Sociology of Religion

Overview and Analysis of Contemporary Religion

Abby Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367151911
• eBook ISBN: 9780429619175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The first sociology of religion textbook to begin the task of diversifying and decolonizing the study of religion, Sociology of Religion develops a sociological frame that draws together the personal, political and public, showing how religion – its origins, development and changes – is understood as a social institution, influenced by and influencing wider social structures.

Organized along sociological structures and themes, the book works with examples from a variety of religious traditions and regions rather than focusing in depth on a selection, and foregrounds cultural practice-based understandings of religion. It is therefore a book about 'religion', not 'religions', that explores the relationship of religion with gender and sexuality, crime and violence, generations, politics and media, 'race', ethnicity and social class, disease and disability – highlighting the position of religion in social justice and equality.

Each chapter of this book is framed around concrete case studies from a variety of Western and non-Western religious traditions. Students will benefit from thinking about the discipline across a range of geographical and religious contexts. The book includes features designed to engage and inspire students:

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• Up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of engaging and accessible material

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• 'Case Examples': short summaries of empirical examples relating to the chapter themes

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• Visually distinct boxes with bullet points, key words and phrases focusing on the context

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• Questions suitable for private or seminar study

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• Suggested class exercises for instructors to use

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• Suggested readings and further readings/online resources at the end of each chapter

Following a review and critique of early sociology of religion, the book engages with more contemporary issues, such as dissolving the secular/sacred binary and paying close attention to issues of epistemology, negotiations, marginalities, feminisms, identities, power, nuances, globalization, (post) (multiple) modernity (ies), emotion, structuration, reflexivity, intersectionality and urbanization. This book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students exploring the sociology of religion, religion and society, religious studies, theology, globalization and human geography.

Part I

Mapping the field

Chapter 1

What is a sociology of religion?

Religion is an institution created by people; sociologists are interested in how and why humans create and practise it. This book has been written for university students who are studying religion from a social scientific perspective, many for the first time. It is not an apparently neutral, fact-laden textbook, but my overview and critical analysis of important themes dominating the field of study, and an exposure of some that have been ignored or silenced.

The ideas and analysis have arisen from my own teaching and research, a review of sociology of religion syllabuses worldwide, detailed review of my proposed chapters by peer reviewers (for whose feedback and recommendations I am most grateful), involvement in the field’s main international academic organizations (mainly the Sociology of Religion study group in the British Sociological Association and the Association for the Sociology of Religion) where many of these ideas, particularly concerning a critical feminist turn, and decolonizing and liberating the curriculum, have been discussed.

The decolonizing agenda, taking ‘colonization’ as both material and epistemic means to suppress and reinforce ‘otherness’ (Said 1978) has rightly been gaining pace and its influence will be seen throughout this book. The institutions of the Global North and West remain dominated by a small elite, with a much narrower set of perspectives and interests than are found in diverse populations. People from a small set of identity-categories – crudely equated to ‘white men of the Global North’ – still dominate the production and dissemination of academic knowledge in teaching, writing and research. This distorts the knowledge that universities produce, ill-serves students from non-dominant groups and threatens the humanistic values on which the modern university is founded (see e.g. Day et al. 2021; Bhambra et al. 2018; Connell 2018; Mbembe, 2016; Santos 2014; Mignolo 2011; Encarnacion et al. 2010).

Ideas that have become ‘taken for granted’ in the sociology of religion need critical exploration, even – or especially – when presented by one of the ‘masters’: the subordination of human agency to structure; the apparently universal search for meaning; a turn to individualization; the universality and timelessness of religion, women being more religious than men, religion’s disappearance or loss of significance; an apparent decline in morality being linked to decline of religion; and so on. Those are often untested, and frequently lazy, tired concepts that need to be subjected to review and analysis.

In this chapter, we will consider three main questions. What constitutes a discipline of ‘sociology’? What is ‘religion’? Why is there such a strong relationship between the two?

Inventing sociology

There is a phrase in the Christian Bible that in the beginning there was the ‘Word’, and the ‘Word’ was made flesh. Sociologists think the opposite: in the beginning (were such a thing as a ‘beginning’ even imaginable), there was flesh and flesh made words. Humans created language and with language came categories that are seemingly so real that they are taken for granted, such as gender, or race, or religion. Sociologists did not invent categories. Centuries before the word ‘sociology’ was spoken, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (Durkheim and Mauss 1963) argued that categories are human constructions which not only classify phenomena, but structure our thinking about them.

The anthropologist Rodney Needham, (1972, vii–xlviii) in his introduction to Durkheim and Mauss’s essay, criticizes the authors for not developing or providing more evidence for that idea, but welcomes it (Needham 1972, xxxiv) nevertheless for drawing attention ‘for the first time in sociological enquiry, to a topic of fundamental importance in understanding human thought and social life’ and, in his words, providing a theoretical contribution that ‘has been to isolate classification as an aspect of culture to which sociological enquiry should be directed’ (Needham 1972, xi)

Durkheim and Mauss’s argument was significant to those in circles beyond the social scientific. It expressly countered claims by the influential philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that human beings uniquely possessed a mental structure that existed a priori (Kant 1881). Durkheim and Mauss took the opposite position and went one step further. Not only did they say that all categories are social and not the product of any one individual, but that the first stage in such social classification would be a religious one as people attempted to explain their worlds, probably by marking a difference between people and something thought to be beyond people.

Thinking with words

Students of the sociology of religion may find it helpful to keep the term a priori in mind when reading books about religion as it identifies a particular, and important, line of argument. The Latin term means ‘from the earlier’, and is used in philosophy to denote something that is inherent, existing before being acquired by the senses. Its opposite, a sense-derived experience, is often called a posterior, a Latin term meaning ‘from the later’. Sociologists generally assume that knowledge is formed from experience, and does not exist pre-socially. When sociologists of religion describe something – an idea, a need, an emotion – as a priori or inherent, they are usually drawing on their theological background rather than a sociological training.

Durkheim and Mauss also opposed James Frazer (1890), arguing that he thought people were divided into clans by something pre-existing. Durkheim and Mauss said that people classify things because they are divided by clans. These distinctions are important because exploring how social worlds are created is one of the principal aims of sociology. Sociologists work to make the familiar unfamiliar, exposing social constructions of what may be otherwise taken-for-granted, appearing ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’. ‘Common sense’ and ‘nature’ are often terms for received, socially constructed and hegemonic ‘wisdom’. Deconstructing those ideas and exposing their background agendas have been the defining marks of feminist analysis, beginning in the 19th century. Suffragette, novelist and sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1899) made an observation that was rare at the time: such taken-for-granted assumptions about nature are gendered, with an apparently natural social order depending largely on the unpaid labour of women as care-provider and nurturer. Insufficient numbers of social scientists then or now have retained that focus, and the apparent distinction between private and public spheres, and reproduction/production are essentialized concepts that have, as will be discussed throughout this book, important ramifications for religion.

Gilman was writing in a period of rapid social change, when the consequences of empire and the industrial revolution, for example, were having significant global impact. She and many other female and non-white sociologists have generally been ignored in what has become the sociological ‘canon’, or accepted ‘foundational’ or, in a gendered manner of speaking, ‘seminal’ works.¹

Thinking with words

Essentialize is a critical term for sociologists. Think first of the noun ‘essential’, meaning that which defines the set of which it is part. Water is an essential resource for human survival. When the word is turned into a verb and used critically, ‘essentialize’ means to convey that something is an essential part of something else, when it is not. People may reduce women’s role as care-givers to something apparently natural by essentializing gendered care. A statement like ‘caring women create strong societies’ makes the notion of care essential to the female condition. Your teachers and examiners will notice if you essentialize during your writing and guide you to think more critically.

Sociology is thus concerned not only with what may be explained about society, but with the methods of explaining that, both theoretically and empirically. What is explained, how, and by whom? Who decides on how knowledge is created? As sociologist Michael Mann put it, it is dangerous to make assumptions about what is a ‘fact’:

Analysis cannot merely reflect the ‘facts’; our perception of the facts is ordered by mental concepts and theories. The average empirical historical study contains many implicit assumptions about human nature and society, and commonsense concepts derived from our own social experience – such as ‘the nation,’ ‘social class,’ ‘status,’ ‘political power,’ ‘the economy.’

(Mann 1986, 3–4)

Mann was interested in how societies operate through the manifestation and distribution of power. He noted that religion traditionally had more power than states or armies because it gave people in a large geographical area a sense of collective identity, producing ‘a particular way of organizing social relations’ (Mann 1986, 21).

While it is therefore striking, it should perhaps not be surprising that many early sociological thinkers chose to investigate religion. Several of those figures were instrumental in what has been regarded as the beginning of social thought, with the French social theorists Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim deliberately rejecting speculative philosophy as a legitimate means of understanding human life, instead turning to science and society, identifying what Durkheim called ‘social facts’.

The turn to describing ideas and behaviours through society has many roots, but a prime one often appearing in contemporary sociology and the sociology of religion is the era of the Enlightenment. This 18th-century, western European period, also known as the Age of Reason, will be familiar to most readers and I therefore will not provide a detailed history lesson. The reason for raising it here, however, is to prepare the sociologist of religion for some of the most heated debates, and often quietly held assumptions, in the field. Put crudely, the Enlightenment is regarded with respect by those who favour its valorization of reason and prominence of the secular over religious, and criticized strongly by those who see it as the beginning of a harsh period of industrialization, capitalism, positivism, and loss of enchantment, even innocence. An accusation of ‘enlightenment thinking’ is not to be taken as a compliment.

Randall Collins (1994, 16–17) describes this period as the point where social scientific thinking began, housed both in universities and the comfortable salons of the wealthy:

It was the first time that thinkers tried to provide general explanations of the social world. They were able to detach themselves, at least in principle, from expounding some existing ideology and to attempt to lay down general principles that explained social life.

The continued rise of universities gave the opportunity for ideas relating to history, economy and the social sciences to develop as their own spheres of research and writing, known as ‘disciplines’. In the following sections, I discuss several themes arising from those new disciplines that have significantly influenced sociology and the sociology of religion.

Materialism and the social

One of the most astute observers of societies, and a master storyteller, was Karl Marx. Understanding basic concepts of Marxist theory is important for a sociologist of religion for several reasons. One is the impact he and his collaborator (and financial backer) Friedrich Engels had on scholars and lay people alike: The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1848) is only outsold by the Bible. Another reason is how Marxism inspired some of the most significant social changes in the 20th century: widespread revolutions across the world included Russia 1917, China in 1925 and 1949, and the Cuban Revolution of 1959, as well as underpinning mixed economies of the 20th century. Sociologists and other scholars have criticized Marx on many grounds, not least of these being a recognition that he universalized his theory from a European perspective. Gurminder Bhambra (2007) criticized Marx for describing ‘capital’ in Euro-centric terms, placing non-European societies as ‘other’ and failing to analyse economic and non-economic processes of exchange between European and non-European societies. Marx also failed to consider under his banner of ‘exploitation’ the role of non-waged slave labour, as authors such as Stephanie Smallwood (2008) discuss.

Other scholars reject Marxist views that ignore the role women play in capitalist economies through their unpaid labour, providing free domestic service to the male worker and raising children to be contributors to the capitalist economy (see e.g. Barrett 1980).

Thinking with words

Materialism has a specific meaning in the context of social theory and philosophy, and should not be confused with a more everyday, normative current term of ‘materialistic’, or a sociology of religion turn to the ‘material’. Materialism is the opposite of ‘idealism’; it is a view that all ‘facts’ and all human history are caused by physical processes. Marx used his idea of ‘historical materialism’ to argue that all societies and their institutions, including religion, systems of morality, the family and law, are products of economic activity.

Sociologists may then explore why communist societies largely banished religion, and what have been the dynamics of its apparent resurgence and retreat in huge swathes of the globe. There is also the usefulness in some research projects of engaging with ideas of ‘the material’, for providing insights into interpretations of social class and, more recently, into a trend towards ‘spirituality in the workplace’ (we’ll learn more about that in future chapters). Finally, some people, such as Stuart Jeffries (2012), are observing a return to Marxist thought and principles, particularly in younger generations who believe that capitalism has developed in ways ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Mapping the field
• Part II Religion and its publics
• Part III Contested borders
• Part IV Is nothing, or everything, sacred?
• Index