Glock, Charles Y.
GLOCK, CHARLES Y.
GLOCK, CHARLES Y. (1919– ), sociologist and author. Born in New York City, Charles Glock earned his bachelor's degree from New York University (1940), his master's degree from Boston University (1941), and his doctorate from Columbia University (1952). He served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War ii and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Legion of Merit.
Glock served as the executive director of the Bureau of Applied Research at Columbia beginning in 1947, becoming managing director in 1949 and director in 1952. He taught at Columbia as professor of sociology from 1956 to 1958, then at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1958 to 1978. He also served as director of Berkeley's Survey Research Center from 1958 to 1967 and as director of an extensive research program on religion and society from 1962 through 1979. Glock was named professor emeritus at Berkeley in 1978.
Glock is perhaps best known for his 1966 work, with coauthor Rodney Stark, Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism, in which Glock and Stark suggest an inherent relationship between Christian beliefs and religious and secular antisemitism. They contend that, because of the traditional Christian claim of universal truth, a strong belief in Christianity leads to the belief that Christianity is the only true religion, which in turn leads to unfavorable images of those who practice other religions, especially Jews, who are considered to have rejected Jesus. The authors also claim that differences in degrees of antisemitism among Christian denominations correspond to differences in Christian beliefs among the denominations. Critics suggested that Glock and Stark did not sufficiently address nonreligious causes of antisemitism, and that therefore the relationship between Christian beliefs and antisemitism was not necessarily inherent.
In 1968 Glock and Stark published American Piety: The Nature of Religious Commitment, which was considered a significant contribution to the study of American religion. The New Religious Consciousness, edited by Glock and Robert Bellah in 1976, which examined religious groups associated with the counterculture movement of the 1960s, was also well received. Glock's other works include Prejudice, U.S.A. (with Ellen Siegelman, 1969), Adolescent Prejudice (with Robert Wuthnow, Jane Piliavin, and Metta Spencer, 1975), and Anti-Semitism in America (with Harold E. Quinley, 1979). Glock received the Roots of Freedom Award from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith in 1977.
[Dorothy Bauhoff (2nd ed.)]