Leadership

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LEADERSHIP

LEADERSHIP . The concept of religious leadership, although indispensable to general discourse, has been of limited value to the social scientific study of religion, which has advanced little beyond the pioneering studies of Max Weber and Joachim Wach. While a great deal is known about individual religious leaders and have accumulated a reservoir of case studies of such leaders, far less is known about the phenomenon of leadership. Indeed, what is lacking at present is a generally accepted concept of religious leadership. Scholars working in different religious traditions use diverse modes of theorizing and analysis and do so in pursuit of differing and often unrelated questions. Important but largely unrecognized work in the psychology of leadership in small groups, social exchange models of interaction processes developed by sociologists, and shifts in focus from power to leadership in political science thinking all provide new bases for generalizations about religious leadership across differing cultures and times.

Religious leadership may be defined as the process by which leaders induce followers to act for certain transcendental goals that embody the values, motivations, and aspirations of both leaders and followers. Such leadership involves the exercise of power in religious collectivities, but its domain is more limited than that of power. Unrestricted power over others is exercised to realize the goals of the power-wielder whether or not these goals are shared by the followers. The essence of leadership lies in the manner in which leaders perceive and act on their own and their followers' values and needs (Burns, 1978).

Weber's Typology of Religious Leadership

The groundwork for a comparative study of religious leadership was laid by the German sociologist Max Weber in his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1925), the first strictly empirical comparison of the social structure and normative order of societies in world-historical depth. He contributed the outlines of a typology of religious leaders as well as a major statement on forms of domination and the bases of legitimization of authority underlying different types of leadership. In spite of his stress on the independent significance of religious values and ethics, he acknowledged the importance of the social vehicles through which the impact of religion is effected. His analysis of religious groups, as one instance of a variety of nearly universal types of human groups found at differing phases of historical development, highlights the crucial importance of religious leadership as a vehicle of religiosity and religious change.

Weber isolates the features peculiar to three major types of leaders—magicians, prophets, and priests—through a comparison with each other as well as with the subsidiary leadership roles of lawgivers, teachers of ethics, and mystagogues. The emergence of priests as distinct from practitioners of magic centers on several points of differentiation: (1) priests influence the gods by means of worship, whereas magicians coerce demons by magical means; (2) priests are "functionaries of a regularly organized and permanent enterprise concerned with influencing the gods," whereas magicians engage in "individual and occasional efforts"; (3) priests are actively associated with some type of social organization by which they are employed, in contrast to magicians who are typically self-employed; and (4) the priest exerts influence by virtue of his professional expertise in fixed doctrine and his vocational qualifications, whereas magicians exert their influence by virtue of personal gifts and charisma made manifest in miracles. The nature of the learning of these leadership roles differs; priests undergo rational training and discipline and magicians are prepared through an "awakening" using nonrational means and proceeding in part as a training in purely empirical lore.

Weber recognized that in reality the contrasts just noted are fluid and by no means unequivocally determinable so that empirically the two contrasted types often flow into one another. The crucial feature of the priesthood is centered on "the specialization of a particular group of persons in the continuous operation of a cultic enterprise permanently associated with particular norms, places, and times and related to specific social groups."

Building on Adolf von Harnack's typology, Weber isolates the sociologically distinctive traits of the prophet as a "purely individual bearer of charisma who by virtue of his mission proclaims a religious doctrine or divine commandment." For Weber, it is this personal call that is the decisive element distinguishing prophet from priest. It is the latter who claims authority by virtue of his service in a sacred tradition, whereas the prophet's claim is based on personal revelation and charisma. It is no accident that almost no prophets have emerged from the priestly class. The priest typically dispenses salvation by virtue of his office even in instances in which personal charisma may be involved. It is the hierarchical office that confers legitimate authority upon the priest as a member of an organized collectivity.

A second and closely linked point is Weber's focus on the prophet as an agent of change who takes personal responsibility for breaking with the established normative order, declaring this break to be morally legitimate. The leadership role of the priest by contrast is exercised typically in the service of an established order.

Unlike the magician, the prophet claims definitive revelations, the core of his mission being doctrine or commandment, not magic. Again, Weber acknowledged that this distinction was fluid; magicians are frequently knowledgeable experts in divination and prophets often practice divination as well as magical healing and counseling like the neviʾim mentioned in the Old Testament. What distinguishes the prophet from both the magician and the priest in this regard is an economic factor, namely, that prophecy is unremunerated. Weber further differentiates prophets from the religious leadership roles of lawgivers, epitomized in the Greek aisumnētai, teachers of ethics, and mystagogues. While the transition historically from prophet to each of these types is not clearly defined, Weber separated out from the category of prophet these other types, treating them as analytically distinguishable leadership roles for "sundry purveyors of salvation." Of these, only the mystagogue—Weber's neologism for the religious counterpart of the demagogue—shared with the prophet a leadership role that demands a break with the established order. But whereas the prophet legitimates that break in ethical and moral terms, the bases of legitimation for the mystagogue are primarily magical.

Central to Weber's delineation of the role of prophet was his differentiation of two subtypes. One was the ethical prophet, who preaches as one who has received a commission from God and who demands obedience as an ethical duty. He is represented most clearly by Muhammad and Zarathushtra (Zoroaster). The Buddha by contrast typified the exemplary prophet, who by his personal example demonstrates to others the way to religious salvation.

A discussion of Weber's typology of religious leaders is distorted unless it includes reference to his discussion of the laity whom prophets and priests sought to influence. For a prophecy is successful only if the prophet succeeds in winning permanent helpers. These include the amaga, or members of the inner circle of devotees of Zoroastrianism; the disciples of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament; and the intimate companions of Hinduism and Islam. The distinctive characteristic in all these cases is that these are personal devotees of the prophet who, in contrast to those of the priest, are not organized into guilds or office hierarchies. In addition to these most active co-workers, there is a widening circle of followers who support the prophet and expect to obtain their salvation through his mission. These followers may engage in intermittent action or associate themselves continuously in a congregation. The latter community does not arise in connection with every type of prophecy; generally it is the result of routinization, that is, of a process securing the permanence of the prophet's preaching and the congregation's role as distributor and recipient of grace.

Weber reserves the term congregation for situations in which the laity has been organized permanently in such a manner that it becomes an active participant. Thus a mere administrative unit that delimits the jurisdiction of priests is a parish but not yet a congregational community. From this point of view, one finds that in medieval Christianity in the West and Islam in Near East the parish was essentially a passive ecclesiastical tax unit with the laity generally lacking the character of a congregation. By contrast, it is the distinctive characteristic of sects that they are based on a restricted association of individual local congregations. In such circumstances the relationship between priesthood and laity becomes of crucial significance for the practical consequences of religion and for the exercise of religious leadership.

Weber here argues that every type of priesthood is to some extent in a similar position: To maintain its own power it must meet the needs of the laity to a very considerable degree. Because as a rule both the ethical and the exemplary prophet are themselves laymen, the prophet's power position depends in both cases also on that of his lay followers. To what extent the prophet would succeed as a leader depended on the outcome of a struggle for power. All prophets made use of the prestige of their prophetic charisma and the support it gained them among the laity. The sacredness of the radically new revelation was continuously opposed to that of tradition. Depending on the success of the propaganda by each side, the priesthood might compromise with the new prophecy, outbid its doctrine, eliminate it, or be subjugated itself. Religious leadership, in short, is exercised typically in competition or conflict with others in which the different leaders contend for the support of their potential followers.

In Weber's ensuing discussion of the major social classes and their affinities for religion, he provides a comparative frame of reference for assessing the influence of class factors in conditioning the outcome of specific religious leaders' claims for support by the laity. This includes a discussion of intellectuals and of the conditions under which priests and monks become intellectual elaborators of religion, as was true, for example, in India, Egypt, and Babylonia. In the religions of the ancient city-states, however, notably among the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, the development of all metaphysical and ethical thought became the province of nonpriests. Weber further emphasized the predominance of high-status intellectuals as religious innovators and leaders.

The Bases of Legitimation of Authority

Weber's typology of religious leadership is intricately linked to his sociological analysis of forms of domination, with its threefold typology of the bases of legitimation of authority to which such leaders made claim. [See Authority.] Domination was defined by Weber as "the probability that certain specific commands (or all commands) will be obeyed by a given group of persons." Domination ("authority") for Weber could be based on diverse motives of compliance "all the way from simple habituation to the most purely rational calculation of advantage." But he makes clear that every form of domination implies at least a minimum of voluntary compliance and thus represents obedience based on self-interested calculation.

For Weber, the key to leadership had to be found in the kind of legitimacy claimed by the leader, the type of obedience demanded, the kind of administrative support developed to guarantee its success, and the modes by which such authority is exercised. All of these would differ fundamentally depending upon which of three types of legitimization was most prevalent. The validity of claims to legitimacy, according to Weber, were based on (1) rational grounds, resting on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands, that is, legal authority; (2) grounds resting on an established belief in the sanctity of traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them, that is, traditional authority; and (3) charismatic grounds "resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character of an individual person and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him, i.e., charismatic authority."

The concept of charisma, "gift of grace," was taken from the vocabulary of early Christianity and drew heavily on writings of the church and legal historian Rudolf Sohm, in particular his Kirchenrecht (1892). The term charisma as elaborated by Weber refers to "a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These … are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a 'leader.'" What is crucial is how the individual is regarded by those subject to charismatic authority, that is, by the leader's followers or disciples. Such recognition is freely given and guaranteed by "what is held to be proof, originally always a miracle, and consists in devotion to the corresponding revelation, hero worship, or absolute trust in the leader."

Weber notes that where charisma is genuine, the basis lies not in such proof per se but rather in the conception that it is the duty of those subject to charismatic authority to recognize its genuineness and to act accordingly. Psychologically, such recognition is a matter of complete personal devotion to the possessor of the quality, arising out of enthusiasm or alternately out of despair or of hope. The charismatic leader's legitimacy to act is thus not derived from the follower's consent or from custom or law, but from a transcendental realm.

The right of the leader to rule is determined by the follower's recognition of the godlike qualities either imputed to him by the follower or bestowed on him through ascension to a charismatic office. The success of the charismatic leader in developing a community of disciples or followers gives rise to the charismatic community. But if that community is to take on a degree of permanence—a matter of considerable interest to the disciples and followers if their own positions are to be put on a stable, everyday basis—it becomes necessary for the character of the original charismatic authority to be altered radically.

The problem of leadership transfer from the charismatically endowed leader to his successor is thus inherently unstable. How this problem is met, if it is met at all, is amenable to a range of solutions. These include the search for a new leader, using as criteria qualities that will fit him for the position of authority, as has historically been so with the search for a new Dalai Lama; revelation manifested in the use of lots or divine judgment or other techniques of selection; designation on the part of the original charismatic leader of his own successor (a very common form); designation of a successor by the charismatically qualified administrative staff together with his recognition by the community; and transmission of charisma by heredity or by ritual means. In the last case, charisma becomes disassociated from a particular individual, is objectified, and becomes a transferable entity that may be transformed into a charisma of office. A critical example is the transmission of priestly charisma by anointing, consecration, or the laying on of hands.

The Weberian typology of religious leadership was subsequently enlarged by Joachim Wach in his Einführung in die Religionssoziologie (1931). Wach attempts to classify the variety of types of religious authority "according to the principle of personal and official charisma," although he recognizes that a given type can include a combination of both elements. Even though the critical issue of leadership as deriving from different forms of charismatic authority is never explicitly addressed by Wach, his typology has generally been presumed to constitute both a delineation of types of religious leaders and an analysis of the underlying types of legitimation of their rule. In addition to the categories of priest, prophet, and magician already developed by Weber to which Wach's delineation provides little that is analytically new, Wach adds the following types: founder, reformer, seer, diviner, saint, and religiosus. As with Weber, Wach's analysis is directed not only to an examination of the charismatic basis of their claims to authority, but also to an elaboration of the variety of religious roles played by such leaders. Even as a classificatory tool, however, Wach's typology needs to be substantially enlarged if it is to encompass the diversity of religious leadership known to contemporary scholars. Still more crucial is the fact that with Wach, the emphasis shifted from typology as a tool of analysis and explanation to a tool of description and classification. It is to these analytic and explanatory concerns to which this article must now return.

Current Theories in the Social Sciences

Research in the fields of psychology, political science, and sociology may be drawn on to suggest a number of new directions for the study of religious leadership.

Origins of religious leadership

One key to understanding leadership lies in recent findings and concepts in psychology, psychiatry, and psychohistory. Despite its cultural limitations, psychobiography can be an important tool in analyzing the formative influences on religious leadership, as Erik H. Erikson's studies of Luther and Gandhi have documented. Viewing some of the influences in the early years of great religious leaders, one may come to better understand the powerful influences of family, peer group, class, and adolescent experience. Such studies, however, will always be inadequate, because they deal with only one segment and tend to slight the effects of religious learning, political and institutional contexts, and the role of followers in shaping the behavior of leaders.

Social sources of leadership

Typologies of leadership by virtue of their abstraction tend to disassociate leadership from its social-situational context. Leadership occurs, as Weber's discussion of hierocracy, theocracy, and caesaropapism documents, in an immensely complex social network of structured and patterned relationships. The psychology of small-group research documents, moreover, how leadership adheres not in an individual but in a role that is imbedded within some specified social system. Variations in the social context within which religious leadership is deemed to be critical represent an important historical variable. Thus, studies of religious organizations that have focused on their leadership in modern industrial societies in the period since World War II rarely if ever address the kinds of issues dealt with by Weber. The study of religious leadership in these contexts typically involves an analysis of personnel recruitment, socialization, professionalization, training for the ministerial or priestly role, and delineation of the various role segments of administrator, preacher, counselor, teacher, and pastor. A recent review of the literature by the American sociologist Edgar W. Mills (1985) decried the absence of a concern with leadership in most contemporary studies of the ministry. These themes reflect, as Roland Robertson (1970) has noted, organizational constraints upon the exercise of leadership in societies in which religion has become increasingly differentiated and compartmentalized.

Personal traits

Religious leadership like other forms of leadership cannot be reduced to some specific set of abilities or personal attributes. Even the prophet is not born with "the gift of grace"; he must claim it. Natural endowment, intellectual or emotional predisposition, and training are only accessory, and they vary considerably.

A mixing of variables

Typologies of leadership, including those of religious leadership, have too often drawn on a variety of analytical and theoretical considerations without adequately differentiating the specific variables according to which a given religious leader is classified within one type rather than another. Indeed the very delineation of these types and their nomenclature suggest a mixing of variables. Thus a delineation of religious leaders as founders, reformers, revolutionaries, and conservationists focuses on the role of such leadership in challenging, revitalizing, or maintaining the existing social and religious order. By contrast, a typological distinction between expressive and instrumental types of leaders emphasizes differences in the ways in which leadership is exercised and followers exhorted, as was also true of Weber's original distinction between exemplary and ethical forms of prophetic leadership. Other typologies have focused on segmental roles or functions assumed by specific religious leaders, such as miracle workers, exorcists, moral teachers, mediators, ritual specialists, administrators, and scribes, as well as intellectual leaders and educators.

Revised Assumptions

Underlying the Weberian approach to religious leadership, and subscribed to equally by Wach, are a number of assumptions that recent research has either seriously questioned or forced to abandon altogether. Classic sociological treatments of religious leadership have leaned heavily on conceptions applying to elites, to authoritarian systems and to rigid caste- and class-based societies. The literature on religious leaders (and on leadership in general) has generally been committed to images of strong-willed leaders and mindless masses. Weber emphasized the authoritarian character of such leadership, especially charismatic leadership, by focusing on the exclusive prerogative of leaders to command and the unquestioning obligation of subordinates to obey. As a result there has been an unfortunate emphasis on the "great man" theory of leadership.

The role of gender—to the extent to which it enters into these studies of religious leadership at all—has simply reinforced the sterotyped image of religious leaders as male. The conditions under which women claim and successfully exercise such leadership has only recently become a topic of serious scholarly investigation. The focus on the great men who exercised religious leadership has moreover ignored the vital network of secondary, tertiary, and even "lower" leadership in most societies and most religious communities.

Weber's delineation of charismatic leadership has been a source of considerable confusion. This confusion has arisen because he integrated two distinct analytic components, the one social-structural and the other psychological, into his discussion of charismatic legitimations of authority. Each of them highlights different aspects of leaders and of their relationships to their followers. Yet, in focusing on the personal and affective dimensions of the relationship between charismatic leaders and their followers, Weber himself tilted the balance toward an emphasis on personality. The dominant thrust of his analysis was toward linking charisma with certain structural strains that are likely to be pronounced during periods of accelerated social change. But his analysis of the social conditions that give rise to charismatic leadership remained sketchy. These ambiguities in Weber's own discussion of charismatic leadership are reflected and magnified in the recent literature dealing with charisma, which has often used historical materials in an undiscriminating way to refer to almost all nonbureaucratic forms of leadership.

Although Weber never adopted the traditional image of leadership as unilateral—one was either leader or follower—his analysis of the relationship between the two, seen in the light of more recent research findings from the social sciences, tends to underplay the degree to which followers condition, shape, and mold both their leaders and the religious movements of which they form a part.

Similarly, Wach's discussion of the groups "corresponding to religious authority" is entitled "the audience" and includes references to the ephemeral audience of the migrating preacher or prophet, the crowd attending a religious celebration, and the permanent circle accompanying the founder and prophet. Such labeling of the group of followers as an audience betrays the passivity with which they are presumed to function and relate to their leader. While past studies of religious leaders generally portrayed their followers as a passive audience or mere aggregation minus the leader, more recent psychological and sociological research drawing on interaction theory and social exchange theory has demonstrated conclusively that the concepts of leading and following are reciprocal. Thus, religious leaders are by no means exclusively and always engaged in acts of leading. Leaders and followers do at times exchange roles, with the most active followers and disciples initiating acts of leadership. The expectations of followers and the acceptance accorded the leader may be as influential in shaping the character and consequences of that leadership as the resources of the leader himself. A more systematic attention to followers is likely to lead to the development of typologies not only of followers but of various models of leader-follower relationships.

The topic of religious leadership needs to draw on the empirical findings, concepts, and theoretical insights of recent research by social scientists working for the most part outside the realm of religious studies. The rapid proliferation of case studies of individual religious leaders, both past and present, has yet to be systematically integrated into a conceptual framework capable of subsuming the complex character of religious leadership. Greater integration is necessary if one is to move beyond description and classification to a level of analysis that will incorporate the determinants, processes, character, and consequences of such leadership.

Bibliography

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Bierstedt, Robert. "The Problem of Authority." In Freedom and Control in Modern Society, edited by Morroe Berger, Theodore Abel, and Charles H. Page, pp. 67–81. New York, 1954.

Burns, James MacGregor. Leadership. New York, 1978.

Erikson, Erik H. Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York, 1958.

Erikson, Erik H. Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence. New York, 1969.

Gibb, Cecil A. "Leadership: Psychological Aspects." In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by David L. Sills, vol. 9, pp. 91–101. New York, 1968.

Mills, Edgar W. "The Sacred in Ministry Studies." In The Sacred in a Secular Age, edited by Phillip E. Hammond. Berkeley, Calif., 1985.

Robertson, Roland. The Sociological Interpretation of Religion. New York, 1970.

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Tannenbaum, Arnold S. "Leadership: Sociological Aspects." In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by David L. Sills, vol. 9, pp. 101–107. New York, 1968.

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Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (1922). 2 vols. Translated by Ephraim Fischoff et al. as Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley, Calif., 1978.

Willner, Ann Ruth. The Spellbinders: Charismatic Political Leadership. New Haven, Conn., 1984.