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Faithful Decisions? Churches as Formal Organisations and 20th Century Religious History
| This paper seeks to offer a fresh conceptual and empirical perspective on the social and societal history of the Christian Churches in Twentieth Century Western Europe, with a particular focus on the Catholic Church. The paper will argue that the development of religion in this period has not only been characterised by processes such as the erosion of a Catholic “milieu” based on various religious associations or the impact of ‘secularization’. Rather, the significance of churches as formal organizations will be stressed. Formal organizations formalize membership roles (according to a dinstinction made by Talcott Parsons for both “audience roles”, i.e. the ‘laity’, and “performance roles”, i.e. the priests), and they connect decisions about membership with decisions about programmes which are implemented in order to reach the aims of the organization. The paper will argue that organization is a complex and also riskful strategy to societalize ‘faith’, and that church organizations were facing different and always problematic options when confronted with social change particularly in the period since 1945. The distinction between ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ as options within declining organizations will be applied to the church history since the 1960s. Finally, the distinction made by Ernst Troeltsch between “church” and “sect” will be discussed in the light of this evidence, as well as his thesis, developed in 1912, that “the main current of Christian religious history has been church history”.
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