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Articles/Essays – Volume 31, No. 1
The Glory of God? Education and Orthodoxy in Mormonism
I begin with a paradox. Sociologists of religion have found that religious orthodoxy tends to decline with educational attainment. However, among Mormons religiosity actually tends to increase with education.
This is paradoxical because Mormonism apparently enjoys a different relationship with education than other American religions. Within that positive relationship, however, is a second paradox. Religiosity for Mormons tends to decline the more one studies the arts, humanities, and social sciences, while exposure to other fields seems to have no effect on, or even to strengthen, religiosity. Thus Mormons educated in the arts, humanities, and social sciences tend to follow the national trend of de creased religiosity, while those trained in all other fields buck it.[1]
(I should note another group of Mormons among whom religiosity tends to decline as education increases: women.[2] For the purposes of this essay, however, let us focus on the question of Mormonism’s positive relationship with education except for the social sciences and humanities.)
For me, this paradox is much more than of passing academic interest. It defines much of my life and that of my friends. I not only live and experience it externally, but it lives within me, nesting among the contours of my soul. Not only am I an anthropologist, but I am also the son of a Mormon sociologist and a Mormon musician, two of the problematic fields.
How do we account for this paradox? What is different in the way the LDS church relates to education and to those particular fields that might account for this quandary?
In this essay I do not propose to produce the results of a study to explain the paradox; rather, I propose to explore the issue, using data from my own experience to try to find an answer and maybe even a little com prehension.
Armand Mauss, in his book The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation, presents the data for this question without fo cussing on or answering it. He discusses the transformation of Mormon ism over the last sixty years as it has gradually accommodated itself to American society and as its members have become more like their fellow citizens on almost every measure. According to Mauss, this social success presents a difficulty for movements such as Mormonism. He writes,
Movements such as Mormonism which survive and prosper are those which succeed in maintaining indefinitely an optimum tension between two oppos ing strains: the strain towards greater assimilation and respectability, on the one hand, and that toward greater separateness, peculiarity and militancy on the other … If in its quest for acceptance and respectability a movement al lows itself to be pulled too far toward assimilation, it will lose its unique identity altogether. If, on the other hand, in its quest for uniqueness of iden tity and mission, it allows itself to move too far toward an extreme rejection of the host society, it will lose its very life. Its viability and its separate life de pend upon a successful and perpetual oscillation within a narrow range along a continuum between two alternative modes of oblivion.[3]
Mauss explores measure after measure which shows how Mormon peculiarity has almost disappeared. Yet he argues that the church still maintains a sense of tension with the surrounding American society. Thus he dedicates significant attention to the brethren’s efforts to re trench, to create peculiarity, when by most ordinary social measurements such uniqueness has pretty much ceased to exist.
While Mauss’s argument is intriguing in its fullness, for now let us focus on one point of potential oblivion, education, and explore the cre ation of assimilation and peculiarity on this issue.
Mauss writes that Mormonism’s traditional emphasis on education “produced a relatively high educational level in Utah; and that there is some evidence that Mormon veterans took advantage of the GIBill at a rate somewhat higher than that of their non-Mormon contemporaries.”[4] This has led to a trend whereby Mormons today are even more urban, educated, and high in occupational status than in the 1960s, perhaps even outstripping their non-Mormon neighbors. Yet Mauss can also claim that “educational level has no impact on religious belief among Mormons.”[5]
Mauss does note that this is not quite as true for people who live outside the core area of Mormonism in large cities and that majors in the arts, humanities, and social sciences show a noticeable decline in religiosity. His sample is small and from a limited period, but it does establish differential rates of orthodoxy for different college majors.
In contrast, sociologist Robert Wuthnow notes that rates of religious participation “declined more rapidly in the 1960’s among the better educated than in the rest of the population.” He thus observes the positive relationship between degree of educational attainment and decline in religiosity, but also stresses that this has shifted over time. The generation of the 1950s showed less of a relationship while that of the 1980s lost its religious commitment at a much higher rate as it attained educational success.
Wuthnow writes:
Between 1958 and 1982, the most serious declines in regular church attendance came about among younger people with at least some college education. Specifically there was a 19 percentage point difference between the two periods among college educated persons between the ages of 25 and 34. And there was a 21 point difference among college educated persons between the ages of 35 and 44. … In other words, being a younger, college educated per son in the late 1980’s was associated with relatively modest levels of religious participation, whereas the same person in the 1950’s was likely to be much more active in religious involvement. Not only were there considerably more people with college educations by the 1980’s, but these people were now less conventionally religious than their counterparts had been a generation ear lier. Again, education seems to have become associated with a kind of “gap” in religious commitment that had not been there prior to the 1960’s.[6]
Thus, according to Wuthnow, for the immediate post-war generation, although education was associated with a decrease in religious commitment, the correlation became much stronger in the 1960s and continued into the late 1980s. Not only did education impact religion, it “emerg[ed] as a fundamental basis of attitudinal difference” in American society, with the more highly educated more likely to take a liberal position on a range of social issues. It “became not only a matter of individual difference but a major means of stratifying society into different subcultures.”[7] College-educated people show more diversity in their sexual practices, are more accepting of civil rights, more supportive of women’s issues, abortion rights, gay rights, etc.—in short, of many of those topics which have since the 1960s emerged as litmus tests of liberal /conservative status.
Wuthnow argues that even those college-educated people who maintain a connection to organized religion are different from their fellow religionists. They pushed their religious organizations to take a more socially activist role first in civil rights, then against the Vietnam war, and later in support of women’s issues, etc. They urged a greater spirit of ecumenical tolerance and cooperation. They were less likely to hold strictly orthodox beliefs, even while continuing their religious practice. Thus
among college graduates, only one person in three thinks the Bible is absolutely true (contains no errors); among persons who have only attended high school the figure is closer to two thirds. Of all college graduates, only a quarter say they have been “born again.” The figure is approximately half among persons with high school educations. Half of the less educated sector says reading the Bible is very important to them, compared with only a quarter of college students.
In more subtle ways, educational differences add up to quite divergent styles of religious expression. For example, college graduates are about three times more likely than persons without college education to put the Second Commandment (loving your neighbor) ahead of the First Commandment (loving God). The better educated are also about three times as likely to think it possible to be a true Christian without believing in the divinity of Christ. Those with low levels of education, in contrast, are about twice as likely as college graduates to believe that being baptized is necessary in order to know God. The two groups also view Jesus and God in quite different ways. For instance college graduates are about twice as likely as those without college educations to be most impressed by Jesus’ compassion and forgiveness. The less educated, in comparison, are more likely to be impressed by Jesus’ healings, miracles, and goodness. Those with higher levels of education are considerably more likely to attribute androgenous characteristics to God; those with lower levels of education, to emphasize the masculinity of God.[8]
Wuthnow continues to argue that, in part, because of the impact of education on American society, our religions have split into two opposing camps, the conservative and the liberal, each with divergent and increasingly hostile views toward the other. Wuthnow locates part of the reason for this in the massive expansion of education, the resultant trans formations of society, the relative access of each group to social prestige and benefits, and the way in which the social shocks of the 1960s played themselves out in each group. Interestingly, denominations used to be separated by the way they fell on either side of whatever cleavage was dividing American society at the time. Now, Wuthnow contends, the cleavage cuts through almost every denomination, meaning that people may have more in common with persons from outside their religious group than with their fellows inside, from whom they feel increasingly estranged.
One must insist on the generational aspect of this. In the 1940s and 1950s, as education expanded massively, a rapprochement occurred between religion and science, leading to theologies of science and scientific theology, that did not begin to fragment in broad social terms until the 1960s as a reaction against the social upheavals of the time and the role the educated population seemed to play in them. Thus we are not simply talking about education having impacted religion, but rather the way each related to broader social changes moving our society, and only then to each other.
Thus Wuthnow sees education as having a significant impact on Americans’ religious lives. Yet for Mormons, according to Mauss, and Tim Heaton and Stan Albrecht,[9] this correlation either does not hold or a different relationship develops in which degree of religiosity is positively associated with degree of educational attainment.
So our first question is: Why do educated Mormons buck the national trend in religious devotion and measures of orthodoxy, as well as the correlation between education and liberalism? In part, the answer to both requires us to note that in national surveys a significant minority of individuals are conservative and maintain their conservatism in the face of whatever pressures liberalize their peers through a college education. And there is a solid group that retains their religious orthodoxy, as well. For some reason, Mormons are more like this second group, one that very possibly develops out of a conscious and, at times, strident opposi tion to the dominant trends in higher education. That is, they develop in conscious opposition to their classmates.
In the case of Latter-day Saint youth, one must also explore how their LDS community provides a social support group and buffer, privileging their ideas and assisting them in maintaining their opposition to the doubly liberalizing effects of a higher education. To this end, Mauss notes the massive expansion of the church’s institutes. I would argue that their pri mary effect is not so much to provide an ideological counter, or religious education—since that aspect is fairly weak compared to a university edu cation—although it is not an insignificant factor. Rather, I think the insti tutes provide a primary support group of LDS students who socialize with each other and keep each other from developing the primary ties with non-LDS students that otherwise would probably lead to the liberal izing effect. Furthermore the organization of students into wards, family home evening groups, the encouragement of early marriage, etc., give students an experience of education that is radically at odds with that ex perienced by most American students. The effect of education, I argue, may have as much or more to do with the social groups to which one is socialized during and after college than to the actual classes one takes and the ideas one encounters.
Note that these mitigate as well other aspects that lead to the liberal izing effects of education, such as the greater occupational and geo graphic mobility of the more highly educated. Mormon families, wards, etc., minimize the effects of mobility on a person by providing similar so cial supports practically wherever the person goes.
Furthermore, the brethren, as part of a reaction against the social movements of the 1960s and their successors, have been establishing boundary lines of peculiarity around the very issues which seem to typ ify the attitudes of the educated liberal. This includes a growing suspi cion and opposition to science, especially when it addresses issues on which the brethren claim to have primacy, such as civil rights and the in feriority of blacks, the Equal Rights Amendment and the nature and place of women in society as being divinely inspired rather than socially determined, and most recently gay and gender topics. They further have developed a resistance to mass, as well as high, culture which leads to tension with the arts and humanities, and have called adherence to their manner of understanding a major moral issue on which society and one’s individual salvation depend. Around these same areas in Mormon let ters, the brethren have challenged the independent Mormon intellectual community and attempted to curtail some discussion.
Thus we notice that certain fields have been problematized indirectly by the brethren’s actions. But Mauss attempts to explain the different de gree(s) of commitment to Mormonism among people who major in dif ferent areas as pertaining simply to belief. After noting that “the kind of education is also very important,” he says, “Those Mormons who majored in the social sciences, the arts, and philosophy had the lowest levels of re ligious beliefs.” Mauss asks, “Why would the rates of religious ortho doxy be lower for Mormonism in the social sciences, arts and philosophy than for those in other disciplines? The answer,” he holds, “is probably that the other disciplines do not confront and challenge traditional reli gious beliefs, nor do they encourage a relativity about religion, as muchas the social sciences, arts, and philosophy do.”[10]
It is true that the humanities and social sciences encourage a critical viewpoint towards religion. In part, this is because it no longer is a matter of belief nor a simple fact of lived faith, but rather an object of critical study which encourages a distance from actual belief. Note that whether this is merely an analytical difference or an existential difference, the former easily slides into the latter because it breaks the “naive” connec tion between belief and believer by interposing the intellect and critical reasoning. But the situation goes even farther.
In sociology or anthropology one is actively taught to desacralize re ligion. This stems in part from the mere act of comparing one religion to another, leading inescapably to analytical relativism, which can easily slide into ontological relativism, unless one develops active defenses against such. Though even more, the desacralization of religion stems from the philosophic stance taken in these fields towards religion in gen eral. They approach religion from a position of “naturalism” which ar gues that, as an object of study, religion is another natural phenomenon, another social fact, whose explanation, whose cause, relates to natural or social processes rather than to divine ones. Thus belief in God reflects so cial processes, not the sacredness of belief, the drawing of the soul to wards divinity. This inverts the Christian religious equation, if no other.
Thus, as philosophical posture, religion inherently is iconoclastic. The great anthropologist Evans-Pritchard questioned other scholars for taking a cynical view towards religion. He argued that they were atheists and through their naturalistic approach to religion, in this case so-called “primitive religion,” they sought to find causal explanations which would reduce religion to simply a function of something else. He held that they used their study to challenge ultimately formal western reli gion, which they felt could similarly be shown to have some other cause, rather than simply being true. He also noted that most anthropologists have an antipathy towards religion that goes beyond the needs of com parative study; they are personally insensitive to the religious muse and feel a need to challenge religion’s place within society.[11]
Social science is a child of the Enlightenment, with its worship of rea son and its social movement challenging the transcendence of religion. Thus it has developed in a space of tension with religion that goes be yond philosophical or methodological necessity, as Evans-Pritchard ar gued. This suggests that part of an answer to the Mormon quandary should address the social aspects of being a social scientist in relationship to other status groups of society, whereby this antipathy to religion might be built-in rather than simply being a function of making religion an object of comparative study.
Nevertheless, one cannot so simply dismiss the challenges a compar ative approach makes to religious belief. Even Evans-Pritchard’s own work tended to reduce belief to its social meaning or function despite his efforts to make room for the believer.[12]
This is critically important in the life of a young social scientist. Sev eral times while I was teaching at Brigham Young University a student after class would come up to me following a discussion of the social ex planation of religion and express severe doubts about his or her testi mony. Whether this was due to my lecture or the student’s own predilection would be hard to determine. Thus, Mauss notes, “we can’t tell whether training in the social sciences, for example, caused an ero sion of orthodoxy or a strongly orthodox worldview led to an avoidance of college disciplines that would threaten traditional beliefs. Maybe both causal directions were at work.”[13] My answer to the student, no matter the source of his or her anxiety, was to explore with each of them the dif ference between explaining something and explaining it away. In this I was not unlike Evans-Pritchard who claimed that religious (he really said magical, but for now this extension is true enough) beliefs and science answer different questions, the why and the how respectively, and that it is an error of logic to reduce the why to the how. I would also tell them that this begs all kinds of questions but should at least be a caution about “throwing the baby out with the bath water.”
Nevertheless, in my own life this has been a problem. I grew up as the very religious son of a quite orthodox sociologist father and an intel lectually-inclined musician mother. In our home orthodoxy referred pri marily to behavior, to what others have called piety, not to belief per se, although we were a very believing family. I was taught that there was no necessary discrepancy between religious truth and scientific truth. At times there might be tension between them, but in the long run they would come to the same answer.
In this my parents were like Henry Eyring the scientist, who argued that a benefit of being a Mormon was that one did not have to accept any thing that was not true. By true, he meant true in the positivist, empiri cist, verifiable sense, not true in the metaphysical sense commonly employed by many members today, following Joseph Fielding Smith’s and others’ defense of Mormonism against what they saw as a challenge from the vain ideas of men (and women, presumably). Eyring meant that when submitted to tests of empirical verification, both religious and scientific truths must pass empirical validation. To him that was a great benefit.
Yet following this philosophy, when I returned from my mission my testimony collapsed. The first class I took was Anthropology of Religion. The very theorists Evans-Pritchard critiques showed me that many things claimed by the church as true had other explanations. These were often simpler, in an empirical sense, and thus the Mormon explanations failed Occam’s razor. I found myself struggling to make space among my shattered titans made of hollow clay for a theology built from that clay while still allowing room for a solid God.
Fortunately my father was a sociologist. I could discuss this with him, and realize that I needed to be cautious in the way I swept away the broken fragments of my titans so as not to lose my solid clay. Fortu nately, as well, he had shelves of back issues of Dialogue, Sunstone, and the Journal of Mormon History where I could read the writings of other scholars who were maintaining faith in a world of shattered titans. Fur thermore, I had a strong will to believe. I knew the whisperings of the spirit and was addicted to them enough that I could withstand the cognitive dissonance of having so much shattered and still wishing to believe.
My father told me that the first generation of Mormon sociologists and anthropologists had pretty much left the church, yet, he said, they had not found happiness. He worked under one such for his doctoral de gree and said that the loss of the church had left a hole in this man’s life, taking away much of his happiness, which he could not seem to fill. My father’s answer was to stay with the church and try to work through one’s troubles, remembering that the church is a product of its time and that what bothers me will some day pass as the Lord struggles with a re calcitrant humanity caught in their social ways.
But this experience did broaden a critical distance between me and many Mormons, including numerous general authorities, who said things that to me seemed to fail Eyring’s test. For example, that blacks could not hold the priesthood because of some “revelation” or because of a difference in “lineage”; that evolution was not “true” and all the other silly ramblings on this issue; that the brethren do not make mistakes and cannot lead the church astray; that a woman’s place is in the home,… etc. My distance was made even wider by listening to Elder Bruce R. Mc Conkie’s talk on the “Seven Deadly Heresies”—which he testified he knew to be heresies because of the witness of the spirit—yet later I heard him recant. To me this said that the brethren are not quite so sure about what the spirit actually tells them, that they too make errors, etc.
Despite the difficulties raised by my early experiences with anthro pology and the ongoing dissonances it would periodically raise, I contin ued to be active in the church, and even to believe most things, although the nature of that belief constantly shifted. My experience of the church also changed in subtle ways. No longer could I take its and its members’ affirmations of what was true at face value. I found other ways to con tinue participating, such as hearing what other members and authorities said as to their attempts to work out the mysteries of faith and the reli gious life rather than simply as statements of truth.
My stumbling blocks came from the church and other members rather than from anthropology, per se. For example, I found that I was not welcomed when I would attempt to verbalize my concerns within the church, although I often heard other members discussing theirs. Mine were problematic because their nature could be seen as challenging other members’ faith. I stopped expressing my opinions in priesthood meeting and Sunday school and instead started attempting to ask simple ques tions. One Sunday, after one of my simple questions focussing on the re lationship between the manual and the class’s comments created a thirty minute debate which seriously deviated from the teacher’s lesson plan, one young man seated in front of me turned around and said, “Why do you even bother to come to church? All you do is create problems. Why don’t you just go away.”
Similar things happened in institute, where I felt not just tension but was actively silenced by my fellow members and leaders. One day, after a particularly trying experience, I spoke to the teacher, who had also been my bishop. I asked him why we couldn’t talk about matters that were im portant to me. He said that because there were members who were not as “advanced,” we needed to protect their testimonies by giving them milk rather than meat. I answered that presumed there was a place where the banquet included meat. The institute class was supposed to be advanced and if we could not eat meat there, where could we? He replied that my attitude was selfish and that I needed to focus more on others. I said that he had no room to accuse me of being selfish because as much as anyone else in the institute and ward I was serving the church and my fellows. “But,” I said, “I am hungry, perhaps even starving, for meat and I don’t get it simply from service, or prayer, or scripture study. Where can I get it?” Furthermore, I added, switching metaphors, “You see no problem in discussing the quandaries raised by your field of study, evolutionary bi ology and paleontology, why can’t I do the same?” At a time when my mind was growing rapidly through intense discussion and challenging readings in school, I found myself blocked at church.
The meeting was stormy and tense. But the next morning I got a note from the bishop, saying that he had stayed up all night reflecting on our discussion, that he had no answers for me, but that he loved me, and that I could always come to his office and discuss my concerns with him, that there we could try to find some meat for me. Besides being an amazingly humane response, this worked well as a stop gap measure and helped me keep going for some time.
But the social fictions of the everyday church were wearing on me. At school I was treated as someone quaint by my peers and professors. Even though I had friends there, my lifestyle and interests were suffi ciently different from theirs that the sharing of close friendship became difficult. I found I was always explaining. My primary group was com posed of LDS graduate students. But even there I was rather different be cause I went to bars and parties fairly often with my non-LDS peers. Following my father’s advice, I did not shut myself off from the social milieu of graduate school.
Despite strong tensions and feeling torn between two worlds, not so much intellectually or spiritually as socially, I have stayed in the church. My Mormonism continues to find meaning in the oddest of ways, al though I strongly realize that I do not fit into the body of the membership and I feel that I must live in a kind of intellectual closet where if many of my fellow ward members got to know me they wouldn’t like what I think.
At BYU my feelings of marginality were publicly expressed when in the appeal hearings over my firing I was first told that I was being re leased for not being a good enough anthropologist (even though my de partment had said I was more than adequate). At the end of our meeting, I had them read from one of my articles on the “Native Anthropologist as Oxymoron.”[14] I had written that the native is drawn from his milieu and socialized into the anthropological community, and in the process is transformed. On the basis of this, the BYU administration argued that I had become too much of an anthropologist and not enough of a Mormon. Thus the entire hearings, it seemed to me, came down to a simple ques tion: “In the event of a conflict between the church and your academic field, with whom would you side?” All of my attempts to avoid having things expressed in such black-and-white terms collapsed in the way this question was worded. There was only one right answer and yet to give it would effectively deny my efforts to stay in the church simply by the way others in power controlled discourse, including the definition of what the church was at any given time. I could only submit, not think and try to find integrity in my actions. My answer was “I hope the church.” But it was the wrong answer because it was already too com plex.
My experience is that of only one person who was a social science major. It seems to me that part of the answer to Armand Mauss’s ques tion has to do with the way the social sciences create critical distance from religion and then relativize it. Part of the answer also has to do with how the social sciences have evolved and socialized within their practice an Enlightenment tension with religion. But even more, from my experi ence, it has to do with how the church has defined things that are critical in my experience as being beyond the pale and thus nondiscussable or are the signs of a weak testimony, and how one thereby is actively social ized out of the church. Part of the answer, therefore, refers to history and how social issues are presented on the stage of our lives.
Mormonism speaks ambivalently about learning. It is valued highly:
The glory of god is intelligence or, in other words, light and truth … (D&C 93:36).
And, verily I say unto you, that it is my will that you should hasten to … obtain a knowledge of history, and of countries, and kingdoms, of laws of God and man, and all this for the salvation of Zion (D&C 93:36).
But:
O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsels of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know it of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish, but to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God (2 Ne. 9:28).
While there are many ways of understanding these scriptures, perhaps one of the most common claims is that we should learn, as long as the product of our learning reflects what the church and others claim to be true, as long as it does not challenge or make complex what people hold as simple. Yet for most of my life, first philosophy, then social science has been presented as a threat to proper religion and the experience of social science has led to a different construction of religion from the Mormon mainstream.
We began this essay with a paradox, and with a paradox we will end. We saw that Mormonism keeps its educated members, with a few critical exceptions, because it manages to fit them into that minority of college educated men and women who do not become liberalized by the experi ence. In part, I think, it does this by providing social relationships for its young people and older professionals which keep them from being fully socialized into the college experience. Also, as part of Mormon retrench ment and reaction to the 1960s, the church has campaigned actively against aspects of a college culture, established strong moral dividing lines around issues, such as freedom of expression, religion in the secular public space, authority, gender, sexuality, etc., that in one way or another strike at the heart of certain disciplines, particularly those in the arts, hu manities, and social sciences.
In this the church bucks another national trend. Its leaders seem to be steering the entire church into the ranks of the religious conservatives. The issues on which they have taken a stand are similar to those which establish the liberal/conservative divide in American religion today. However, in most cases the chasm has grown up within any given de nomination, in part because of the relationship of its educated members to the broader body of the church. In Mormonism the brethren are trying to see that this not happen in the church. Furthermore, by this tactic, even though our issues are shared with a range of conservative religions, they are framed in such a way as to try to rebuild Mormon “peculiarity” at a time when it, on almost every other measure, has almost disappeared. They kill two birds with one stone. At root this may be the reason for the other anomalies.
This essay is, of course, a preliminary and very personal discussion of the relationship between education and orthodoxy, based on recent writings. To these we can add the phenomenon of the Mormon who does not follow either national or Mormon trends, who insists on being reli gious despite being a woman and/or despite his or her education in arts, humanities, and social sciences. Following anthropologist Mary Douglas, we must note that, as they insist on keeping one foot on either side of a boundary line others have drawn strongly between the sacred and the profane, they thus become anomalies and dangerous ones at that. With that paradox of living people torn apart, we must end.
[1] Armand Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle for Assimilation (Ur bana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 68-70.
[2] Kristen L. Goodman and Tim B. Heaton, “LDS Church Members in the U.S. and Can ada: A Demographic Profile,” AMCAP Journal 12 (1986): 1:88-107. See also the work of Marie Cornwall, e.g., “The Institutional Role of Mormon Women,” in Marie Cornwall, Tim B. Heaton, and Lawrence A. Young, Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives (Urba na: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 239-64.
[3] Mauss, 5.
[4] Ibid., 67.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 170.
[7] Ibid., 163.
[8] Ibid., 169.
[9] Tim Heaton and Stan Albrecht, “Secularization, Higher Education and Religiosity,” Review of Religious Research 26 (1984), 1:43-58. See also Goodman and Heaton.
[10] Ibid., 69.
[11] E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “Introduction,” in Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1965), 1-19.
[12] Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 91-92.
[13] Mauss, 69.
[14] David Knowlton, “No One Can Serve Two Masters, or Native Anthropologist as Oxymoron,” International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 7 (Spring 1992), 1:72-88.