A little more focus
Peri has suggested an approach to the proposal in which I use three different theoretical approaches to assess the question of why the LDS Church act politically (see the discussion in my post on 18 Nov 2003). Why use three different approaches to explanation for the same question?
Therein lies the answer to my question about the thesis of the proposal. My study is not a normative one in which I assess whether or not the Church should act politically. That is not my question. My question is why does the Church act politically. This is an empirical question; not a question then about what ought to be (normative theory), but a question of what is (description), why it is (explanation), and whether we can tell if it will be (prediction). The role of empirical theory is to construct, or find, a theoretical framework that will answer these questions.
I had originally thought that I might tease out a political philosophy for the church, but the more I think about it, the more I think that “political philosophy” is the wrong term. I think a better term is “world view”, something akin to Peter Berger’s “sacred canopy”. Michael Leming calls Berger’s sacred canopy humanity’s use of “religion [as] the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant”. At a more fundamental and, importantly, testable level the canopy is a method of giving sense to the world and identifying the individual’s (or the group’s, in the case of the Church) place and role in it.
So, the proposal becomes a competition of sorts in which each theoretical framework is tested by asking each to describe Church political action, explain Church political action, and predict Church political action. And thus, when Peri is suggesting to me that I need to create ideal types from two perspectives, rational choice and Foucaultian, she is in fact asking me to create expected descriptions and explanations of Church activity based upon these perspectives, and then compare these creations to the historical record.
