Introduction to the Science of Sociology

by Robert Ezra Park; E. W. Burgess

To a very great extent, as everybody knows, American colonization proceeded through the formation of religious communities. Such were the Pilgrim and the Puritan commonwealths. Such were the Quaker groups of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Such were the localized societies of the Dunkards, the Moravians, and the Mennonites.

As late as the middle of the nineteenth century the American people witnessed the birth and growth of one of the most remarkable religious communities known in history. The Mormon community of Utah, which, originating in 1830 as a band of relatives and acquaintances, clustered by an idea that quickly became a dogma, had become in fifty years a commonwealth de facto, defying the authority de jure of the United States.

We are not likely, however, again to witness a phenomenon of this kind in the civilized world. Recently we have seen the rise and the astonishingly rapid spread of another American religion, namely, the Christian Science faith. But it has created no community group. It has created only a dispersed sect. It is obvious to any intelligent observer, however untrained in sociological discrimination he may be, that the forces of Protestantism, still dividing and differentiating as they are, no longer to any great extent create new self-sufficing communities. They create only associations of irregular geographical dispersion, of more or less unstable or shifting membership. In a word, the conflicting-idea forces, which in our colonial days tended to create community groups as well as sects, tend now to create sectarian bodies only—mere denominational or partisan associations.

A similar contrast between an earlier and a later stage of culture group-making may be observed if we go back to centuries before the Protestant Reformation, there to survey a wider field and a longer series of historical periods.

It is a commonplace of historical knowledge that in all of the earliest civilizations there was an approximate identification of religion with ethnic consciousness and of political consciousness with both religious and race feeling. Each people had its own tribal or national gods, who were inventoried as national assets at valuations quite as high as those attached to tribal or national territory.

When, however, Roman imperial rule had been extended over the civilized world, the culture conflicts that then arose expended their group-creating force in simply bringing together like believers in sectarian association. Christianity, appealing to all bloods, in some measure to all economic classes, and spreading into all sections of the eastern Mediterranean region, did not to any great extent create communities. And what was true of Christianity was in like manner true of the Mithras cult, widely diffused in the second Christian century. Even Mohammedanism, a faith seemingly well calculated to create autonomous states, in contact with a world prepared by Roman organization could not completely identify itself with definite political boundaries.

The proximate causes of these contrasts are not obscure. We must suppose that a self-sufficing community might at one time, as well as at another, be drawn together by formative beliefs. But that it may take root somewhere and, by protecting itself against destructive external influences, succeed for a relatively long time in maintaining its integrity and its solidarity, it must enjoy a relative isolation. In a literal sense it must be beyond easy reach of those antagonistic forces which constitute for it the outer world of unbelief and darkness.

Such isolation is easily and often possible, however, only in the early stages of political integration. It is always difficult and unusual in those advanced stages wherein nations are combined in world-empires. It is becoming well-nigh impossible, now that all the continents have been brought under the sovereignty of the so-called civilized peoples, while these peoples themselves, freely communicating and intermingling, maintain with one another that good understanding which constitutes them, in a certain broad sense of the term, a world-society. The proximate effects also of the contrast that has been sketched are generally recognized.

So long as blood sympathy, religious faith, and political consciousness are approximately coterminous, the groups that they form, whether local communities or nations, must necessarily be rather sharply delimited. They must be characterized also by internal solidarity. Their membership is stable because to break the bond of blood is not only to make one's self an outcast but is also to be unfaithful to the ancestral gods; to change one's religion is not only to be impious but is also to commit treason; to expatriate one's self is not only to commit treason but is also to blaspheme against high heaven.

But when associations of believers or of persons holding in common any philosophy or doctrine whatsoever are no longer self-sufficing communities, and when nations composite in blood have become compound in structure, all social groups, clusters, or organizations, not only the cultural ones drawn together by formative ideas, but also the economic and the political ones, become in some degree plastic. Their membership then becomes to some extent shifting and renewable. Under these circumstances any given association of men, let it be a village, a religious group, a trade union, a corporation, or a political party, not only takes into itself new members from time to time; it also permits old members to depart. Men come and men go, yet the association or the group itself persists. As group or as organization it remains unimpaired.