Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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Three classical paradigms

The sociology of religion emerged from the philosophy of the Enlightenment on the one hand and its Romantic critique on the other. Although it attempts to make religion the object of scientific study, sociology has inherited certain presuppositions from the philosophical discourse that have shaped its perspectives on religion in different ways. In order to better understand the development of the sociology of religion, one has to consider how social scientific understandings of religion are informed by basic assumptions about Western modernity, the course of history, and the place of human beings in this world. Three classical paradigms had the strongest impact on the Âdiscipline: the approaches of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber.

Karl Marx (1818–1883)

For Marx, as for his teacher Hegel, history follows a logic through which human beings emancipate themselves from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom and selfrealization. However, for Marx, unlike Hegel, the engine of this development is not the dialectics of the ‘world spirit’ but that of the material conditions of existence. Human beings realize themselves in the process of the production and reproduction of their concrete lives. This takes place through actors’ engagements in the technical and technological control of nature, in conjunction with the social relations through which humans exercise this process of control. An increasing control of nature leads to an increasing division of labor, creating class distinctions initially based almost exclusively upon gender. The differentiation between manual and intellectual labor causes drastic inequality based on the ownership of private property. In early socioeconomic stages, ‘nature’ seems rather mysterious, whereas with increasing control of natural forces and increasing class differentiation, ‘society’ becomes more unfathomable.

In other words, modern science and technology have produced an unprecedented rational understanding and practical control through which nature has become widely demystified. However, capitalism has produced an extreme class differentiation between manual and intellectual labor, as well as between owners of the means of production and workers. These social relations are usually not comprehended as they actually are, but are misunderstood, misrepresented, and mysticized.

The reasons for this mystification are manifold, but all based upon the alienating structures of modern socioeconomic relations. There are the privileged, who have an interest in legitimation. They produce and spread an ideology of self-justification, which is in part strategic – perhaps even cynical – and in part self-deluding. Then there are the workers, who are alienated from each other through competition, and deprived of their creativity and self-realization through the mechanical character of their work and the loss of control over the means of production as well as their own products. Finally, misrecognition lies in the very nature of commodity production itself, since the interaction between social actors appears in the form of an exchange relation between products.

For Marx, religion plays an obvious role in these processes. In early socioeconomic stages, religion consists mainly in a response to the mysteriousness of nature and expresses humanity’s lack of understanding and control. But in more advanced stages, religion increasingly distorts the understanding of the true nature of social relations by expressing the alienation inscribed into class structures. Religion, by creating the illusion of a transcendental power of perfection which demands submission to the status quo, also prevents social actors from collectively

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establishing a social order that would allow them to realize their full potential as social and creative human beings.

In order to overcome alienation, it is not sufficient to criticize religious consciousness. Rather, one has to overturn the class structure of capitalism and change the mode of production. Once this has happened, religion would disappear and people would be able to understand and control society as rationally as they do nature, and they would be free to realize their true natures as social and creative beings.

Since for Marx religion does not represent the source of human alienation, but just expresses it, this approach does not pay much attention to the study of religion per se. Although the Marxian view that religions reflect the structures of social relations holds true for all social scientists to a certain degree, a rather narrow reading of Marx has led to a long and unfortunate neglect of the study of religion from a Marxian perspective. Only recently have social scientists recaptured the fruitful aspects of the Marxian tradition while giving up the teleological view of history (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1995).

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917)

While Marx’s understanding of history and humanity is based on a model of human and social emancipation, Durkheim’s is based on social order and its civilizing, moralizing, and socializing mission. According to Durkheim, human beings have a double nature consisting of body and soul. On the one hand, they are driven by bodily needs, following their egoistic natural drives and desires; on the other, they have souls, which are social and moral. The task of any social order is to keep the egoistic drives of individuals in check, and to transform these individuals into social and moral agents who conform to group norms (Durkheim 1914/1960).

Although civilization progresses for Durkheim, the basic problem stays in many respects the same. What changes is the division of labor, and with it, modes of thought and methods of social integration. An increasing division of labor, which according to Durkheim has been institutionalized not for its unforeseeable greater efficiency but for the social regulation of competition, makes people much more interdependent than they were in segmentary societies. This explains why segmentary societies rely much more on integration through rituals than modern ones.

Nevertheless, any social order works only when people share basic categories of thought and moral beliefs, and reinforces them through collective rituals. All categories of thoughtÂand moral beliefs originate in religion, which is based on the distinction between sacred and profane. Differentiations of space, time, cause, and number originate out of this basic distinction. Religion, therefore, is the source of thought and knowledge but, following Comte, Durkheim argues that with the progress of civilization other modes of thought, especially science, replace religion at least in part. However, this is only a difference in degree, not in kind; since scientific knowledge also becomes obligatory it is, so-to-speak, a higher form of religion. Nevertheless, religion is still needed since science cannot replace the emotional side of religion, which attaches people to each other via symbolic representations. This can be generated only by dense interactions in extraordinary and often ecstatic situations, such as public ceremonies.

Durkheim’s understanding of religion assumes a basic identity between the political and the religious unit and appears to be heavily informed by the modern Western idea of the nation. Durkheim’s theory directly jumps from tribal religion to civic religion – omitting all

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examples of religiously pluralistic empires, conflicts between and within religious traditions, and disintegrative effects of religions. Durkheim suggests via his study of Australian totemism that all societies need a unifying system of thought, symbols, norms, and values, identifying nationalism as the new ‘civic religion’ adequate to modern industrial societies (1912/1995). However, Durkheim is not a nationalist. For him nationalism represents only a necessary intermediary stage in the emergence of human universalism. Durkheim’s understanding of religion has been the most dominant theoretical influence in both sociology and anthropology.

Max Weber (1864–1920)

For Weber, neither human emancipation nor social order and integration are the central points of departure. Neither does history have an intrinsic goal, nor does modernity’s central problem lie in the control of egoistic individualism. For Weber, modern Western societies are not underregulated but rather overregulated. In the modern bureaucratic age there is hardly any space left to lead a meaningful life according to any principles other than utilitarian ones. Weber shared the Marxian insight that people make their own history but do not control it. Weber’s sociology is full of examples of how social actions have led to unintended and often paradoxical historical outcomes. Weber’s central question, therefore, is how this modern rationalist system of external social control and internalized self-control has developed historically, and how modern individuals as cultural beings can respond to it with dignity and responsibility. Although himself religiously ‘unmusical,’ Weber sees a certain dignity in religious attempts to transcend the narrow boundaries of utilitarian interests through the dramatization of ultimate values and the principled shaping of one’s life according to them.

Weber’s sociology of religion begins with an inquiry into the religious sources of modern capitalist culture and ends with a cross-culturally comparative study of rationalisms embedded in the religious traditions of China, India, and ancient Judaism. Weber draws the conclusion that the modern West is the result of a unique rationalization process, which has affected not only its economic system and its principles of bureaucratic organization but also its culture – especially its science, music, and art.

While ‘primitive’ religions were hardly differentiated from the pursuit of ‘this-worldly’ interests, the rise of ‘salvation’ religions formulated by religious intellectuals and virtuosi defined religion as a separable sphere of interests. The very idea of salvation and the different paths to salvation defined the world in relation to an ultimate value, and restructured the attitudes and life conduct of social actors towards worldly spheres of interest. Of course, this did not take place independent of political and economic structures and developments, but it added a dimension of interests, which in turn could exert influence upon economic and political institutions and actors. According to Weber, religious ideas and interests are mediated by institutions, which develop their own dynamics in conjunction with the everyday needs of their followers.

In the West, a unique type of rationalism of ‘world mastery’ developed out of the confluence of the rationalism of Judaic ethical prophecy, Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christian monasticism and the emerging bourgeois economy of independent cities. This rationalism was taken up by parts of the Protestant Reformation, particularly by Calvinism and ascetic Protestant sects, and systematized into an attitude of inner-worldly asceticism. The ethos of these groups is characterized by self-control, methodical life conduct directed towards work in a calling, and acquisition through a regularly and rationally pursued business. This religious ethos of inner-worldly asceticism matched perfectly with a socially upwardly mobile class of

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small entrepreneurs and a wider economic interest in docile workers. It became a model that was adopted eventually by wider society, contributing to the shaping of a bourgeois, modern Western type of capitalism. Ironically, this originally religious ethos has been transformed in the course of capitalist development into our modern, religiously empty work habits and utilitarian attitudes.

Challenged by critics that his view of religion in the shaping of modern capitalist culture is not well founded, Weber engaged in a cross-culturally comparative study of The Economic Ethics of the World Religions. Studying the religions of China (Weber 1920/1951) and India (Weber 1920/1958) he concludes that they offered to their practitioners very different psychological incentives from Western religions, especially ascetic Protestantism. Confucianism basically affirms the world and does not create the inner tensions which motivated ascetic Protestants to shape the world. And although Indian religions certainly reject the world, they have cultivated techniques to escape from it, rather than transforming it. Moreover, Weber observes that the spread of a religious elite’s ethos to the masses requires institutions of transmission; in the case of ascetic Protestantism, the intense involvement of the laity in congregational forms of prophetic religions was key to the development and spread of an ethic of innerworldly asceticism. But according to Weber, these were absent in China and India.

The Western rationalization processes set in motion by this religiously motivated ethos contributed to the disenchantment of the world by rejecting all irrational means of attaining salvation, and promoted the emergence of rationally organized institutional orders and ethics. According to Weber, this process of disenchantment and secularization removed the religious ethic from central economic, political, and cultural institutions, freeing them from religious control. Whoever chooses to live a life based on religious principles can do so only against the institutionalized logic of ‘unbrotherly’ bureaucratic regimes that no longer recognize religious morality but instead value efficiency, performance, and utility. Therefore, in Western modernity, religion can only survive in more central social institutions if it adapts to their logics and more-or-less sanctifies them. It is only in small voluntary associations at the social margins that religion can preserve an ethos of universal brotherhood. According to Weber, there exists the possibility of new charismatic upheavals that can change people’s inner attitudes – but given the rigidity and efficiency of bureaucratic systems, these revolutionary possibilities are rather unlikely to succeed in the modern West.

Religion, modernity, secularization

Unlike Marx, neither Durkheim nor Weber expected religion to disappear, but both certainly assumed that it would be transformed in the modern world. The next generations of scholars elaborated these arguments in more detail, usually fusing the traditions of Durkheim and Weber as they understood them. Whereas those working in the Durkheimian tradition tended to focus more on the integrative role of religion at the social center, Weberians turned instead to religious movements at the margins of society.

Modernization and civil religion

Talcott Parsons and his students elaborated the Durkheimian perspective on religion, inquiring into the integration of modern societies through generalized religious values and civil religions. Parsons (1902–1979) focused on the interpenetration of Christian (specifically

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sectarian Protestant) values into the very fabric of modern industrial (specifically American) society. According to Parsons, the generalization of Âvoluntarism and individualism made the modern US the most Christian society ever (Parsons 1963).

Robert Bellah’s work typifies this view, especially in his evolutionary theory of religion (Bellah 1970). According to Bellah, humanity’s need for religious symbols is a constant factor in social life – but as human societies have evolved over time, so have the content and dynamics of religious symbol systems. Historically, religion developed alongside of social and self-development, and as societies acquired greater knowledge and achieved greater capacity for social and self-transformation, religious belief concurrently has become characterized by individual choice. Bellah argues for a five-stage schema of the evolution of religion, ranging from primitive to modern. This schema views religion in the modern West – paradigmatically the Protestant US – as more highly developed and normatively better than other less rationalized and more magical forms. Bellah claims that the doctrinal diversity of Protestantism and the freedom of individuals to choose belief are not evidence of secularization, but rather evidence of human progress.

Following ideas of civil religion earlier explored by Rousseau and Durkheim, Bellah sought institutional settings where essential American values such as civic activism and individualism were interpreted, dramatized, and ritually enacted. Focusing on Presidential addresses at certain decisive moments in American history, he identified expressions of nationally shared ultimate values and a vision of the nation’s calling, and claimed civil religion’s continuing if fragile existence in America. According to Bellah, the particulars of American civil religion have incorporated Protestant Christian themes of covenant, death, and resurrection or rebirth, and its ritual calendar emphasizes the central importance of family and local community in American democracy. Civil religion, through narrative and collective ritual experience, creates a moral and affective consensus for democratic participation.

In later works, Bellah expresses concern that the actual practice of civil religion in the US has diminished to the point where it no longer provides moral cohesion, and worries that individualism threatens to undermine the moral consensus for participation upon which American democracy is built (Bellah 1975). In Habits of the Heart (1985), Bellah and his colleagues conclude that an individualistic ethos cannot supply the moral cohesion needed for democracy, and relocates the affective and cognitive resources necessary for democratic participation back within institutional churches, especially liberal Protestant ones.

Building on Bellah’s approach, Robert Wuthnow (1988) presents an alternative characterization of religion in the contemporary US. Wuthnow argues that, in contrast to the early twentieth-century US when religion was primarily allied with and supportive of the state, religion since the Second World War is increasingly politically polarized and often mobilized against government and other political actors. Brought about by post-war economic expansion and a strong and active state, and catalyzed by special purpose groups, the religious landscape in the contemporary US has been restructured: a cleavage between liberal and conservative religionists has replaced denominationalism as the primary source of identification and religio-political engagement .

The Parsons School also sought to elaborate aspects of Max Weber’s sociology of religion, but their reception of it was rather unfortunate. As translator of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic, Talcott Parsons encouraged his students to look for its analogs all over the world. The idea was to identify carriers of inner-worldly asceticism, which would promote the passage of ‘underdeveloped’ societies into a Western type of modernity. This represents a rather peculiar reading of Weber. Weber was not an evolutionist thinker, but a historicist one; he placed no