Christian Smith is one of the most prolific sociologists of religion in the world. In the 1990s, his research project on American evangelicalism produced multiple award-winning volumes, including American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (University of Chicago, 1998) and, with Michael Emerson, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford, 2000). Since joining the faculty of Notre Dame five years ago, Smith has published several works that are more theoretical in approach, including a provocative journal essay on "Why Christianity Works."

Critics would not have quibbled with a sociological article along the lines of "How Christianity Works." An article with such a title would likely relate empirical research on the way that ordinary Christians invoke their religious faith in various social contexts, such as at home, at work, and in politics. But that was not the thrust of Smith's 2008 article. Instead, he took a more normative stance, drawing linkages among the content of the Christian faith, the positive effects Christianity has had on adherents, and the persistence of the faith over two millennia.

Smith's normative hermeneutic is even more obvious in one of his latest books, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. This 544-page volume is one of the most ambitious works of sociology I have read. In it, Smith endeavors not simply to offer a new theory of human personhood or to critique prevailing theoretical paradigms of social science, both of which he does exceedingly well. Rather, he seeks to invoke or reinstate—depending on your perspective—a much fuller purpose for the discipline. As he states, "A central purpose of sociology as a discipline should be to help achieve the human good." Granted, segments of the discipline have advanced this sort of altruistic vision for quite some time, but to the best of my knowledge, no sociologist of religion—and certainly not a sociologist who is personally religious, as Smith is (he recently converted from evangelical Protestantism to Roman Catholicism)—has taken such a strong position.

What Is a Person? offers the kind of "grand theory" that characterizes works such as Talcott Parsons' The Social System (Free Press, 1951) and The Social Construction of Reality (Doubleday, 1966) by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Smith advances a theory of the ontology of the nature of human personhood, drawing on three vital sources from social science and the humanities: critical realism, philosophical personalism, and antinaturalistic phenomenological epistemology. Fundamentally, Smith posits a social theory of the middle, one that avoids the overreacting tendencies of individualism and structuralism that orient most theoretical approaches in social science. Like many works of social theory, the book will appeal to philosophers more than mainstream social scientists—at least as social science operates today, where methodological mania is the coin of the realm. Yet Smith persuasively argues that all of social science assumes a model of human personhood, even if that model is latent and unexamined (which is nearly always the case).

Smith advances his understanding of personhood through the theoretical scaffolding of critical realism. Critical realism, which is much more popular in European sociology and in the humanities in North America than in the social sciences here, seeks to provide a via media between positivist empiricism and postmodern constructionism, which represent the two prevailing epistemological poles of contemporary social science. Positivist empiricism makes the mistake of conflating what's real with what is observable; critical realism distinguishes between the two, insisting that a great deal of reality exists independent of humans' consciousness of it. This line of thought draws an analogy with modern scientific discoveries: Just because scientists could not observe protons in the 17th century did not make protons any less real. So it may be with other dimensions of reality, such as divine inspiration or miraculous healings. To fully understand human personhood, Smith suggests, we have to make room for things such as intuition, even revelation, regardless of our ability to measure and test such things.

By the same token, critical realism critiques the postmodern claim that everything in life is socially constructed, that all we know and experience in the world is the product of humans' making. Instead, there are dimensions of reality that exist independent of our efforts. This point most naturally comports with an orthodox Christian understanding of the world, one where God endows the world and humanity with certain things that humans did nothing to generate on their own. Smith produces a list of thirty items (such as aesthetic judgment and self-reflexivity) that are unique human capacities. These emerge from humans' interaction with the environment over time, but they are endemic to human personhood. This section of the book reminded me of Parsons' famous AGIL framework, which sought to explain the four functions of every system—adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latent pattern maintenance. Yet Smith's formulation makes much greater room for human agency, in large part because of his focus on the properties of emergence: "None of the[se] capacities … would have a chance to develop normally … apart from regular and intense social interaction with other humans."

At the heart of the book is a forceful critical examination of the three prevailing paradigms of sociology today: social constructionism, network structuralism, and variables analysis. Smith's criticisms of social constructionism are peppered throughout the book, but in the third chapter, "The Reality of Social Construction," he helpfully explains how this approach's fixation on language diminishes the agency of human personhood. In a memorable metaphor, Smith says that this approach "liquefies the person into language and so eliminates human ontological substance and causal agency."

One of the book's most trenchant critiques of American sociology as it is practiced today appears in the fourth chapter, addressing network analysis. Smith criticizes network structuralism for its inattention to the question of motivation; its impressively complicated analysis obscures the more fundamental question of why people do what they do. He claims that sociologists are so intent on currying favor with and garnering legitimacy from colleagues in the natural and physical sciences that they rely on "preposterous" social theories of human personhood so long as they appear to be methodologically sophisticated. He goes on to say that "anxiety about the scientific status of sociology is a motivation for the kind of disciplinary scholarship that most threatens, through its antihumanism, the moral and political status of human persons."

Statements such as this are not likely to score points for Smith with the editors of the American Sociological Review. But in conversations I have had with colleagues around the country, a number of sociologists agree with him. The discipline and its flagship publications have become so fixated on the mathematical elegance of statistical models that they have ignored the fundamental questions of human personhood that are being raised by the phenomena being studied.

In the book's finest chapter, "Persons and Mechanisms (Not) in Variables Sociology," Smith cogently addresses the shortcomings of quantitative sociology, which he refers to as "variables sociology." He attacks the "fetishism of asterisks" that plagues much of the discipline, whereby scholars narrow their empirical vision to levels of statistical significance without attending to weightier matters. He writes, "the inherent logic of variables social science arguably works at cross-purposes with moral and political commitments to human equality, dignity, and justice." To address these more significant issues, Smith favors qualitative research techniques, such as ethnography and interviewing, where human subjects are (presumably) at the forefront of the researcher's mind. That is a striking assertion for a scholar who directs Notre Dame's Center for Social Research, which is home to the institution's statistical and survey research services.

Smith does not believe we ought to jettison quantitative research altogether—not at all. Rather, he advocates for a critical realist orientation to quantitative methods, one that attends not only to causal mechanisms in explaining, for example, why churched single adults in their twenties marry more often than do their unchurched peers, but those in their forties do not. Critical realism also considers conjunctural and suppressing effects as various social mechanisms interact with one another. Hence, it is possible that church-level variables may be suppressing or exacerbating individual-level characteristics that are often overlooked in the elusive quest for parsimonious, publishable studies. This part of the book, which amounts to a methodological manifesto, should be required reading for every aspiring sociologist. Such effects are rarely discussed in sociology courses, though every sociologist recognizes they clearly must be at work.

At the outset, Smith claims that philosophical personalism and antinaturalistic phenomenological epistemology are as important as critical realism, but by the book's final two chapters, the latter theory is clearly more fundamental to his argument. Simply titled "The Good" and "Human Dignity," these chapters are Smith's most speculative but also, the reader senses, the ones most important to him. In them, Smith endeavors to overcome what he calls "personal scholarly schizophrenia by offering a single, coherent theory that informs and underwrites good sociological scholarship and the right moral and political commitments." His enthusiasm for critical realism is justified in many ways; it is a better approach than many of the prevailing alternatives. At the same time, the reader gets tired of this point by the book's end, because the author touts the approach's virtues too relentlessly.

Readers who are unsympathetic to Smith's project of wedding moral philosophy to social theory will be least impressed with the chapter on human dignity. Here, the author asserts a number of points but does not persuade as effectively as he does in the earlier chapters. At the same time, those readers who agree with Smith's overall concern for the declining importance of the human in social science will resonate with the book's conclusion as he suggests the possibility that a scientific hermeneutic can sustain a moral vision for the world. Certainly, Smith's approach is more likely to accomplish that than would social constructionism or positivist empiricism, but such a bold proposal needs more careful consideration than a single chapter can offer. It is encouraging to see that Smith approvingly cites support from thinkers as diverse as Jacques Maritain, Michael Polanyi, and Karol Wojtyla (better known as Pope John Paul II).

The book has a number of unnecessary, albeit interesting, tangents (such as the etymology of different terms), and the prose contains too much sign-posting and enumerated lists, which convey the tone of a lecture at various points. And in his definitions, especially, Smith compromises succinctness for comprehensiveness. His definition of a person goes on for sixty-six words, and his definition of social structures is similarly long. There are a few moments of technical jargon, though thankfully we are spared most of that because of the book's multidisciplinary audience.

The thrust of the book is an argument in favor of multiple perspectives and broad understanding as a way of enhancing the contributions of social scientists. Here, Smith succeeds in practicing what he preaches. The breadth of sources consulted for this work is impressive; by my count, he consulted over 600 different scholarly works in fields ranging from philosophy to literary studies to physics. Smith cites David Sloan Wilson's metaphor of the academy as an "archipelago" where scholars in different disciplines, like isolated island-dwellers, rarely engage each other's works or consider how their differing perspectives could yield a fuller picture of particular subjects of study. What Is a Person? endeavors to provide a metatheory that can frame and direct our scientific work through a shared pursuit of human flourishing that is grounded in a critical realist understanding of human personhood. Smith rightly reminds us that plural bases of knowledge are scholarly assets, not liabilities. This work hearkens back to the 19th century, when moral philosophy served as the capstone course in American institutions of higher education. The 20th century was an era of disciplinary specialization, but the last twenty years have borne witness to the scholarly breakthroughs that come from multidisciplinary projects as various as the Human Genome Project and the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture.

It remains to be seen if social scientists in North America will embrace a critical realist approach to human personhood in the way Christian Smith hopes, but What Is a Person? is a landmark work from a highly influential scholar. If any single book can bring human personhood back to the center of sociological investigation without devolving into wholly individualist or constructivist accounts, this is it.

D. Michael Lindsay is president and professor of sociology at Gordon College.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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