ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 analyzes how this overt religious proselytizing by Christian sociologists was a short-lived triumph of the theistic worldview in sociology and how it was rejected due to the rise of science. In order to further establish itself as a legitimate discipline to be studied in the university, sociology attached itself to the already growing influence of science. In fact, science was the reason American universities began to replace European universities as the premier sites for advanced graduate education. In one of the ironies of American sociology’s early history, the “Giddings men” (students trained at Columbia University in statistically oriented research methodologies by Franklin Giddings), rejected Giddings’ desire to use statistical reasoning to understand the “mind of God,” and stripped any religious orientation from his “scientific,” quantitative sociology. With this rejection the moral and religious underpinnings of sociology all but disappeared. In particular, the most famous of the “Giddings men,” William Fielding Ogburn, went to the University of Chicago from Columbia University, where he replaced Albion Small as the leading figure in the sociology department. What Ogburn did was banish any vestiges of the religious fervor Small had introduced into sociology. Sociology was to be a pure, objective science. Positivism was institutionalized as the method of sociological research. There was no place for religion, or for any semblance of transcendence and moral undergirding. Religion was seen as just another non-objective ideology. It had no place in the “science of sociology.”
