09/25/2024 – What is "religion"? Sociology of Religion

Have you ever wondered what is “religion”? I’ve got your back because I’m a former community college professor of religion. We’re going to look at a number of lenses academic scholars of religion use to understand, interpret, and define religion, but… broken down into slightly easier-to-understand bits. And, by the way, I spent a lot of time researching and writing this episode, so you better watch the whole thing. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

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This is the third episode in a multi-episode series which I’m simply calling “What is Religion?” This is about understanding the academic field of religion including how it started and ways academic scholars of religion interpret, understand, and define religion. In the first two episodes we looked at some of the early stages of development and about the anthropology of religion. In this episode were going to talk about the sociology of religion. In future episodes we’re going to get into the psychology of religion, phenomenology (or experience of religion), and finally the comparison of religion. Today, we’re going to take a look at sociology and religion, the study of human group religious behavior, through the lenses of four important figures: Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Robert Bellah, and Peter Berger. Let’s get into it.

We’re starting with Émile Durkheim who was born in a Jewish family in France in 1858, and, as his career developed, became a major figure in the developing field of sociology. By the early 1900’s he was a full professor at the Sorbonne in France, one of the most prestigious institutions in all of Europe. By far his most well-known and important work is The Elementary Forms of Religious Life published in 1912. In this work, Durkheim explained that the goal is to attain the reality of religious experience by going underneath the symbol to the reality which it represents. No religion is false and all are true in the sense that they express truths about the reality underlying them. This reality is society and the title of the book expresses this. Durkheim wanted to get to the most elementary, or simplest, forms of religion and religious life and believed by looking at that, we can then learn and understand all about other higher forms of religious life and how religion has developed in humanity.

Two important ideas in this book further explain his views. The first is a distinction between the sacred and the profane. Something sacred is that which is set apart or special, such as a rite or action, or an object like a rock, tree, or river. A sacred rite or action can involve words, formulas, gestures, and/or ceremonies which are done or acted out by certain people or maybe with or in certain conditions. The profane is simply everything else that is not sacred. He argued all religions have this sacred/profane distinction. The second idea important in this book is totemism, a phase in the developing history of a religion which he largely based on his study of native Australian cultures. A totem is a name or emblem or sign which takes on religious character for a tribe, and is often used in religious ceremonies. Totemic religion is social because clans could not come into being and join together without this religious identity, and thus, is an elementary form. The “power” of the totem gives life to the group and the group keeps the “power” of the totem alive from generation to generation. This morally binds the clan to certain obligations such as assistance, vengeance, or a general concept of kinship. The distinction between the sacred and the profane and the force of the totem help explain why Durkheim thought that religion and the feelings of believers were not mere illusion, but were grounded in how societies developed as a whole. The religious forces were simultaneously human forces and these became the organizing principles or standards both by which the people within the community understood how the world works and how they were to live their lives. He used the phrase pensée collective or “collective conscience” referring to the social mind-agreement which transfigures the real world as a shared sacred world which constructs the religious and moral life for all members in the community. Now that’s some fascinating stuff because a lot of religions seem to be based on this idea of a collective conscience. In fact, a number of later sociologists were heavily influenced by Durkheim’s thoughts, including quite a few recent thinkers. But, let’s move on to Max Weber.

Max Weber, along with Durkheim, are regarded as two of the main founders of the modern field of sociology. Weber was friends with Ernst Troeltsch, who we mentioned in our first episode in this series. Weber’s primary interest was not how religion reinforced the stability of societies, but rather how religion has been a source of the dynamics of social change. He talked about trying to find a “breakthrough.” In what situations are breakthroughs most likely? Weber defined the word “sociology” as that science which aims at the interpretive understanding of social behavior in order to gain an explanation of its causes, its course, and its effects. Weber’s methodology was based in the idea of finding causes, and in doing so, he was attempting to put some objectivity into the subjective side of interpretation. People’s reasons for acting were the causes for acting as they did. An important tool in doing this was positing what he called the “ideal type.” The ideal type is deliberately constructed to project a hypothetical progression or development of behaviors that could be explained in terms of motives and beliefs. If they were sufficiently motivated, the situation could be described as objectively probable and thus causally adequate. An ideal type could be something like capitalism in Western countries which could be compared with capitalism in other areas. The positing of the ideal type allows the investigator to compare an actual sequence of behaviors with the sequence predicted by the ideal type. One could then measure the deviation that must be causally attributed to the difference between the motives hypothetically ascribed by the ideal type and to the motivation of the real agents involved. It was a logical argument based on a psychological process.

One of Weber’s important works was The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904-1905. It explained how the sense of duty to one’s profession was garnered from religion and that sense of duty sustains the culture of contemporary capitalism. This was rooted in the quest for a rigorous conduct of life, a task ordered by God. The Protestant Ethic was in part a response to the Marxist assumption that society can be explained from the single cause of economics. Since the dominant classes tend to monopolize not only the good things in life, but also the spiritual benefits, they must consolidate their power by imposing on everyone else a specific type of moral conduct. In demonstrating this, Weber showed the central problem was that humans’ conceptions of religion influenced or shaped social relationships, especially in the area of economics and politics.

Weber’s main attention, especially later in his career, was focused on the problem of the tension between religion and other activities in society. What was later published as The Sociology of Religion in 1922 was originally a part of a larger work called Economy and Society, which was incomplete at his untimely death in 1920. Here he talks about rationalization and theodicy. Rationalization is the master concept through which cultures define their religious situation. Ideas are generated by what Weber called the teleological meanings of humans’ conceptions of themselves and their place in the universe. These conceptions legitimize their orientations in and to the world and meaning, to their various goals. Rationalization comprises normative control or sanction, and in the process of development, this eventually leads to a written sacred tradition of sacred books. Written tradition provides a basis for further differentiation of the system precisely because it is a focus of stability which can be made independent of a system of tradition which were largely controlled by priestly groups and other religious leadership figures. Theodicy was important because it was a religious rationalization of suffering which arose out of hopes for salvation. Good and evil must remain in conflict until the definitive triumph of good at some future undetermined time. Again, this is just scratching the surface. There’s a whole lot more going on, but at least this is an introduction to some of Weber’s main ideas.

The next two figures are contemporary sociologists who lived about the same time, Robert Bellah and Peter Berger. First up, Robert Bellah. Bellah led a group of researchers to publish a book on religion and American life back in 1985 titled, Habits of the Heart. It was based on a five-year study of various communities describing religion and the search for meaning in society. As interesting as this is, it however, isn’t the book I want to talk about because his large 600-page magnum opus, is really one of the top books describing the development of religion in humanity. This is the 2011 work published two years before his death titled, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, and in many places the influence of both Durkheim and Weber are obvious. In this book, the first two chapters set up the idea of religion and development followed by seven chapters which describe religion from tribal beginnings through various geographical areas including ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India. It is a lot and I mean a lot to take in, but let me relay a few things.

By 100,000 years ago full grammatical language developed in humans making oral narratives possible, but writing of such narratives did not begin to occur until around 1000 BCE, or about 4,000 years ago. In many cases it was actually much later than that, probably between the years of 500 to 200 BCE. Part of this book attempts to understand religion, as rudimentarily as we can, in this paleolithic, or before-writing age. Bellah then describes, using numerous case studies and illustrations or examples, some possible ways on how religion emerged from this pre-writing stage of humanity, to tribal societies, to what’s known as archaic societies, and finally to the four main axial age civilizations of ancient Israel, ancient Greece, ancient China, and ancient India. The time period this book covers ends before Christianity and Islam even appear on the scene, so they are not covered here. The transition from the archaic era into the axial age is really the main focus, and this means the transition when a society changed old hierarchies, rituals, and myths or stories into new ones which were more universal in scope. Now Bellah worked on this book for 13 years and it really could have been an entire book series rather than a single book. I mean, look at these 600+ pages. It’s a fantastic work and maybe someday I’ll do an entire episode just on this book because it deserves it. There is a tremendous number of sources cited and consulted, which is not surprising for a book this size. The purpose of the book seems to be not only to inform, but to humble us, the readers, into realizing the long process of development of religion so that we recognize that our way of understanding religion, is not the only way. And now on to Peter Berger.

Peter Berger’s first major work written with his graduate school classmate, Thomas Luckman, was The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. It was published in 1966 and is about the sociology of knowledge which isn’t really focused on religion and only mentions it a few times. This book is fascinating in its own right in that it dives into the following question: How do subjective meanings become objective facts? This largely occurs through a process of social development and the sedimentation of intersubjective traditions. The main ideas from this book, however, were adapted for another book published the next year in 1967 called The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. I already created a deep-dive two-episode series on this book in late 2022, so if you want more go check them out, but here’s a synopsis. The two main ideas in The Sacred Canopy are religion and world construction, and religion and secularization. He describes the process by which humans create society and then that created society turns around and creates humans by shaping and molding them. This is a dialectical circle of externalization, objectivation, and internalization. Humans are creatures which crave for meaning and possess a strong desire to impose a meaningful order upon reality. This is where religion comes into the picture. Whenever the socially established habits creating human thinking attains the quality of being taken for granted, there occurs a merging of its meanings with what are perceived to be the fundamental meanings inherent in the universe. Did you get that? Religion legitimates social institutions by bestowing upon them an ultimately valid ontological status, making them “real” by locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference. Conversion amounts to an individual transferring to another entirely socially-constructed reality called a plausibility structure. Thus, our “world” is constructed by religion by “religionizing” objective reality, or to use Berger’s terminology, the world becomes “cosmized” in a sacred mode. A sacred canopy is this sacred cosmos legitimizing itself as a plausibility structure.

Now, the secularization part. The concentration of religious activities and symbols in a single institutional sphere defines itself over against the rest of society as “the world” – some sort of profane realm at least relatively removed from the jurisdiction of the sacred. Now this wasn’t a problem in Europe as long as Christendom, the domination of Christianity in all aspects of understanding and interpreting the world, was a social reality. But over the last century or two, probably for the first time in history according to Berger, the religious legitimations of the world have lost their plausibility, not only for a few intellectuals in their ivory towers, but for broad masses of entire societies. Religion kind of becomes its own gravedigger. The concept of religious debt became the origin of money, and the state, once the protector of religion, slowly morphed to become the protector of the economy, especially in capitalistic countries. Whew… Secularization brings about a de-monopolization of religious traditions and this leads directly to a pluralistic situation. Allegiance to religion is now voluntary and has to be marketed, taking on the very qualities which broke it down in the first place. How’s that for irony? Religion no longer legitimates “the world.” Rather, different religious groups seek, by different means, to maintain their particular subworlds in the face of a plurality of other competing subworlds. Those who continue to adhere to the world as defined by the religious traditions then find themselves in the position of being intellectual minorities. And that’s Peter Berger in a nutshell. Great stuff.

Today we were answering the question “What is religion?” through the lens of sociology using: Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Robert Bellah, and Peter Berger. So, what do you think about the sociology of religion? Which figure did you find the most interesting and why? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Next up, the psychology of religion. Yeah baby, it’s gonna be good! Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.