ABSTRACT

Rodney Stark is a stereotypically US sociologist of religion. Prior to him, most sociologists of religion treated the United States as an exception to their theories. Stark, along with a group of like-minded scholars, including Roger Finke and Laurence Iannaccone, has taken the United States as his paradigm. In orientation, Stark is not only American but strikingly Reaganesque. His theorizing rests upon a foundation of free-market, supply-side economics that is both dismissive of liberalism, which he simply equates with a lack of religious conviction (Stark and Finke 2000: 276), and triumphalistically Christian, with an especial fondness for American Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism (cf. Carroll 1996). Since the mid-1990s, he has published a series of books (1996, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007) that not only present the discovery (rather than the invention, construction, or cognitive emergence) of God as a social-scientic inevitability but also make Christianity responsible for the development of modern science and technology and the ‘success of the West.’ Islam, he baldly proclaims, was and is a retrograde movement (Stark 2007: 394-5).