The authors' lucid and poignant discussions get to the root of the Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft degeneration. In the Gemeinschaft stage the economic and political facets of life are under the control of the family and church. Businesses are family businesses, churches function like families, political decisions are mainly made at the local level by communities which are themselves networks of families and churches, and the church attempts to apply Biblical principles to all of life, including the economic and political matters of the community. Love rules the family, and money rules the world. With the breakdown of the community and the loss of authority of Christianity over all of life, the church becomes part of the segmentation and is restricted to individual self-control and family life.
Sermons become more emotional and sentimental.
The church, instead of upholding and directing the entirety of a unified community life, becomes, like the family, a haven of love in an overall segmented, loveless society. In the resulting compartmentalized Gesellschaftic society religion can no longer challenge the dominance of selfish utilitarianism in the world. It can care for the casualties of the world but it can no longer challenge the assumptions running the world but has to operate within them. This complex of trends constitutes the essence of the Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft degeneration. The really radical, significant sociological changes were those involved in that complex of changes which occurred in the Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft degeneration during the nineteenth century.