Rodney Stark

• 1. Introduction

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  Rodney William Stark grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, in a Lutheran family, attended journalism school, and spent several years as a newspaper reporter before anyone might have guessed he would one day reshape how scholars think about God, belief, and history. He was born on the 8th of July, 1934, and died on the 21st of July, 2022. In between, he wrote more than 30 books and more than 140 scholarly articles on subjects as varied as prejudice, crime, suicide, and city life in ancient Rome. He twice won the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. He spent 32 years teaching at the University of Washington, then moved to Baylor University in 2004, where he held the title of Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences until his death. What drove a former journalist to become one of the most provocative sociologists of religion in the United States? Why did he spend decades arguing that secularization is a myth, that Christianity grew not through miracles but through social networks, and that anti-Catholic prejudice has distorted centuries of historical writing? And what did a man who once called himself personally incapable of religious faith eventually say about his own beliefs? Those questions run through everything Stark wrote.

• 2. From Newsroom to Academy

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  Stark graduated in journalism from the University of Denver in 1959 and immediately went to work as a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, where he stayed until 1961. That background in practical, evidence-driven writing would mark his scholarly style for the rest of his career. He pursued graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his MA in sociology in 1965 and his PhD, also from Berkeley, in 1971. Before completing that doctorate, he had already published an early and influential conversion theory in 1965, co-authored with John Lofland, based on fieldwork among members of the Unification Church. The article appeared in the American Sociological Review and introduced concepts about how people adopt radically new beliefs through social ties. After finishing his PhD, Stark held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. A detail that would later appeal to journalists: during high school in North Dakota, Stark played football alongside Alvin Plantinga, who went on to become an influential Christian philosopher teaching at Calvin College and Notre Dame.

• 3. Rewards, Compensators, and Religious Economy

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  During the late 1970s and 1980s, Stark worked closely with William Sims Bainbridge on what became known as the Stark-Bainbridge theory of religion. Their collaboration produced two books: The Future of Religion in 1985 and A Theory of Religion in 1987. The theory tries to explain religious involvement through a framework of rewards and compensators, treating belief and practice as rational responses to human needs that earthly life cannot always satisfy. Scholars later credited this work as a precursor to the more fully developed economic approach to religion advanced by Laurence Iannaccone and others. Stark called his broader framework the theory of religious economy, applying the logic of markets and rational choice to the way competing faiths attract, retain, and lose adherents. The Future of Religion, co-written with Bainbridge, won the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 1985. A second book, co-written with Roger Finke, The Churching of America 1776-1990, won the same award in 1992.

• 4. Secularization, R.I.P.

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  In 1999, Stark published an article whose title alone was a provocation: "Secularization, R.I.P." It became both famous and controversial in the sociology of religion. The core argument was that statistical data does not support the theory that religion declines as societies modernize. Stark acknowledged that the forms and practices of religion change over time. What he challenged was the assumption that this change amounts to a decline. He argued that secularization theory rests on faulty quantitative analysis and on ideological preconceptions rather than on what the data actually shows. He expanded this argument in later books, including The Triumph of Faith in 2015, which carried the subtitle "Why The World Is More Religious Than Ever." His 2012 book America's Blessings put a pointed claim directly into its subtitle, arguing that religion benefits everyone, including atheists. These arguments placed Stark firmly against a longstanding consensus in mainstream sociology, and the debate he helped ignite about secularization continued well after his death.

• 5. Christianity's Rise Through Social Networks

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  The Rise of Christianity, published in 1996, brought Stark's methods to a wide audience beyond academic sociology. His central claim was that Christianity spread not through dramatic mass conversions but through gradual, individual conversions along webs of family, friends, and colleagues. To make this case, he drew on documented evidence of how Christianity had spread through the Roman Empire, then compared that pattern to the history of the LDS church in the 19th and 20th centuries. The comparison illustrated how sustained, continuous growth at a modest rate can produce enormous numerical expansion over roughly 200 years. Scholars had previously tended to assume that mass conversions were necessary to account for Christianity's scale. Stark's use of exponential growth as the explanatory mechanism was widely accepted after the book appeared. He also advanced two more specific arguments: that Christianity attracted converts partly because it treated women better than pagan religions did, and that making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire actually weakened it, by bringing in people with shallow or absent belief. That second argument connected directly to his broader work on the free rider problem in religious movements, where successful faiths dilute their own fervor as they become dominant.

• 6. Bearing False Witness

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  Stark was not himself a Roman Catholic, but he argued in several works that anti-Catholic prejudice has distorted the historical record in lasting ways. His most direct statement of this case came in Bearing False Witness in 2016, which carried the subtitle "Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History." The book targeted what Stark called an "anti-Catholic history" applied to the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the conduct of Pope Pius XII during the Nazi period. His argument was that this anti-Catholic reading of events persists in school curricula and in mainstream media even though it is at odds with what contemporary academic research actually shows. A similar spirit ran through God's Battalions in 2009, which made the case for the Crusades on historical grounds. Stark also published Reformation Myths in 2017, extending his critique of received historical narratives to popular accounts of the Protestant Reformation.

• 7. A Shifting Personal Faith

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  In A Theory of Religion, the 1987 book co-written with Bainbridge, both authors described themselves as "personally incapable of religious faith." That statement would not be Stark's final word. He was reluctant throughout his career to discuss his own beliefs in public. In a 2004 interview he said he was not a man of faith, but also not an atheist. Then in 2007, after accepting his appointment at Baylor University, he told an interviewer that his self-understanding had changed. He described himself in that conversation as an "independent Christian," and said he had always been a "cultural Christian" in the sense of being "strongly committed to Western Civilization." Looking back at his earlier positions, he wrote: "I was never an atheist, but I probably could have been best described as an agnostic." The 2007 interview was given in the context of taking up a position at a Baptist university with an explicit religious mission. Stark had by then written For the Glory of God in 2003, arguing that monotheism drove the development of science and the abolition of slavery, and The Victory of Reason in 2005, which linked Christianity to the rise of freedom and capitalism in the West. His intellectual trajectory and his personal one had moved in the same direction.