Remembering Rodney Stark (1934-2022)

Rodney Stark.

(OPINION) Baylor University professor Rodney Stark passed away at his home in Woodway, Texas, on July 21, 2022.

I first encountered Rodney Stark’s writing as a graduate student. I remember reading the work of many scholars whose assumptions, theories and perspectives not only seemed problematic to me but often conflicted in significant ways with my Christian worldview. Stark, however, was a scholar whose work always seemed to have just the opposite effect. His writings were straightforward, accessible, compelling and encouraging. To state the obvious, countless others have had similar experiences after reading Stark’s articles and books. Like many, I quickly became a Rodney Stark fan.

Stark grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, and began his career as a newspaper reporter for The Oakland Tribune. Following a tour of duty in the U.S. Army, he received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, where he held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. He left Berkeley to accept a tenured full professorship at the University of Washington, where he taught for 32 years before retiring in 2003.

Stark was a prolific and pioneering scholar and is widely considered a father of the modern field of the sociology of religion. Indeed, his thought and writing revolutionized the sociology of religion with original insights. Stark published 40 books and more than 150 scholarly articles on subjects as diverse as prejudice, crime, suicide and city life in ancient Rome. However, the greater part of his research and writing was on religion. It is what he was most known for and what he will be remembered for.

Stark was a past president of both the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. He also won a number of national and international awards for distinguished scholarship. He twice won the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, for “The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation” (1985) and for “The Churching of America 1776–1990” (1992).

His book “A Theory of Religion” explains religious group processes and societal levels of religiosity from a rational choice framework. This approach, which became known as the Theory of Religious Economies, was controversial because it explained faith as the consequence of logical cost-benefit analyses.  Scholars had previously assumed that religiousness was the outcome of normative processes, in which the individual had little agency or independence. Stark’s alternative assumption that people employed rational choice more convincingly explained both the growth and decline of religion and ushered in a “new paradigm” in the scientific study of religion. 

In 1996, Stark would make yet another important connection for sociologists and criminologists when he put forward the “moral communities” thesis. The thesis suggested that religion should be understood sociologically as a group property more than an individual one. When seen in this light, religion is thought to directly affect the behavior of the group’s members. Stated differently, participation in a religious community, not just one’s own religious beliefs or practices, is what emboldens the individual to resist participation in delinquent activities. Stark’s moral community thesis, like so many of his publications, sparked significant attention from scholars and eventually led to the emergence of entire new literatures. His most celebrated book, “The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries” (1997), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Stark’s move to Baylor after his earlier retirement from Washington surprised many people because, as he noted on many occasions, he did not like universities. He accepted the opportunity to join Baylor not because the world needed another great university but because he felt the world needed a great university that was Christian. Unbeknownst to either of us, Rod and I were being recruited by Baylor at the same time. We both joined the faculty in 2004, and I subsequently launched the Institute for Studies of Religion. In 2005, Rod accepted my offer to become ISR’s co-director. His decision to accept my offer played a critical role in the rise of ISR as one of the world’s leading academic homes for social, historical and policy-related research on religion.

While at Baylor in 2006, Stark became the founding editor of the Interdisciplinary Journal for Research on Religion, published by ISR. The final publication of his career appeared in the journal in 2022, co-authored with several ISR colleagues. The paper used national population data to debunk the prevailing narrative that religion in the U.S. is on the decline.

Rodney Stark was a brilliant thinker and gifted writer who influenced multiple generations of scholars in diverse fields including political science, demography, history, criminology and economics. His intellectual legacy in the sociology of religion is unmatched. His true genius is also exemplified by the fact that his work influenced generations of scholars as well as ordinary people interested in religion. Clergy, lay leaders, journalists and policy makers alike continue to read, study and discuss Stark’s writings, and will continue to do so for generations to come.

Byron R. Johnson is a professor of social sciences, Director of the Institute for Studies of Religion, Director of the Program on Prosocial Behavior and Director of the Global Flourishing Study at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.