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John H. Evans and Michael S. Evans
Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego;
email: jhevans@ucsd.edu, msevans@ucsd.edu

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008. 34:87–105 Key Words

First published online as a Review in Advance on secularization, rationality, STS, institutions, values
April 7, 2008

The Annual Review of Sociology is online at Abstract

soc.annualreviews.org
Studies of the relationship between religion and science have tradi-
This article’s doi: tionally assumed that any conflict that exists is based on epistemology.
10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134702
This assumption is built into the history of Western academic thought,
Copyright  c 2008 by Annual Reviews. the founding of sociology itself, as well as the common definitions of
All rights reserved
religion used by social scientists. This assumption has hindered the ex-
0360-0572/08/0811-0087$20.00 amination of the relationship between religion and science. We catego-
rize studies of the relationship between science and religion into three
groups: the symbolic epistemological conflict studies, the symbolic di-
rectional influence studies, and the social-institutional studies. We find
that the social-institutional studies, which most closely examine actual
public conflicts, do not presume that the conflict is over epistemological
claims and offer a more general and fruitful approach to examining the
relationship between religion and science.

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88
INTRODUCTION
Although we know of no study of the compar-
ative coherence of sociological research areas,
we suspect that the field of religion and sci-
ence is one of the muddiest in all of sociology.
The conceptual source of this muddiness lies in
the long-running academic assumption that re-
ligion and science always conflict and that they
conflict over competing truth claims about the
world. It is therefore hard for sociologists to
analyze the relationship dispassionately because
sociology itself was born as a scientific alterna-
tive to religion. Before we begin a review of
the literature in science and religion, we must
outline the sources of this conceptual morass.
We do not attempt to define religion and sci-
ence here. Rather, we focus on how scholars
have used these categories to generate findings.
It is our general position in this review that the
epistemological conflict assumption built into
many sociological analyses has hindered exam-
ination of the relationship between religion and
science by blinding analysts to more subtle em-
pirical possibilities.
The Dominance of the
Epistemological Warfare Narrative
There is a deep assumption spread through
most academic writing about religion and sci-
ence: the warfare narrative. In popular ac-
counts, religion and science are fixed categories
of thought that have always been at war, with
the first skirmish being between Galileo and
the seventeenth century Catholic Church. For
example, a textbook on the relationship be-
tween science and religion identifies four his-
torical landmarks in the debate: the medieval
synthesis, the Copernican and Galilean con-
troversies, debates over Newton’s ideas, and
Darwinism (McGrath 1999). The political
rhetoric of contemporary scientists and their
supporters also often portrays a situation of war-
fare, with complaints about religion shutting
down legitimate stem cell research and so on
(Mooney 2005). As one recent article by a scien-
tist enumerating the results of scientific contro-
Evans · Evans
versies was titled, “science three, religion zero”
(Mazur 1996).
The warfare narrative does match older aca-
demic accounts in which military metaphors
were dominant in descriptions of the relation-
ship between religion and science (Numbers
1985, p. 59). This narrative is classically indi-
cated in the title of an 1896 text by the for-
mer president of Cornell University, Andrew
Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Sci-
ence with Theology in Christendom (White 1960
[1896]).
However, historians no longer accept the
warfare narrative. For example, examining
American history, Numbers (1985, p. 80) con-
cludes that “the polemically attractive warfare
thesis [is] historically bankrupt.” Or, even more
strongly and specifically, “the war between sci-
ence and theology in colonial America has ex-
isted primarily in the cliché-bound minds of
historians” (p. 64). Indeed, there was a “pre-
vailing harmony between science and religion
in the antebellum period” (p. 68). This analy-
sis suggests that if and when there is conflict,
it is not an inevitable or permanent feature of
American life and, further, that the idea of con-
flict is tied to specific definitions of religion and
science. Note that the warfare narrative implic-
itly assumes that the warfare is over the author-
ity to establish truth claims about the world—
about how planets move (Galileo) or where hu-
mans came from (Darwin).
When historians say that conflict was not an
inevitable feature of American life, it is because,
for much of American history, religion and sci-
ence agreed on how to establish truth. In fact,
historically science used to be a very religious
endeavor. For example, according to Toumey,
“early in the nineteenth century, evangelical
Protestantism and science were so intellectually
compatible in the United States that a natural-
ist and a minister could easily agree on what
they believed about nature” (Toumey 1994,
p. 14). God was revealed twice in this view: once
through scripture, and once through nature.
Drawing on an idea that may go back at least
to Aquinas, the details of nature were evidence
of God’s wonderful design, it was thought, and
 further that “nature contains clear, compelling
evidence of God’s existence and perfection”
(Hovenkamp 1978, p. ix).
Epistemological Warfare
at the Birth of Sociology
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Despite the historical lack of inevitable conflict
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008.34:87-105. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
between science and religion, its existence has
been a deep assumption in American culture
and particularly in American universities. Al-
though it is possible that conflict over the secu-
larization of American universities is the source
of the conflict narrative, whatever the source,
the narrative has filtered into much of the soci-
ological work that we have been able to identify.
It is nearly always a deep, unexamined theoret-
ical assumption that we try to unearth in this
review. One reason for this assumption is that
the founders of the discipline of sociology—the
creators of the metaphors we rework year af-
ter year (e.g., culture, rationality)—actively op-
posed religion and saw the two systems as in-
compatible means of making claims about the
world (Smith 2003b).
This vision of incompatibility was the result
of the new field’s Enlightenment assumptions.
We should not forget that it was Comte, the
supposed father of sociology, who thought he
was going to replace the religion of the time
with a new religion of science called sociology.
Societies would evolve from a primitive theo-
logical stage, and as society acquired a more
rational understanding of the world, theology
would be displaced by philosophical thinking
and ultimately by the “queen of the sciences,”
sociology (Wernick 2005). A conflict between
science and religion over truth was then en-
shrined in the earliest conception of the socio-
logical enterprise. Once institutionalized, sub-
sequent sociologists did not need to have this
motivation for the religion-science conflict as-
sumption to continue.
This nineteenth century notion that reli-
gion was primitive and both deserving and due
to have an imminent death was also common
among the founders of American sociology.
When it came to founding sociology as an ac-
tual discipline with departments in universities,
the boundary drawing against religion inten-
sified. Although several key American sociolo-
gists were personally religious (Swatos 1984),
the commitment to positivism as an epistemo-
logical stance in American science created a sit-
uation in which religion detracted from scien-
tific credibility and therefore had to be excluded
in order for the new discipline to gain respect
in the university. Irrespective of their personal
commitments, sociologists took action to re-
move religion as a contributor to the developing
discipline through such tactics as the develop-
ment of textbooks that described religion as an
object of study rather than a source of knowl-
edge (Smith 2003b) and through the active ex-
clusion of religious sociology and its supporters
from the field’s core institutions (Evans 2008).
By excluding religion as a source of sociological
knowledge, early American sociologists hoped
to promote sociology as a respected academic
scientific discipline.
Epistemological Conflict in the
Definitions of Religion and Science
The narrative of religion and science in conflict
over truth claims is so deeply entwined with so-
ciology that sociological definitions of religion
presuppose it, making it almost impossible to
find a perspective outside of this tangle from
which to analyze the relationship between reli-
gion and science. There are two dominant tra-
ditions in defining religion: the functional and
the substantive (Berger 1967, pp. 175–77). A
functional definition of religion holds religion
to be any cultural system at its most abstract.
Luckmann (1967) and Geertz (1973) have fa-
mously advocated such definitions. As has been
pointed out, this then means that any ultimate
system of meaning becomes a religion: femi-
nism, Marxism, secular humanism, analytic phi-
losophy, the world of Star Trek, or, as pointed
out by Berger and to add to our confusion,
“modern science [as] a form of religion” (Berger
1967, p. 177). There is no conflict here because
the content of religion and science have been
radically relativized. Although this would avoid
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90
the problems with assuming conflict over truth
(as we note below), this definition of religion is
not commonly used.
More common in actual empirical analysis
are substantive definitions of religion, and these
typically involve splitting the world into some
version of the sacred and the profane. The pro-
fane world operates rationally, explainable by
human reason and able to be observed. The
sacred, commonly called the supernatural or
transcendent, operates outside of the ability of
rationality (e.g., science) to explain it. As one
popular textbook in the sociology of religion
puts it, “religion can be defined as a system
of beliefs and practices by which a group of
people interprets and responds to what they
feel is sacred and, usually, supernatural as well”
( Johnstone 1997, p. 13). Weber, who was fa-
mously reluctant to provide a definition of reli-
gion, nonetheless thought that religion has the
function of “rendering rational the irrational-
ities of life through the provision of mean-
ing. . . . Unlike magic, therefore, religion is po-
tentially capable of transcending the mundane
gains and losses of practical life through a cu-
mulative rational systematization of ideas con-
cerning the supernatural and on the basis of
progressive preoccupation with other-worldly
goals” (O’Toole 1984, p. 142).
These substantive definitions of religion
have essentially defined religion as concerning
the “irrationalities,” the “not science.” There-
fore, in theological terms, sociologists tend to
define religion like a “God of the gaps,” where
God exists in the phenomena that science can-
not (yet) explain (Verhey 1995).
However, religion is about much more than
truth, on both an institutional and an individual
level. In an underappreciated article, anthropol-
ogist Buckser (1996) makes this point while ex-
amining secularization on a Danish island. The
declining amount of religious activity was not
due to an encounter with science and scientific
ways of understanding nature, but rather due
to a transformation in social relations on the is-
land brought about by agricultural mechaniza-
tion, which reduced the population of villages
and weakened social ties. He concludes that the
Evans · Evans
problem with secularization theory is its defini-
tion of religion as “a method of explaining the
physical world through the supernatural.” He
concludes, citing Geertz, that “in any religion,
explaining the physical world is only a subordi-
nate task; it is explaining the social world, giving
it meaning and moral value, which is religion’s
primary concern” (Buckser 1996, p. 439).
We note here that although religion is often
recognized as complicated, plural, and multi-
faceted, science has usually been considered as
a stable, uniform, and unproblematic category
in the sociological literature. Work challenging
a uniform vision of science has emerged from
the subfield of science and technology studies
(STS) in recent decades but has not yet pene-
trated the discussion of religion and science be-
cause such work usually does not engage ques-
tions of religion. We discuss relevant recent
STS work in the social-institutional section be-
low. Nevertheless, we maintain that the dom-
inant assumption in sociology that religion is
about truth claims is the factor that has hobbled
the more subtle investigation of the relation-
ship between religion and science. However, as
we highlight below, not all examinations of re-
ligion and science make this assumption, and
these studies seem to offer the most promise.
Demarcating the Field for this Review
We need to draw tight boundaries around our
subject, for parsimony’s sake. Most notably,
there is an extremely large theological literature
that discusses what the proper theoretical rela-
tionship between religion and science should be
(Barbour 1990, Polkinghorne 1998). We take
this to be outside of the interests of most so-
ciologists, and it has had little influence on the
literature we are concerned with. We do include
research from the fields of cultural anthropol-
ogy, history, and medicine, but only when the
research has implications for the contemporary
science-religion relationship that most sociol-
ogists are concerned with. This generally ex-
cludes, for example, the voluminous literature
on the Galileo conflict, the religious beliefs of
early scientists, and so on.
 When examining the existing literature on
religion and science in sociology, we use one
clear distinction to further organize this paper:
the distinction between symbolic and social-
institutional (Lamont & Molnar 2002, p. 168).
Symbolic analyses of religion and science treat
them as systems of ideas, beliefs, or discourses.
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Social-institutional analyses of religion and sci-
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ence are concerned with the institutions that
propagate these ideas, beliefs, or discourses. We
begin with the symbolic accounts.
SYMBOLIC: INCOMPATIBLE
EPISTEMOLOGICAL
CONFLICT LITERATURE
The existing symbolic literature can be divided
into two families: the epistemological conflict
and the directional influence families. The epis-
temological conflict literature assumes that re-
ligion and science are inherently incompatible
and that a growth in science leads to decline in
religion because they are competing ways of es-
tablishing truth. The directional influence liter-
ature is more subtle and complicated. This liter-
ature tends to ask whether a particular religious
discourse or belief leads to the rise of science or
a change in science. The epistemological con-
flict literature presumes that the categories of
religion and science are fixed, whereas the di-
rectional influence literature does not.
We should note that the symbolic literature
is often difficult to recognize as a science and
religion literature because, although religion is
clearly labeled as a system of thought that in-
cludes references to the transcendent and so on,
its opposition is often described as modern sec-
ular rationality. It is then explicitly noted or im-
plicitly assumed that science is the embodiment
of modern secular rationality. We start with the
epistemological conflict literature.
The Rationalization of Religion
A field of research concerning the relationship
between religion and science where the epis-
temological conflict model is very evident is
Weber’s concern with the rationalization of re-
ligion. Weber’s concerns here are intertwined
with his more general concern with an increase
in formally rational systems in which action be-
comes more calculable. Weber postulated the
increasing rationalization of religions, of which
the Protestantism of the Reformation was a
particularly strong example. In the words of
Peter Berger, probably the most influential in-
terpreter of Weber’s sociology of religion:
The Catholic lives in a world in which the
sacred is mediated to him through a variety
of channels—the sacraments of the church,
the intercession of the saints, the recurring
eruption of the “supernatural” in miracles—a
vast continuity of being between the seen and
the unseen. Protestantism abolished most of
these mediations. . . . This reality then became
amenable to the systematic, rational penetra-
tion, both in thought and in activity, which we
associate with modern science and technology.
A sky empty of angels becomes open to the
intervention of the astronomer and, eventu-
ally, of the astronaut. It may be maintained,
then, that Protestantism served as a histori-
cally decisive prelude to secularization, what-
ever may have been the importance of other
factors (Berger 1967, pp. 112–13).
Rationalization in religion had contributed
to the disenchantment or, more literally, the
demagification of the world, resulting in a sit-
uation in which mysterious forces and powers
have been replaced by the calculation and tech-
nical means embodied in modern science. Ow-
ing to this rationalization, religion reduces the
number of truth claims about the world that
are not compatible with the “systematic, ratio-
nal penetration” that we “associate with mod-
ern science and technology.” Religion does not
change except by becoming more like science.
We are not claiming that this account is wrong
but that it focuses only on the epistemological
claims of religion and science.
Secularization
Closely related to the rationalization of religion
are debates about secularization. Of course,
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92
secularization theory is itself a recognized
morass in the sociology of religion. We believe
there is consensus that secularization should be
split into two components that are related in
contested ways, which we describe as macro
and micro. The macro component of secular-
ization is institutional differentiation, in which
religion becomes separated from other institu-
tional spheres. Whereas at one time the state,
the family, education, and other institutions
were legitimated by religious symbols, secular-
ization occurs when this is no longer the case.
Despite some evidence of its reversal in politics
(Casanova 1994), we believe that the consensus
among scholars is that this process has occurred
over time. The remaining debates are about ex-
plaining this secularization (Smith 2003a).
A second, micro component of seculariza-
tion concerns changes in individual belief and
practice (Stark 1999). This research most often
includes measures of participation in religious
organizations (Finke & Stark 1988, Chaves &
Gorski 2001, Norris & Inglehart 2004). There
is, of course, a theorized relationship between
these two components, which for our purposes
we can simply say are related and reinforcing.
Whereas there is consensus that macro secular-
ization has occurred, there remains a debate as
to whether micro secularization has occurred
in the United States (Norris & Inglehart 2004),
and even in Europe (Stark 1999).
The literature on the relationship between
religion and science in secularization theory
emerges in the explanations. We divide these
explanations into three families, with the first
being an example of symbolic epistemologi-
cal conflict and the other two fitting into the
social-institutional theories below. In the first,
the traditional and dominant secularization ac-
count, growth of certain types of rationality—
embodied in modern science—plays a central
role in secularization. In one concise summary,
“the era of the Enlightenment generated a ra-
tional view of the world based on empirical stan-
dards of proof, scientific knowledge of natu-
ral phenomena, and technological mastery of
the universe. Rationalism was thought to have
rendered the central claims of the Church im-
Evans · Evans
plausible in modern societies, blowing away the
vestiges of superstitious dogma in Western Eu-
rope” (Norris & Inglehart 2004, p. 7).
Probably the most infamous and explicit de-
scription of this version of secularization comes
from Wallace (1966), who directly attributes
secularization to the greater explanatory power
of rational science:
[T]he evolutionary future of religion is extinc-
tion. Belief in supernatural beings and super-
natural forces that affect nature without obey-
ing nature’s laws will erode and become only
an interesting historical memory. . . . [B]elief in
supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all
over the world, as the result of the increasing
adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge
(p. 265).
We again see in both of these works the epis-
temological conflict model on display. An in-
crease in the ability of science to make credible
truth claims leads to a decline in religion’s abil-
ity to make truth claims. This literature is also
symbolic in that it does not examine conflict be-
tween institutions, but rather concerns a change
in the ideas or beliefs of people.
Degree of Symbolic Incompatibility
on an Individual Level
Another literature, related to the traditional
secularization literature, tries to demonstrate
the epistemological conflict between science
and religion, typically by examining how
religious scientists are and how scientific the
religious are. Given the assumption in this lit-
erature that they are incompatible systems de-
signed to make competing truth claims about
the natural world, people who are the most ex-
pert in science or religion should then exhibit
the least adherence to the opposing symbolic
system.
Early studies of the religiosity of sci-
entists, beginning with Leuba’s survey of
American scientists in 1914, indeed found that
scientists were disproportionately less religious
than nonscientists and, even more importantly,
 that scientists with higher status tended to be
less religious than other scientists (Leuba 1916,
1934). The better the scientist, the less reli-
gious they were likely to be. An influential study
of graduate students by Stark (1963) also sup-
ported Leuba’s broader finding. Stark argued
that those students who were better educated,
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attended better schools, and generally did what
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was necessary to achieve higher scientific sta-
tus were less likely to be involved with their
religious tradition, even if they still nominally
claimed affiliation (Stark 1963).
But later studies found important contradic-
tory patterns in the beliefs of academic scien-
tists. For example, Lehman & Shriver (1968)
and Thalheimer (1973) found that social scien-
tists were less religious than natural scientists,
despite their lower position in the scientific sta-
tus hierarchy. Although this evidence still sup-
ported the epistemological conflict thesis, it
seemed to subvert the linearity of the model.
Being more scientific did not necessarily equate
to being less religious, at least at the margins.
Scholars explained this variously as an effect
of “scholarly distance from religion” (Lehman
& Shriver 1968) or as a “boundary postur-
ing mechanism” by social scientists trying to
appear more scientific by being less religious
(Wuthnow 1989, pp. 142–57).
The most current research suggests that al-
though scientists are less religious than non-
scientists, just as in Leuba’s day, religiosity (in
varying forms) is persistent among scientists
(Larson & Witham 1997). Several recent pop-
ular books by scientists, including the leader
of the Human Genome Project, evince a vi-
tal thread of religiosity within academic science
(Collins 2006). Moreover, results from a recent
national survey of scientists show that differ-
ences in religiosity across the scientific status
hierarchy are flattening, so that scientific disci-
pline is a less useful predictor of the religiosity
of scientists than are many other variables, in-
cluding age, marital status, and childhood reli-
gious background (Ecklund & Scheitle 2007).
In addition to the studies of religiosity of sci-
entists, a few studies have attempted to address
directly the question of whether religiosity in-
terferes with the acquisition of scientific knowl-
edge, again assuming the two systems make in-
compatible truth claims about the world. For
example, on the one hand, Lawson & Worsnop
(1992) find that students with stronger religious
commitments are less likely to change to a belief
in evolution after being taught a unit on evolu-
tion and natural selection in biology class. On
the other hand, Verhey (2005) finds that even
students with prior commitments to creation-
ism became more sympathetic to evolutionary
theory after being exposed to both intelligent
design and evolution in the classroom.
Efficacy of Prayer
Perhaps the subfield that most clearly assumes
the conflict over epistemology is the efficacy of
prayer debate. This debate has its roots in ar-
guments between clergy and scientists in nine-
teenth century England over the usefulness of
public days of prayer (Turner 1974, Mullin
2003). In 1873, Francis Galton published an
analysis showing that monarchs and clergy, who
presumably received the most prayer, did not
live as long as merchants and lawyers, who pre-
sumably received less prayer. On these grounds,
he claimed that religious practice had no ef-
fect on the real world and that public days of
prayer were therefore not worthy of the state’s
endorsement. By implication and later by direct
claim, only science could provide grounds for
intervention in health matters. The modern day
version of this contest began when Byrd (1988)
conducted a double-blind randomized experi-
ment in which groups engaged in intercessory
prayer for patients in a coronary intensive care
unit. Byrd’s finding that prayer had some posi-
tive health effects triggered a host of studies fur-
ther evaluating whether health outcomes could
be affected through intercessory prayer (Astin
et al. 2000, Benson et al. 2006).
Here we have a direct epistemological con-
flict between religion and science, fought on
what is currently the epistemological ground
of science, in that currently institutionalized
scientific methods are being used to evalu-
ate claims. This literature does not describe a
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94
conflict like the debates about Darwinian evolu-
tion, but rather is the conflict between religion
and science.
SYMBOLIC: DIRECTIONAL
INFLUENCE
The Merton Thesis: Particular
Religious Ideas Lead
to Modern Science
Although the research described above assumes
that religion and science are symbol systems
in conflict specifically over truth claims about
the world, other research is focused on how
other aspects of the religious symbol system in-
fluence the symbol system of science. At the
end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, Weber suggests that future studies
might investigate connections between Protes-
tantism and “the development of philosophical
and scientific empiricism” (Weber 2002 [1905],
p. 122). In the 1930s, Robert K. Merton took
up Weber’s challenge. The argument was pub-
lished first in Osiris and later in book form
as Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-
Century England (Merton 1970 [1938]).
Contrary to the dominant warfare narrative
of the historians of the time, the Merton Thesis
proposed that certain dominant cultural values
expressed in Puritanism contributed to the rise
of science. At the social-psychological level, Pu-
ritanism provided external motivation and pro-
moted a particular style of scientific practice
through its expression of cultural values such as
the glorification of God, diligence and industry,
choice of vocation, “blessed reason,” “profitable
education,” empiricism rather than rationality,
and experimentation over idle contemplation
(Merton 1970 [1938], pp. 60–80). At the social-
structural level, the emerging social institution
of science drew on religion for legitimacy until
it could establish itself as an autonomous do-
main. As Merton put it, religion “consecrated
science as to make it a highly respected and
laudable focus of attention” (p. 106).
Merton’s sociological approach to science
and religion broke from existing historical
Evans · Evans
methods in three important ways. First, he fo-
cused on how religion complemented science
rather than on specific instances of conflict,
avoiding “the short leap from such empirical
episodes of conflict to a belief in the logi-
cal and historical necessity for such conflict”
(Merton 1970 [1938], p. xxxviii). Second, he de-
fined religion in nonessential terms, as “dom-
ination by a particular group of sentiments”
rather than “adherence to the logical impli-
cations of a system of theology” (p. 59). Be-
ing nominally Protestant mattered less than the
extent to which one’s Protestantism expressed
dominant cultural values. Finally, in contrast to
Great Man approaches to history, Merton em-
phasized that the institutionalization of science
(in societies, universities, high schools, and oc-
cupational training) was equally as important as
the personal characteristics of those individuals
involved in its practice.
Many historians and a few sociologists have
lodged objections to the Merton Thesis on the
basis of competing interpretations of Merton’s
historical evidence (Becker 1984, Cohen 1990).
And as both Abraham (1983) and Shapin (1988)
have noted, the Merton Thesis in practice is
usually whatever simplified version of Merton’s
argument seems most amenable to one’s pre-
ferred analytical tools. But the more general
idea that religion leads to the methods and insti-
tutions of modern science has proven attractive
to many scholars, even if they do not directly
respond to Merton’s careful argument.
The most common response from sociol-
ogists has been to fit the Merton Thesis into
conventional understandings of cause and ef-
fect. The thesis is often tested through cross-
national comparisons in which the growth of
science is the dependent variable and religious
affiliation is one of several independent vari-
ables. For example, Sorokin (1937) claimed
that predominantly Catholic countries also had
high levels of scientific activity in the seven-
teenth century, whereas Thorner (1952) argued
that Protestants were doing the contributing in
those Catholic countries. Working with more
recent data, Cole & Phelan (1999) find that
countries with lower levels of Catholicism have
 lower levels of total scientific output, while
Schofer (2003) shows that Protestantism had a
positive effect on the institutionalization of geo-
logical science. Schofer (2004) also argues more
generally that Protestantism had a historically
positive effect on the worldwide expansion of
scientific institutions but that this positive effect
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did not persist after 1970. By finding the lim-
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its of religion’s explanatory power, such studies
have also been useful in pointing to other im-
portant factors contributing to the institutional
legitimacy of science, such as political decen-
tralization (Ben-David 1971) or patronage and
state support (Wuthnow 1987, pp. 265–98).
Merton’s contribution suggests a basic com-
patibility and indeed a positive, if complex, re-
lationship between religion and science at a
particular historical moment. It also provides
a way to explain empirical instances of conflict
without assuming an epistemological conflict
model.
Other lines of research take seriously the
idea that religion influenced science. For ex-
ample, one ambitious recent argument com-
bines elements of Weber and Merton to suggest
that Christianity’s focus on systematic forward-
looking theology, combined with an empiri-
cist focus and an understanding of the physi-
cal world as God’s creation, led to the rise of
Western science, capitalism, and modernity as
we know it (Stark 2003, 2005). Another ap-
proach proposes that science has sometimes
benefited from struggles within religion. For
example, Hollinger (1996) tells of several cases
in which secular, autonomous science became
positively associated with democracy in mid-
century America, in part as a reaction by (secular
and nonsecular) Jews against Protestant hege-
mony in universities (see also Cantor 2005).
Finally, a seemingly unrelated yet comple-
mentary literature highlights how science draws
on religious metaphor, language, and imagery.
At a more abstract level, scholars suggest that
metaphor and myth are centrally important to
religion and to science, both as ways of ordering
knowledge (MacCormac 1976) and as impor-
tant sites of cultural production over which re-
ligion and science contend (Gilbert 1997, Stahl
et al. 2002). More concretely, scholars repeat-
edly find that religious themes of immortal-
ity, transcendence, and omniscience figure in
the description of important scientific goals,
such as finding the “God particle” or decod-
ing the “Holy Grail” of the human genome
(Nelkin & Lindee 1995, p. 39). Such themes
and metaphors may even help define research
agendas in scientific fields such as space ex-
ploration, genetic engineering, and artificial
intelligence (Noble 1997).
Islamic Science
The Merton-inspired literature focuses on
the influence of Western religion on post-
Enlightenment science. There is also a litera-
ture on the non-Western religious influence on
science that presumes compatibility. In North
America and Western Europe, the study of re-
ligion and science is largely bound to the cul-
turally prominent traditions of Christianity and
Judaism. Islam and science have had an equally
complex relationship. Yet the common view is
that Islamic science is one historical stage of
scientific development, sitting between classical
Greek thought and the Renaissance in Western
Europe. This suggests a fundamental compat-
ibility between religion and this version of sci-
ence. In this view, science continued to develop
in the West but not in the Muslim world, and
this is possibly due to conflict with, or subor-
dination to, some feature of Islam such as reli-
gious law or orthodoxy (Huff 2003).
But historically, as Sabra (1987) has noted,
Islam did not just transmit information from the
Greeks to the Renaissance Europeans. Rather,
it transformed and expanded scientific knowl-
edge in the process. This is not necessarily a
rebuttal of the common view. In the stronger
version of this view, however, Islam and sci-
ence have always been intertwined, with sci-
ence emerging in Islam as scholars attempted
to reconcile observations of the physical world
with beliefs about the spiritual world (Nasr
1968, Iqbal 2002). Consistent with anthropo-
logical views of religion and science (below),
there is an important trend in this analysis to
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96
treat science as a cultural product rather than a
universal project and to represent Islamic
science as an explicitly religious version of
scientific knowledge production rather than
an Islamic interpretation of existing scientific
knowledge. There are important consequences
to treating Islamic science as a specific cultural
product, not least of which is the potential for
such an approach, if sufficiently developed, to
challenge Western science’s guise of value neu-
trality (Sardar 1989).
Critics of the idea of Islamic science note
that a commitment to culturally specific sci-
ence is just another method of putting Islam
in the way of universal scientific progress. For
example, Hoodbhoy (1991) notes the relatively
low scientific production in Islamic countries
during the twentieth century and blames the
reluctance to embrace non-Islamic science on
a fundamentalist-influenced education system
that emphasizes religious rather than scientific
achievement. Yet, as Roy (2004) argues, Islamic
fundamentalism is not simply a nostalgic hear-
kening to an idealized religious past. Rather, it is
both a product and agent of modernity whose
key role models are Western-educated scien-
tists who enthusiastically embrace cutting-edge
technology (Roy 2004). So it is not entirely clear
that fundamentalism is responsible for limit-
ing scientific development in Islamic countries.
The question of whether Islamic science is a
useful way to approach scientific development
remains open. Although there are clearly ways
in which science is historically compatible with
Islam, answers to questions of conflict depend
largely on the definition of science one is en-
gaging.
Anthropological Analyses
of Religion and Science
Unlike sociologists, anthropologists have not
started from an assumption of incompatible
truth claims. For the most part, focusing on
local cultural features rather than global ana-
lytical categories has given anthropology a dif-
ferent perspective on religion and science, such
that it is more helpful to think of religions and
Evans · Evans
sciences as multifarious, local, and contingent
rather than universal, essential, and enduring.
Of greater interest to anthropology is how cul-
turally specific manifestations of religion and
science, as modes of knowing, are enacted and
how certain modes of knowing are able to travel
across and through cultural boundaries.
So, for example, it is not particularly prob-
lematic to say that, in Western Europe and
later in North America, the Protestant form of
Christianity expressed dominant cultural val-
ues that also contributed to the development of
science and, more generally, of economic ratio-
nality in the form of capitalism. Sahlins (1996),
for example, has pointed out the tight relation-
ships between Judeo-Christian principles and
specific types of consumption-oriented capital-
ism. But more importantly, as Keane (2002)
has noted, the penetration of modern ratio-
nality into local cultures is not so much based
on the merits of the more esoteric Western
modes of thought such as science, philosophy,
and literature or even in the blunt application
of the Protestant ethic to local cultures. Rather,
Protestantism provides a conceptual apparatus
that places in the hands of ordinary people the
cultural framework for imagining themselves
and their actions as part of the project of moder-
nity. In this sense, it is religion, not science,
at the vanguard of Western rationality (Keane
2002).
Although there are efforts in anthropology
to treat religion and science debates as spe-
cific sites of cultural contention (Spuhler 1985,
Scott 1997), the most fruitful discussions have
come from connecting the insights of Sahlins,
and later Keane, to anthropology’s own devel-
opment as part of a modern scientific project.
Robbins (2006) and Cannell (2006) both point
out important ways that anthropology’s own
classifications and conceptual apparatus are tied
to specifically Western versions of Christian-
ity, so that standard anthropological concepts
like the other and interiority are themselves
products of one particular mode of knowing
grounded in one form of Christianity.
In sum, there are two families in the sym-
bolic tradition: the epistemological conflict
 family and the directional influence family. The
epistemological conflict family presumes fixed
categories of religion and science and presumes
they are in conflict over ways of knowing about
the world. The directional influence family pre-
sumes that religion influences science in some
way and broadens the conception of religion
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beyond truth claims. For the most part, how-
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ever, neither family broadens the conception of
science. Further, it is interesting to note that
there is no literature (of which we are aware) of
science influencing religion in which science is
predicted to lose. All the literature we have en-
countered uses one of two perspectives on the
influence of science: the epistemological con-
flict perspective, in which science leads to the
decline of religion (the traditional seculariza-
tion literature), or the religious rationalization
perspective, in which science makes religion
more like science in the truth claims it is will-
ing to make and its form of reasoning. Future
scholars should ponder why this is the case.
THE SOCIAL-INSTITUTIONAL:
CONFLICT STUDIES
DOWNGRADING
EPISTEMOLOGICAL DEBATES
A number of intellectual maneuvers avoid as-
suming epistemological conflict between reli-
gion and science. One perhaps unintentional
theoretical solution was to create the functional
definition of religion such that religion is not
about the supernatural or anything that falls
outside of the aegis of science, but rather re-
ligion is the most abstract of symbols. Thus,
the assumptions of science itself could be a re-
ligion. Scholars rarely label symbol systems as
religions unless they fit the common usage of
the term because, quite pragmatically, people
think that Roman Catholicism, analytic philos-
ophy, Marxism, and science are indeed qual-
itatively different phenomena. Or, differently,
as we discuss below, they intuit that religion
is about more than the most abstract, assumed
truths.
However, a slightly different approach than
labeling science a religion has been to treat
the epistemological status of scientific knowl-
edge as potentially equal to the epistemologi-
cal status of religious knowledge. This means
that the truth or falsity of religion or science
is bracketed, and contests for authority or the
power to determine truth between science and
religion are recast as power-inflected discursive
struggles. The earliest canonical texts in what
became the sociology of scientific knowledge
(SSK), published in the late 1970s and early
1980s, made the case that scientific knowledge
is socially constructed, like any other knowl-
edge (Bourdieu 1975, Latour & Woolgar 1986
[1979], Knorr-Cetina 1981). Science therefore
does not inherently have more believability
than religion, but rather scientists have to make
efforts and spend resources to claim that au-
thority. Such studies examine religion and sci-
ence not as feuding symbol systems, but rather
as social conflicts between institutions strug-
gling for power, with the content of the symbol
systems definitively bracketed.
Institutional Conflict
The earliest studies that examine a conflict be-
tween religion and science that make use of this
new intellectual move are those of Gieryn and
colleagues. Gieryn was interested in how scien-
tists struggle to demarcate science from non-
science, and therefore garner societal authority
(Gieryn 1983, Gieryn et al. 1985). In this view,
science is not a monolithic, unchanging system
of knowledge, but rather this system of knowl-
edge is transformed for tactical advantage, de-
pending on which profession or institution sci-
ence is competing with (such as religion).
Similarly, Evans (2002) examined a conflict
between theologians and scientists over the
authority to promulgate the ethics of human
genetic engineering. He also gives scientific
symbol systems no inherent power but rather
focuses on how one group obtains the re-
sources with which to wrest jurisdiction over
ethics making from the other group. As in the
rest of the studies in this category, there is
no essential definition of religion or science—
religion is what people associated with religious
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98
institutions do; science is what people associ-
ated with scientific institutions do. In the case
studied by Evans, scientists indirectly defeated
the theologians by nurturing the subsidiary pro-
fession of bioethics, which in turn furthers the
scientists’ interests.
Other studies are similar. Mulkay (1997), in-
vestigating the debate over embryo research in
the UK, shows how the debate became por-
trayed as “a conflict between those who wish
to enforce unthinking obedience to out-of-date
religious beliefs and those who are determined
to defend scientists’ right to continue their
search for truth” (p. 97). Contrary to the por-
trayals by scientists, Mulkay finds that the argu-
ments on the two sides “cannot be distinguished
in terms of their rationality, their reliance on
dogma or in terms of other features central
to the stereotyped contrast between religious
and scientific styles of thought” (Mulkay 1997,
p. 97). Proponents of embryo research won the
debate owing to fragmentation among religious
opponents, as well as the power of their own
dogmatically asserted beliefs (Mulkay 1997,
p. 114). They did not win because of the na-
ture of their symbol system.
The religion and science social conflict that
is most readily available in the public mind
is probably the debate over Darwinian evolu-
tion owing to legal cases and political debates
over public schooling (Binder 2002). Again, like
other studies of the social-institutional (instead
of symbolic) relationship between religion and
science, studies of conflicts over Darwinism fo-
cus on institutions and power. Toumey (1994)
and Numbers (1992), for example, spend great
effort discussing the organizational strength
and orientation of various creationist and cre-
ation science organizations over time. Binder
(2002) makes the case that it is not the con-
tent of religion or science per se that results
in the defeat of religiously inspired creationists
in public school debates, but rather the nature
of the institutions they are arguing within (see
also Lienesch 2007). In sum, if the scientists
win these battles it is not directly due to the
inherent power or truthfulness of science as a
system of ideas, but rather due to how institu-
Evans · Evans
tions have resulted in science being considered
more truthful.
Religious Belief and Opposition to
Interests and Conclusions of Scientists
Another literature that tends to bracket truth
claims examines how religious individuals eval-
uate the interests and conclusions of scientists.
For example, Ellison & Musick (1995) find that
conservative Protestants are more likely than
are other Americans to have moral criticisms of
science.
Probably the first and largest literature in
this area concerns the accuracy of White’s
(1967) article, which linked Christianity to the
cultural notion of “subduing the earth” derived
from a traditional Christian reading of the book
of Genesis. This notion, according to White
(1967), led to the current irresponsibility in en-
vironmental policy. Here, we describe respon-
sible environmental policy as a policy proposal
from the mainstream of the scientific commu-
nity, and the question was whether average re-
ligious people really hold this view of creation
and, if so, whether it results in an unwilling-
ness to engage in environmental stewardship,
to use one of the terms in the debate. Research
was designed to determine whether, for exam-
ple, Biblical literalism, religious tradition, or
belief in God lead to a lack of support for lib-
eral environmental policy (Eckberg & Blocker
1989, Greeley 1993, Woodrum & Hoban 1994,
Sherkat & Ellison 2007). Although such re-
search has recently engaged religious complex-
ity (e.g., which aspects of religious belief would
lead one to be opposed to liberal environmental
policy?), it remains largely silent on the com-
plexity of science.
Non-Epistemological Secularization
Theories
A newer strand of secularization theories avoids
assuming that religion and science are strug-
gling over truth, but focuses on religion as an
institution with multiple tasks and interests,
struggling with other institutions. The focus
 here is on power and agency of individuals
within institutions. In Smith’s (2003a) account,
there is not secularization so much as there are
secularizers, individuals with a vested interest
in the discrediting of religion. Many of these
secularizers are scientists, but that is not neces-
sary to the account. For example, the secular-
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ization of the institution for the promulgation
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of public morality in the 1920s was a conflict
that did not involve scientists, rationalization,
or truth at all. Rather, it was a response by pub-
lic intellectuals to censorship originating from
religious social reformers who sought to ban
“pernicious books” (Kemeny 2003). Similarly,
the secularization of the journalistic profession
responded to a demand for objective institu-
tions to assume responsibility for public edu-
cation, for which the rejection of subjective re-
ligious perspectives in public newspapers was
a necessary precursor (Flory 2003). Although
this approach to professionalization mirrored
scientific models, the secularization process did
not depend on, or necessarily include, the par-
ticipation of scientists or appeals to scientific
authority (see also Roberts & Turner 2000).
This secularization explanation does have a
basic conflict narrative when religion and sci-
ence do encounter each other, but this explana-
tion avoids the epistemological conflict model
by relativizing the content of religion and sci-
ence. The groups are conflicting over differen-
tial interests, not differential notions of truth,
and therefore the content of the symbol systems
in each group is not important to the analysis.
These conflicts are won by the group that ob-
tains greater power and resources.
Another secularization explanation, associ-
ated with rational choice theory, is interested
not in differentiation but only in individual
religiosity. It posits a constant demand for re-
ligion by the public, with secularization in par-
ticipation occurring where religious organiza-
tions are not effectively providing services to
meet this demand (Stark & Bainbridge 1985,
Finke & Stark 1992, Warner 1993). Western
Europe is then more secular than the United
States because in Europe monopoly churches
have become lazy and have only produced one
religious product. In the United States, com-
petition between religions makes the religions
effective producers of varied religious products
(Finke & Stark 1992, p. 19). Therefore, where
secularization occurs, it has nothing to do with
science but rather with institutional restrictions
on religious organizations.
Additionally, some rational choice advocates
have made further assertions of the compatibil-
ity of religion and science (Stark et al. 1996;
Stark 1999, pp. 264–66). Religion is still de-
fined in a way that makes it incompatible with
traditional conceptions of science [e.g., “Any
system of beliefs and practices concerned with
ultimate meaning that assumes the existence of
the supernatural” (Stark & Iannaccone 1994,
p. 232)]. This assertion of compatibility is itself
supported by following the lead of economics
in not theorizing people’s preferences or beliefs,
but rather by only being interested in showing
that both religion and science use instrumental
rationality in their decision making. This also
allows an end run around the conflict over epis-
temological claims: The comparison is not be-
tween religions as ultimately about the super-
natural (e.g., unverifiable through observation)
and science about the natural (e.g., empirically
observable), but rather that, whatever a person’s
conception of natural or supernatural, he or she
makes decisions using the same form of ratio-
nality. Therefore, religion and science are com-
patible because religious people and scientists
are both instrumentally or theoretically ratio-
nal in their reasoning.
In sum, the secularization literature has been
the location of much of the sociological work on
the relationship between science and religion.
The earlier, yet still dominant tradition assumes
epistemological conflict between a fixed science
and a fixed religion, such that an increase in sci-
ence mechanically leads to a decline in religion.
An emergent tradition embodied by the authors
found in Smith (2003a) typically still sees reli-
gion in conflict with science, because of histor-
ically contingent interests, not out of necessity,
and not necessarily about truth. A final ratio-
nal choice tradition sees religion as compatible
with science and sees instances of secularization
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100
as due to institutional regulation. This view
would seem to open paths for more subtle and
contingent examinations of the relationship be-
tween religion and science, in that religion can
decline owing to factors unrelated to science
and Enlightenment rationality.
CONCLUSION
It is our contention that the epistemological
conflict assumption has limited our understand-
ing of the relationship between religion and
science. First, it seems problematic to make
truth claims the center of interaction between
a static religion and a static science when reli-
gion and science are dynamic and concerned
with much more than truth claims. Indeed,
in another paper, we make the case that pub-
lic debates between religion and science are
no longer about truth, but rather about values
(Evans & Evans 2006). Similarly, Buckser and
Geertz, cited above, make a similar claim that
religions are not primarily about explaining the
physical world, but rather “it is explaining the
social world, giving it meaning and moral value,
which is religion’s primary concern” (Buckser
1996, p. 439, see also Greeley 1972, pp. 248–49;
Smith 1998, pp. 90–91). We should add that our
claim that religion is decreasingly concerned
with the truth of the natural world is also a nor-
mative position of some in the theology and sci-
ence debates, most notably Gould (1997), who
argued that religion and science should be en-
gaged in different activities of truth making and
meaning making.
One could object by saying that the specific
religious traditions that have had the most ob-
vious conflicts with science do think of them-
selves as being concerned with epistemology.
But even fundamentalists involved with cre-
ationist debates not only cede authority to the
scientific method (if not contemporary scien-
tists), but also are motivated by their concerns
that Darwinism leads to corrupt societal values
(Toumey 1994).
One could also object by saying that while
religions are indeed concerned with many mat-
Evans · Evans
ters, claims of truth are the keystone that keeps
the entire edifice intact. This seems false in that
the incompatibility of at least core Christian
truth claims with science has not had a negative
effect on religious practice in the United States
in the past few hundred years. Knowing that
science cannot prove that Jesus was resurrected
does not seem to have had an impact on be-
lief in the resurrection of Jesus. As is obvious,
people have the ability to maintain a number of
seemingly inconsistent ideas at once.
What seems most likely is that publicized
scientific claims about the world are so incon-
sequential to belief and practice in American
religion that they do not matter. The truth of
global warming, how birds fly, or whether nu-
clear energy plants are safe have no impact on
religion. Also note that most of the truth claims
of religion are not publicly contested by science.
There is no research agenda within science to
show that human resurrection is impossible, so
the incompatibility of truth claims on this topic
remains fully hypothetical and thus unlikely to
enter the mind of the average religious person.
Only a few issues, constructed as important by
activists with resources, merit such attention.
The social studies outlined above show how
rarely religion and science conflict at all and
how even more rarely they conflict over truth,
giving further reason to abandon the assump-
tion. In the twentieth century, only truth claims
about the book of Genesis have resulted in ac-
tual social conflict with organized institutional
struggles and, in this case, only for a minority
of the religious citizens of the United States.
The review of the literature clearly demon-
strates that whereas religion is considered in all
its incredible variation, science is more typically
conceived of in static and monolithic terms.
Science typically means the positivist, materi-
alist practices that are admittedly dominant in
the contemporary West. Of course, historically
other conceptions of knowledge creation such
as Baconianism were influential, but there is
certainly more variation under the title of sci-
ence than analysts are accounting for. This is
probably because the field of the sociology of
 science has not been interested in religion, and
this is the field that questions whether the naive
realist position really describes scientific prac-
tice. The studies of religion and science we have
cited above are more likely to be conducted
by sociologists of religion than sociologists of
science.
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If we leave the question of conflict over truth
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008.34:87-105. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
open rather than building it into our defini-
tions of religion and science, then we can imag-
ine breakthroughs in our understanding of long
stalled debates. As an example of the possi-
bilities, consider a new book on secularization
written by two political scientists outside the so-
ciology of religion and science: Norris & Ingle-
hart (2004) begin with a non-epistemological
definition of religion, that “a key factor driv-
ing religiosity” is “feelings of vulnerability to
physical, societal, and personal risks” (p. 4). In
this definition, religion clearly is not primarily
about explaining the natural world but about
the meaning of events outside of one’s control.
Implicit in their analysis is the notion that sci-
ence would lead to secularization with the de-
velopment of knowledge that reduces vulnera-
bility, such as improved medical care. However,
it is not automatic—the fruits of science would
actually have to be distributed to the people
through something like a social welfare state.
Knowledge alone is insufficient to lead to a de-
cline in religion. The authors seemingly can
then explain the classic deviant case in the secu-
larization debate—the United States—because
it is the one Westernized democracy where vul-
nerability is high owing to the lack of a welfare
state and other features. This openness to other
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any biases that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this
review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Alper Yalcinkaya, Ron Numbers, Joan Fujimura, Mark Chaves, and Tom Gieryn for
comments.
conceptions of religion and science, we argue,
not only helps the authors explain seculariza-
tion data better than previous efforts, but also
provides a model for the way forward in study-
ing religion and science.
At minimum, we suggest that future sociol-
ogists who examine the relationship between
religion and science not assume the episte-
mological conflict model, but rather leave the
source of contestation as an empirical ques-
tion. We maintain that attention to science as
a complex, plural, and multifaceted object of
study is necessary for producing useful stud-
ies of religion and science. Such studies may
come from STS or they may come from other
sociologists who incorporate STS approaches.
Either way, we argue that the best empirical
work comes from treating religion and sci-
ence not as predetermined categories but as the
words and actions of institutionally embedded
persons.
Finally, we note with interest that some of
the best sociological work on religion and sci-
ence happens when scholars are not explicitly
studying religion and science. We have high-
lighted work by anthropologists, political scien-
tists, and social movements scholars who treat
religion and science not as the only categories
to be studied but as pieces of larger puzzles.
Such studies often provide the most insight with
the fewest essential assumptions. We encour-
age such work in the future and humbly predict
that the best insights into religion and science
will emerge as scholars find ways to incorporate
the complexity of religion and science into their
work.
www.annualreviews.org • Religion and Science 101
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Annual Review
of Sociology

Contents Volume 34, 2008

Prefatory Chapters
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Reproductive Biology, Technology, and Gender Inequality:

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008.34:87-105. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

An Autobiographical Essay
Joan N. Huber p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 1
From Mead to a Structural Symbolic Interactionism and Beyond
Sheldon Stryker p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p15
Theory and Methods
Methodological Memes and Mores: Toward a Sociology
of Social Research
Erin Leahey p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p33

Social Processes
After Secularization?
Philip S. Gorski and Ateş Altınordu p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p55

Institutions and Culture

Religion and Science: Beyond the Epistemological Conflict Narrative
John H. Evans and Michael S. Evans p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p87
Black/White Differences in School Performance: The Oppositional
Culture Explanation
Douglas B. Downey p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 107

Formal Organizations
Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub: Empirical and Theoretical Advances
in the Sociology of Higher Education
Mitchell L. Stevens, Elizabeth A. Armstrong, and Richard Arum p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 127

Political and Economic Sociology

Citizenship and Immigration: Multiculturalism, Assimilation,
and Challenges to the Nation-State
Irene Bloemraad, Anna Korteweg, and Gökçe Yurdakul p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 153

v
 AR348-FM ARI 10 June 2008 11:22

Differentiation and Stratification

The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination
in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets
Devah Pager and Hana Shepherd p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 181
The Second Generation in Western Europe:
Education, Unemployment, and Occupational Attainment
Anthony F. Heath, Catherine Rothon, and Elina Kilpi p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 211
Broken Down by Race and Gender? Sociological Explanations
of New Sources of Earnings Inequality
Kevin T. Leicht p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 237
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Family Structure and the Reproduction of Inequalities

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Sara McLanahan and Christine Percheski p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 257

Unconscious Racism: A Concept in Pursuit of a Measure
Hart Blanton and James Jaccard p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 277

Individual and Society

Horizontal Stratification in Postsecondary Education:
Forms, Explanations, and Implications
Theodore P. Gerber and Sin Yi Cheung p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 299
Gender Inequalities in Education
Claudia Buchmann, Thomas A. DiPrete, and Anne McDaniel p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 319
Access to Civil Justice and Race, Class, and Gender Inequality
Rebecca L. Sandefur p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 339
How the Outside Gets In: Modeling Conversational Permeation
David R. Gibson p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 359
Testing and Social Stratification in American Education
Eric Grodsky, John Robert Warren, and Erika Felts p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 385

Policy
Social Networks and Health
Kirsten P. Smith and Nicholas A. Christakis p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 405

Sociology and World Regions

Gender in African Population Research: The Fertility/Reproductive
Health Example
F. Nii-Amoo Dodoo and Ashley E. Frost p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 431
Regional Institutions and Social Development in Southern Africa
Matthew McKeever p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 453

vi Contents
 AR348-FM ARI 10 June 2008 11:22

Conditional Cash Transfers as Social Policy in Latin America:

An Assessment of their Contributions and Limitations [Translation]
Enrique Valencia Lomelı́ p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 475
Las Transferencias Monetarias Condicionadas como Política Social en
América Latina. Un Balance: Aportes, Límites y Debates
[Original, available online at http://www.annualreviews.org/
go/EValenciaLomeli]
Enrique Valencia Lomelí p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 499

Indexes
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Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 25–34 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 525

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008.34:87-105. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 25–34 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 529

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Sociology articles may be found at

http://soc.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml

Contents vii