in the literature. Also, the Church was preaching in urban areas and getting financial donations to keep the organization running; that had to be coming from somewhere. In general, I think the "liberal threat" to Catholicism as a religion, per se, has been greatly exaggerated during the 1800s. Liberals were opposed to the Church having political and social power, but were not necessarily against Catholicism as a faith. And I have argued elsewhere that much of the property expropriation during the 1800s was prompted by the necessity of governments to raise cash quick during the first and second rounds of debt crises in the region (c. 1820s - '60s). Secularizing marriage and funeral services also allowed the government to capture easily-collectable sources of revenue (user fee based) and the secularization of the registry helped to build a bookkeeping infrastructure for taxation.

9. There are undoubtedly many reasons why CEBs were created, most of which I think are for very good reasons - to help the poor and teach people the Catholic faith. What I argue is that many of the techniques used by CEBs were adapted from early Protestant missions and that the Church turning to the poor was prompted by the realization that they had not effectively evangelized this sector in the past. In effect, Protestants acted as an "alarm clock." Also, the current pope is not anti-CEB (and has advocated them several times in visits to the region). Instead, the Vatican is anti-radical CEBs that threaten to challenge hierarchical authority. The encouragement (by some) of the Catholic charismatic movement seems to me to be a direct response to charismatic Protestants; the two are often found in close proximity to one another. One of the interesting features of Church organization is that it can include a wide variety of religious, political and social preferences under one umbrella.

Rejoinder to Marquis:

Prof. Marquis is correct to note that one of the weaknesses of my (and almost all) rational choice approach is the underdevelopment of a theory of preferences. Most work in economics tends to assume preferences (with the exception of the "revealed preferences" crowd). My approach has been to assume some justifiable set of preferences and derive implications from those preferences. Differing motivations (preferences, values, goals) usually imply different behavioral characteristics. Once these implications are derived, evidence can be brought to bear on whether the initial assumptions were valid or not.
Currently, I am working on an article that looks at people's values (preferences) empirically through survey data. However, as many within the field of attitudinal research will tell you, survey research has many limitations in determining an individual's actual preferences.

Rejoinders to Vasquez:

As I see it, Vasquez has two major critiques of the rational choice approach in general: 1) it is too simplistic; and 2) it doesn't add much to our understanding (in large part, a result of the first).

To begin, I need to first note that in the first paragraph there is an implication that rational choice (or economics) is most appropriate for "neoliberal, capitalist" economies. This is not necessarily the case. Rational choice, as defined above, can easily study command economies, corporatist economies, gift economies, etc. It is simply a theory of how people allocate resources to achieve goals under a variety of constraints. A command economy places different constraints on behavior than market economies. (Both of these categories are rather broad terms and any economic analysis would do better to specify more detailed constraints - e.g., specific regulations, sets of property rights, etc.). On another corrective note, Vasquez claims that game theory is the branch of economics that adds constraints to the analysis. This is not entirely true. All rational choice analysis deals with constraints in some form or another (e.g., budgets, voting regulations). Game theory deals with a specific set of constraints, namely strategic constraints (i.e., the actions of other people as they try to pursue their goals). Finally, I do not intend to say that "rational choice is economic theory," but rather, rational choice is largely congruent with microeconomic theory. Almost all microeconomic analysis are rational choice-based. There is a great deal of macroeconomic theory that is not based in microeconomic analysis (Keynes being a classic example).

As for the critique that rational choice is a simplistic theory, I must say "guilty as charged." Actually, I would say that it is a "simple" theory, not "simplistic" (which has some negative connotations). I feel that the strength of the approach is that it keeps behavioral assumptions to a minimum. (On a sidenote, I have often been critiqued for using assumptions in my research, implying that there is research that does not employ assumptions. I would like to see such a work. The strength of many rational choice studies is that they make their assumptions explicit, which invariably leaves them open to critique. So be it. Assumptions should be open for critique, not hidden and denied.)

By keeping things simple, rational choice theory tries to hold as much of the world constant as possible and analyze how certain changes in exogenous constraints affect behavior. Is the rest of the world "held constant" in reality? No, certainly not. However, if everything varies in a model without proper controls, it is difficult to determine causal mechanism. Studies that try to emphasize a "holistic" approach to understanding the world invariably end up reporting spurious relationships between variables that are not causally related. Methodologically there are ways to control for this problem (using both solid research design and/or a variety of statistical techniques). [This is not to claim that quantitative research is superior to qualitative, hence the mention of solid research design.] But there is also a role for theory here. A good theoretical model should make predicted causal mechanisms clear in a way that suggests falsifiable empirical tests. This involves simplifying the world into "bite-sized" pieces. Nowhere do I claim that rational choice is THE unifying theory in the social sciences (akin to string theory in physics). Instead, it is a theory that helps us understand how environmental constraints affect human choices. Given that the overwhelming amount of work being done on Latin American religion focuses on the importance of "doctrine," "values," "identities" and "mindsets," I consider this simple examination of constraints to be a welcome addition (not replacement) to this body of scholarship.

As to the more specific comments on "gift economies," I have no knowledge of this literature. I imagine it connects to the ongoing debate in economics as to why people give gifts for birthdays, etc. rather than cash, which is more fungible. This is an interesting question and one that is reconcilable with rational choice theory. Do people try to maximize prestige, reputation, close relations, etc.? Sure they do. This just takes us back to the question about the content of preferences raised above. I hesitate to add (not knowing the literature) that claims about preferences (self-denial, festive play) in gift economies are assumptions unless someone has discovered a way to empirically validate those assertions in a rigorous manner. It is perfectly plausible to imagine someone giving gifts with a reasonable expectation of receiving something in return in the near future, despite what they may say to a social science interviewer. A great deal of this can be picked up on the literature on reputation (see Dan Klein's edited volume on Reputation or Dennis Chong's Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement). To date I know of no research that has been able to verify internal preferences in a rigorous manner, a topic addressed by a forthcoming paper by Michael Hechter, et. al. in the European Sociological Review. Full cite available on request. Survey research has many pitfalls and the "revealed preference" literature devolves toward tautology. To assert that people in gift economies are acting on preferences (or, perhaps, norms) of self-denial and festive play is as equally simplified as my stating that religious firms seek market share. Both analyses must make use of simplifying assumptions.

As for the claim that rational choice theories add little to our understanding of religion, that is largely in the eye of the beholder. Iannaccone's earlier work on religious human capital could be seen as confirming the findings of "socialization theory." However, what I think the approach does add - via simplification - is the ability to derive a great many more testable implications than theories that have come before. Iannaccone's work (along with Stark & Bainbridge, Finke, and others) has provide a number of testable theoretical propositions that earlier theories did not - e.g., on the role of time vs. money tradeoffs in people's religious participation. Finke & Stark's Churching of America is a wonderful example of how longstanding beliefs about religious practice in the U.S. are challenged using rational choice proposition and then tested with available data. Instead of seeing "Great Awakenings" as spontaneous events, they predict that a great deal of organization went on before such events and then show convincing evidence (in my humble opinion) that this was indeed the case. Likewise, they challenge the notion that the rise of televangelism was a function of a society lost in consumerism, and instead trace it back to changes in FCC regulations on network programming. I consider these to be important new findings, not to mention R. Stephen Warner's claim that rational choice theory has gone a long way to challenging the longstanding belief in secularization theory.

As for my own work, I certainly am beholden to the insights of many who came before me, including Ivan Vallier, Thomas Bruneau, and Ed Cleary all of whom noted the importance of "competition" among denominations. Indeed, one of Ed Cleary's edited works includes "competition" in the title - Conflict and Competition: The Latin American Church in a Changing Environment (with Hannah Stewart-Gambino). What I hope I add to the general debate is a rigorous way of looking at church-state relations in Latin America (and elsewhere) that points to some empirical evidence that may have been overlooked. What do I hope I add to the debate? Well, among other things: 1) changes in mindsets (e.g., conservative to progressive Catholicism) are often provoked by external events (e.g., Protestant growth among the poor); 2) the Protestant challenge started in some countries much earlier than is typically thought, and the Catholic Church did react to these challenges in a variety of ways; 3) Protestant growth is not merely the result of a grave cultural crisis in society, but often has much to do with changes in government regulations that make it easier to proselytize. (Additional research and findings available on request.) Do I adequately make a case for these assertions? That is up for you to decide.

By way of a final note, I enjoyed this intellectual interchange as it was very instructive and stimulating for me. I hope to have further such interactions in the future. Please feel free to contact me with any additional questions and/or comments.

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Tim Steigenga (Political Science, Florida Atlantic University), review for Journal of Church and State shown here through permission of editor.

Dr. Timothy J. Steigenga
Davidson College
Department of Political Science
Davidson NC, 28036
 
 

Manuel Vásquez (Wesleyan University and University of Florida) Response

    It would seem that this privileging of simplicity is informed by a positivistic outlook that has shown significant signs of exhaustion. (I think that, at least unconsciously, a similar kind of positivism is what has U.S. religious studies folks so upset at the work of Stark, Finke & co). What is at stake, then, is not the applicability of economic categories to religious behavior (although Prof. Gill seems to think that this is the issue, given the considerable energy he spends arguing for the obvious claim that religion is also of this world). As I stated in my initial comments, I am very much in favor of the whole notion of economies of faith, provided that they are defined in a conceptually rich fashion. Instead, the problem with Gill’s work is an economistic positivism that is set against non-reductive, flexible yet rigorous theories of religion as a complex field of activity (simply because these theories "invariably end up reporting spurious relationships between variables that are not causally related").

    Perhaps it is unfair to ask Prof. Gill to commit himself to this kind of theoretical openness, given some of the dominant trends in his discipline. At any rate, I am willing to wait and see if the much-cherished simplicity of rational choice models can enrich our understanding of Latin American religions. 

Edward T. Brett, Professor of History, La Roche College, Pittsburgh, PA:

    1. Gill calls me "disingenuous" for stating that the post-Medellin option for the poor differentiates progressive Catholics from Evangelical Protestants. He rather arrogantly reminds me that Protestants also care about the poor and that pre-1968 Catholics and Protestants had programs for the poor. I never said that Protestants do not care about or work with those living in poverty. Likewise, I realize that pre-Medellin Catholics had programs for the poor. Gill seems to have missed my point. It is that the post-1968 progressive Catholic option for the poor is something new to Latin American religion. Whereas earlier programs were reformist and often premised on a developmentalist approach, the Post Medellin approach went much further. It is far more radical and is influenced in no small part by liberation theology. This is what differentiates it from Evangelical, more conservative, approaches. 

    2. Again, Gill's statements that all national episcopal conferences did not take a progressive stance after Vatican II and Medellin and that the ideas presented at Vatican II did not pop out of thin air are of course true. No sane person would argue against these points. Likewise, no one would deny
his contention that there were in several countries precursors to progressive Catholicism. My point is that the post-1968 form of progressive Catholicism differed quite a bit from the pre-Medellin form.
The former was far more widespread and far more radical.

    3. Gill spends much time in his reply to my critique showing that there was concern among bishops and some religious orders about Protestant inroads into Latin America. I never said that there wasn't. My point was that this concern was secondary to that over communist inroads. In other words, if
one wants to speculate on why the Catholic church began showing greater attention to the poor in the 1930s through the 1950s, one should concentrate more on the so called "communist threat" rather than the "Protestant threat." (Of course, this is not to say that the church's attention to the poor was the sole result of either of these "threats"). My contention here is that Gill is responding to things I never said in my critique and I find this disturbing (perhaps "disingenuous"). Gill states that the Catholic church was willing to have the state take care of the communist problem. No one would deny that the church was glad to have the state go after communists. Nevertheless, it took its own
independent measures. For instance, the importation of North American missionaries to work in previously "priestless" areas beginning in the late 1930s or early 1940s was primarily aimed at nipping communism in the bud. If one looks at documents of U.S. missionary orders, one will find much
concerning the fight against communism. One will also find some mention of Protestant inroads, but it is obvious which is the primary concern.

    4. Concerning my statement that elitist Catholics in the late 19th & early 20th century were far from in the pocket of the Catholic church, as Gill argues, and that the Liberal elites were mostly anticlerical, Gill notes that Liberals sent their children to catholic schools. So what! I teach at
a Catholic college, but all of the Catholic students who attend are not what I would call serious-minded Catholics. Many of them give little thought to Catholicism and seldom if ever attend Catholic religious services. Gill is correct when he states that Liberals were opposed to the
church's political and social power, but were not necessarily against Catholicism as a faith. But that's beside the point. No one would argue that the vast majority of Liberals would seldom have been found at a Sunday mass. My argument was that Liberal elites were not strong Catholics, who were therefore inaccessable to Protestant missionaries, as Gill implies in his article. Nothing that gill says in his response to my critique shows otherwise.

    5. Concerning Gill's remarks on CEBs, I have no disagreement. My contention was that Gill's statement that CEBs are an attempt to fight Pentecostal success, although true to a degree, is too simplistic. I see nothing in Gill's response to my critique to show otherwise.

    In summary then, Gill's rational choice theory for Latin American religious developments are, in my oppinion, from an historian's perspective,simplistic and ahistorical. To be taken more seriously, he will have to work on this area.

Daniel H. Levine (University of Michigan, Chair, Political Science)

    This ambitious work attempts to lay out a new agenda for the study of religion and politics in Latin America. Three points undergird the argument: that concepts derived from rational choice theory can be usefully applied to this reality; that doing so results in more systematic research and more fruitful results than other approaches have offered; and that the central force making for change in Catholic stances towards the state is the competition from expanding Protestantism, and the threat this embodies to the Catholic church's ability to hold mass publics. More threat from Protestants means more disengagement of church institutions from old alliances with the state, more open opposition to that state (e.g. through promotion of human rights) and more vigorous promotion of popular groups. Churches are treated as unitary actors; what bishops do and say (as manifest in episcopal conferences) stands in for "the church". 

    That religion and politics mix at all is taken as something in need of explanation. "Even in the United States" Gill writes, "the constitutional separation of church and state cannot keep the religious and political realms apart. The intertwining of religion and politics is even more pronounced in Latin America--the focus of this study, where the issue of church-state separation remains far more ambiguous. "(2) This is not a good way to begin the search for a new approach. Strong ties between religion and politics have been a conspicuous part of US history, are visible in all cultures and traditions (by no measure "even more pronounced in Latin America") and evolve continuously everywhere. The issue is not to keep these "realms apart", either in theory or practice, but to understand who brings them together, for what purposes, and with what consequences.
    After a brief historical overview, the author focuses on church-state relations in the post 1930 period, with special reference to the last three decades. He sees 1979 as a turning point in church state relations. That year brought Sandinista victory in Nicaragua (with multiple religious-political alliances both in support and opposition), the regional bishops' conference at Puebla, which enshrined the notion of a "preferential option for the poor" in Catholic vocabularies, not to mention initial impact of the first of many visits by Pope John Paul II to the area. Subsequent chapters lay out "An Economic Model of Church-State Relations" (3), followed by a case studies of Protestant expansion and Catholic response (4), and by of the progressive church in Chile (5), and the conservative Church and its complicity with the dirty war in Argentina (6). 

    Central to the author's "economic model" is an expanding supply of religious goods which leads churches to fierce competition for clientele. Competition, in turn, makes clergy and church leaders more responsive to parishioners' needs. Gill insists that without competition, there is no option to exit, and hence no effective pressure on elites to change positions. (66). What about the option to do nothing, or to vote with one's feet, leaving religious and other choices for a subsequent point? Both have been much exercised in Latin America. Underlying the model is the assumption that "there has always been a relatively high demand for both social justice and religion in Latin America"(48) Unfortunately little or no attention is paid to how needs are defined, how those definitions change, or how competing visions of need are brought to mass clientele which is what brought social justice issues to center stage in the first place. The propositions advanced are extremely general: viz. that church state conflict occurs when the opportunity cost of cooperation for any one party exceed the present or future benefits of cooperation. (63). Propositions of this kind are not very helpful: they give little guidance as to who initiates conflict, what the stakes turn out to be, who gains and loses, and with what consequences. 

    Gill attempts to fill in the blanks with an eclectic mix of standard narrative histories, anecdotes, statements of position from documents issued by episcopal conferences, and ecological inference from religious statistics. The discussion of Protestant growth, and the case studies of on Chile and Argentina rely for the most part on standard histories, and are generally well done if based on a narrow range of sources. The results are not very powerful, although "the data do provoke the suspicion that a systematic relationship is at work" (109). Throughout, the author underscores the importance of competition, which "furnished the wake-up call the Church needed to realize that poverty and repression were serious problems that demanded more than temporary acts of charity. More than just a wake up call, however, Protestant advances also provided the motivation to do something about these problems." (120) This statement ignores much of the history of change in the theory and practice of religion over the religious discourse over the last half century.     The central empirical issue in this book is whether or not the Church (that is, the Catholic episcopal hierarchy as manifested in its bishops' conferences) did not did not oppose authoritarian governments and did or did not support progressive, popular social movements. Gill asserts that all previous accounts of these issues are inadequate: inductive, excessively reliant on case studies, and more focused on the variables such as poverty, repression and internal church reform than on the decisional processes of church leaders, which the author holds to be the critical dependent variable. Calls for more systematic methodology notwithstanding, as noted the author relies in practice on a loose collection of sources including standard narrative histories (both for general issues and specific countries), statistics on religious competition, which boil down to growth numbers for different churches, general social and economic statistics, which are used to test rival hypotheses about correlates of church growth, and interviews. 

    The final chapter on "The Institutional Limits of Catholic Progressivism" is curious. The author correctly notes general trends in the Catholic church (dating from the onset of the Papacy of John Paul II) to constrain and where possible to suppress progressive views and initiatives on the part of church leaders and active members. This is unobjectionable, but Gill does not let the matter rest here. He admonishes liberationist Catholics on the incorrectness of their views: "Actually", he writes, "considering that the church's universal mission is to evangelize all people (i.e. maximize parishioners), being all things to all people is a reasonable strategy, not to mention one of St. Paul's recommendations. Exclusively favoring one social sector over another will undoubtedly alienate the unfavored group and in the presence of religious pluralism may lead to their conversion away from Catholicism" (174). Such editorializing is out of place, and misreads what is at issue not only in general Church strategies, but also in the ongoing debate between liberationist and other positions. Evangelizing all peoples is not the same as "maximizing parishioners" and anyway, the notion that opting for the poor benefits one group exclusively over another is an tired accusation that utterly fails to stand up to scrutiny. The claim to be all things to all people at all times is what requires careful social and political scrutiny. The liberationist position itself arose out of efforts to put that claim to systematic test in theory and in practice. 

    Gill's argument relies on narrowly drawn assumptions about individual psychology, and puts great stock in the free rider problem as a key to the difficulties of sustaining religious (or indeed any) organization. Such positions ignore the dynamics of collective action, and obscure the extent to which involvement in the group itself is part of the reward for action. They also fail to acknowledge the power of ideas and moral suasion in bringing and holding groups together. Difficulties of this kind are well known in work in the rational choice vein. More surprising to this reader is the weakness of the data presented. Often the information is simply not there, and the author speculates. Thus, "Although it is impossible to measure, it is likely that in some cases the Church's pastoral outreach to the poor and concomitant opposition to the military slowed the number of defections to Protestantism. As the poor became more involved in church activity through CEBS and other organizations, or by directly benefiting from humanitarian assistance, they were likely to gain a new respect for the church and deepen their ties to Catholicism. (184) This assertion is simply not supported by readily available evidence of various kinds drawn from studies in Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela and Chile not to mention comparative works. 

    Rational choice concepts have inspired fruitful research on religion. Recent work on supply side interpretations of US. and European religious history and on the dynamics of church growth by authors like Finke or Iannacone demonstrate the potential power of this approach. Rendering Unto Caesar makes important claims about the utility of bringing this body of thought to bear on the effort to explain change in Latin America, but in the last analysis, more is promised than is delivered. 

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Phillip Berryman (author of many books on religion and years of field experience in Latin America)

    1. In my observation, initiatives in the Catholic church came primarily from priests and sisters, not from bishops. A "progressive" bishop was one who allowed and encouraged particular types of work, but could not command it; a "conservative" bishops could put some restraints on what was done publicly but again limits were real. The exception is in a relatively small rural diocese where a bishop over time might build a team along his own lines (Pedro Casaldaliga in Araguaia and Samuel Ruiz in Chiapas).

    Although you could categorize priests as "progressive" and "conservative" it was perhaps even more relevant to see them as doing maintenance (responding to requests for mass, rituals, classes for sacraments etc) and doing outreach. The first category would be the overwhelming majority of priests up to mid-century; they had plenty to do in response to the existing demand for their services. Gradually some became aware of the need for outreach, prompted by the sense that many people were not "good Catholics" by the usual norms of mass attendance, etc. and also by the "dangers" to the flock from communism, Protestantism, etc. as Gill points out. Things gathered momentum in the late 1950s when the Vatican urged the North Atlantic churches to send a tenth of their priests and sisters to Latin America .

    In terms of this discussion, it is the church people on the front lines, priests (and increasingly sisters) who felt the problem--it is not accidental that Hurtado was a priest, not a bishop. Also I think one would find that the various forms of Catholic Action (whether conservative Italian or liberal Belgian) were championed by priests first, and had to win acceptance from the bishops. Most ordinary Catholics whose religion centered around periodic saints feasts (the majority of the poor) but not regular church attendance did not feel the problem (the were the problem). Bishops, in my view, did not generally provide leadership in meeting challenges. Their time and attention was taken up almost entirely with administration and their own sacramental rounds.

    2. Vatican II brought the unexpected in two ways. First, in four years (1962-65) ideas that had been held and advocated by a small minority of theologians and pastoralists went from being suspect and suppressed to being adopted by the world episcopacy. And then, in the post-council which people had assumed was going to be largely a matter of implemented the Council decisions, suddenly everything was up for grabs. Clergy who had been taught to preach on the necessity of the church for salvation, suddenly themselves doubting the existence of the devil, hell, mortal sin--and, logically, their own raison-d-etre. It was all made more vertiginous with the world wide "Sixties" including (talk of) revolution (political, cultural, sexual).

    My point is that priests and sisters were the ones most jolted the most by the council and its aftermath. If everyone was saved, what need for the church? And a fortiori for priests. Many decided to leave the priesthood and/or religious life. Those who stayed had to work out at least a provisional answer to that and also a new model of life and work as sister or priest. In Latin America this often took the form of abandoning a more traditional style of work (teaching middle and upper class children in Catholic schools) and going to live and work directly with the poor. The jolt of Vatican II-Medellin affected a particular generation--those coming of age in the 1960s (they may have had their coming-of-age while in their thirties). Let me suggest, in other words, that the Catholic renewal (Vatican II & Medellin, perhaps Puebla) was a once-only event, as sometimes happens in history, e.g., the Mexican revolution. Subsequently you can try to "explain" why the event that no one foresaw was "inevitable" but it is still hindsight into a peculiar event.

    With reference to the present discussion: agreed with Gill that there were gradual steps of Catholic renewal for a couple decades prior to the council; agreed with Brett that the significance of the renewal is hard to overstate, although I would add that its impact was greatest on those who were most "bought into" the Tridentine church: clergy who had internalized its theology, middle class lay people who had gone to Catholic schools and had internalized mortal sin, the need to confess etc. By contrast, most poor people had never internalized that type of Catholicism, and hence could tranquilly live in common law marriage, and have only very intermittent contact with their parish (baptisms). In Panama I recall people not at all concerned about, say, the vernacular mass or the papal refusal to reconsider contraception; they were, however, incensed when the Vatican in its modernization sought to eliminate some saints who legendary rather than historical, from the official roster. (One man told me it was as though they had taken St. Christopher before a firing squad.)

    3. Appeal and limitation of base communities.

      As just noted priests (and increasingly sisters) found themselves bereft of former certitudes and trying to figure out what they were supposed to do. Priests of course could continue the maintenance model, i.e., spend their time supplying ritual on schedule and on request. But how do outreach? A new model almost miraculously drops out of the sky: form base communities. It seems to be the answer to a pastor's prayer: it is a way to bring in people who are not currently practicing Catholics; it is respectful and uses a dialogue pedagogy; it is built around the bible; its point is to connect faith and life; it develops lay leadership and hence has a multiplier effect; it can appeal to biblical authority (house churches); it makes sociological sense to work with face to face communities rather than the masses of a large parish. In the post-1968 years pastoralists Edgard Beltran (Colombia) and Jose Marins and his team (Brazil) gave hundreds of workshops on them all over Latin America.

    Note that I have not described them in political terms, and in fact for the first several years they were not seen that way. The emerging liberation theology and base communities traveled along separate tracks (I don't think they are mentioned in the first edition of Gutierrez' book (Spanish edition 1971). They were a pastoral initiative, essentially from priests and sisters working in parishes, and they were an attempt to meet the problem of the "priest shortage" and at some level (although not often mentioned) to respond to some emphases of Protestants (then typically assumed to be from the historical churches).

    Their political implications were seen under the dictatorships of the 1970s: base-communities were a way of coming together and holding out hope when all forms of gathering were suspect. They could also be a source of leaders for community action projects, or a place where activists in different areas could come together as believers. This was so, even though, Hewitt and Burdick have shown, pastoral agents may view base communities more politically than most lay participants.

    In the early years, some thought and assumed parishes of the future would be networks of base communities; priests would be coordinators of these networks; laymen (gender intended) would eventually be ordained for eucharist although they would continue in their secular jobs. The priest shortage would be solved; Latin America would have developed its own church model (which might in fact be repeated elsewhere); the base community would be the cell of authentic development.

    So what happened? Why have base communities remained a minority phenomenon, and in some places seem to have disappeared entirely? Although Vatican opposition is often mentioned, I would emphasize the following:

1. Catholic base communities have almost always been very dependent on pastoral agents, priests and sisters. Even though the theologians and those pastoral agents emphasize the role of the lay people, those lay leaders do not have true independence. They cannot start communities as can Protestant lay people. If the priest or sister is transferred and no one with the same vision takes their place, the community is likely to wither unless a pastoral agent from somewhere else can cross parish lines and serve as a kind of chaplain to them.
2. Typically base communities have tended to flourish during the early stages of a barrio, for example, when people are struggling for electric power, water, clinics, bus lines, etc. Once those things are achieved there tends to be a withdrawal from community to household. It may well be a rational choice to expend your energy and resources for your family once community organizing has gotten what it can reasonably expect to get. Activists and pastoral agents who hoped that those efforts were steps toward building a new kind of society are disappointed to see that it is harder and harder to get people out to meetings. 

4. Social theory and churches and religion in Latin America

    A generation of Latin Americanist academics to some extent followed suit. Moreover, they may have chosen to go into Latin American studies out of a sense of participating in this vast historic movement, making their contribution as scholars, teachers, and often activists. The repression of the military regimes of the 1970s (and the 1980s in Central America) reinforced the sense of the need for engaged scholarship, and especially in writing on the church.

    The trend among Latin America social scientists for some years has been away from the generalist model. To some extent it reflect a shift from European to American models of social science. It must also reflect a sense that individual countries and their relationships can no longer be summed up under the heading of a realidad nacional--if they ever could. Likewise, I get a sense that Gill is seeking to move a body of literature which from his viewpoint is perhaps only descriptive and perhaps "pre-scientific," into a genuinely scientific mode, e.g., with testable hypotheses submitted to procedures with explicit assumptions, and so forth. At some points he seems to imply the superiority of such an approach; at other times he admits that it is only one approach whose fruitfulness will be known only through results.

    Is that also why his book gets our juices going? Correctly or incorrectly, we get a sense that he sees most of a body of literature to which some of us have contributed as descriptive, lacking in rigor, and that his book represents a serious attempt to move it to a new phase in which much of what we have done will be superseded? If he's right, have we been wrong?

    5. As systematic human knowledge, the social sciences can perhaps be seen as positioned between the physical sciences, and the hermeneutic scholarship (e.g., art criticism). Some aspects of human individual and collective behavior can be isolated and quantified, while some cannot. "Hard" social sciences like economics seem to be more scientific than, say, anthropology, and within particular fields advocates of "hard" and "soft" approaches find themselves at odds. The terms hard and soft themselves are evaluative.

    Yet behind the disdain that "hard" advocates may show for practitioners of "soft" approaches may be a reductionism that is by no means uncommon, e.g., it seems to me that as bright and engaging as Edward O. Wilson undoubtedly is, in Consilience, he seeks to unify human knowledge by ultimately wanting it to come down to one type, the scientific model. Something similar is often found in scientists addressing wider audiences, and in science writers. An opposite blind alley, I also believe, is that of many academic post-structuralists who spin off ideas that may be provocative but are untestable or whose relativism puts current physics and creation stories from around the world on the same footing: they're all myths trying to make sense of the world. They got their due come-uppance in the Skokal controversy of a year or so ago

    What is called for is a differentiated grasp of human knowledge and understanding that takes into account the full range of human endeavors: ordinary common sense, and the kinds of knowing practiced in art, philosophy, physics and other sciences, mathematics, history, and the social sciences. Human history, and intellectual history, is partly the story of a growing differentiation of knowledge (e.g. astronomy out of a mishmash of astrology and observation). In our century, social sciences (or human sciences) have become more differentiated and have become more methodologically self-conscious and continue to do so. (I have found the work of the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian, Bernard Lonergan most helpful, especially Insight: A Study of Human Understanding [1957]). 

    6. My own sense is that social sciences are heavily--perhaps primarily--interpretive or hermeneutical disciplines and their practitioners need not be apologetic on that account. Hermeneutical methods are most appropriate to the complexity of the object, the behavior of human beings individually and collectively. Social scientists should not feel or be made to feel that they are prescientific because their methods do not approximate those of physics or chemistry. Their object, human action in society, requires a suitable approach. 

    To take an example mentioned earlier, can the Mexican revolution be "explained"? Has the application of the techniques of the cliometricians, introduced a couple decades ago, made history more "scientific"? Even if some interesting correlations have been found--as I suspect they have--and even if the "great man" theory of history has been exposed, giving an account of something like the Mexican revolution is still primarily a matter of seeking the fullest possible interpretation--not that of isolating certain explanatory factors.

    Rational choice theory may well have fruitful applications. It is implicit, I think, in work by Caroline Moser, who describes who women in Guayaquil barrios have to budget their time and energy between maintaining a home, earning money, and participating in community organizations and activities, e.g., they will take part in a community organization as long as it makes sense in terms of things needed e.g., a local school, but when there is no longer anything that can reasonably be expected, they may choose to spend more time attending to their families, and are unlikely to respond to moral appeals to support the community. Rational choice theory might be applicable in the sense that choosing among these fields--only one of which brings in revenue--entails a calculus of best use of one's time and energy for employing particular means as a way of pursuing personal and household ends. I can imagine an elegant research project. And yet Moser may have gotten the gist of it without invoking rational choice theory.

    7. The foregoing no doubt strongly suggests where I am heading with regard to Gill. Even so, when I began reading the book I was quite aware that what he was proposing was indeed a fresh approach--and at least an implicit reproach to work on religion and politics in Latin America. I was also open considering the need for greater rigor and explanatory power. 

    I found the central effort of Rendering Unto Caesar more suggestive from a distance, i.e., when giving an account of the Catholic church's behavior when it enjoyed a quasi-monopoly and hence its lack of motivation to change. The central test, the comparison between the reactions of the hierarchies of Chile and Argentina I find suggestive, i.e., that the Chilean Catholic episcopacy had been forced to face its loss of the working class even in the 1940s and had a prior history of initiatives so that in 1973 it was more inclined to face up to the dictatorship than was the Argentine episcopacy from 1976 onward when facing an even more ruthless dictatorship. Even so I have some reservations.

    Gill casts his argument in terms of the "option for the poor." (That phrase, in my recollection, gained currency only in the discussion leading up to Puebla, i.e., in the late 1970s, and was qualified by the adjective, "preferential," meaning non-exclusive. Of course the move by priests and sisters to barrios and villages was taking place by the late 1960s.) In any case, bishops are a lot more responsive to the sensitivities of middle class people and their priests than to the poor. . It is well to be reminded that the worst features of the repression in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s was the abduction and murder of activists, themselves disproportionately of a kind of middle class. Perhaps referring to the poor is a form of shorthand, but it may be misleading.

    Often it was a personal experience that pushed bishops over the edge. For Cardinal Arns, for example, it was his experience of going looking for people who had been arrested around 1969, e.g. he encountered a nun who had been arrested and tortured. I suspect, in other words, that there is a lot of contingency in the way these things happen and that may be lost in seeking to isolate causal factors.

    Is it possible to line up episcopacies neatly into those that resisted and those that did not (pp. 111-119)? The Guatemalan episcopate is categorized with bishops who did not resist. On the basis of my experience in Guatemala, I would say that although the bishops did not make many statements of condemnation, those they made were understood as clear condemnation, e.g., Unidos in La Experanza 1976, was ostensibly a post-earthquake pastoral letter and the condemnation of violence was only a couple sentences, but those sentences were eloquent in Guatemala. 

    Moreover, how do you weigh the episcopate as a body vs. the archbishop of the capital city? In Guatemala, most of the bishops would have been willing to make more vigorous statements, but they were thwarted by Cardinal Casariego who refused to sign strong statements, and even when they were made he could neutralize them by just giving a press conference. After one statement--Unidos en la Esperanza, I believe--he joked that he not become a priest he might have gone into the military. It was featured prominently in the right-wing press thereby undercutting the episcopal conference as a whole, but even so the clase política understood that the bishops had stood up to the military when no one else could do so publicly. In El Salvador, by contrast, the episcopal conference at least tacitly supported the military, (pace Gill) but Romero and Rivera, and then Rivera and Rosa Chavez, were able to outweigh the episcopal conference in public perception. What is most interesting in El Salvador is the undeniable split in the episcopacy, quite at variance with the general practice of maintaining a united public position. In Chile wasn't the Vicariate of Solidarity a structure of the archdiocese of Santiago? There the bishops came to a position of opposition, but more eloquent than statements was what was done by church agencies, primarily in Santiago, but with a national impact. 

    Moreover, how do you weigh the effect of one statement in Guatemala against a murderous military as opposed to perhaps several in Panama against an authoritarian regime that did not practice systematic murder? Can you really isolate a stance of opposition or acquiescence in disparate situations? The closer you look, the less explanatory rational choice based on Protestant competition seems to be even of this limited phenomenon of the behavior of Catholic bishops vis-à-vis authoritarian governments.

    Earlier I noted that bishops are extremely limited in their effect at the parish level. On the national level they could have some effect in legitimizing or delegitimizing. How influential that was is much harder to say. Those of us who write on church and state can easily fall into the post hoc propter hoc fallacy, i.e., General X said or did this, Bishops Y did or said that, and the military high command responded with Z. I recall that when I was working on my account of church and state in the Sandinista period I read Arturo Cruz Jr.'s book, Memoirs of a Counterrevolutionary (1988), I believe, and was struck by the fact that the churches which others had seen as central actors (Obando, the Cardenal brothers, , Bishop Vega, Pat Robertson, etc.) were not even mentioned. There could be other reasons, of course, but what I came away with was a sense that what seemed central to one participant was marginal or off the screen to another. In writing, Stubborn Hope I was aware of that danger, but that does not mean I always successfully avoided it. Any of us seeking to give an account have to be aware that we perceive only a portion of the proverbial elephant.

To summarize:

	I appreciate Anthony Gill's effort to apply rational choice theory to the behavior of church representatives in church state conflicts in Latin America.
	I find the approach most useful for accounting for the longstanding Catholic church behavior under monopoly conditions (e.g., it is easier to seek continued state support than to compete with incoming religious groups).
	Gill seems to exaggerate the impact of what bishops do, i.e., in my observation they are administrators, and initiative comes from the level of priests (and sisters) who have to face directly the church's weakness. Of course bishops were once in pastoral situations, but they become bishops not on the basis of their pastoral effectiveness, but by staying out of trouble, cultivating contacts, and perhaps displaying some administrative ability.
	Vatican II-Medellin may be best viewed as a once-only event, most strongly affecting those who were forced to deal with the upheaval it unleashed, a generation that is now approaching retirement age.
	Rational choice theory is not a superior form of "explanation," but a tool within social sciences; those disciplines may be expected to be remain largely interpretive, not because their practitioners are "soft" but because their subject matter is complex human behavior.
	The very effort to isolate the decisive factor, in this instance the perceived presence of competition from Protestants, as suggestive as it might be, entails a simplification so extreme as to rule out elements that were crucial in the actual behavior of the episcopacies. In the pursuit of a single crucial explanatory variable, understanding of the phenomenon to be explained may be sacrificed.

Comments by Professor Kenneth Serbin (Assistant Professor of History and Director, Transborder Institute, University of San Diego):

  The following review is reprinted with permission of the Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs.

      Anthony Gill has written one of the first studies that effectively links the question of Protestant growth with the Roman Catholic Church's opposition to Latin America's recent authoritarian regimes. His thesis is simple:  the Church attacked authoritarianism mainly in those countries where it felt threatened by religious competition. 

      By adopting a more progressive stance and distancing itself from the state, the Church increased its
   appeal among the poor, where Protestants were making their greatest gains. Protestantism, he concludes, provided  Catholicism with a "wake-up call" for realizing the seriousness of poverty and repression (p.120).
  Indeed, poverty, repression, and also internal church reform--the factors most often cited in the literature--are
  less important than religious competition for explaining the appearance of Catholic progressivism in Latin
  America. This thesis will cause a stir in the academy, especially because Gill unabashedly applies rational
  choice theory to the study of religion. Yet he skillfully employs this theory and is careful not to overstate his
  case.

      The strength of the book lies in Gill's thorough statistical analysis of twelve countries. This analysis makes
  clear that the presence of strong religious competition coincided more than other factors with the decision by
  each nation's group of bishops to support or oppose authoritarian rule. Where little or no competition existed,
  the Catholic bishops could do as they pleased, going against the interests of their followers and even ignoring
  them by shunning pastoral activity and engaging exclusively in high-level politics (pp. 53, 67, 156-70). Gill
  fleshes out the statistical data with chapter-length case studies of two extreme reactions to authoritarianism.
  In Chile, Protestant growth and political influence were on the rise long before General Augusto Pinochet took
  power in 1973. Protestant strength eventually led the Catholic hierarchy to oppose the dictatorship. In
  Argentina, where the bishops notoriously collaborated with the military repression, Protestant missionary
  efforts were practically nil throughout the twentieth century. Significantly, Gill deepens our understanding of the
  Argentine case and other conservative churches generally ignored in the wave of literature about post-World
  War II Catholic reform.

      The value of this book goes far beyond its main argument. Gill provides us with important data on the
  little-studied Catholic reaction to Protestantism before the authoritarian era. This historical approach to
  political science is refreshing. Gill's good comparative eye extends beyond Latin America. Another important
  contribution is the book's focus on church-state cooperation, which is often ignored in a field where scholars
  usually search for conflict.

      Gill may define too narrowly the concept of Church by referring only to the actions of the bishops. He
  includes very little on the role of the clergy and on popular reaction to church-state issues. Gill makes the
  highly significant observation that the famed Comunidades Eclesiales de Base (CEBs, or Grassroots
  Christian Communities) became most numerous precisely where the Protestant challenge was greatest
  (p.102), but he has little discussion of these groups. Gill also takes the military (among other groups) as a
  monolithic block without considering the possibility of fissures within authoritarian regimes over church-state
  issues. He assumes that no "conciliatory gestures" came from the military (p. 183), and he does not comment
  upon the fact that the Catholic Church still has remained largely a semi-official religion in much of Latin
  America. Gill examines public statements but tells little about what occurred behind the scenes in church-state
  relations.

      The most egregious example of viewing groups as homogeneous blocks is Gill's portrayal of the poor. In
  explaining the rise of progressivism, he assumes--as the progressives themselves did--that the poor would
  automatically be attracted to this new form of Catholicism. Yet the poor in Latin America often vote for
  conservative, authoritarian politicians. This is why much of the new Protestant movement avoids and even
  criticizes progressive political ideas. Therefore, instead of explaining why the Catholic Church opposed
  authoritarianism, a more interesting focus might be on why the new wave of Protestant churches did not do
  likewise. After all, Gill points out that the Protestants did develop an "option for the poor" (p. 88). Moreover,
  diversity among the poor is revealed by their varying preferences for a cornucopia of Protestant churches.

      One of the book's most perceptive conclusions deals with the conservative retrenchment that occurred in
  the Latin American Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II in the 1980s and early 1990s. Gill avers that this
  movement was not only about ideology, but also papal concern over religious competition (p. 16). It is wrong
  to interpret the new Catholic conservatism as unconcerned with social issues, because it is partly the
  Church's option for the poor that has strengthened its competitive base (pp. 172-73). Gill thus helps us
  understand the Church's continued focus on social justice in the late 1990s even after two decades of strict
  control by John Paul II. Analysts should not divide the Church into conservative and progressive camps, but
  instead should view its actions primarily as an attempt to address the new religious pluralism sweeping
  across much of Latin America (p. 175).

      Gill is also quite perceptive in questioning the unchallenged assertion of practically all of the literature that
  the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and the famous meeting at Medelln (1968) were the primary factors in
  raising the consciousness of Latin America's bishops about poverty (p. 46). As Gill states, these meetings
  were catalysts--not determining factors. A deeper analysis of their impact on the clergy has yet to be
  undertaken.

      Gill is to be most commended for considering economic factors in church-state relations. He presents this
  perspective as a natural component of his rational choice approach, although one does not have to accept
  this approach in order to employ an economic analysis of churches. (See p. 227 for Gill's comments on this
  reviewer’s own work on the economics of the Catholic Church). One of the book's most elegant and powerful
  phrases appears on page 11: "No matter how divinely inspired the clergy may be, a church exists in a world
  of scarcity and can thrive only to the extent that its leaders use resources efficiently." Along these lines, Gill
  points out the importance of foreign resources for the political autonomy of the Latin American Church (pp.
  70-71).

      However, despite the emphasis on economics, the book contains disappointingly little hard data on Church
  finances, and no estimates of the actual economic impact of state subsidization and other financial resources
  on the Church's life. Gill focuses too much on rational choice theory and not enough on the actual economic
  reality of religious denominations. This emphasis at times lead to an exaggeration in which rational choice
  seems to be the only factor governing church-state relations (for example, p. 72), though to his great credit Gill
  includes a fine appendix in which he discusses both the applications and limits of his chosen theory.

      The major weakness of the book is frequent lack of convincing evidence to support the main argument. The
  cross-country comparison is solid, but Gill admits in other sections that his evidence his merely anecdotal
  (pp. 48, 104). The same goes for his interview data. Use of evidence also appears to be selective. This
  problem is particularly evident in Gill's attempts to illustrate that the Catholic bishops had a deep concern
  about Protestant growth and actively combated it long before the contemporary surge in religious
  competition. It is true that the Latin American Church has made official statements against Protestantism
  throughout much of this century; but little proof appears in this book or elsewhere that most of the Church was
  really concerned about Protestant competition to the point that it took an active and profound interest in
  learning about the phenomenon and formulating effective ways to counter it. Gill tries to assert the opposite. In
  doing so he presents much circumstantial and anecdotal evidence, but he fails to establish causal links. He
  states, for instance, that "many of the techniques employed by the Brazilian Church mirrored the efforts being
  made by the Protestants" (p. 111), but he demonstrates no actual proof. (Gill himself recognizes that
  correlation is not causation; p. 224.) Gill falls into the same trap as other scholars of Latin American
  Protestantism by asserting that Protestants innovated in pastoral practice, only to be "mimicked" later by
  Catholics (p. 134). 

      This kind of assertion reveals a gross misreading of the history of the Catholic Church, in particular the
  complex internal dynamics that led to pastoral innovation. For instance, in his discussion of one influential
  Chilean priest's perception of Protestant innovation's potential example for Catholic Action and CEBs, but he
  fails to mention the profound impact of Belgian Father Joseph Cardijn (p. 134). Other factors, such as the
  crisis of the clergy and the impact of the Cold War, receive little consideration. As Gill readily maintains,
  concrete historical events explain the exact reason for church-state hostility (p. 70). Thus the use of poverty,
  repression, reform, and religious competition as the main variables results in a limited analysis.

      Contrary to Gill's assertions, many Catholic clergy and bishops to this day lack much knowledge about their
  Protestant competitors. This is especially true among progressive Catholics. Although in Gill's view they
  represent the vanguard against the new religious competition, these Catholics have been extremely reluctant
  to accept Protestant growth as a legitimate social phenomenon and have not used their considerable
  intellectual power (that is, the liberation theologians) to learn more about it. Similarly, if progressivism is
  primarily a response to religious competition, Gill needs to explain why conservatives often attacked rather
  than praised progressives' attempts to attract the poor to the Church! 

      Ultimately, Gill's use of evidence is not the test of fire necessary for supporting the powerful kind of theory
  that he purports rational choice to be, nor is it sufficient for demonstrating the Catholic Church's copycat role.
  By the same token, Gill does not ask to what degree Protestant innovation might be a reflection of what the
  Catholic Church has done in both the distant and more recent past. This is a common problem in much of the
  literature that emphasizes the new over continuity in Latin American religion.

      Part of the evidentiary problem lies in the great breadth of the work, which at times subtracts from its
  historical depth. Occasionally it leads to inaccuracies and oversights that further undermine the main
  argument. For example, contrary to Gill's assertion (p. 31), at least some Latin American leaders in the
  nineteenth century did indeed understand that the Catholic Church had a tenuous hold on the people because
  of the powerful attraction of popular religion. The cause of this situation was the region's chronic shortage of
  priests, which Gill analyzes. However, he incorrectly states that there was a lack of seminary construction to
  remedy the problem (p. 99). In the discussion of Catholic human resources (pp. 88, 179-80), furthermore, Gill
  completely overlooks the vast contingent of religious women who provided the Church with cheap but highly
  educated labor in the past and more recently with cadres for the CEBs and other organizations of the
  progressive movement. But then practically every book on the Latin American Church has ignored the
  nuns–and only rarely has gender entered as a category of analysis.

      On balance, this book is an extremely important contribution. Despite its flaws, it forces us to think about
  the Latin American Catholic Church, authoritarianism, and the rise of Protestantism in different ways, and it
  suggests many paths for future inquiry. It is, in short, a "wake-up call" to the community of scholars that studies
  Latin American religion. 

  (Viewers may visit The Journal of Interamerican Studies at: www.rienner.com/jis.htm )

Comments by Stathis N. Kalyvas (New York University): 

    The following review is reprinted with permission of the American Political Science Review.

        The allocation of social science research to the issues vying for attention is oddly uneven. Some matters
    tend to attract great attention, while others remain for a long time in disproportionate obscurity. The
    allocation process appears not always to take into account the importance of the issue at hand. For
    example, research in European politics has long privileged the study of left-wing parties despite the fact
    that right-wing parties have played at least as defining a role in politics. One of the most blatantly
    underrepresented topics in social science research is religion, particularly church-state relations. Despite
    its obvious political and social relevance, this issue has for a long time remained mostly in the hands of
    antiquarians and constitutional legal scholars rather than social scientists. 

        There are indications that this is slowly changing. Consider the study of secularization, which has long
    been the prominent research program in the sociology of religion. As in modernization theory, the main
    prediction of secularization theory is that economic and social development will cause religion to fade.
    Since religious practice has failed to vary as predicted, the addition of new sets of conditions to salvage
    the core of the theory gradually has become dominant. The study of religious practice has been revitalized,
    however, by the recent infusion of an incentive-based, "microeconomic" approach. Thinking of religion as a
    "product" produced by "religious firms" is bound to be controversial, bu the empirical returns so far have
    been extremely encouraging.

        Anthony Gill successfully adapts and expands insights from this recent wave of research. The empirical
    puzzle Gill identifies is politically relevant and theoretically compelling: What explains the political position of
    Catholic churches in Latin America vis-a-vis authoritarian regimes? Why do some churches ally with these
    regimes while others oppose them? Despite its relevance, this question has not been addressed before, at
    least never in a systematic and comparative fashion.

        By addressing this issue, Gill embarks on the first sustained effort to define the microfoundations of
    state-church relations and test them systematically. He currently points out rationality, but leaders of
    religious institutions are subject to concerns and constraints similar to those of their secular counterparts.
    Bishops are also bureaucrats running large organizations. Gill begins by specifying a model of state-church
    relations based on simple and highly realistic assumptions. On the one hand, given that states minimize the
    cost of ruling, ideology is the least expensive method of obtaining popular compliance, and churches
    specialize in the production of ideological norms and values, it then follows that states will seek to