The Sociology of Religion

Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives

Malcolm B. Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415226677
• eBook ISBN: 9781134976256
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This clear introduction to the sociology of religion combines a discussion of key theorists with a modern emphasis on the diversity of religious beliefs and practices. Malcolm Hamilton's expanded second edition brings the discussion fully up-to-date, and extends its material on secularization and religious sects, giving a broad comparative view. Drawing on the insights of history, anthropology and sociology, he surveys classic and contemporary theory to give a full picture of the variety and scope of theoretical perspectives.

1 Introduction

WHAT IS THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION?

The human capacity for belief is virtually limitless. It is this capacity, and the striking diversity, indeed strangeness, of the beliefs and associated practices it has generated in human society and history which have stimulated the curiosity of many writers on religion including sociologists. There are those, some sociologists among them, who might agree with Lucy in the Peanuts cartoon reproduced opposite, at least as far as certain fundamentals are concerned. However, Charlie Brown’s answer, despite the dubious authenticity of the reference to Melanesian frog worship, makes it plain that if religions are all alike, they are also very different. Even if frogs are not worshipped anywhere, there are many other beliefs which seem equally odd, even bizarre, to the outsider.

The sociologist, however, is not simply puzzled by this diversity but by the fact that such beliefs and practices exist at all. The sociology of religion can be said to consist of two main themes or central questions, namely, why have religious beliefs and practices been so central a feature of culture and society, and why have they taken such diverse forms? The sociology of religion poses the question of the role and significance of religion in general, as well as that of understanding the beliefs and practices of particular groups and societies.

In one respect, both of these central questions have been stimulated by the same puzzlement. Although things have changed dramatically since, the sociological approach to the study of religion had among its roots a nineteenth-century rationalism or positivism which questioned and rejected religious notions as illusory. They were thought to be irrational and otiose in a modern society in which science as a mode of understanding of reality would predominate. Religious ideas would atrophy and die in the face of the superior conceptions and explanations of science. These thinkers saw religion as a natural phenomenon to be studied objectively and scientifically and explained like any other natural phenomenon in terms of underlying causes. This position is usually designated positivist and reductionist. Religion is ‘reduced’ to underlying factors which produce it so that the reality of religious entities, experience, and so on, is denied. To explain it in such a way was largely to explain it away. Indeed, the very centrality and universality of what were seen as irrational notions and actions, and which were in many cases undeniably odd and puzzling, seemed to cry out for explanation. Because in past societies religious ideas and beliefs constituted, to a large extent, the entire world-view and value system, the task seemed all the more urgent for the understanding of the evolution of human society and culture and indeed for the understanding of human nature itself. Religious belief was not in past societies a special realm coexisting alongside mundane conceptions as had come to be the case in the contemporary society As Max Weber put it, past societies had lived in a ‘magic garden’ whereas modern society had witnessed a thoroughgoing ‘disenchantment’ of the world. How was it possible, then, for past societies to have lived and prospered in an enchanted world and how was it possible that such notions could have been so central and significant? Hence the major task of the sociology of religion was to account for the very presence of religious beliefs and practices in human society As Berger has pointed out, this was an even more fundamental challenge for religion than the discoveries of the natural sciences, since it not only threatened to undermine acceptance of religious claims, but purported to be able to explain why such claims were made at all and why they appeared to have credibility (Berger, 1971, p. 47). By some it was also seen as having the task of dispelling such residual irrationality from contemporary society and of quickening its replacement by science. By others it was seen as promising a basis for a substitute for religion which would preserve the essential benefits that, in their view, it had provided for past societies but without the supernaturalism and irrationality which characterised it – a substitute founded upon sound and objective principles established by the discipline of sociology itself.

During the course of the twentieth century this attitude has given way to one which is less imperious, less dismissive of and usually agnostic towards the veracity of religious statements and claims. Sociologists of religion today often have a personal commitment to one or other form of faith, although others maintain an atheistic or agnostic position. Personal convictions, whatever they might be, are, however, generally regarded as irrelevant to their sociological interests. Their fundamental concern, as sociologists of religion, remains the same, namely, to further the understanding of the role of religion in society, to analyse its significance in and impact upon human history, and to understand its diversity and the social forces and influences that shape it.

Sociology and the truth claims of religion

Despite the emergence of more tolerant attitudes, very different views can still be found on what stance the sociologist of religion should or can adopt towards the evaluation of the truth, rationality, coherence or sense of beliefs and consequently the nature of the sociological enterprise in this area.¹ One view holds, in complete contrast to those who advocate treating religion entirely as a natural phenomenon, that it is not amenable to sociological analysis at all. In this view, religion is not just another social institution or human activity like any other. It is not something that can be subjected to rational explanation. Or, at least, it is alleged to spring from some fundamental source of a non-naturalistic or spiritual character which cannot be understood in any other way than in religious or spiritual terms.

An extreme form of this view is that belief can be explained in no other way than that it is the truth and has been revealed as such. This would, of course, place only one set of religious beliefs out of court as far as sociological understanding is concerned, namely, those of the believer. Every other system of belief would be legitimate territory for the sociologist to explore. From the perspective of the discipline of the sociology of religion, however, this is an incoherent position. If the sociologist were to pay heed to this argument when put forward by a Christian, then it would also have to be heeded when put forward by a Buddhist, a Muslim, or a devotee of Melanesian frog worship. The sociologist would then be in the position of accepting what neither a Christian, a Buddhist, nor a Muslim would be inclined to accept, namely, that all three were based upon truth. Furthermore, sociology as a discipline would find itself in the absurd position of simultaneously holding that a particular belief system was and was not a legitimate object of analysis, since individual sociologists of different faiths would each wish to exempt their own from sociological analysis. Clearly, those who would question the sociology of religion as a viable field of enquiry cannot be selective about which religious systems can be placed outside its scope.

There are, of course, those who, along with Lucy, would claim that all religions do share some common fundamental basis – appreciation of the divine, the spiritual, the sacred, the transcendental, perhaps – but their view is rarely well substantiated, as Charlie Brown’s reply would suggest.² Attempts to state what this fundamental essence is are generally vague, unsatisfactory and unconvincing. In any case, even if there were some common factor impervious to sociological, psychological or other explanatory analysis, this would leave a great deal, indeed, the greater part of the substantive content of systems of belief, open to sociological treatment. The sociologist or psychologist could, at least, search for the reasons for the differences between belief systems. Whatever the nature of the underlying essence, the specific and concrete forms that this appreciation of the spiritual takes could be related to varying social or psychological conditions.

Some of those who believe that religion entails the inexplicably transcendental would be quite content to allow sociology and psychology this broad scope (Garrett, 1974). Why the enquiry has to be limited in this way and not allowed to attempt to investigate the nature, source and causes of what believers experience and interpret as sacred or transcendental, is generally not stated.

Others, even some sociologists, would, rejecting reductionism, limit the scope of the subject to the sympathetic description and interpretation of different belief systems ruling out causal generalisations (Eliade, 1969; Towler, 1974). Comparison would be allowed only in so far as it did not seek to go beyond the understandings of believers themselves. Religion is seen as understandable only in its own terms, as a phenomenon which is sui generis. This approach has a long tradition in Europe and in particular Germany and Holland and is generally known as the phenomenological or hermeneutic approach (Morris, 1987, p. 176; Kehrer and Hardin, 1984).³

Eliade, for example, argues that we cannot understand religious phenomena by attempting to reduce them to social or psychological facts. They must be understood in their own terms as stemming from the human experience of the sacred. Each is an expression of this experience and the sacred is something which is irreducible to any kind of explanation.

Against such views some have reacted by offering thoroughgoing defences of reductionist approaches (Cavanaugh, 1982; Segal, 1980, 1983, 1994). Others have criticised the anti-reductionists for asserting the autonomy or sui generis nature of their subject matter without sound justification and for attributing to religion an ontological reality that they do not demonstrate that it has. Such claims, according to these critics, simply constitute an attempt to rule, rather arbitrarily, certain questions out of court, motivated by the anxiety that to ask them carries a threat to the religious convictions of those who make them, to religious belief in general and to the reality of religion as an autonomous phenomenon (Edwards, 1994; Strenski, 1994). That any such threat exists is questionable, according to Edwards (1994), while Penner and Yonan (1972) argue that reductionism operates only at a theoretical level and does not in any sense undermine the reality of the phenomena that it seeks to understand. In the biological sciences a reductionist explanation of some aspect of bodily function in biochemical terms does not mean that the function in question is not real. Penner (1989) considers that the phenomenological stance in the study of religion is, in any case, as reductionist as any sociological or psychological approach. It not only departs just as much from the believers’ own accounts of their beliefs as the latter approaches do but is also actually covertly theological. ‘The phenomenology of religion and theology are two sides of the same coin’ (ibid., p. 56) and it ‘could reasonably be described as Christian theology carried on by other means’ (ibid., p. 42) according to Penner.

Pals (1994) remains unconvinced that reductionism is as harmless as this would make it seem. In any case it is illegitimate, such critics argue, to attempt to preclude a reductionist account of religion on a priori grounds (Wiebe, 1990). On the other hand, Wiebe (1978, 1981, 1984, 1990) has sought a middle way between reductionism and radical non-reductionism, arguing that reductionists are wrong in claiming, in so far as they do, that an understanding of religion necessarily requires a reductionist account. This, of course, cuts both ways as others who have sought a middle way have argued (Dawson, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990; Dippman, 1991; Edwards, 1994; Pals, 1986, 1987, 1990, 1994) in that it leaves the matter open to either reductionist or non-reductionist accounts which should be judged on their merits and how well they stand up empirically. There is little agreement, then, on what a middle way would look like nor do critics of this position believe that one has been found (Segal and Wiebe, 1989).

Clearly, these debates will probably continue unabated and the issues cannot be resolved here. Nor can or will the sociological study of religion wait upon their resolution. Perhaps they are ultimately irresolvable. Perhaps they can only be resolved by actually attempting to understand and to explain religious belief, behaviour and experience sociologically and psychologically, the success or otherwise of this enterprise providing the test of the various points of view. In the face of such disagreements the approach of the social sciences to religion must be accepted as a viable one, at least as viable as the hermeneutic approach.

Methodological agnosticism

In any case, even if there were some irreducible element in religious experience, the concrete forms it takes may well be mediated by psychological and sociological processes. The extent to which religious beliefs and practices can be understood in terms of such processes is an empirical question and it must be left to the disciplines concerned to attempt to discover relationships and patterns, or social and psychological influences. This means, of course, that the sociology of religion is not necessarily incompatible with phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches.

Perhaps the most prevalent and currently respectable stance which is taken towards religion by contemporary sociologists is that which in one of its versions has been called ‘methodological atheism’ (Berger, 1973, pp. 106 and 182).⁴ This holds that it is necessary to ‘bracket’ aside the question of the status of religious claims, reserving judgement on whether they are ultimately founded upon some irreducible and inexplicable basis. This approach would take the sociological analysis of religion as far as is possible on the assumption that it is a human product (or projection, as Berger puts it) and amenable to the same sort of explanations as other forms of social and individual behaviour using whatever methods are deemed appropriate for the social sciences.

The neutrality of this methodological agnosticism⁵ with regard to the claims of religious beliefs clearly has considerable advantages. It protects the sensibilities of those who would otherwise feel uncomfortable with the idea of treating religious belief empirically. More importantly, it is not always necessary for the sociologist to adjudicate on the matter of the truth or falsity of any given set of beliefs under investigation. In fact, in many cases it would be impossible to do so. If, for example, it were observed that in a given society certain ‘medicines’ claimed to have magical curative powers were utilised, the sociologist could hardly set about carrying out all the various tests to determine whether there was any evidence for the substances used having defmite medical properties before going on to analyse the beliefs and practices sociologically. Even more importantly, there would be little point in doing so, since what matters in attempting to understand and explain the given pattern of belief and behaviour or assessing its social effects is the tests that the believers and the practitioners have undertaken and the evidence that is available to them as they see it. The existence of evidence in the eyes of the sociologist is neither here nor there in accounting for what the people themselves believe or what they do.

On the other hand, methodological agnosticism also suffers from a major weakness if it is applied too rigidly – if it is taken to imply that the question of truth or falsity of beliefs need never arise for the sociologist as an important matter to decide upon and which might play a central role in accounting for belief – if, in short, it is used to defend a relativist position. This would place too great a constraint upon the discipline. One of the conclusions that a sociological investigation of a system of beliefs might come to is precisely that it contains much that is false, incoherent, etc. In the example used above, of medicines with magical curative powers, it might be that extensive tests of the substances used have been carried out by medical science which finds no evidence for the claims of those who use them. Clearly, then, if the sociologist accepts the findings and conclusions of medical science, there is a discrepancy between what the practitioners regard as good evidence and what the sociologist does. The crucial sociological question is thus moved on a stage to become not ‘why do the believers believe what they believe?’ but ‘why do the believers consider that they have good evidence for believing what they believe?’. Now it might be that the sociologist observes that the practitioners count only positive instances in establishing the evidence in support of their belief. It is a very common error in all cultures and societies to notice only positive inst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Religion and reason
• 3 Magic
• 4 Religion and emotion
• 5 Buddhism
• 6 Religion and ideology
• 7 The coming of the millennium
• 8 Religion and solidarity
• 9 The birth of the gods
• 10 Religion and solidarity
• 11 Taboos and rituals
• 12 Religion and rationality
• 13 The Protestant ethic debate
• 14 Religion and meaning
• 15 Secularisation
• 16 Religion and rational choice
• 17 Sects, cults and movements
• 18 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index