The established and the newcomers. A Weberian-Bourdieusian view of congregations in the Swiss religious field

Abstract

At least since the work of Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu, scholars have claimed that established and newcomer groups may compete for resources and power in religious fields. Remarkably, even though the religious field concept rests in important ways on the relationships between religious suppliers, there have, to date, been few quantitative studies that describe these fields on the congregational level. Using a representative National Congregation Study (NCS), we measure and compare the activities and resources of established and newcomer congregations across all major religious traditions in Switzerland. As expected, establishment status is linked to strong privileges for the established groups. Despite diminishing numbers of official members and diminishing attendance, established groups are much wealthier and have more staff than newcomer groups. Other than expected, established groups do not seem to compete with newcomer groups by using exclusion strategies. On the contrary, established groups explicitly seek ecumenical and interreligious contacts and are very tolerant concerning individual social and religious diversity. We suggest that this does not contradict the Weberian/Bourdieusian field theory, but can be viewed as a strategy by established groups to preserve their threatened establishment status.