11/3/2008
Jason Wollschleger (graduate student, UW Sociology) and Lindsey Beach (student, SPU Sociology, A Cucumber for a Cow
Wednesday November 12th at 3:30 PM in Condon Hall 311.
The faculty discussant will be Edgar Kiser (Sociology) and the graduate student discussant will be Danny Koski-Karell (Sociology).
Abstract
Drawing from the religious economies approach this paper offers a theory of religious hypocrisy based on the understanding that religion can be defined as the terms of exchange between a rational individual and his/her god(s). It follows that religious hypocrisy is a rational strategy for minimizing one's costs and maximizing one's rewards by cheating on his/her end of the exchange relationship i.e. cheating on his/her religious commitments. We argue that there are two main types of religious hypocrisy: subjective and objective. Subjective hypocrisy is cheating on subjective religious commitments (beliefs and emotions) in order to gain social rewards; whereas, objective hypocrisy is cheating on objective religious commitments (religious and moral behavioral requirements) in order to gain otherworldly rewards. We specify three types of social conditions that will lead to subjective religious hypocrisy, as well as argue that there are two different types of objective hypocrisy: acts of omission and acts of commission.
We then hypothesize that these two types of objective hypocrisy will be more or less prevalent depending on the level of strictness of religious groups, and discuss the nonobvious implication that strictness poses a danger for the long-term vitality of religious groups. We test one hypothesis using data from the 1998 GSS, and find that strict congregations have higher rates of objective hypocrisy.
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