In my family, the study of sociology skipped a generation—mine. My father left Lutheran parish ministry to become a sociology professor, and my son recently graduated from Indiana University with a major in sociology. (That I’m able to understand some of their language I owe in part to sociologist Robert Wuthnow, whose weekly Religion and Culture Workshop I was privileged to attend while I was a graduate student in religious studies.)
So on this hundredth anniversary of the death of Max Weber, I pay tribute to the sociologists in my life by recalling the unlikely story of Weber’s sojourn in my native North Carolina.
Maximilian Karl Emil Weber died in Munich on June 14, 1920, at age 56, of complications from the 1918 pandemic flu. Weber needs no introduction as a canonical theorist, but his travel to North Carolina is not as widely known.
In August 1904, Weber and his wife, Marianne, sailed to the United States to attend a scholarly congress held in conjunction with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. After the meeting, they toured other regions of the country, including rural locales in Oklahoma and North Carolina, where Weber witnessed the “inner-worldly asceticism” made famous by his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which he was then writing. Weber defined inner-worldly ascetics as the self-scrutinizing, hyper-industrious Protestants of the stricter sects—Baptists, Quakers, Pietists, and Methodists, among others.
Weber observed these sectarian Protestants up close in Mount Airy, North Carolina—later the birthplace of Andy Griffith and the inspiration for the town of Mayberry in The Andy Griffith Show—where he and Marianne visited several cousins on his mother’s side.
With one of the relatives serving as their translator, the Webers attended what Marianne called a “Baptist christening”—a service of believers’ baptism, in which a number of people were baptized by immersion in an ice-cold mountain stream. One of the persons being baptized was a businessman who was planning to open a bank in Mount Airy. Recounting the incident in a later essay, Weber cited the man’s baptism as evidence of acetic Protestantism’s legitimating function in the community. The thorough scrutiny required for admission to the Baptist sect certified the businessman’s probity in the eyes of prospective clients.
This “ruthlessly rigorous control over the conduct of their members,” as Weber put it, was a hallmark of inner-worldly asceticism. In such austere conventicles, Weber maintained, the real strength of Protestantism was apparent, in contrast to what he regarded as the decadence of Europe’s established churches. He concluded: “One only has to look at the Berlin Cathedral to know that it is certainly not in this grandiose Caesaro-Papist showpiece but rather in the small meeting halls of the Quakers and Baptists, where there is no such mystical adornment, that the ‘spirit’ of Protestantism is most truly manifested.”
It was a romanticized view, to be sure, and not entirely new. As I’ve argued in another essay (see citation below), the “Weber Thesis” (his claim that Protestantism fueled the rise of capitalism) bears striking resemblance to ideas expressed earlier by the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe. Weber didn’t plagiarize Stowe, but both were writing from a similarly ingrained confessional stereotype that equated Protestantism with dynamism and progress and Catholicism with passivity and retrogression.
Scholars now recognize the cultural chauvinism of this aspect of Weber’s work. The debate over what’s still salvageable from his corpus will continue.
But on Weber’s hundredth Todestag, I’m content to remember his Mount Airy connection. As a North Carolinian, I’d like to think that besides giving us Andy Griffith and Mayberry, Mount Airy gave us the Weber Thesis.
Further Reading
Larry G. Keeter, “Max Weber’s Visit to North Carolina,” Journal of the History of Sociology 3, no. 2 (1981): 108-14.
Paul Münch, “The Thesis Before Weber: An Archaeology.” In Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, edited by Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
James L. Peacock and Ruel W. Tyson, Jr., Pilgrims of Paradox: Calvinism and Experience Among the Primitive Baptists of the Blue Ridge (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989).
Lawrence A. Scaff, Max Weber in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011).
Peter J. Thuesen, “Geneva’s Crystalline Clarity: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Max Weber on Calvinism and the American Character.” In John Calvin’s American Legacy, edited by Thomas J. Davis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
© 2020 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved