David Martin in Memoriam
The Reverand Professor David A. Martin, a sociologist, passed away March 8. Martin was the first visiting scholar to CURA. Former CURA Director Bob Hefner writes about his life.
A friend and founding collaborator of CURA and Boston University, David A. Martin passed away on March 8, 2019, just short of his 90th birthday. The author of some 24 books, Martin was, with Peter Berger, one of the two most influential sociologists of religion of the late twentieth and early twenty first century. Written at a time when forecasts of religion’s global demise were the reigning wisdom in the social sciences, Martin’s Notes for a General Theory of Secularisation (1969) was the first major work in sociology to cast doubt on secularization’s ostensible universality. The book argued that, even within Western Europe, religion-state relations were highly varied, and this variation had influenced the relative vitality or decline of religion in modern times. This theme of “multiple secularities” and “multiple modernities” was to remain a trademark of Martin’s scholarship, including two later major and still foundational works on comparative secularization.
Martin spent most of his academic life in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, which he had joined in 1962 and from which he retired in 1989. However for some twenty years of his life he and his wife and fellow sociologist, Bernice Martin, had a primary research collaboration with CURA and Boston University. In 1986, just one year after CURA’s founding, Peter Berger and I invited Martin to become CURA’s first international research collaborator, to carry out a comparative study of the growth of Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism in Latin America, paying special attention to the implications of these populist varieties of Christianity for politics, economic development, and gender relations. Martin’s Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (1990) presented the results of this project. Among other things, the book demonstrated that the single greatest (albeit by no means uniform) consequence of Pentecostalism’s spread lay more in its “domestication of machismo” and the creation of a gentler masculinity than in any specific political or economic effect. Martin’s Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (2002) took much the same critical analysis global, and to this day remains a classic reference in studies of modern popular Christianity.
Martin was born into a working class English Methodist family to a mother who worked as a maid and a father who was a black cab driver and itinerant revivalist preacher in London’s Hyde Park. Martin’s early socialization into revivalist Methodism and Christian pacificism led to his service in the Non-Combatant Corps as a conscientious objector in 1948-50. Completed in 1964, his Ph.D. thesis provided a historical sociology of Christian pacifism. In his fifties, and while still teaching at the LSE, Martin converted to Anglicanism and was ordained a minister in the Church of England. In addition to his sociological scholarship, he wrote several books on theology, including studies that touched on his life-long passion for poetry and music, as well as the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer. A skilled pianist, he also wrote reviews on musical trends in genres ranging from opera to contemporary pop. David was a gentle spirit and, in the deepest sense of the word, an original. We mourn his passing, and celebrate his memory.
— Bob Hefner, March 15, 2019