8 Key excerpts on "Religious Organisation"

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  eBook - ePub

  Turning Psychology into a Social Science

  • Bernard Guerin(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There are many behaviours that have variously been called religious: church membership, church attendance, rituals, taboos, totem behaviours, praying, devotion, spiritual experiences, magic, and reading scriptures. While some sociologists and anthropologists have tried to distinguish among these different behaviours, I will include them all because, as will become clear, I do not wish to discriminate between religious and non-religious behaviours, let alone any of these finer categories.

  Definitions of religion are very broad. Consider one definition of religion:

  Religion is a human phenomenon that unites cultural, social, and personality systems into a meaningful whole. Its components generally include (1) a community of believers who share (2) a common myth that interprets the abstractions of cultural values into historic reality through (3) ritual behavior , which makes possible personal participation in (4) a dimension of experience recognized as encompassing something more than everyday reality—the holy. These elements are united into recognizable structures that undergo processes of change, development, and deterioration.

  (Hargrove, 1989, pp. 29–30, italics in original)

  Religion has many component behaviours that are difficult to distinguish conceptually, and no single feature defines religion. Sociologists and anthropologists (Malinowski, 1925/1948) have at times tried to distinguish between religion and magic, but others blur this distinction also (Homans, 1941; Nadel, 1957).

  Some functions of religious behaviours

  Pathway 1: the ‘internal’ functions of religious behaviours

  When we look at the structures and functions claimed for religion, we again see current psychology focusing on functions originating inside

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  Foundations and Futures in the Sociology of Religion

  • Luke Doggett, Alp Arat(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part IV

  Religious dimensions of social life

  Passage contains an image

  10 Researching the religious dimensions of social life

  The sacred and the social uses of moral meaning in contemporary society

  Gordon Lynch

  As the earlier sections of this book demonstrate, research in the sociology of religion has much to contribute to our understanding of important structures and processes in religious institutions and individual religiosity, as well forms of interaction between Religious Organisations and other fields of social life. The aim of this chapter is to delineate an area of research within the contemporary sociology of religion that has arguably been less well-developed than this work on the religious lives of individuals and organisations, but which constitutes an important area for future work.

  A central assumption of much work in the sociology of religion over the past forty years is that it most naturally focuses on beliefs, practices, organisations and social structures and processes that relate to human engagement with supra-human beings or forces.1 This substantive understanding of religion under-writes the continued interest in the sociological study of major religious traditions as well, in recent decades, as the discipline’s interest in new religious movements and the ‘new age.’ The emergence of the study of ‘nonreligion’ as an important area for attention more recently has not necessarily troubled this assumption in instances where this work focuses on organisations or forms of living that are defined as being distinct from those oriented towards such supra-human powers.

  The aim of this chapter is not to declaim this centre of gravity for our discipline in any way. This working assumption about its field of study, and the avoidance of protracted debates about disciplinary focus and identity, has provided a valuable basis for researchers to develop our understanding of contemporary religious life across a range of traditions and contexts. The intellectual, ethical and political significance of resourcing more nuanced academic and public understandings of religion cannot be understated.

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  What is Religion?

  • Robert Crawford(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  16 A definition of religion

  Having considered the way religion is practised, organized and believed, we proceed to try and define it. Attempts, as we noted in the first chapter, usually concentrate on the functional or substantial aspects. The former wants to draw into the net secular ideologies which have little to do with the divine as understood by the religions we have examined. Questions about ultimacy are rarely answered as the sociologist deals with the function of religion in society, but it is useful to understand how religious organizations and secular movements can be regarded as similar.

  The problem of a substantive definition is that it involves belief in the supernatural and raises problems. How are we going to explain it? And in the religions there seems to be such a blend between the religious and the secular, the social and the gods, and the reverence for ancestors and the worship of God, that the supernatural and natural are mixed together. It is difficult for us in a Western tradition, where religion is something distinct, private, and usually seen in state events or funerals or weddings, to understand this. But even where there is a secular government, as in India today, religion permeates every aspect of life. The Muslims insist that religion is Islam and the best state is an Islamic one.

  But let us consider some of the elements that could be part of our understanding of what religion is.

  An ethical definition?

  This seems a good suggestion, for we have seen that good behaviour towards our neighbours and care of animals and the earth is required. Critics are right when they contend that religious members of the faiths have not practised what they have preached, but the ideal is there and needs to be followed. Conduct predominates over creeds in most, and it is interesting that on this basis Humanism was declared by the United States Supreme Court in 1961 to be a religion. The reason given was that though it denied the existence of God, it was a carefully structured belief system and had in common with the religions a belief in the dignity of the human person and the sharing of other ethical values.

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  Supernatural as Natural

  A Biocultural Approach to Religion

  • Michael Winkelman, John R. Baker(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Many anthropologists have focused on religion as a social phenomenon involving beliefs and practices that both reflect the structure of society and provide symbolic meanings that organize the members of a group. These social approaches tend to regard religion as a central cultural practice with important functions for society as a whole. The social focus illustrates how religion and society are intimately intertwined and how religion provides norms, values, and collective activities that are essential for the functioning and survival of a group. The dominant role of religion in pre-modern societies is unmistakable, as religion defines and structures people’s relationship to their environment as well as their marriage patterns, work activities and organization, cosmology, politics, and virtually all other aspects of their culture.

  All societies must manage their internal affairs, set limits for acceptable behavior, and deal with outside groups. Because they help to organize people (as well as other beings) into social networks and cosmological systems, religions throughout history have been important sources of inspiration and justification for the cultural rules and models that societies use to define how to behave. Throughout the course of cultural evolution from small-scale egalitarian societies to large-scale stratified societies, religious beliefs, values, and behaviors have influenced the ways in which groups define, organize, govern, and identify themselves. Today, many people see religion and the supernatural as distant from the “practical world” of politics and economic power. But even in a nation like the United States, which explicitly separates church and state, there are still important relationships between religion and politics. Around the world, the integration of political and religious roles is the norm rather than the exception. Religion and politics are not strange bedfellows, but constant companions. Religious functionaries often serve as political leaders, and political leaders frequently justify their positions by citing religious beliefs.

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  Invitation to the Sociology of Religion

  • Phil Zuckerman(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002 [1904]). In this classic study, Weber explores the ways in which specific Protestant/Calvinist religious beliefs played a decisive role in the development of modern western capitalism.

  4.  Sociologists study social patterns .

  Do women attend religious services more often than men? Are blacks more likely to believe in the existence of Satan than whites? Do Jews tend to vote more liberal than Christians? Do religious people divorce less frequently than the nonreligious? Sociologists of religion have their work cut out for them in exploring the plethora of patterns that emerge concerning religion in society. The most hotly debated topic within the sociology of religion during the past decade has revolved around a basic question of one particular social pattern: whether or not people are more or less religious today than they were in the past—the matter of secularization (Swatos and Olson 2000; Bruce 1992).

  5.  Sociologists understand that an individual can be truly understood only within his or her sociohistorical context .

  To put it simply, an individual can be a member of a particular religion only if that religion exists when he or she does. Furthermore, geography (where a person exists) is key (Park 1994). An individual born in Sri Lanka is much more likely to be Buddhist than an individual born in Honduras, who will most likely be Catholic (O’Brien and Palmer 1993). My friend Kent describes himself as “nothing” in terms of a religious identity. But he isn’t “nothing” in a sociohistorical vacuum. His parents were also “nothing”; they didn’t raise Kent with any particular religious education or involvement. Furthermore, Kent grew up in a largely secular enclave and attended school in west Los Angeles with few overtly religious kids or teachers. Additionally, Kent lives in a time in history and within a culture in which religion isn’t imperative, lack of religion isn’t illegal or suspect, and being “nothing” is considered quite normal. In short, an individual’s personal religious identity (or lack thereof) is greatly influenced by where, when, and among whom that individual lives.

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  Sociology of Religion

  An Historical Introduction

  • Roberto Cipriani(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Sociological Definition of Religion

  The simplest way of defining the sociology of religion is to say that it is an application of sociological theories and methods to religious phenomena. Historically, there have been very close ties between sociology and the sociology of religion. The slow and uneven development of theory and methods in the general field of sociology affected the development of the sociology of religion, but the latter has also benefited from increasing precision and scientific validity in the general field of sociology. It is a significant fact that the great “classic” theorists of general sociology, such as Comte, Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Sorokin, and Parsons, were also major exponents of the sociology of religion.

  There is a particular point at which the different approaches of these and other sociological writers agree and disagree. Some sociologists maintain an approach to the sociology of religion that is militantly confessional or anticonfessional; others, instead, assume a position of neutrality, refusing any confessional involvement or application of their work. But few sociologists of religion take a position equidistant from these two alternatives. The personal beliefs of each sociologist emerge clearly from the definitions of religion to which each adheres. Yves Lambert has devoted a study to this (1991) in which he makes a distinction between substantive and functional definitions of religion. The former refers to substantive elements: religious practice, the supernatural, the invisible, ritual, etc. The latter, instead, emphasizes the functional connotation of religion, that is, the role of religion in society. When the sociology of religion first got started, substantive definitions were prevalent; later—particularly with the debate on secularization—functional approaches became more influential. But both approaches were shot through with and conditioned by problems of belief (or unbelief) and by the confessional belonging (or not belonging) of the individual scholar or sociologist.

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  Disembedded Markets

  Economic Theology and Global Capitalism

  • Christoph Deutschmann(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In Greece as well as in Palestine, Persia, India and China, new religious prophets and philosophers became influential, whose teachings, despite their vast differences, culminated in the discovery of the spiritual foundations of human existence. The new universal beliefs transcended the legitimacy of given political regimes and opened a horizon for intellectual discourse and critique based on a sharp disjunction between the mundane and a trans-mundane world. 3 A system of ‘institutionally specialised’ religion developed (Luckmann 1967), which monopolised the exchange of society with the ‘holy cosmos’ beyond the traditional association of religion with political power. As a ‘symbolic universe’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966), religion gave meaning and coherence to an opaque reality, and hence became able to take a hegemonic position over society and to constitute the legitimation for centralised systems of political rule. Under such conditions, religion could take on the function of a self-representation of society in a two-fold, internal and external sense. First, religion represented the internal boundary of society, as it marked the most encompassing level of sociality beyond particular, local, kinship and national affiliations, allowing humans to relate themselves to each other as humans. Excommunication from the religious community, in other words, was equivalent to social exclusion. Second, by defining the utmost general level of collective identity, religion also marked the interface of society with extra-social, natural and cosmic realities. A basic distinction was set up between the realms of the knowable and observable, open to human reason, on the one hand, and of the transcendent and unknowable, being accessible only via divine revelation, on the other. As Luhmann never got tired of emphasising, defining collective identity means fixing a distinction, and a distinction always has two sides to it: an internal and an external one

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  The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Religion

  • Adam Possamai, Anthony J. Blasi(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  First, there is the effect that sociological research has on religious organizations. If sociologists avoid referents to what religious people take to be transcendent, religious organizations would have little reason to pay attention to, let alone sponsor or fund, research findings in the field. In this context, referents to what religious people take to be transcendent do not mean the researchers’ beliefs or commitments but rather those of the people under study. As a science, sociology need not abandon a stance of methodological agnosticism. However, scholars in the field should not be dismissive, by way of a priori reductionist preconception, of the very fact of religious actors’ beliefs and commitments. This is not to say that social scientific findings must make leaders of religious organizations happy; one may still find religiosity and various prejudices against minorities positively correlated, for example. However, one would not from the outset define religion as hallucinatory, nothing but a form of acting out childhood repressions or a self-justificatory ideology of dominant classes. All these could be findings, but research should not be predicated on prior conceptualizations that predetermine such findings. Second, there is the effect by way of definition that the sociology of religion can have on law. Many nations implement governmental neutrality with respect to religions by banning religion from the public forum but preserving and even protecting the private exercise of religious activities (see Laïcité, this volume). Ironically, such a policy leads governments into the business of identifying which pursuits are religious expressions and which are nonreligious cultural ones

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