I have done my fair share of reading in the sociology of religion and in social research in general. Yesterday I tried to read through the first chapter of John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. In large part he frames the work as an apologetic for theology as a foundational discourse for understanding micro and macro social behavior and social structures. He frames this incredibly weighty and sophisticated argument contra secular social theory which he asserts is essentially anemic and limited to relative surface issues in the way it makes sense of society. The problem is the very differentiation of theology from other sources of rational discourse. Well and good.
My question with such lenghty and weighty discourses is what overall purpose it serves. I cannot see this work being very influential to sociologists who are quite comfortable in focusing on the causes and effects of different social structures and behaviors. Certainly the work of Berger, Stark, Smith, Bellah and others (Milbank does critique all of these thinkers) and certainly David Martin who is also a trained theologian forcus on more than the surface structures of social behavior, but attempt to dig to deeper levels of abstraction in order to ground their theoretical frameworks in a more rigorous manner.
My problem is that Milbank is so abstract in his arguments contra social theory, that I find is completely useless in the process of social theorizing itself. It is, without reserve, the most unhelpful text I have encountered thus far. Many may take issue that I am limiting Milbank's text to utility. To this assertion I say that it does not grasp the fundamental ground of social theory which is that it is fundamentally pragmatic.
This is where I find Milbank's work anemic (and for some that statement may seem like absurd apostasy in the presence of genius). It seems to lack any pragmatic sense of the world in which non-academic elites live. It appears to be academic discourse for its own sake and to drive the interests of a relative few who will smoke pipes and sip brandy discussing such abstractions while sociologists are actually working to find out what makes the rest of the world behave as it does. This latter project gives people the tools to make the world womething that it is currently not. Perhaps for Milbank that is the very midguided problem with social theory. I find it, and the social research community at large finds it, the source of its very liberation from the constraints of academic irrelevancy and indeed not symbolic of a discipline that has lost its way.
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