Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Writing Social Problems and Social Nightmares

Writing Social Problems and Social Nightmares

Last updated on: May 9, 2024 at 12:46 am by Philip Jenkins

0 Comments

Writing Social Problems and Social Nightmares 2024-05-07T08:34:08-04:00 Philip Jenkins

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

If you look at the list of books I have published through the years, you will see a lot of topics that might seem out of the way – cults, drugs, child abuse, Satanism, pornography, terrorism, and more. What is going on here? Actually, this work is a lot less random and indiscriminate (and sensational) than it might initially appear.

As I remarked in my last post, my writing through the years falls into a couple of broad categories. There is my Christian History cycle, which runs to a dozen or so titles since 2000, and also more recently my Global Religion cycle. But before all that, before I was working primarily on religion, I was doing whole other kinds of research, and that was what I was known for. This present post represents a kind of auto-archaeological digging into that earlier phase of my career, my work on Social Problems. The act of putting together this post helps me think through the question of whether I might ever get back to those interests as an active agenda for new research and publication.

How Do You Judge Impact?

When assessing a particular scholar, universities often use citation counts, namely the number of times that person’s work has been cited by others, and in theory, this provides a nice objective way of judging one’s impact. Everyone knows the system is not perfect, as it is heavily slanted towards finding results in the hard sciences and biomedical fields rather than the social sciences, and in the social sciences rather than the humanities. Citations of books, as opposed to articles, are systematically undercounted. Even so, these counts can be a useful and comprehensible way of measuring things. If I look at my own count on Google Scholar, then I find over 15,000 citations throughout my career. Not surprisingly, by far my most cited work is my Next Christendom (2002), with almost 4,000 hits if you combine the different editions. But then look at my next most noted item, which is Moral Panic: Changing Concepts Of The Child Molester In Modern America, in the number 2 slot, with over 1,100 cites. For what it is worth, a major 2014 study in Nature found that only 0.026% of research papers in any discipline score over 1,000 citations, so Moral Panic is doing well. Nature did another piece on why such thousand-citation items should be seen as “outliers” and are thus particularly “impactful” (what a word!)

Then we move down my list to Using Murder: The Social Construction Of Serial Homicide (at #4), Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics In Contemporary Great Britain (#5) and Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography On The Internet (#6). Each of these titles scores between five and seven hundred citations, which is very respectable, particularly for books, and this would gladden the heart of any promotion and tenure committee. But in terms of what I am known for these days, these titles may seem surprising and even eccentric.

Quite seriously, I have on more than one occasion dealt with colleagues who believe that a quite separate Philip Jenkins must be writing that other stuff. I have even been asked if I know the other Jenkins who writes so much on terrorism.

My Social Problem Sequence

To be specific, I published a series of books that together I call my Social Problem sequence, which included the following ten titles. These appeared over a little more than a decade, and from a variety of publishers:

Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain (Aldine de Gruyter, 1992).

Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide (Aldine de Gruyter, 1994).

Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Social Crisis (Oxford University Press, 1996).

Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (Yale University Press, 1998).

Synthetic Panics: The Politics of Designer Drugs (New York University Press, 1999).

Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet (New York University Press, 2001).

Images of Terror: What We Can And Can’t Know About Terrorism (Aldine De Gruyter, 2003).

The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (Oxford University Press, 2003).

Decade of Nightmares: The End of the 1960s and the Making of Eighties America (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Constructing Social Problems

So what is happening here? Where did all this come from?

Before I defined myself as a scholar of religion, I was a Professor of Criminal Justice at Penn State University, where I worked on an area of sociology/criminology that is known as Social Problems. I used a theoretical approach called social constructionism, and what I studied was the construction of social problems. The basic idea is that every society has issues that it regards as problems, but it is not immediately obvious which issues will be regarded as more or less serious at any given time, or how they might be understood in terms of causation or cure. In one society, sexual threats to children might be regarded as a small scale and trivial threat (I hate to make that observation, but it is true). At other times and places, such threats are seen as a kind of ultimate evil. Concerns about drugs are at least as malleable. The same is true for terrorism, or homelessness, or violent crime, or sexual harassment, or … carry on the list as you choose.

What changes over time is not necessarily the nature of the social issue itself, but how people regard it. We have to understand the methods by which groups and individuals make and establish their claims, and this means understanding the role of pressure groups, of bureaucratic agencies, of political activists, and commonly, of religious and moral reformers. Research focuses on the interests that particular groups have in promoting a problem; the resources available to them to achieve their goals; and finally the ownership that they eventually secure over the issue, or the degree to which their analysis is accepted as authoritative. Constructionists often use the concept of the moral entrepreneur, who reshapes social values just as a conventional business entrepreneur shakes up the economic order. Of its nature, the kind of study I am talking about here overlaps substantially with social movement theory.

Just to take the example of child sexual abuse – the subject of my Moral Panic book – the most important activist groups historically include therapists and psychiatrists, criminal justice administrators, women’s groups, teachers and educators, sexual reformers and libertarians, and moral traditionalists and conservatives.

To be clear, this approach absolutely does not say that there is no objective core to these perceived problems. Constructionism means more than simple debunking, and a constructed problem is not “made-up.” Though we might challenge factual claims used to support a particular cause, only very rarely might we argue that a given problem has no basis whatever in reality. (The Satanism Scare of the 1980s and 1990s was one such exception, where there was lots of smoke and no fire). People really do misuse drugs, they really do commit sexual abuse against children, and serial killers really do commit multiple murders. But our understandings and definitions of such actions vary enormously according to the social and cultural setting, and the role of these different actors, claims-makers, and campaigners.

We are centrally concerned with studying rhetoric, the age-old art of persuasion. In conventional speech, we tend to scorn the term – “that’s just empty rhetoric!” – but in reality, this is the core of how problems are made, remade and interpreted. A constructionist study examines the means by which activist views are projected, through news media and popular fiction as much as through expert or professional sources. Also critical is the question of audience, of why the public are prepared to accept one rather than another of the given models offered them at different times. What rhetorical arguments do the various movements and activists deploy? How do they frame an argument about a given cause to ensure that it achieves the widest possible credibility? Commonly, this means building upon older problems that are believed to be serious and authentic: You know established Problem X? Well this new problem Y is actually a subset of it, so you need to take it just as seriously! This is all part of the critical process of contextualization.

Again, just how do particular people and groups acquire the status of “experts” on any given topic, the ones to whom the media immediately turn at the drop of a crisis? In the terms I used earlier, how do they win ownership of the given problem? And how does that expert status change over time? To take one example of many, you could actually witness the moment in the mid-1990s when the media overwhelmingly decided that the previously respected advocates of “recovered memory” were charlatans who should be ignored. Suddenly, the people complaining about “false memories” gained a new respect. Ownership of the problem changed hands.

By the way, social problems are often presented in terms of a “crisis.” We should never forget that this is a purely subjective and impressionistic term, commonly deployed by activists to indicate that the issue they are concerned about is extremely grave, and demands urgent action. (Journalists love the term as an empty magnifier). The word has no objective definition, and usually no relationship with quantitative evidence. If you will pardon the circular definition, a crisis is a set of phenomena that some group believes should be regarded as a crisis.

Over time, activism changes the understanding of problems, and in the process it has a radical effect on social discourse and partisan debate. Rarely does the construction of such problems and “crises” proceed in a rational and objective way, relying on empirical evidence. Rather, it is conditioned by underlying concerns, which in an American context very often involves racial nightmares, with fears over changing gender roles usually in play. If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it with my own eyes.

Social problems offer a wonderful tool of analysis for understanding the changing fears of a given society.

An Age of Panics and Problems

The 1980s and early 1990s were an incredibly productive time for such fears and problems. Indeed, the media were dominated by fears and panics over child sexual abuse, Satanism and ritual abuse, and there were rising fears over the newly defined problems over clergy sexual abuse, and child pornography on the emerging Internet. Each, of course, was a crisis. Meanwhile, the Drug War was reaching terrifying proportions, as it devastated urban communities. What most of these social threats had in common was the alleged danger posed to children and the young.

These fears had a sizable impact on the way we talk. It was in these years that people first invented such labels as serial murder (or serial rape, or serial anything), stalking, grooming, profiling, predators (in a sexual context), and survivors. In 1977, the term child abuse was first used in the context of sexual maltreatment as opposed to physical violence, and that usage became standard in the 1980s. The term sexual harassment originated among radical feminists in the mid-1970s, but it only entered general parlance in the following decade. Elder abuse followed a similar chronology. Conversely, some words become unacceptable or even toxic. When I published my book on child pornography in 2001, that term was quite acceptable, which it is not any longer: today we are supposed to speak of child abuse images.

Problems beget words, and words shape problems. Language speaks us.

Constructing a problem also means shaping policy priorities in a way that agencies and budgets target topic A rather than B. Around 2000, constructions of terrorism had come to focus almost exclusively on far right and neo-Nazi threats to the near-total exclusion of Islamist activities. We saw the consequences of that distorted decision on September 11, 2001.

Understanding Fear

And that is why much of my research in that era involved studying the things that stirred the most public fear and concern, as I sought to understand the shifting nature of those fears. I must here acknowledge one major influence on my work at that time, namely the sociologist Joel Best, who published the classic Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims (University of Chicago Press, 1990), among other important titles. If you ever want to know about understanding social problems, just turn to anything he has ever written. Joel was extremely generous and helpful in supporting my publishing ventures.

In light of what I said about social problem theory, you see that those titles of mine are not random at all, and there really is a very consistent agenda working through them all. In each case, I took an issue that was generally accepted as a pressing social problem, even a “crisis,” and tried to write its history. I showed how concern had evolved over time, and how and why it had cone to such prominence in recent times. Commonly, that meant studying the workings of media and bureaucratic agencies. It also meant observing how interest groups made their arguments, which in a modern context involved the use (and gross abuse) of statistics. Some of the statistics used for the purpose of grabbing media attention were lulus. Every year, four thousand Americans fall victim to serial killers! Every year, fifty thousand American children are abducted by strangers! Or maybe killed by Satanic cults! (No, no, and no). Guy Debord famously noted how in a modern media-saturated world, “All of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation … Real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it.”

Frequently, the kind of historical analysis I was doing showed that contemporary problems had deep roots, and even a cyclical nature. When we were told that a problem was New! Unprecedented! Unique!, you could easily show that it had many historical precedents. The American cult scares of the 1920s and 1940s looked very much like that of the 1970s. The serial murder panic of the 1940s provided a close comparison to that of the 1980s, and so on. Time and again, looking for parallels to modern-day social nightmares took me back to the Progressive era, those dazzlingly creative years between about 1890 and 1915. There is not much new under the sun.

My Decade of Nightmares provided a kind of capstone to this whole earlier project by showing how those surging panics and problems in the 1980s had allowed and accelerated the fundamental rightward shift of American life and culture during the Reagan era, and the effective repeal of 1960s liberalism. Throughout, issues of gender, race, and demographics were to the fore. (In a future post, I will also show how intimately many of these problems were bound up with the religious history of the era).

By the way, the books in that Social Problems sequence were generally very well received. I can’t help sharing one review that might be the best I ever received on anything. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Sir Lawrence Freedman (Sir Lawrence Freedman!) called my Images of Terror “a brilliant, uncomfortable book, its impact heightened by clear, restrained writing and a stunning range of examples.” Reading that, I can die happy.

Moving On

So if things were going so well in academic terms, why did I give up on those Social Problem topics? One reason was that I had said all I reasonably could on these matters, and had no wish to repeat myself ad nauseam. But more significant, I became steadily more interested in religious themes, specifically in Global Christianity and Christian history, and that just took up all my professional time for the next couple of decades. Related to that, I moved my departmental affiliation to Penn State’s Religious Studies Program, where I remained until 2011.

In summary, then, looking back at my Social Problems work, then that’s all shove behind me, long ago and far away. But might I ever go back to these older approaches? Is a social constructionist about to re-emerge from his closet? Let me address that thought in an upcoming blogpost.

Previous Post

May 8, 2024

Choosing Mother: Camus's Advice for Today

Next Post

May 10, 2024 The History of Failure

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Very good point about MacDonald.I am certainly a Machen fan!"

philipjenkins

Fairies, Witches, Folk Horror, and the ..."

"The Scottish author George MacDonald integrated fairy world into his fiction in a way that ..."

Terry

Fairies, Witches, Folk Horror, and the ..."

"I like the idea that we can have different streams. The coffee analogy is genius."

Lisa Clark Diller

How Do You Take Your Evangelicalism?

"Geography lesson: Southern California is actually in North Texas. I've lived her for 40 years, ..."

Terry

How Do You Take Your Evangelicalism?

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

True or False: David committed adultery with Bathsheba and arranged for her husband Uriah to be killed.

Select your answer to see how you score.

TRUE FALSE