Sociology of religion is the
study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the
tools and methods of the discipline of sociology. This objective investigation
may include the use of both quantitative methods (surveys, polls, demographic
and census analysis) and qualitative approaches such as participant
observation, interviewing, and analysis of archival, historical and documentary
materials.
Modern academic sociology began
with the analysis of religion in Émile Durkheim's 1897 study of suicide rates
among Catholic and Protestant populations, a foundational work of social
research which served to distinguish sociology from other disciplines, such as
psychology. The works of Karl Marx and Max Weber emphasized the relationship between
religion and the economic or social structure of society. Contemporary debates
have centered on issues such as secularization, civil religion, and the
cohesiveness of religion in the context of globalization and multiculturalism.
The contemporary sociology of religion may also encompass the sociology of
irreligion (for instance, in the analysis of secular humanist belief systems).
Sociology of religion is
distinguished from the philosophy of religion in that it does not set out to
assess the validity of religious beliefs. The process of comparing multiple
conflicting dogmas may require what Peter L. Berger has described as inherent
"methodological atheism". Whereas the sociology of religion broadly
differs from theology in assuming indifference to the supernatural, theorists
tend to acknowledge socio-cultural reification of religious practice.
Classical, seminal sociological
theorists of the late 19th and early 20th century such as Durkheim, Weber, and
Marx were greatly interested in religion and its effects on society. Like those
of Plato and Aristotle from ancient Greece, and Enlightenment philosophers from
the 17th through 19th centuries, the ideas posited by these sociologists
continue to be examined today. More recent prominent sociologists of religion
include Peter L. Berger, Robert N. Bellah, Thomas Luckmann, Rodney Stark,
William Sims Bainbridge, Robert Wuthnow, Christian Smith, and Bryan R. Wilson.
Karl Marx
"Marx was the product of the
Enlightenment, embracing its call to replace faith by reason and religion by
science." Despite his later influence, Karl Marx did not view his work as
an ethical or ideological response to nineteenth-century capitalism (as most
later commentators have). His efforts were, in his mind, based solely on what
can be called applied science. Marx saw himself as doing morally neutral
sociology and economic theory for the sake of human development. As Christiano
states, "Marx did not believe in science for science's sake…he believed
that he was also advancing a theory that would…be a useful tool…[in] effecting
a revolutionary upheaval of the capitalist system in favor of socialism."
(124) As such, the crux of his arguments was that humans are best guided by
reason. Religion, Marx held, was a significant hindrance to reason, inherently
masking the truth and misguiding followers. As we will later see, Marx viewed
social alienation as the heart of social inequality. The antithesis to this
alienation is freedom. Thus, to propagate freedom means to present individuals
with the truth and give them a choice to accept or deny it. In this, "Marx
never suggested that religion ought to be prohibited." (Christiano 126)
Central to Marx's theories was
the oppressive economic situation in which he dwelt. With the rise of European
industrialism, Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels witnessed and responded
to the growth of what he called "surplus value." Marx's view of
capitalism saw rich capitalists getting richer and their workers getting poorer
(the gap, the exploitation, was the "surplus value"). Not only were
workers getting exploited, but in the process they were being further detached
from the products they helped create. By simply selling their work for wages,
"workers simultaneously lose connection with the object of labor and
become objects themselves. Workers are devalued to the level of a commodity – a
thing…" (Ibid 125) From this objectification comes alienation. The common
worker is led to believe that he or she is a replaceable tool, and is alienated
to the point of extreme discontent. Here, in Marx's eyes, religion enters.
Capitalism utilizes our tendency towards religion as a tool or ideological
state apparatus to justify this alienation. Christianity teaches that those who
gather up riches and power in this life will almost certainly not be rewarded
in the next ("it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven
than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle...") while
those who suffer oppression and poverty in this life, while cultivating their
spiritual wealth, will be rewarded in the Kingdom of God. Thus Marx's famous
line - "religion is the opium of the people", as it soothes them and
dulls their senses to the pain of oppression.
Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim placed himself in
the positivist tradition, meaning that he thought of his study of society as
dispassionate and scientific. He was deeply interested in the problem of what
held complex modern societies together. Religion, he argued, was an expression
of social cohesion.
In the fieldwork that led to his
famous Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim, a secular Frenchman,
looked at anthropological data of Indigenous Australians. His underlying
interest was to understand the basic forms of religious life for all societies.
In Elementary Forms, Durkheim argues that the totems the Aborigines venerate
are actually expressions of their own conceptions of society itself. This is
true not only for the Aborigines, he argues, but for all societies.
Religion, for Durkheim, is not
"imaginary," although he does deprive it of what many believers find
essential. Religion is very real; it is an expression of society itself, and
indeed, there is no society that does not have religion. We perceive as individuals
a force greater than ourselves, which is our social life, and give that
perception a supernatural face. We then express ourselves religiously in
groups, which for Durkheim makes the symbolic power greater. Religion is an
expression of our collective consciousness, which is the fusion of all of our
individual consciousnesses, which then creates a reality of its own.
It follows, then, that less
complex societies, such as the Australian Aborigines, have less complex
religious systems, involving totems associated with particular clans. The more
complex a particular society, the more complex the religious system is. As
societies come in contact with other societies, there is a tendency for
religious systems to emphasize universalism to a greater and greater extent.
However, as the division of labor makes the individual seem more important (a
subject that Durkheim treats extensively in his famous Division of Labor in
Society), religious systems increasingly focus on individual salvation and
conscience.
Durkheim's definition of
religion, from Elementary Forms, is as follows: "A religion is a unified
system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say,
things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single
moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them." (Marx,
introduction) This is a functional definition of religion, meaning that it
explains what religion does in social life: essentially, it unites societies.
Durkheim defined religion as a clear distinction between the sacred and the
profane, in effect this can be paralleled with the distinction between God and
humans.
This definition also does not
stipulate what exactly may be considered sacred. Thus later sociologists of
religion (notably Robert Bellah) have extended Durkheimian insights to talk
about notions of civil religion, or the religion of a state. American civil
religion, for example, might be said to have its own set of sacred
"things": the Flag of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, Martin
Luther King Jr., etc. Other sociologists have taken Durkheim's concept of what
religion is in the direction of the religion of professional sports, the
military, or of rock music.
Max Weber
Max Weber published four major
texts on religion in a context of economic sociology and his rationalization
thesis: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), The Religion
of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1915), The Religion of India: The Sociology
of Hinduism and Buddhism (1915), and Ancient Judaism (1920).
In his sociology, Weber uses the
German term "Verstehen" to describe his method of interpretation of
the intention and context of human action. Weber is not a positivist – in the
sense that he does not believe we can find out "facts" in sociology
that can be causally linked. Although he believes some generalized statements
about social life can be made, he is not interested in hard positivist claims,
but instead in linkages and sequences, in historical narratives and particular
cases.
Weber argues for making sense of
religious action on its own terms. A religious group or individual is
influenced by all kinds of things, he says, but if they claim to be acting in
the name of religion, we should attempt to understand their perspective on religious
grounds first. Weber gives religion credit for shaping a person's image of the
world, and this image of the world can affect their view of their interests,
and ultimately how they decide to take action.
For Weber, religion is best
understood as it responds to the human need for theodicy and soteriology. Human
beings are troubled, he says, with the question of theodicy – the question of
how the extraordinary power of a divine god may be reconciled with the
imperfection of the world that he has created and rules over. People need to
know, for example, why there is undeserved good fortune and suffering in the
world. Religion offers people soteriological answers, or answers that provide
opportunities for salvation – relief from suffering, and reassuring meaning.
The pursuit of salvation, like the pursuit of wealth, becomes a part of human
motivation.
Because religion helps to define
motivation, Weber believed that religion (and specifically Calvinism) actually
helped to give rise to modern capitalism, as he asserted in his most famous and
controversial work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
In The Protestant Ethic, Weber
argues that capitalism arose in Europe in part because of how the belief in
predestination was interpreted by everyday English Puritans. Puritan theology
was based on the Calvinist notion that not everyone would be saved; there was
only a specific number of the elect who would avoid damnation, and this was
based sheerly on God's predetermined will and not on any action you could
perform in this life. Official doctrine held that one could not ever really
know whether one was among the elect.
Practically, Weber noted, this
was difficult psychologically: people were (understandably) anxious to know
whether they would be eternally damned or not. Thus Puritan leaders began
assuring members that if they began doing well financially in their businesses,
this would be one unofficial sign they had God's approval and were among the
saved – but only if they used the fruits of their labor well. This along with
the rationalism implied by monotheism led to the development of rational
bookkeeping and the calculated pursuit of financial success beyond what one
needed simply to live – and this is the "spirit of capitalism." Over
time, the habits associated with the spirit of capitalism lost their religious
significance, and rational pursuit of profit became its own aim.
The Protestant Ethic thesis has
been much critiqued, refined, and disputed, but is still a lively source of
theoretical debate in sociology of religion. Weber also did considerable work
in world religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism.
In his magnum opus Economy and
Society Weber distinguished three ideal types of religious attitudes:
1. world-flying mysticism2.
world-rejecting asceticism3. inner-worldly asceticism
He also separated magic as
pre-religious activity.
