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Why american sociology taking religion seriously had to fail (or nearly so), positive signs, future directions and challenges.

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Roundtable on the Sociology of Religion: Twenty-Three Theses on the Status of Religion in American Sociology—A Mellon Working-Group Reflection

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Christian Smith, Brandon Vaidyanathan, Nancy Tatom Ammerman, José Casanova, Hilary Davidson, Elaine Howard Ecklund, John H. Evans, Philip S. Gorski, Mary Ellen Konieczny, Jason A. Springs, Jenny Trinitapoli, Meredith Whitnah, Roundtable on the Sociology of Religion: Twenty-Three Theses on the Status of Religion in American Sociology—A Mellon Working-Group Reflection, Journal of the American Academy of Religion , Volume 81, Issue 4, December 2013, Pages 903–938, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lft052

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American sociology has not taken and does not take religion as seriously as it needs to in order to do the best sociology possible. Despite religion being an important and distinctive kind of practice in human social life, both historically and in the world today, American sociologists often neglect religion or treat it reductionistically. We explore several reasons for this negligence, focusing on key historical, conceptual, methodological, and institutional factors. We then turn to offer a number of proposals to help remedy American sociology's negligence of religion, advance the study of religion in particular, and enhance sociology's broader disciplinary capacity to improve our understanding and explanation of human social life. Our purpose in this analysis is to stimulate critical and constructive discussion about the significance of religion in human life and scholarly research on it.

DOES AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY take religion seriously? Does sociology understand all that it should about religion, if only in order to do its descriptive and explanatory job well? And how does the specific field of sociology of religion fit within or relate to the larger discipline of sociology? We believe that the answers to these questions are that American sociology too often neglects religion or treats religion reductionistically, and ought to improve itself by taking a more robust understanding of religion more seriously in research and teaching. We addresses questions about religion as a social object, sociological knowledge about religion, religious claims about social life, and the character and future of the larger discipline of sociology itself.

At the initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with the University of Notre Dame, we—a group of mostly American sociologists interested in the study of religion—take up these questions and reflect critically and constructively about the relationship between religious knowledge and the discipline of sociology. 1 We offer this article to stimulate greater disciplinary self-reflection and more constructive discussions about religion in sociology. We offer our thoughts as a small contribution to much larger conversations that have unfolded around the world in recent decades about the meaning, social role, and future of religion and secularity. We speak mostly as Americans about American sociology, yet hope that our particular perspective might make some useful contribution to these larger global conversations.

This article proceeds in three parts. We first describe problems and challenges facing the study of religion within sociology. We then describe positive signs. Finally, we offer constructive proposals for future directions.

In this section, we examine the reasons—historical, conceptual, methodological, and institutional—why American sociology has had difficulty taking religion seriously. To approach this issue, and the questions that opened the article, it is necessary to first set them in their larger historical context and then place them in the contemporary landscape of American sociology.

Historical Problems

First, since its inception, American sociology has had a complicated, shifting relationship with “religion.” 2 In its earliest years, American sociology germinated in the soil of a socially activist American Protestantism. Many first-generation sociologists came from Christian backgrounds, hoped to use sociology to promote religiously inspired and informed social reforms, and even spoke confidently about visions for “Christian sociology.” The Social Gospel leader, Shailer Mathews, for instance, published an eight-part series of essays titled “Christian Sociology” in the first two volumes of the American Journal of Sociology in 1895–96. Mainline and progressive evangelical Protestantism was the traditional institutional authority exercising control over socially legitimate cultural knowledge ( Smith 2003b ). Beginning in the twentieth century, however, American sociology began to marginalize “religious sociology” as a misguided attempt to make claims to knowledge. University-based sociologists, seeking to turn their nascent field into a legitimately viewed profession, began intentionally drawing a sharp distinction between scientific sociology (said to be good and authoritative) and religious “do-goodism” (said to be bad and illegitimate). As such, American sociology was established discursively and institutionally as a structural rival of religion, in some sense, a secularized version of American Protestant Christianity (as the discipline of anthropology was, similarly, a secular complement to the Christian missionary movement abroad). From the start, then, American sociology got off on the wrong foot in its ability to take religion seriously. 3

Second, in the particular history of American thinking about religion and society, certain dimensions of religion and the “spiritual” were unjustifiably removed from the roster of serious academic topics that merit scholarly description, understanding, and explanation . An evolutionary theoretical heritage that posited religion, particularly the dominant form of Christianity, as the most highly evolved form of the “natural spiritual quest of man” dominated the latter half of the nineteenth-century. In retrospect, scholars now see that heritage as not only self-aggrandizing, but also false. In turn, other forms of practices concerning transcendent, spiritual, supernatural, and mystical matters—such as magic, cultic practices, mysticism, and nonobvious forms of spiritual searching—were largely removed from sociological consideration. Given the evolutionary assumptions about religion common in the nineteenth century, it was easy to discard these as primitive and inferior superstitions and residues destined for extinction. These all remain important religious or quasi-religious realities in the contemporary world, however, and deserve more and better study than they typically receive by sociologists. 4

Third, the larger academy's current renewed attention to religion is driven not by a native academic interest in things sacred and transcendent but, rather, by the external imposition of undeniably important religious movements and events building over the past forty years . The founding thinkers of sociology understood religion to be important, but also believed that it would wither away in relevance and strength with the development of modernity. In fact, to the contrary, a host of social, political, and theological movements, revolutions, events, and trends in recent decades have forced mainstream American academics, whether they like it or not, to take religion seriously. These developments include the rise of the Moral Majority and religious right in the United States; the Iranian revolution; Catholic Solidarity in Poland; the role of Pope John Paul II in challenging communism; liberation theology in Latin America; the religious energy in the antiapartheid movement in South Africa; ongoing conflict between Hindus and Muslims in and around India and Pakistan; a resurgent evangelicalism in American culture and politics; the massive growth of Pentecostalism and charismatic evangelicalism in the Global South; and the surging growth of multiple religions in China, South Korea, and other Asian countries. September 11, 2001, put a massive exclamation point at the end of these profound phenomena to open up the twenty-first century.

The recent renewal of scholarly interest in religion has thus resulted not from any internally driven enlightenment about the subject of religion among faculty in universities. It has rather been forced upon the academy by the reality of religion's continued presence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These facts have forced American academics to reconsider problems in the secularization-theory model, to learn more about the empirical realities of religion in the contemporary world, and to adjust their interests, understandings, and analyses to better account for the religious realities and religious facts of the real world. But the deeper effect on the discipline of sociology itself has been arguably limited. That is, something big has happened in the world in last forty years that has thrown the standard, received views of religion into flux, provoked renewed interest in things religious or spiritual, and underscored the limits of the old paradigm. But many American academics, often ill-prepared intellectually, seem to have met these changes and challenges with surprise and perhaps with some begrudging resistance.

Fourth, the apparent “resurgence” of public religion around the world transpired when American social scientists were focused primarily on theories and explanations that could not properly account for that resurgence . During the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, American sociology was preoccupied with rejecting the Parsonian structural functionalism that had dominated the discipline during the mid-twentieth century and replacing it with theoretical alternatives. Some of that reaction took the form of various micro-sociologies—symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, enthnomethodology, dramaturgy, and so on—which were relatively neutral in their ability to accommodate a renewed interest in religion. But the more influential movements in American sociology during these decades were expressed in “rational choice” theory and various “structural” approaches to social analysis, including versions of neo-Marxism and state-centered theories. Central to these latter approaches are the commitment, rooted deeply in Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and others, to rational egoism, materialism, and a focus on resource or utility gain. Consequently, much of the discourse of the “structural” outlook of those years concerned interests, resources, domination, and the determinative power of social structure. Other matters, such as culture, belief, ideology, nonrational behavior, ritual, and “superstition,” were considered marginal. So when religion began in the 1970s to show that it was not going away, many social scientists of the era were unprepared intellectually to make sense of it. That influence continues to this day. To the extent that the theoretical worldviews of sociologists today still revolve primarily around matters of material interests, economic forces, political interests, social dominance, relational power, and so on, religion remains largely reducible and ignorable. By theoretical presupposition, the former are taken to be “real” while religion is believed to be peripheral or epiphenomenal. But, we believe, religious commitments in the end cannot be completely reduced to interests, power, and material resources, so an interest- and resource-based general sociological model cannot account for religion well.

Even today, Western nations largely frame processes such as global socioeconomic development in ways that do not involve religion in any serious way. Worse yet, leaders of liberal democracies cling to an old faith in the positivist account of modernization, presuming that the processes of development are solvent enough to neutralize or subdue the antimodernizing impulses of religious belief. This has perpetuated patterns of Orientalism and colonialist relations between “developed” and “developing” countries. Instead of understanding religion as it operates on its own terms within the developing world—not to mention in “advanced” countries—Western leaders react with dismay, ignorance, and despair over the “staying power” of religion across the globe. As a result of this ignorance about the roles that religion plays in various national contexts, development projects, state-building, peace building, the promotion of democracy, and even trade agreements have often failed. Thus, as global religion becomes increasingly difficult to ignore, we believe an appropriate sense of urgency for taking religion seriously is still lacking in important power centers of the West, let alone amongst scholars. Yet, as the waves of “world problems” inevitably crash onto local shores in a globalizing world, we can no longer afford to ignore the important matter of religion as it exists in human life around the globe.

Fifth, the resurgent American cultural sociology since the 1980s has proven only marginally interested in religion and, in fact, tends to treat religion as indistinguishable from other social realities. Hitting the real limits of the rational choice and structural sociologies that dominated the discipline in the United States during the 1970s helped to give rise to a resurgent cultural sociology in the 1980s and beyond. We view that as a good movement overall, although much of the work in the new cultural sociology turned out to ignore religion. With few exceptions, little was done on the theoretical front of the new cultural sociology to take on religion as a particular social object and to significantly improve our sociological understanding of it. If anything, religion became viewed as simply another “ideology”—ontologically and conceptually indistinct from any other belief system. Indeed, dominant sociological views of culture secularize religion, treating it as a subcomponent of culture, when, we think, a plausible historical and sociological argument can be made that culture is actually a subcomponent of religion.

As a result, many cultural sociologists saw little reason to theorize religion as a particular kind of social entity—even though cultural sociology should be well-equipped theoretically to study religion as a distinctive kind of social object. Within this larger intellectual and analytical movement that might have served to revive a robust understanding of religion, the latter was instead melted into the larger mix of all things ideological, symbolic, and meaningful. Arguably, too, the ability of cultural sociology to adequately understand religion was weakened by the neo-positivism and empiricism advocated by some in the subfield. Recent developments in the field have increasingly called into question the link between discourse and practice, leading to focused studies of either discursive structures or popular material culture. Consequently, cultural sociology has constrained its own ability to make adequate sense of the subjective aspect of human existence, which we think is important (though not exclusive) in religion.

Conceptual and Methodological Problems

Sixth, many of our standard methodological tools reflect assumptions about and treatments of religion that are so thin, skewed, and misleading that they constitute a serious obstacle to understanding and explaining the complexity of real religious phenomena. Methodologically, sociology has generally not thought of religion as an important variable. Mainstream surveys simply do not ask enough in-depth questions about religion, nor are our concepts about religion deep or interesting enough to generate many really good survey questions. Several sociological studies of religion presuppose, for example, that religion can be adequately captured for most analyses by a limited set of standard survey-measure variables entered into multiple regression equations—“church attendance,” “affiliation,” “Bible views,” and the like. In certain circumstances, that may work. But the common tendency is to proceed with little reflection on or conceptualization of the subject of study, slapping standard measures and methods on a variety of matters “religious,” and concluding that what is to be learned will either come out in the findings or, if nothing comes out, that there is nothing important to learn. Attempting to “pay more attention to religion” while relying on such flawed assumptions and measures may actually make matters worse and inhibit future investigation. As a simple example, for a long time, sociological surveys of religion asked one religion question about affiliation: “Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Other.” Those categories proved grossly simplistic for capturing real distinctions of consequence that existed in American religion. Often, dummy variables for these gross religious types produced no significant results, and so analysts concluded that “religion does not matter.”

Subsequent improvements in religion survey measures (e.g., Steensland et al. 2000 ) have improved our ability even with statistical analyses of religion to find significant and sometimes powerful religion effects. But we think the conceptual and theoretical work that needs doing is much more extensive than the incremental improvements in measurement we have seen in recent years. Knowing something about the complexities of religion in most cases, we suspect that far more rethinking of the tools we use for capturing different aspects of religious practices, rituals, affiliations, attitudes, habits, beliefs, and so on—inductively driven by significant qualitative field research—would have a big payoff in revealing the intricate and subtle ways that religion actually influences people's lives and the social world. We also think sociology of religion needs to consider the ways in which too many of its assumptions, concepts, and measures are governed by a normative evangelical Protestant view of religion. In short, religion is much “thicker” than what many of our standard measures and methods capture, and most of our (neo-positivist) methodologies cannot adequately test our theories about religion. If we hope to adequately grasp the social significance of religion in social life, we need to improve our measures and methods.

Seventh, disciplinary preoccupations and trends often include conceptual inadequacies and biases that impede the serious study of religion . In general, mainstream American sociology has a strong antimentalist outlook. Because the discipline commonly discounts “beliefs,” attitudes, and mental life in motivating and guiding social action and behavior ( Campbell 1996 ), sociology has difficulty taking religion seriously. Underlying this trend are many basic theoretical misunderstandings, including, for example, the failure to recognize that “social structures” are always culturally constituted, including by sets of cultural beliefs such as religion. More broadly, we detect here an inadequate familiarity with important issues in the philosophy of science that affect our work, including questions about causation, empiricism, emergence, and the ontology of unobservable entities. At a much more simple level, for decades, secularization theory dominated social science's view of the fate of religion in modern society. As this theory has proven untenable, scholars since the 1980s have found themselves without an adequate conceptual apparatus at hand to respond to the very-real religious world that imposed itself upon their crumbling academic verities.

For another example, some scholars, especially postmodern and postcolonial critics in religious studies, have challenged the very idea of “religion” as a universal, basically human, and coherent concept. We think such critiques are partly insightful and correct (see below), but also misleading on the particular question of defining religion. It is true that the use of the idea of “religion” as a singular category can be misleading in various ways, including wrongly suggesting that all “religions” in the world are natural kinds that share identifiable sets of properties, tendencies, teachings, and practices. At the same time, we believe that, by shifting our focus from largely exclusive concerns with discourse and concepts to a more expansive view that takes seriously practices and actions, we can identify a particular type of human activity and orientation that shares features that can be rightly described under the rubric of “religion.” 5 However, we think it best (as much as possible) to refer to “religions” in the plural, to remind ourselves of the multiplicity and diversity of the subjects of study. And we think it important to intentionally distinguish different aspects of religious phenomena, such as religious practices, rituals, beliefs, organizations, dispositions, material artifacts, and so on. To improve the definitional adequacy of our concepts in a way that will enhance our ability to understand religion well will require much more theoretical work ( Edgell 2012) .

In this larger context, however, sociologists have also paid insufficient attention to how the study of religion has itself participated in and authorized the discourses of colonialism and “Orientalism.” On this point, we think many of the postcolonial critics are correct. Too often, we have overlooked the complicity of academic concepts such as “religion” in authorizing historical power restructuring, domination, and direct and cultural violence, both domestically and globally. Interrogating this legacy entails ramifications for the global and comparative academic study of religion, calling religion scholars to overcome our too-common national and Christocentric parochialisms. Further, the modern project itself has involved “migrating the holy” to the political construct of the nation state (see Cavanaugh 2011 ). The nation has become not merely a replacement of religion but, at times, instrumental to the fulfillment of religious objectives. This is not only the case with Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories, for example, but also motifs located in the mythologies of Sinhala Buddhism, Hindutva, Hamas, and a host of other explicitly religious nationalisms. None of these, however, can be explained outside intersecting discursive formations, from colonialism to Orientalism and to the very logic of nationalism. Nor can they be reduced to these formations either. To make sense of the reality of religion around the world, we need to become more self-reflexive about these kinds of processes and dynamics.

Contemporary Institutional Problems

Eighth, the sociology of religion in the United States continues to remain somewhat institutionally isolated . For much of the twentieth century, sociology of religion in the United States was organized into largely autonomous professional associations. These, most notably, include the Association for the Sociology of Religion, the Religious Research Association, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. It was not until 1995 that a religion section even began in the American Sociological Association, ninety years after the ASA's founding. These independent associations have helped the field's development in some ways. They all enjoy significant material resources to carry on their work, publish their own field-specific journals (e.g., the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion ), and organize their own conferences. But, in doing so, they have also segregated sociologists studying religion from their sociological colleagues in other, often more central fields of study in the discipline (e.g., social inequality, organizations, gender, and race and ethnicity). An unintended consequence of this particular organizational structuring has been to culturally define “religion” among sociologists as a distinct, isolated field of study. This has a silo effect, isolating scholars who think a lot about religion from colleagues who do not, and sending a message that “religion is being taken care of” by specialists, so those who are not sociologists of religion can largely ignore it. (This dynamic is not unique to the sociology of religion—many fields of sociology encounter it too—but it is still a fact that we think helps to explain the difficulty of sociology taking religion adequately seriously.)

Ninth, the isolation of religion has been reinforced organizationally at the university-level through the creation and expansion of religious studies departments . Historically, universities concentrated the study of religion into distinct departments, most of which emerged out of religious seminaries, divinity schools, and other semi- and quasi-confessional programs in academia. Departments of religious studies worked hard to define and protect the specific subject matter over which they presided. They also developed distinct methodologies believed to be uniquely suited to research on the sacred. For example, phenomenological approaches provided a means for taking seriously people's reports about religious experiences and beliefs in a way that potentially protected the latter from reductionistic, subject-dissolving analyses (like those that neuroscience might provide). While religious studies departments rightly gave “religion” a real place at the academic table, this often had the negative consequence of excusing scholars in other disciplines from also taking religion seriously. In effect, other scholars, including those in sociology, were able to overlook or ignore religion as a relevant social reality in their research because of religious studies' specialization in and dominance of the topic. This fact becomes clear when we compare how much attention major European sociologists, such as Ulrich Beck, pay to religion relative to their counterparts in the United States. As a result of this academic division of labor, many scholars in many disciplines, including sociology, are not particularly well prepared to understand and explain religion well.

Tenth, the sociology of religion is at the lower end of the disciplinary status hierarchy in the academy . Within sociology generally, the subfield of religion occupies a low status; moreover, within the social sciences, sociology has become somewhat marginal especially compared with the rise of positivistic economics in shaping policy and public discourse in recent years. These status hierarchies have become even more heightened with the growing prominence of a new scientific discourse shaped by neuroscience and neo-Darwinian approaches, which are arguably marginalizing all of the social sciences. Further, dominant trends in science suggest a growing scient ism that reduces numerous phenomena, including religion, to the neurological, genetic, and biological levels—privileging magnetic resonance images (MRIs), for instance, as the method by which we can arrive at our best knowledge of complicated social realities. Certainly, there is a diversity of voices among scientists in their views of and attitudes toward religion, but often the loudest voices are those that assume reductionist accounts of religion.

Eleventh, understanding religion is hampered by a larger inability in the discipline to think broadly, which is reinforced by current institutional structures and standard practices . The institutional reward structures in sociology do not incentivize studying religion, let alone big-picture social-theoretic questions that are relevant to religion. Yet such big-picture questions are foundational to sociology and ignoring them undermines the quality and significance of our sociological work. These forces are especially evident during graduate training and for junior professors. Graduate training in sociology across most American universities increasingly pressures students to generate publishable articles as quickly as possible, to make students more competitive on the job market, and to improve the rankings of their departments. Junior scholars face similar pressures as they navigate the tenure process; success and security depend on establishing an early and steady production of publications. What junior scholars often develop as a result, whether intentionally or as an unintended by-product, is a mentality that privileges the use of available survey data sets to run quick quantitative analyses to address some minor lacuna in a particular body of literature. Such training generally does not encourage in-depth and broad reading on difficult problems. It rather fosters a careerist mentality that sees the pursuit of big and difficult questions as grit thrown into the machinery of scholarship. Engaging big questions slows down the prolific manufacturing of published articles and is a risk to short-term achievement and, hence, a threat to professional survival. The requirements of major, sought-after funding sources (such as the National Science Foundation) to couch research in scient istic frameworks that privilege “hypothesis testing” also arguably inhibit the pursuit of serious, in-depth research on religion exploring territory beyond well-worn paths and formulas. The institutional reward structures in the academy may thus obstruct the pursuit of big theoretical questions as well as moral visions of sociology's possible contributions to society which might shape the discipline. We may rely on training in sociological theory to address such questions, yet even this as normally taught in graduate programs can be quite narrow, even perfunctory, and is often skewed by a common, underlying picture of human persons as essentially interested in political, status, and material ends.

Twelfth, the relative lack of personal religious commitment, identity, and knowledge among mainstream American sociologists arguably provides an obstacle to taking religion seriously in scholarship . We assume that, in general, the more personal, substantive knowledge a scholar has about an object of study, the more comfortable and competent the scholar can be in studying it ( Polanyi 1962) . We also assume that academics, who value competence and nuanced understanding in the topics they study, are less likely to turn their focus to subjects that would require significant investment in basic and professional knowledge. It is problematic, then, for the study of religion that American social scientists, and sociologists specifically, are disproportionately less religious than the U.S. population overall ( Ecklund 2010) . One consequence, we think, is that many social scientists may consider religion to be unfamiliar, unknown, and perhaps alien. This unfamiliarity may not necessarily make sociologists hostile to religion—although anecdotal evidence suggests that hostility toward religion is by no means absent in the discipline—but it may still have other consequences for taking religion seriously in scholarship. Without first making a substantial investment to learn more about religion, religiously unfamiliar scholars who address religion in their work risk getting their analyses and interpretations wrong. The majority of academics who are not personally familiar with religion, therefore, have incentives to simply steer clear of religion as “not something they study.”

In addition, some social scientists are suspicious of bias among religion scholars, whose knowledge of religion may stem from personal experience as believers and practitioners. Indeed, many American sociologists of religion in the 1950s and 1960s were often pastorally oriented—that is, they were practitioners interested in using sociological research to improve their religious institutions. However, there is no reason to think that a scholar with experience in a religion and commitment to a religious identity is any more likely to be biased than a scholar committed to any other identity (such as gender, class, or race) or political stance (such as feminism or Marxism). In fact, we question whether lack of personal experience with religion is a justifiable reason for ignoring the presence and effects of religion in sociological work. Sociologists often lack personal experience with the things we study: privileged scholars often study underprivileged peoples and communities, male scholars often study women, scholars of different racial and ethnic backgrounds often study people and communities of different backgrounds, and so on. In some cases, personal unfamiliarity or distance is analytically advantageous. That same principle ought to function similarly when it comes to religion, one of the fundamental fields and sources of solidarity and social cleavages in social life. In the particular case of religion, the obstacle may not simply be unfamiliarity, but also what we believe is widespread and growing misinformation about religion in recent years, driven by the fear in various communities of “fundamentalism” and some New Atheism discourse. When personal unfamiliarity is coupled with readily available public discourse characterizing religion as essentially evil and irrational, it may not be surprising that scholars are reluctant to undertake the serious study of religion.

Despite the problems and weaknesses we have presented above, we do not think the future of the field is bleak. American sociology has seen a growing openness to the importance of studying and understanding religion since the 1990s. Many sociologists have realized that the traditional critique of religion, in the form of secularization theory, is misguided, empirically flawed, and uninteresting. As a result, the discipline has seen a growing interest in the study of religion at many levels. Evidence suggests, for example, a growing demand from undergraduate students for courses that can help them to better understand religion and its role in the contemporary world—a demand that many sociology departments do not yet seem to be meeting. The quantity and quality of sociology graduate students interested in studying religion also seems to have increased in recent years. So, too, has interest in religion among established sociology faculty, journal editors, and book publishers in the last two decades.

In addition, sociology of religion as a field in the United States has produced a lot of theory and empirical work seeking to account for the persistence of religion in the modern world. Most scholars (though not all) in American sociology of religion have overcome the traditional presupposition—found in Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and other classical thinkers—that religion is inherently irrational and is a negative force in personal and social life. Indeed, some contemporary observers claim that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, suggesting that American sociology of religion has developed too much of a “pro” view of religion and of the human goods that it promotes; they call instead for a more balanced view of religion's ambivalent capacity for causing both positive and negative outcomes ( Levitt et al. 2010 ). Recent analysis has also identified a significant shift in sociological treatments of religion over time: religion is analyzed less often as a “dependent variable” (the outcome or effect of other causal influences) and more often as an “independent variable” (the influence or cause operating on other outcomes) ( Smilde and May 2010) . These shifts indicate that scholars are at least interested in trying to understand the phenomenon of religion more adequately.

We can consider a further example here. Above, we noted that the designated “study of religion” as it evolved in the modern university consequently defined “religion” as a self-contained entity separable from other aspects of life; its study was cordoned off (by a theory of political liberalism) as having to do mainly with a particular dimension of people's private lives. This tended to set up scholars to miss the many ways that religion was in fact part of everyday life in all spheres of society, but recent work on “everyday religion” has helped to correct this myopia regarding empirical reality (for example, Ammerman 2007 ; McGuire 2008) . This suggests that some in the discipline are committed to more adequately grasp religion as an object of study. It also suggests that, in the course of rethinking the role of knowledge about religion in the discipline of sociology, we need to pay close attention to the very conceptual boundaries and categories of religion that we presuppose and sustain in our scholarship.

Many sociologists still do not know what religion is and how and why it may have such consequences. But, more and more, sociologists seem in principle to be open to the fact that people are religious and that religion may have consequences in those people's lives. In fact, compared to the disciplines of economics and political science, for example, where religion is nearly excluded from serious consideration by the presupposed axioms and focuses of the mainstream of those disciplines, sociology is positively enlightened and dynamic on matters religious. Some evidence also suggests that many good sociologists who study religion avoid parochialism, purposely framing their scholarship, which by any account is essentially about religion, in terms of interests in different fields, such as political sociology, marriage and family, economic sociology, and so on. While this may suggest something amiss about the community of sociologists who study religion, it may also broaden the intellectual and network reach of the study of religion in the discipline.

More generally, most of the old disciplinary boundaries and categories are being reconsidered or challenged. Western “Enlightenment” when it comes to religion appears to be intellectually and academically stunting. People around the globe are transcending the standard Western story about “modernization” and its attendant doctrines about the “warfare of science and religion,” the obvious good of the liberal individual subject, and the teleological evolutionary destiny of religion to become privatized and subjectivized. This kind of fundamental intellectual churning and rethinking is happening not only (or even mostly) in the United States, but also in Europe, China, south Asia, and elsewhere. For instance, in Germany today, about one-third of the academic “clusters of excellence” are about religion. Thinkers outside of the cultures most influenced by Western Enlightenment skepticism appear to be more creative and open in their reflection on these matters than most scholars within those cultures. This appears to be a moment of flux provoking a foundational rethinking around the globe of terms and issues that have until recently been largely stable and taken for granted (in the West) since the seventeenth century.

Sociologists interested in improving the way that religion is understood and treated in sociology more broadly should recurrently ask and answer questions like these: What specifically would success look like? What do we need to understand about the nature of society in the twenty-first century that requires us to understand religious groups, practices, identities, rituals, beliefs, sensibilities, affiliations, and movements? How specifically would better debates about religion and social life sound? With whom should sociologists, both those who specialize in religion and those who do not, be talking? How could understanding religion better and taking religion more seriously improve the quality and fruitfulness of our disciplinary discourse? The task of reimagining the future is a crucial to moving forward the state of the relationship between sociology and religion. In what follows, we advance a set of proposals that we believe could help move sociology in the right direction.

Overcoming Parochialism: Transcending National and Disciplinary Boundaries

Our thirteenth thesis is that sociology must expand its conceptual and theoretical focus to address a wider variety of disciplines, nations, and religions. Debates about the proper role of religion are churning all over the world, in academia and beyond. All of the social sciences today are struggling to come to terms with the fact that religion has not disappeared as a result of modernization but continues to exert significant influences in a host of ways in many institutions and nations around the world. The issues addressed here, in short, are very big and must be understood in such global, foundational terms. To the extent that we fail to expand the focus of our research, not only will religion remain regrettably marginal in sociology, but sociology will also increasingly marginalize itself in the broader world of practical and theoretical knowledge about human social reality.

Commensurate with the real globalization of social life today, the sociology of religion in America needs to globalize its vision—to address broader histories, cultures, and religious experiences. The discipline needs to focus on big issues, questions, and debates, and show how religion must be taken into account to address and answer them well. American sociology of religion has a strong bias toward studying the United States, particularly American Christianity ( Smilde and May 2010 ; Cadge et al. 2011 ). In and of itself, this is perfectly legitimate and valuable. But changes in the world around us require a more international, multireligious, comparative perspective in order to acquire a more adequate understanding of religion—even for scholars just studying the United States. One positive example is the creation of programs in religion and politics at major universities like Berkeley, Columbia, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Harvard, and Princeton. Until sociology expands its focus to incorporate a greater variety of religions from all regions of the world, it will not only remain parochial in its substantive focus, but will be hindered in its ability to imagine new theories and paradigms for making sense of religion in the world as it is unfolding.

In addition to globalizing in meaningful ways, for the study of religion in sociology to flourish, it must shift into a more extradisciplinary or interdisciplinary mode. Sociology has developed a particular perspective on understanding the world that we think is valid and useful, but much of the best work on religion in recent years has been produced by scholars outside of sociology. All sociologists trying to better understand religion must make efforts to learn outside of the discipline from the best in anthropology, religious studies, psychology, history, philosophy, and theology, as appropriate. No one discipline can adequately address and make sense of the new realities of religion in the world today. However, we do not think that sociology's role in such global and disciplinary exchanges should be exclusively passive and receptive. Sociology has much to bring to the table in terms of its theoretical and methodological resources, as well as its history of debates. Enriching sociology with the knowledge and perspectives of scholars in other disciplines will both elevate the quality of our own sociological work and generate interest and visibility outside of our own silo. We need both new ideas and new organizational forms, such as multidisciplinary centers for the study of religion, which are more adequate to the real world in which we now live. Connecting with other disciplines and scholars from different cultures around the world will not only promote cultural diversity but also move us past the constraints of the dominant epistemologies that govern and constrain American sociology.

The Need to Historicize Sociology and Religion

Fourteenth, it is essential to take a longer-term view and recognize the deep cultural assumptions and categories that have set up all of modern social science to think and behave in certain ways toward religion . 6 By self-reflexively historicizing the study of religion and sociological theory itself, we can see the discipline's real points of connection to moral, historical, philosophical, and ontological questions. Most pressing for our purposes is why religion is an “other” in sociology. That is, why does religion seem to occupy a separate category among all human phenomena that scholars past and (often) present think can be ignored or explained away?

To answer these questions, we point to the impact of the Enlightenment, a transformation of fundamental cultural categories in Europe between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, a shift which changed what was taken for granted about religion. During this time, the “otherness” of Christianity's God was redefined to be brought within the known world of “creation,” through a theological shift from analogical knowledge of God to nominalism's univocal knowledge of God. Transcendence was “domesticated” in ways that had huge cultural, social, religious, and political implications ( Placher 1996) . (That decisive shift was itself set up by the nominalist movement of William of Ockham, among others, in the late medieval period [ Gregory 2012] .) Christian apologetics also abandoned claims to theology as a rational enterprise, operating with the sharp divide between “nature” and “the supernatural.” With Immanuel Kant, religion became subjectivized, as simultaneously humanly unknowable and personally experienced in a subjective way. The basis for future arguments about religion and its legitimacy were then grounded in inner, subjective experience (e.g., Friedrich Schleiermacher and much of liberal Protestantism). Religion also was redefined to be about ethics and morals, often construed as rule-following. In the end, theology became cast as a nonrational enterprise and ethics as a discipline that did not reference empirical reality (as ethics does, say, in the Aristotelian approach of virtue ethics [ eudemonian ]). These lines of thought passed through Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, and others. Hence, the very foundations of sociology are rooted in an “othering” of religion and everything else “pre-Enlightenment” while keeping liberal Protestantism's outlook and progressivism.

The formative role of a variety of historical developments in the West is also critical for understanding religion and how intellectuals now define its “proper place” in social scientific research and higher education. One such important development was the outcome of the Western so-called wars of religion in early modern Europe (see Cavanaugh 2009) . Another is the emergence of the secular state and forms of nationalism. Yet another was the rise of the modern research university and philosophies of science that informed its work in different ways along the path. For instance, the expansive German notion of Wissenschaft , in which philosophy and theology are inclusively considered particular forms of science, is remarkably different from the early twentieth-century approach of positivist scient ism , which excluded theological claims, among others, as literally meaningless. Even further back in time, one can examine the impact of the “Axial Age,” a period between 800 and 200 BCE in which key philosophical and religious developments took place across civilizations, including the emergence of perspectives such as individualism and universalism, as well as new social forms such as a religious elite and traveling scholars (see Jaspers 1953 ; Eisenstadt 1986) . New theoretical perspectives such as Multiple Modernities and Comparative Civilizational Analysis encourage a comparative cultural and historical approach ( Eisenstadt 2003) . Such work has been done by people like Robert Bellah, David Martin, and Peter Berger ( 1967 ), and we encourage other scholars to undertake answering these questions.

Conceptual and Methodological Reconfigurations

Questions about the role of religion in sociology also highlight the need for much better theorizing about religion broadly. In other words, simply giving more attention to religion, if religion is conceptualized in its current, problematic terms, could make matters worse. Improving religion's treatment in the structure and practices of the discipline of sociology will be fruitful only if it provokes scholars to rethink many of the assumptions, categories, and expectations that define the current approaches to religion in sociology. To begin, fifteenth: among the numerous conceptual issues needing to be addressed is the very distinction between “religious” and “secular.” In most of social science, the received presupposition is that the secular or secularity is a kind of space created with the disappearance or exclusion of religion. For most who operate under categories inherited from the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century social-evolutionism, the “secular” suggests a kind of natural resting place—that is, a neutral territory or condition achieved when the superstitions and irrationalities of religion are dispelled, or perhaps a final destiny for ever-evolving humanity. In this sense, secularity itself is naturalized, made neutral or objective, and de-problematized as a particular historical and social formation needing explanation itself. Scholars are now challenging that Eurocentric and totalizing notion ( Asad 2003) . In fact, some scholars have recently asserted that secularity is not some kind of natural, neutral, and ultimately universal space or condition toward which humanity moves as it discards the irrationalities and oppressions of religion. Rather, it is a particular social condition created at a specific time in mostly post-Christian circumstances ( Buckley 1987 ; Taylor 2007 ; Warner et al. 2010) . Scholars must therefore view “the secular” as a construction that comes after and out of particular religious traditions (i.e., there is a distinctly Catholic secular, a Turkish secular, and so on). This process of relativizing secularity opens important questions about how such constructions happen, historically and culturally, both religious and not. It also raises larger questions about the nature of humanity, personhood, and history as they relate to matters of transcendence, the sacred, and the like. We need, in short, a sociology of secularism, even a sociology of comparative secularisms. 7

In reflecting on these matters, we realize how easy it is to confuse terms in ways that trip up our thinking. For example, sociologists can easily forget that Emile Durkheim actually wrote about the sacred versus the profane , not the sacred versus the secular . The difference matters significantly for how we conceptualize things religious and their place in the larger order of cognition, culture, and society. For instance, we can certainly distinguish the “sacred secular” from the “secular profane,” including in the former category things such as the U.S. Constitution, human rights, and so on. Thus, we need to seriously consider distinctions between concepts such as “religious,” “sacred,” and “transcendent,” and, as we argue below, do more to define and conceptualize religion. We need to re-read and re-think the classics and examine—perhaps dissolve or reframe—intellectual problems that may be inherent to our original foundations.

The task of historicization described above can also aid the task of reconceptualization. We can ask why, for instance, such a thin definition of religion has persisted for so long. In American sociology, we can easily recognize the legacy of certain kinds of Protestant theology, whose heavily creedal and voluntaristic natures, along with their relatively narrow, privatized accounts of divine involvement in history and life, have defined the way most Americans understand religion. This theology also belies an intellectualist error that treats practices as propositions. Recognizing this legacy should strengthen the imperative to eschew reductionistic accounts of religion and to turn instead to a more practice-theoretic understanding of what religion is, focusing not so much on ideas in the minds of individuals as their participation in communities of discourse (but without making the error of dismissing the role of beliefs altogether).

We must also attend to the fact that debates over and renegotiations of the “secular” take place within the nexus of the nation-state, which is always a contested construct. The colonial legacy's definitional hold on religion has led to what we call “methodological nationalism”—the presupposition that “the social” and “the national” are interchangeable, settled categories and realities. Moving forward, sociology needs to overcome this analytic parochialism. This would involve, for example, thinking more critically about Islam and the Orient as “The Other” and acknowledging the modern, liberal West as a normatively guided geopolitical project. Denaturalizing what may seem to be axiomatic (e.g., who or what is the nation? Religion?) does not require giving up the analytic distinctness and efficacy of religion. In fact, it may actually attune analysts to a nonreductionistic account of religion, in part because such approaches would necessarily depart from modernist biases and paradoxes. So, while imagining modern nationalism as a first instance where religion intersects with sociological realities to generate cultural and political boundaries coincides with the complementary invention of religion as a transcultural and ahistorical essence to be domesticated and interiorized, a more critical view provides us greater and much-needed self-reflexivity.

Sixteenth, sociology would do well to pay closer attention to its motivations for studying religion, as well as our assumptions about religion reflected in these motivations . Our motivations affect our perceptions, interpretations, and theorizations. Human interests always shape human thinking, even scientific thinking. All human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, has always been, always is, and always will be personal knowledge—always historically, culturally, and morally situated in ways that affect it, for better or worse ( Polanyi 1962 ). We know that the distinction in scholarship between value-driven motivations and (compulsory) value-free objectivity is hard—and probably impossible—to maintain in practice, regardless of Weber's injunctions. This need not mean the automatic loss of balance, fairness, and the search for truth in scholarship. And this need not mean that truth statements are impossible to make. But it complicates matters and certainly disrupts our foundations in epistemological foundationalism and positivism. Increasing our self-reflexivity about our motivations for studying religion may provide clues about how we approach, perceive, and interpret religion in our work. And this may enable us to study religion in a way that improves sociology and, in turn, broadens our knowledge about human social life.

What Is Religion? (And Why Does the Question Matter?)

Seventeenth, we need more clarity on what “religion” even is . When we discuss what religion is and how it works, we are often addressing different issues. One concerns differentiating the “thing” religion as an object in reality from things not religious. 8 For another, there is the phenomenological question or approach, which deals with how people experience religious phenomena. While this captures something important about religion for people, it is inadequate to treat a phenomenological account as a definition of religion's ontology. This raises the issue of whether there are ontic facts behind “religion.” That is, is religion something more than human construction? While sociology is not suited as a discipline to answer this question, we need to recognize that our work carries presuppositions about the nature of the world, reality, and religion's place in it. These discussions often also address whether a general theory of religion is even possible, compared to a more strictly historicist approach. Another set of distinctions has to do with levels of analysis at which we could examine the phenomenon of religion. One could talk about individual-level religious beliefs, practices, and experiences of the sacred or spiritual or transcendent. Then there are practices and shared beliefs at the level of groups, communities, and congregations. At another level, there exist global “imagined communities,” for instance, in Hinduism, Islam, or Roman Catholicism. One could even talk about the emergence of a “global sacred” with the sacralization and global diffusion of human rights.

Then there is the question of why the study of religion is worthwhile at all. One rationale for the study of religion is that it is “out there” as a matter of institutional fact that seems to matter in the world. A second rationale is phenomenological: many people, by all their accounts, actually experience “religion” as something transcendent, sacred, and important. They experience it as making a difference in their lives. For at least those kinds of reasons, religion deserves its own field of study. We simply cannot understand the nature of the world well, we think, without understanding religion and its role in human life. More broadly, it would be difficult to understand the historical emergence of the human species itself without religion. Religion, language, narratives, and rituals are crucial in the formation of the human species. Myths and sagas are crucially important to humans, who are mimetic animals. Contrary to the assumptions of some in modern science, whether humans can even live as purely rational animals without religion, narratives, rituals, and myths is questionable in our view.

In addressing these issues, the fundamental question that sociologists of religion need to answer is: Exactly what about religion warrants identifying it as a distinct human activity, formation, or cultural or organizational expression deserving its own specialized focus and field of study? It is clear that religions operate in social life through many of the same causal mechanisms that other, nonreligious phenomena do. In other words, religious and nonreligious phenomena alike shape beliefs and desires, organize communities of discourse that exert social influence on members, provide content for socialization, transfer information and resources through social networks, and so on. Indeed, many in sociology tend to treat religion as mere “ideology,” which, while not totally reductionistic, does not recognize any distinctively religious aspect of religion. (The assumption here is that the same mechanisms involved in religious phenomena, such as beliefs, are also at work in other, nonreligious beliefs that cause action. If this is the case, the thinking goes, why not dissolve “religion” into organizations, resources, ideologies, or other categories?)

But what, if anything, makes religion distinctive among other ideologies, cultural formations, and social organizations that warrants particular attention? Answering this question requires developing a theory that treats the religious dimensions of human experience as real in their own right—a theory we believe is still lacking. Some thinkers focus on transcendence—the engagement with superhuman powers. Others object that people pursue transcendence in all sorts of ways, including nonreligious ones. Still others argue that religion involves a particularly powerful version of transcendence that is both qualitatively and quantitatively distinct from other experiences or ideologies. Martin Riesebrodt's recent work (2010) is an important step in explicating a practice -based conceptualization centered on people seeking help from superhuman entities. 9 Even so, transcendence itself can be seen as a historically emergent category arising in the Axial Age, as religious community became differentiated from society based on kinship and city-gods and critiques of cultic sacrifice took hold. Prior to this period, religious experience was arguably characterized more by modes of immanent sacreds, similar to what Durkheim describes. Definitions of religion focused exclusively on the concept of salvation arguably neglect such earlier modes of religion.

Further work to define religion must resist the prevailing attempts to subsume religion into culture, ideology, psychological coping, or other categories. We do not anticipate a quick and easy resolution, especially the roots of our very discipline contain the seemingly incommensurable definitions of religion by Durkheim and Weber. But we need to promote fruitful discussion on this question, if only because real-world groups have beliefs and practices that they themselves consider religious and which we as scholars need to do a better job of understanding.

This all requires yet another shift: from ideas in the minds of individuals to participation in communities of discourse. Eighteenth, methodologically, this entails adopting more thickly historical, ethnographic, and comparative approaches when these are better suited to answer our questions about religion . Although we are wary of the presumptions built into survey methods, we do not advocate the rejection of these research methodologies altogether. They do have important advantages in that, when done well, they are able to make claims about populations, map the prominence of various phenomena, and spot trends whose importance could be assessed over time. At the same time, we do need to be careful of the problems and limits with these approaches—for instance, despite the advantages of longitudinal surveys, a serious problem with them is that the meaning of a survey question can—and often does—change over time. Further, many of our standard methodologies do not have the capacity to grasp deeper and more complex aspects of religion. But this does not mean we should simply stick to what we already know how to do with our existing methods or let them serve as perennial constraints on what we are able to see. We certainly need to acknowledge that “religion” is harder to measure than concepts such as “income,” but at the same time, it is comparable to other elusive and less tractable concepts, such as “power” or “capitalism.”

As noted above, better work to conceptualize and measure religion, even in standard instruments such as surveys, requires breaking with the biased standards of American conservative Protestantism, such as frequency of Bible-reading. One tangible improvement would be the development of survey questions designed to capture aspects of everyday “lived religion” (e.g., how people are involved in practices of informal prayer such as asking God or a higher power for help) or to gauge the importance of place and materiality (e.g., ways in which particular places might be “set apart,” either physically or metaphorically, from routine life; or ways in which religion has to do with objects that people own, wear, or contact in certain situations). Importantly, improved measures of religion need to find their way into general surveys—not just religion-focused ones. Religion should be as common a variable as race, class, and gender in quantitative analyses. That this is not yet the case is, we believe, largely due to the inadequacy of our standard measures.

Is a Two-way Dialogue Possible, and What Would It Look Like?

Nineteenth, we propose the idea of a two-way stream between religion and sociology . But what would that possibly look like? Why and how might each benefit from the other? We observe that the social sciences have much to offer other disciplines in driving empirical inquiry on religion. In theology, for example, interest has grown in how scientific and social scientific knowledge can inform reflections and understandings in that discipline (for example, Placher 1989 ; Martin 1997 ; Flanagan 2007 ; Mathewes 2007 ; Ward 2012 ). The field of religious studies also benefits by importing tools of systematic data collection and analysis first developed in the social sciences. However, much less is said, among social scientists in any case, on what theology (very broadly conceived) might be able to offer our conversations and debates. Indeed, it is not clear that social scientists can even imagine the possibility or be willing to consider the discussion. Still, we might ask, what theological or more broadly religious research could shed light on work in the social and behavioral sciences? What are the philosophical anthropologies of different forms of religion, and how might they shape the way social scientists think about their objects of study and explanations?

One starting point might be to examine how religious traditions influence conceptualizations of agency and personhood, which would then influence our use of those concepts in the social sciences ( Smith 2003a , 2010) . More generally, engaging in greater reflexivity concerning basic sociological ideas of explanation, causation, and motivation could reveal the extent to which these are still deeply rooted in Protestantism. Comparing religious traditions—for instance, by examining Buddhist conceptions of the person—may likewise alter our understandings of causality as involving co-dependent co-arising phenomena. Such investigations might help us work on a thicker understanding of religions specifically and human personal and social life more broadly.

Another rationale for intentionally integrating both knowledge about religion and religious knowledge into the discipline of sociology follows from the observation that at least some schools of thought in our discipline unapologetically begin with particular intellectual and moral locations, commitments, presuppositions, and interests; some even argue that these particular positions privilege their sociological understandings. Examples include feminist theory, Marxism, queer theory, some forms of critical theory, and projects of “real utopias.” One might ask why or how such value-committed scholarly approaches that start with particularistic intellectual and moral presuppositions are legitimate in sociology, while religious perspectives on human person and social life are a priori excluded. The uneven privileging of certain intellectual and moral positions deserves ongoing questioning and consideration. At the very least, examining such issues seriously will force sociologists to be more self-aware and self-reflexive.

All of this obligates sociologists to invest more into learning about religion, just as they invest in learning about race and ethnicity, class, gender, and other important aspects of social life. We do not mean that sociologists of religion should be personally convinced about the truth-claims of any religion. Rather, we refer to the sort of seriousness about religion and religious phenomena that is evident in scholars as professedly “religiously unmusical” as Max Weber. This would entail being open to the possibility that disciplines such as theology or traditions of spiritual disciplines may contain valuable insights for sociologists of religion. This would also entail a greater basic literacy about religion, in the sense of what religious beliefs and practices mean to the people who adopt them and the communities that sustain them. Rather than imposing secularist assumptions about how people operate and about the proper role of religion in society, it would obligate sociologists to consider religious beliefs, practices, and experiences as reflecting modes of knowledge about the world worth engaging to better understand human history, culture, and social life—even when we disagree with their claims.

We therefore urge scholars today to not prematurely limit ourselves to what may feel like “safe” and “obvious” categories and lines of thought. The construction and policing of strong traditional boundaries will only stunt the intellectual vibrancy of the contemporary university. Our discipline and its comfortable tendencies and practices—including the dominant secularist assumptions that tend to reduce religion to other categories such as ideology, power, insecurity, and so on—are a product of a particular, path-dependent, noninevitable historical process. Questioning some of these basic presuppositions and categories will not hurt sociology or sociologists ( Milbank 2006 ).

In fact, most social theory is about the intellectual push and pull of life in a post-Kantian dispensation. And most of the theoretical issues we wrestle with today have roots that go all the way back to the ancients. Might it help us to begin to question the very reasons for believing in the modern fact–value divorce? How might we benefit from questioning the widespread assumption that human action is always based on interests and rules? Might we have something to learn from reconsidering the possibility that there is something like a natural law? Might ancient knowledge accumulated through millennia of religious experience—including teleological and eudaimonian views—have something to tell modern inquirers into human social life (insights that Enlightenment skepticism and rationalism have ignored)? Raising such questions underscores the need for further reflection on what the dominant epistemology or epistemologies in the field are and should be, since this has bearing on how sociologists approach the study of religion.

What Are (or Should Be) the Big Questions in Sociology of Religion?

Twentieth, we need to better identify and focus on big questions . There are numerous important, broad questions that contemporary research in the sociology of religion should be addressing. Some of these are longstanding problems, others have only received recent attention, and still others have hardly been considered. Some of these questions are more empirically tractable, whereas others deal with deep cultural forces that are not observable on the surface.

A first category of questions asks what is the role of religion in generating or sustaining or challenging different cultural structures in the modern world. Several examples merit consideration here. One is the relationship of religion to certain types of individualism. 10 Another pressing question is the role of religion in creating and rectifying social inequalities. We need a better understanding of the relationships between religion and race, class, and gender stratification (see, for example, Emerson and Smith 2000; , Keister 2011) . Analyses focused on race, class, and gender may help us to better understand religion in the first place. Turning to the political arena, open questions concern the relationship between religion and sources of power such as states and governments, especially the role of religion in state formation and peace-building. For example, what are the various institutional and juridical mechanisms by which democratic polities manage and accommodate pluralism? Under what conditions do religious cleavages lead to intractable forms of conflict, including violence? In economics, what is the role of religion in sustaining and challenging economic systems? How did American Protestantism make peace with neoliberal capitalism? Relatedly, one avenue for examination is the historical imprint of religion on present-day processes such as globalization. The Jesuits, for example, were a globalizing force long before neoliberal capitalism. An even more macrohistorical exploration would consider the cultural innovations generated during the Axial Age such as the emergence of transcendence as a preoccupation of religions, or the ways in which religion began to challenge violence. 11 Such historical questions are critical to challenging the pervasive (and we think erroneous) assumption that everything begins with modernity and that we can conveniently ignore what came before.

A second set of questions concerns factors that foster the emergence and sustenance of secularism—including the ways in which religion is a contributing factor in this regard. One dimension of this question is to study people and societies who are irreligious or indifferent to religion. Phil Zuckerman, for instance, claims that in Scandinavian societies such as Denmark, which have the lowest rates of religious belief and participation, people are more content and society is more effective in resolving issues such as poverty. His recent edited collection sets an agenda for the social-scientific study of atheism and secularity ( Zuckerman 2008 , 2010) . But much more scientific work remains to be done along those lines. More historical questions merit investigation as well. One such issue is the now-pervasive notions of “freedom” or “liberty.” How did these concepts emerge historically? What role did religion play in shaping whether they were considered natural or cultivated capacities or rights? Comparing our dominant Western views to other conceptions of freedom, autonomy, and agency would be instructive in this regard (as Saba Mahmood does with Islam, for example) ( Mahmood 2005) . Agency is typically framed from a Western liberal viewpoint, but in order to better understand how it is differently conceived in non-Western and nonliberal societies, we need to consider the role of religion in sustaining our own liberal presuppositions. Along these lines, it is worth examining the role of religion in the emergence of political liberalism in general. Scholars such as Michael Gillespie, Pierre Manent, and Charles Taylor have examined the role of religion in the intellectual history of modernity, although more sociological treatments of this question are needed ( , Manent 1994 , 1998 ; Taylor 2001 ; Gillespie 2008). This could help us understand, for instance, why, in spite of the seeming collapse of Christianity in Europe, religion—and Christianity in particular—is arguably still fundamental in structuring politics and economics in Europe.

A further question regards the role of religion in shaping the current belief in (a certain form of) science as a way to explain the world. Understanding this would entail examining, for instance, the relationship between scientism and creationism in the contemporary United States. All such questions would require historical, cultural, and comparative methods of research. A still further set of questions, also entailing comparative cultural inquiry, concerns the forms and meanings of “spirituality” worldwide. As Peter van der Veer suggests, “spirituality” in its meanings and manifestations in modern societies shows significant cross-cultural diversity ( van der Veer 2009) . A related issue worth addressing is the emergence of the historically recent category of “spiritual but not religious.” For instance, when, where, and to what extent do we find spirituality that is meaningfully disconnected from religion? To what extent is this discourse a boundary-maintenance mechanism having to do with, perhaps, embeddedness in social networks in which being “religious” is perceived as a bad thing? Also relevant here is the importance of understanding and explaining variation in how people engage with the supernatural and with superhuman powers. For instance, examining the role of “spiritual insecurity” and the continued prominence of witches in the lives of many modern Africans can illuminate the relationship between religion and uncertainty and how this shapes people's behavior and decisions ( Ashforth 2005 ; Trinitapoli and Yeatman 2011) . This allows for a more adequate understanding of the role of risk and insecurity in modernity than, for instance, its treatment by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (2004) . In addition, we need to better understand the emergence, sustenance, and diffusion of new religious movements in the world today, such as Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. We do not sufficiently understand how new religious movements are generated. For example, how it is possible for a movement to be cobbled together from disparate traditions yet “stick” and gain traction among followers around the world? What binds people to these beliefs and practices, and how do global and local processes interact? And how are these processes similar to or different from other globally diffusing phenomena, such as multinational corporations?

Institutional Reconfigurations

Twenty-first, we need some tangible changes in the broader institutional setup and reward structures of the discipline . We note a contradiction between the agenda we are setting forth here, which calls for more in-depth intellectual work on big questions, and the nature of graduate training, which increasingly emphasizes quick publications and tries to push students through programs ever faster. With few exceptions, graduate programs in sociology are designed to produce technicians and not intellectuals. The limited financial resources of departments play an important role here; in many cases, departments are unable to support students beyond the third, fourth, or fifth years of their graduate programs. The sort of training and research we are proposing would take longer than most departments can—or are willing to—support. And in addition to in-depth reading to address big questions (rather than simply a topic-focused approach that characterizes most students' interests), our call for more interdisciplinary and international research calls for institutional interventions that would support good graduate students studying religion as they pursue such ends.

Part of the difficulty in rewarding big thinking is the increasing corporatization and commodification of education. The past decade has seen an increasing shift toward the quantification of academic goals and achievements that resemble the dynamics of a for-profit corporation, driven by boards of trustees and corporate CEOs looking for achievement metrics that might be comparable to those of a corporate sales division. Add to this the sacralization of the college degree in our culture, and we can better understand the dwindling support for the kind of research that we are calling for. One solution to this problem would be the establishment of generous dissertation fellowships, postdoctoral fellowships, grants for international research, and sabbatical grants for early- and mid-career scholars pursuing bigger questions. Another possibility is the development of think-tanks and institutes for the study of religion that can bring scholars together and support them in the focused pursuit of their research for a period of time. But given that some foundations have been reducing their investments in scholarship on religion, this might prove a formidable challenge. Given the globalized perspective required in the study of religion today, the additional investments in travel, languages, fieldwork, education in new literatures, and so on will need significant institutional financial support.

In addition to reward structures, a crucial institutional issue is the supply of courses. For graduate students, this is a serious issue because it affects the availability of jobs and thus what scholars-in-training choose to study. The dearth of courses in the sociology of religion adversely affects the availability of the next generation of scholars. But university departments across the country need not provide more course offerings in this area in order to generate employment for our specific subfield. Rather, universities ought to measure student interest and demand in sociology of religion and adjust their supply of courses. Deans should then act accordingly to create new positions and courses. This is an issue that institutional gatekeepers need to take more seriously.

Publishing Outside Specialty Sociology-of-Religion Journals

The community of sociologists interested in religion have four different associations, three religion-specialty journals, and three annual conferences. 12 While a unique strength of our subfield, the drawbacks of this structural arrangement are worth considering, too. We suspect that having three sociology-of-religion journals, for example, fosters scholarly isolation by enabling scholars to limit their contributions to specialty journals, where their work will remain invisible to readers who do not already follow these. “Religion” as a topic is thus concentrated: strong but also cordoned off from the rest of the discipline. Having three of its own journals does not push scholarship on religion to “spread out” and speak more broadly to a wider constituency of colleagues. But if that were to happen, religion might be better integrated in the discipline as a whole—even if this made it harder (at least initially) to publish peer-reviewed articles on religion. We think at the very least that, twenty-second, sociologists of religion should make efforts to overcome their insularity by being more vocal in journals and conferences outside the subfield . Established scholars who publish articles in other journals, making in those contexts the points about the study of religion we have discussed here, will both add legitimacy to the subfield and do a service to the discipline as a whole. More generally, we think we need to seriously ask what purposes our many religion associations and specialty journals do and should serve. Should some of our associations and journals merge?

Rethinking Teaching

Finally, twenty-third, we need to reconsider our teaching of sociology, sociology of religion, and social theory. How should we introduce undergraduates to the study of religion? What are the most important things we want to communicate to students? What do they most need to learn to be good citizens of the world today? What should be in a syllabus, how should we engage students, what projects ought to be assigned? Such questions raise larger questions about the boundaries of the sociological canon. How, for instance, do Weber and Durkheim fit into a longer tradition of history and philosophy? Are there other thinkers in theology, philosophy, and religious ethics that students in the sociology of religion ought to read early on, perhaps people like Reinhold Niebuhr or Michael Polanyi? What do we assume and teach about the philosophies and meta-theories that underwrite our sociology? Then there is the issue of mentoring: what sorts of research are we encouraging graduate students to conduct? Should we be encouraging something different instead? What problems and questions are worth investigating?

Certainly, there are many important topics to address in the sociology of religion courses we teach. Notable among these are religion and immigration; religion in global cities; religion and youth; global Pentecostalism; the globalization of Islam; religious individualism in the West and other places; religion and conflict, violence, and peace-building; the “resurgence” of religion; and addressing and demystifying “fundamentalism.” These courses can help students understand, for example, the uniqueness of religion in America, the role of race in American exceptionalism, and the complexity of religion in the contemporary global context, such as global Islam or religion in China. Our discipline offers analytical categories and techniques that are useful for making sense of these phenomena. Moreover, the work that some of us assign students as part of these courses, such as observing a religious congregation that is different from their own tradition and writing religious autobiographies from a sociological perspective, can have significant and even transformative impacts on them. Such projects guide students (most of whom consider themselves to be religious to some degree) in the experience of looking at a religious tradition or institution—even their own—from the “outside,” without having to either discard their own beliefs and traditions or to attack (or embrace) those of another. Our courses provide a structure within which such difficult experiences can be navigated.

In addition, sociological tools can allow students to critically engage with religion based on a hermeneutic of not only suspicion but one of generosity and genuine understanding. More than simply “critical thinking,” our courses can cultivate a way of constructively engaging in meaningful discourse about religion, across all sorts of boundaries. To have such an engaged civil discourse first requires students to develop more accurate understandings of what people actually believe and what religion means to its adherents and practitioners. Simply correcting misperceptions and simplistic ideas about religion can be a great service. For instance, it comes as surprising news to many evangelical Protestant college students that they belong to a broader tradition that was once part of Roman Catholicism. Similarly, it is worth debunking the myth that “all religions are the same” (see Prothero 2010) .

Classes in sociology of religion can cultivate the habit of civilly disagreeing with others. The pedagogical aim of this endeavor should therefore be to generate practices of civil relations and discourse that enables students, regardless of whether they are personally supportive, hostile, or indifferent to religious claims, to engage in conflictual or agonistic but constructive thinking over differences that really matter. It would show that, despite the toxic conflicts of our broader culture, it is still possible to generate “civic friendship”—to have discussions across difference, not in a simplistic “politically correct” way that merely maintains decorum, but to engage productively in discussions that take seemingly intractable differences seriously. This requires the cultivation of humility; it entails openness to learning from people students disagree with, rather than rendering such differences irrelevant by a relativistic approach.

Our position on teaching the sociology of religion represents a deeper moral vision for the field and a commitment to a kind of “public sociology.” Teaching religion at this moment inescapably entails taking on such a responsibility. Sociologists will do a bad job in helping students become good citizens of the world if we do not understand religion, provide adequate knowledge about religious phenomena, and model how such constructive conversations can take place around contentious and divisive issues related to religion. The sociology of religion and individual sociologists who take religion seriously can provide a much-needed challenge to certain contemporary views, which—encouraged by vocal proponents of the New Atheism—foster reductive views of religion and outright dismissal of if not hostility toward religion. Further, we can challenge the idea that civility requires leaving religion at the door, and we can support a more robust understanding of pluralistic, democratic engagement and citizenship. Our discipline can also serve as an endeavor in peace-building if we move beyond our current semi-parochialism toward conversations with peace studies and political science.

In our twenty-three points, we have tried to lay out what we see as the main causes of sociology's difficult dealings with religion and offer some suggestions for improving the situation into the future. We hope that by publicly advancing these views, we might foster more critical and constructive conversations among a variety of sociologists coming from different approaches—all toward the larger goal of improving sociology's engagement with and understanding of religion. Finally, it is our hope that such improvements within the sociology of religion will improve more generally the quality and contribution of sociology, social science, and higher education broadly.

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The term “religious knowledge,” provided by the Mellon Foundation, means what academic studies have come to understand about the nature of religion and its role in human life, as well as knowledge that religions claim to have about different aspects of reality. Our appreciation goes to the Mellon Foundation and to the University of Notre Dame for their funding and support of this project. The views contained within do not necessarily represent theirs. Many thanks, too, go to Atalia Omer and Katherine Sorrell for extremely helpful suggestions for revisions of this article—although they share no responsibility for any possible errors or problems in the article. Not every author necessarily agrees with every specific point advanced here, although this article reflects the general thinking of the authors as a group.

The twenty-three “theses” of our working group are given in italics.

To keep this story realistically complicated, however, we do note the contributions to studying religion made by the early-twentieth-century Community Studies tradition (e.g., “Middletown”); by Talcott Parsons, for whom religion played a central (if abstract) role in social theory; and by the occasional serious scholars like Gerhard Lenski ( 1963 ).

For an anthropological example that takes “primitive” religion seriously, see Ashforth (2005 ), in addition, obviously, to much anthropological work in this area.

See Riesebrodt (2010 ), which most, though not all, of us find highly persuasive.

We do not promote historicizing as a means to dissolve the subject of “religion,” or to suggest that all of these matters are “relative” in the sense that any one position is as good as another; we historicize to foster a historical awareness that enables us to take stock of our situation and of the means we have for dealing with it.

Some of this work is being done, especially outside the United States, but it remains an open question as to whether that work will influence mainstream American sociology. See, for example, Warner et al. ( 2010 ).

From certain perspectives, “religion” is only or mainly a modern phenomenon or category, but such perspectives make the mistake of reducing religion (only) to institutionalized religions or belief systems. See Asad (1993) .

Riesebrodt also provides a strong argument for the continued relevance of religion as a universal concept.

This was addressed in Bellah et al. (1985) .

Good examples are recent works by Hans Joas and William Cavanaugh that demolish the idea that it is only through modern secularism that violence is challenged, and Jurgen Habermas' work on the emergence of prophets as a critique of state power.

These include the American Sociological Association religion section, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR), the Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR), and the Religious Research Association (RRA), the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , Sociology of Religion , Review of Religious Research (in addition to Social Compass and other non-US-based specialty associations, journals, and meetings).

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15.1 The Sociological Approach to Religion

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

• Discuss the historical view of religion from a sociological perspective
• Describe how the major sociological paradigms view religion

From the Latin religio (respect for what is sacred) and religare (to bind, in the sense of an obligation), the term religion describes various systems of belief and practice that define what people consider to be sacred or spiritual (Fasching and deChant 2001; Durkheim 1915). Throughout history, and in societies across the world, leaders have used religious narratives, symbols, and traditions in an attempt to give more meaning to life and understand the universe. Some form of religion is found in every known culture, and it is usually practiced in a public way by a group. The practice of religion can include feasts and festivals, intercession with God or gods, marriage and funeral services, music and art, meditation or initiation, sacrifice or service, and other aspects of culture.

While some people think of religion as something individual because religious beliefs can be highly personal, religion is also a social institution. Social scientists recognize that religion exists as an organized and integrated set of beliefs, behaviors, and norms centered on basic social needs and values. Moreover, religion is a cultural universal found in all social groups. For instance, in every culture, funeral rites are practiced in some way, although these customs vary between cultures and within religious affiliations. Despite differences, there are common elements in a ceremony marking a person’s death, such as announcement of the death, care of the deceased, disposition, and ceremony or ritual. These universals, and the differences in the way societies and individuals experience religion, provide rich material for sociological study.

In studying religion, sociologists distinguish between what they term the experience, beliefs, and rituals of a religion. Religious experience refers to the conviction or sensation that we are connected to “the divine.” This type of communion might be experienced when people pray or meditate. Religious beliefs are specific ideas members of a particular faith hold to be true, such as that Jesus Christ was the son of God, or that reincarnation exists. Another illustration of religious beliefs is the creation stories we find in different religions. Religious rituals are behaviors or practices that are either required or expected of the members of a particular group, such as bar mitzvah or confession of sins (Barkan and Greenwood 2003).

The History of Religion as a Sociological Concept

In the wake of nineteenth century European industrialization and secularization, three social theorists attempted to examine the relationship between religion and society: Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx. They are among the founding thinkers of modern sociology.

As stated earlier, French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) defined religion as a “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things” (1915). To him, sacred meant extraordinary—something that inspired wonder and that seemed connected to the concept of “the divine.” Durkheim argued that “religion happens” in society when there is a separation between the profane (ordinary life) and the sacred (1915). A rock, for example, isn’t sacred or profane as it exists. But if someone makes it into a headstone, or another person uses it for landscaping, it takes on different meanings—one sacred, one profane.

Durkheim is generally considered the first sociologist who analyzed religion in terms of its societal impact. Above all, he believed religion is about community: It binds people together (social cohesion), promotes behavior consistency (social control), and offers strength during life’s transitions and tragedies (meaning and purpose). By applying the methods of natural science to the study of society, Durkheim held that the source of religion and morality is the collective mind-set of society and that the cohesive bonds of social order result from common values in a society. He contended that these values need to be maintained to maintain social stability.

But what would happen if religion were to decline? This question led Durkheim to posit that religion is not just a social creation but something that represents the power of society: When people celebrate sacred things, they celebrate the power of their society. By this reasoning, even if traditional religion disappeared, society wouldn’t necessarily dissolve.

Whereas Durkheim saw religion as a source of social stability, German sociologist and political economist Max Weber (1864–1920) believed it was a precipitator of social change. He examined the effects of religion on economic activities and noticed that heavily Protestant societies—such as those in the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and Germany—were the most highly developed capitalist societies and that their most successful business leaders were Protestant. In his writing The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), he contends that the Protestant work ethic influenced the development of capitalism. Weber noted that certain kinds of Protestantism supported the pursuit of material gain by motivating believers to work hard, be successful, and not spend their profits on frivolous things. (The modern use of “work ethic” comes directly from Weber’s Protestant ethic, although it has now lost its religious connotations.)

Big Picture

The protestant work ethic in the information age.

Max Weber (1904) posited that, in Europe in his time, Protestants were more likely than Catholics to value capitalist ideology, and believed in hard work and savings. He showed that Protestant values directly influenced the rise of capitalism and helped create the modern world order. Weber thought the emphasis on community in Catholicism versus the emphasis on individual achievement in Protestantism made a difference. His century-old claim that the Protestant work ethic led to the development of capitalism has been one of the most important and controversial topics in the sociology of religion. In fact, scholars have found little merit to his contention when applied to modern society (Greeley 1989).

What does the concept of work ethic mean today? The work ethic in the information age has been affected by tremendous cultural and social change, just as workers in the mid- to late nineteenth century were influenced by the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Factory jobs tend to be simple, uninvolved, and require very little thinking or decision making on the part of the worker. Today, the work ethic of the modern workforce has been transformed, as more thinking and decision making is required. Employees also seek autonomy and fulfillment in their jobs, not just wages. Higher levels of education have become necessary, as well as people management skills and access to the most recent information on any given topic. The information age has increased the rapid pace of production expected in many jobs.

On the other hand, the “McDonaldization” of the United States (Hightower 1975; Ritzer 1993), in which many service industries, such as the fast-food industry, have established routinized roles and tasks, has resulted in a “discouragement” of the work ethic. In jobs where roles and tasks are highly prescribed, workers have no opportunity to make decisions. They are considered replaceable commodities as opposed to valued employees. During times of recession, these service jobs may be the only employment possible for younger individuals or those with low-level skills. The pay, working conditions, and robotic nature of the tasks dehumanizes the workers and strips them of incentives for doing quality work.

Working hard also doesn’t seem to have any relationship with Catholic or Protestant religious beliefs anymore, or those of other religions; information age workers expect talent and hard work to be rewarded by material gain and career advancement.

German philosopher, journalist, and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx (1818–1883) also studied the social impact of religion. He believed religion reflects the social stratification of society and that it maintains inequality and perpetuates the status quo. For him, religion was just an extension of working-class (proletariat) economic suffering. He famously argued that religion “is the opium of the people” (1844).

For Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, who were reacting to the great social and economic upheaval of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Europe, religion was an integral part of society. For Durkheim, religion was a force for cohesion that helped bind the members of society to the group, while Weber believed religion could be understood as something separate from society. Marx considered religion inseparable from the economy and the worker. Religion could not be understood apart from the capitalist society that perpetuated inequality. Despite their different views, these social theorists all believed in the centrality of religion to society.

Theoretical Perspectives on Religion

Modern-day sociologists often apply one of three major theoretical perspectives. These views offer different lenses through which to study and understand society: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and conflict theory. Let’s explore how scholars applying these paradigms understand religion.

Functionalism

Functionalists contend that religion serves several functions in society. Religion, in fact, depends on society for its existence, value, and significance, and vice versa. From this perspective, religion serves several purposes, like providing answers to spiritual mysteries, offering emotional comfort, and creating a place for social interaction and social control.

In providing answers, religion defines the spiritual world and spiritual forces, including divine beings. For example, it helps answer questions like, “How was the world created?” “Why do we suffer?” “Is there a plan for our lives?” and “Is there an afterlife?” As another function, religion provides emotional comfort in times of crisis. Religious rituals bring order, comfort, and organization through shared familiar symbols and patterns of behavior.

One of the most important functions of religion, from a functionalist perspective, is the opportunities it creates for social interaction and the formation of groups. It provides social support and social networking and offers a place to meet others who hold similar values and a place to seek help (spiritual and material) in times of need. Moreover, it can foster group cohesion and integration. Because religion can be central to many people’s concept of themselves, sometimes there is an “in-group” versus “out-group” feeling toward other religions in our society or within a particular practice. On an extreme level, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, and anti-Semitism are all examples of this dynamic. Finally, religion promotes social control: It reinforces social norms such as appropriate styles of dress, following the law, and regulating sexual behavior.

Conflict Theory

Conflict theorists view religion as an institution that helps maintain patterns of social inequality. For example, the Vatican has a tremendous amount of wealth, while the average income of Catholic parishioners is small. According to this perspective, religion has been used to support the “divine right” of oppressive monarchs and to justify unequal social structures, like India’s caste system.

Conflict theorists are critical of the way many religions promote the idea that believers should be satisfied with existing circumstances because they are divinely ordained. This power dynamic has been used by Christian institutions for centuries to keep poor people poor and to teach them that they shouldn’t be concerned with what they lack because their “true” reward (from a religious perspective) will come after death. Conflict theorists also point out that those in power in a religion are often able to dictate practices, rituals, and beliefs through their interpretation of religious texts or via proclaimed direct communication from the divine.

The feminist perspective is a conflict theory view that focuses specifically on gender inequality. In terms of religion, feminist theorists assert that, although women are typically the ones to socialize children into a religion, they have traditionally held very few positions of power within religions. A few religions and religious denominations are more gender equal, but male dominance remains the norm of most.

Sociology in the Real World

Rational choice theory: can economic theory be applied to religion.

How do people decide which religion to follow, if any? How does one pick a church or decide which denomination “fits” best? Rational choice theory (RCT) is one way social scientists have attempted to explain these behaviors. The theory proposes that people are self-interested, though not necessarily selfish, and that people make rational choices—choices that can reasonably be expected to maximize positive outcomes while minimizing negative outcomes. Sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (1988) first considered the use of RCT to explain some aspects of religious behavior, with the assumption that there is a basic human need for religion in terms of providing belief in a supernatural being, a sense of meaning in life, and belief in life after death. Religious explanations of these concepts are presumed to be more satisfactory than scientific explanations, which may help to account for the continuation of strong religious connectedness in countries such as the United States, despite predictions of some competing theories for a great decline in religious affiliation due to modernization and religious pluralism.

Another assumption of RCT is that religious organizations can be viewed in terms of “costs” and “rewards.” Costs are not only monetary requirements, but are also the time, effort, and commitment demands of any particular religious organization. Rewards are the intangible benefits in terms of belief and satisfactory explanations about life, death, and the supernatural, as well as social rewards from membership. RCT proposes that, in a pluralistic society with many religious options, religious organizations will compete for members, and people will choose between different churches or denominations in much the same way they select other consumer goods, balancing costs and rewards in a rational manner. In this framework, RCT also explains the development and decline of churches, denominations, sects, and even cults; this limited part of the very complex RCT theory is the only aspect well supported by research data.

Critics of RCT argue that it doesn’t fit well with human spiritual needs, and many sociologists disagree that the costs and rewards of religion can even be meaningfully measured or that individuals use a rational balancing process regarding religious affiliation. The theory doesn’t address many aspects of religion that individuals may consider essential (such as faith) and further fails to account for agnostics and atheists who don’t seem to have a similar need for religious explanations. Critics also believe this theory overuses economic terminology and structure and point out that terms such as “rational” and “reward” are unacceptably defined by their use; they would argue that the theory is based on faulty logic and lacks external, empirical support. A scientific explanation for why something occurs can’t reasonably be supported by the fact that it does occur. RCT is widely used in economics and to a lesser extent in criminal justice, but the application of RCT in explaining the religious beliefs and behaviors of people and societies is still being debated in sociology today.

Symbolic Interactionism

Rising from the concept that our world is socially constructed, symbolic interactionism studies the symbols and interactions of everyday life. To interactionists, beliefs and experiences are not sacred unless individuals in a society regard them as sacred. The Star of David in Judaism, the cross in Christianity, and the crescent and star in Islam are examples of sacred symbols. Interactionists are interested in what these symbols communicate. Because interactionists study one-on-one, everyday interactions between individuals, a scholar using this approach might ask questions focused on this dynamic. The interaction between religious leaders and practitioners, the role of religion in the ordinary components of everyday life, and the ways people express religious values in social interactions—all might be topics of study to an interactionist.

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17.3 Sociological Perspectives on Religion

Learning objectives.

• Summarize the major functions of religion.
• Explain the views of religion held by the conflict perspective.
• Explain the views of religion held by the symbolic interactionist perspective.

Sociological perspectives on religion aim to understand the functions religion serves, the inequality and other problems it can reinforce and perpetuate, and the role it plays in our daily lives (Emerson, Monahan, & Mirola, 2011). Table 17.1 “Theory Snapshot” summarizes what these perspectives say.

Table 17.1 Theory Snapshot

The Functions of Religion

Much of the work of Émile Durkheim stressed the functions that religion serves for society regardless of how it is practiced or of what specific religious beliefs a society favors. Durkheim’s insights continue to influence sociological thinking today on the functions of religion.

First, religion gives meaning and purpose to life . Many things in life are difficult to understand. That was certainly true, as we have seen, in prehistoric times, but even in today’s highly scientific age, much of life and death remains a mystery, and religious faith and belief help many people make sense of the things science cannot tell us.

Second, religion reinforces social unity and stability . This was one of Durkheim’s most important insights. Religion strengthens social stability in at least two ways. First, it gives people a common set of beliefs and thus is an important agent of socialization (see Chapter 4 “Socialization” ). Second, the communal practice of religion, as in houses of worship, brings people together physically, facilitates their communication and other social interaction, and thus strengthens their social bonds.

The communal practice of religion in a house of worship brings people together and allows them to interact and communicate. In this way religion helps reinforce social unity and stability. This function of religion was one of Émile Durkheim’s most important insights.

Erin Rempel – Worship – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

A third function of religion is related to the one just discussed. Religion is an agent of social control and thus strengthens social order . Religion teaches people moral behavior and thus helps them learn how to be good members of society. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Ten Commandments are perhaps the most famous set of rules for moral behavior.

A fourth function of religion is greater psychological and physical well-being . Religious faith and practice can enhance psychological well-being by being a source of comfort to people in times of distress and by enhancing their social interaction with others in places of worship. Many studies find that people of all ages, not just the elderly, are happier and more satisfied with their lives if they are religious. Religiosity also apparently promotes better physical health, and some studies even find that religious people tend to live longer than those who are not religious (Moberg, 2008). We return to this function later.

A final function of religion is that it may motivate people to work for positive social change . Religion played a central role in the development of the Southern civil rights movement a few decades ago. Religious beliefs motivated Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists to risk their lives to desegregate the South. Black churches in the South also served as settings in which the civil rights movement held meetings, recruited new members, and raised money (Morris, 1984).

Religion, Inequality, and Conflict

Religion has all of these benefits, but, according to conflict theory, it can also reinforce and promote social inequality and social conflict. This view is partly inspired by the work of Karl Marx, who said that religion was the “opiate of the masses” (Marx, 1964). By this he meant that religion, like a drug, makes people happy with their existing conditions. Marx repeatedly stressed that workers needed to rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie. To do so, he said, they needed first to recognize that their poverty stemmed from their oppression by the bourgeoisie. But people who are religious, he said, tend to view their poverty in religious terms. They think it is God’s will that they are poor, either because he is testing their faith in him or because they have violated his rules. Many people believe that if they endure their suffering, they will be rewarded in the afterlife. Their religious views lead them not to blame the capitalist class for their poverty and thus not to revolt. For these reasons, said Marx, religion leads the poor to accept their fate and helps maintain the existing system of social inequality.

As Chapter 11 “Gender and Gender Inequality” discussed, religion also promotes gender inequality by presenting negative stereotypes about women and by reinforcing traditional views about their subordination to men (Klassen, 2009). A declaration a decade ago by the Southern Baptist Convention that a wife should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership reflected traditional religious belief (Gundy-Volf, 1998).

As the Puritans’ persecution of non-Puritans illustrates, religion can also promote social conflict, and the history of the world shows that individual people and whole communities and nations are quite ready to persecute, kill, and go to war over religious differences. We see this today and in the recent past in central Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland. Jews and other religious groups have been persecuted and killed since ancient times. Religion can be the source of social unity and cohesion, but over the centuries it also has led to persecution, torture, and wanton bloodshed.

News reports going back since the 1990s indicate a final problem that religion can cause, and that is sexual abuse, at least in the Catholic Church. As you undoubtedly have heard, an unknown number of children were sexually abused by Catholic priests and deacons in the United States, Canada, and many other nations going back at least to the 1960s. There is much evidence that the Church hierarchy did little or nothing to stop the abuse or to sanction the offenders who were committing it, and that they did not report it to law enforcement agencies. Various divisions of the Church have paid tens of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits. The numbers of priests, deacons, and children involved will almost certainly never be known, but it is estimated that at least 4,400 priests and deacons in the United States, or about 4% of all such officials, have been accused of sexual abuse, although fewer than 2,000 had the allegations against them proven (Terry & Smith, 2006). Given these estimates, the number of children who were abused probably runs into the thousands.

Symbolic Interactionism and Religion

While functional and conflict theories look at the macro aspects of religion and society, symbolic interactionism looks at the micro aspects. It examines the role that religion plays in our daily lives and the ways in which we interpret religious experiences. For example, it emphasizes that beliefs and practices are not sacred unless people regard them as such. Once we regard them as sacred, they take on special significance and give meaning to our lives. Symbolic interactionists study the ways in which people practice their faith and interact in houses of worship and other religious settings, and they study how and why religious faith and practice have positive consequences for individual psychological and physical well-being.

The cross, Star of David, and the crescent and star are symbols of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, respectively. The symbolic interactionist perspective emphasizes the ways in which individuals interpret their religious experiences and religious symbols.

zeevveez – Star of David Coexistence- 2 – CC BY 2.0.

Religious symbols indicate the value of the symbolic interactionist approach. A crescent moon and a star are just two shapes in the sky, but together they constitute the international symbol of Islam. A cross is merely two lines or bars in the shape of a “t,” but to tens of millions of Christians it is a symbol with deeply religious significance. A Star of David consists of two superimposed triangles in the shape of a six-pointed star, but to Jews around the world it is a sign of their religious faith and a reminder of their history of persecution.

Religious rituals and ceremonies also illustrate the symbolic interactionist approach. They can be deeply intense and can involve crying, laughing, screaming, trancelike conditions, a feeling of oneness with those around you, and other emotional and psychological states. For many people they can be transformative experiences, while for others they are not transformative but are deeply moving nonetheless.

Key Takeaways

• Religion ideally serves several functions. It gives meaning and purpose to life, reinforces social unity and stability, serves as an agent of social control, promotes psychological and physical well-being, and may motivate people to work for positive social change.
• On the other hand, religion may help keep poor people happy with their lot in life, promote traditional views about gender roles, and engender intolerance toward people whose religious faith differs from one’s own.
• The symbolic interactionist perspective emphasizes how religion affects the daily lives of individuals and how they interpret their religious experiences.

For Your Review

• Of the several functions of religion that were discussed, which function do you think is the most important? Why?
• Which of the three theoretical perspectives on religion makes the most sense to you? Explain your choice.

Emerson, M. O., Monahan, S. C., & Mirola, W. A. (2011). Religion matters: What sociology teaches us about religion in our world . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Gundy-Volf, J. (1998, September–October). Neither biblical nor just: Southern Baptists and the subordination of women. Sojourners , 12–13.

Klassen, P. (Ed.). (2009). Women and religion . New York, NY: Routledge.

Marx, K. (1964). Karl Marx: Selected writings in sociology and social philosophy (T. B. Bottomore, Trans.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Moberg, D. O. (2008). Spirituality and aging: Research and implications. Journal of Religion, Spirituality & Aging, 20 , 95–134.

Morris, A. (1984). The origins of the civil rights movement: Black communities organizing for change . New York, NY: Free Press.

Terry, K., & Smith, M. L. (2006). The nature and scope of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests and deacons in the United States: Supplementary data analysis . Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Sociological Theory of Religion

2012, Religion Compass

This article provides an overview of the sociological theory of religion- that is, the sociological theory that is used to guide the empirical research in the sociology of religion. Mainstream sociological theory of religion went through four distinct phases: 1) classical (Emile Durkheim and Max Weber) 2) the old paradigm 3) the new paradigm 4) the neo-secularization paradigm. The article concludes by calling for a critical perspective, which while prevalent in religious studies and the other subfields of sociology is absent from the sociological study of religion.

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The prime purpose of this article is to study religion from different paradigms or perspectives from a sociological viewpoint. Religion is defined as a social institution while economic reality, ideological support, and everyday interactions of people are also undertaken as core concepts. In fact, this article is an overview of the religion of three theoretical perspectives of sociology focusing on the work of Emile Durkheim, Robert K. Merton (the functionalist), Karl Marx, Max Weber, Friedrich Engels (the conflict), and Peter Berger (the interactionist). A brief discussion of each perspective is articulated clearly, followed by secondary sources including published books, book sections, blogs, research articles, and WebPages highlighting the foundations of the relevant theory. Afterward, the author reviews the discourses of the theorists regarding religion with its application to human society. Finally, the article provides a summary of these perspectives continuing to develop the ...

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Provides an account of Marx and Weber's Sociology of Religion as the fountations for sociology of religion today.

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In almost 700 pages, The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion attempts an all-encompassing approach to the study of religion in modern societies. This ambitious effort was edited by Bryan S Turner, an experienced scholar in the field, who also wrote the introduction and a concluding chapter. The book has an interdisciplinary focus and a historic-comparative viewpoint inspired by Weber. It is divided into 29 chapters, organized in seven well-defined sections and includes a very useful index at the end.

Religion will remain a vital arena of research among sociologists not only because religious dynamics are ubiquitous, but also—as revealed in essays in this special issue—because our research findings are so often distorted if religion is ignored. Noting the many ways scholars find their way to their research subjects, the future of published scholarship in the sociology of religion must depend less on faithful adherence to established concepts and debates, and more on welcoming and extending new questions and approaches to religion. Finally, editors and reviewers of developing and forthcoming scholarship should continue to affirm religion as a highly flexible arena of investigation, regardless of whether it fits a tight framing of whatever seems to constitute the “sociology of religion.”

Encyclopedia, 2021

The new sociology of religion differs from the classical and mainstream sociology, which was in force until the end of the last century, in that it no longer considers religion only as an independent variable, but places it together with other dependent variables, so that it becomes possible to investigate new themes, especially those that do not consider religious involvement—from atheism to the phenomenon of ‘nones’ (non-believers and non-practicing), from spirituality to forms of para-religions and quasi-religions and the varied set of multiple religions.

This, the first issue of Sociology of Religion to appear under my editorship, has been a long time coming. I began preparing for my tenure as editor in the fall of 2004, shortly after I was appointed by the Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR) council, and have been receiving manuscripts since September 2005.

Since the Age of Enlightenment, scholars have been continuously predicting the demise of religion. Yet, religion is still thriving and vibrant in most contemporary societies. Not only has religion “survived” in the “modern” world, it has also undergone significant changes, revivals and adaptations. The objective of this course is to study religion sociologically, which means that we will not focus so much on religious texts and teachings but rather on the way individuals experience religion in their daily lives. The course is divided into three sections. The first section consists in a theoretical endeavor to define religion. The founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx, devoted considerable amounts of time to writing about religion. Following their lead, we will analyze religion as a socially constituted reality that in turn influences the social world. A significant part of the course will be dedicated to unpacking the very category of “religion:” What is religion? When do you know when you see it? What is the meaning of religion in people’s lives? The second section will provide methodological tools to study religion in a sociological perspective: students will be introduced to the ethnographic method in social sciences and will learn the art and craft of performing participant observation in religious settings. The third section will focus on empirical work describing contemporary manifestations of religion and how it intersects with class, race, gender, immigration, civic life, and the state.

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Nordic Journal of Religion and Society (2015), 28 (1): 21–36, 2015

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Annual Review of Sociology, 1999

Social compass, 1994

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2013

Department of Sociology Working Papers, Singapore: National University of Singapore 85: 1–33, 1987

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Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion

• Cortes Gomez , R. María
• Published 2001

19 Citations

Production, circulation, and accumulation: the historiographies of capitalism in china and south asia, a feminist critique of the concept of harmony: a confucian approach, classical sociological theory, political development of the world system: a formal quantitative analysis, demand-responsive industrialization in east asia, recontextualizing max weber’s ideal type, indigenous peoples and modernity, international investment law as formally rational law: a weberian analysis, max weber’s ideal versus material interest distinction revisited.

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20 References

Religion and the rise of capitalism, the thing that would not die, el capitalismo actual y la ética del beneficio., the thesis before weber: an archaeology, the spirit of japanese capitalism and selected essays, the spirit of capitalism, investigacion de la naturaleza y causas de la riqueza de las naciones, weber's protestant ethic: the longevity of the thesis: a critique of the critics, naturaleza y lógica del capitalismo, on the thirty-nine articles: a conversation with tudor christianity, related papers.

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Home — Essay Samples — Religion — Religious Pluralism — Role of Religion in Society: Exploring its Significance and Implications

Role of Religion in Society: Exploring Its Significance and Implications

• Categories: Religious Beliefs Religious Pluralism

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Introduction, the significance of religion in society, the implications of religion in society, the debate surrounding the role of religion in society, the historical context of religion in society, the impact of religion on culture and identity, the role of religion in promoting social cohesion, the impact of religion on politics and governance, the relationship between religion and morality, the role of religion in promoting social justice and equality, the debate between secularism and religious influence in society, the impact of cultural attitudes towards religion on the debate, the potential consequences of religion's role in society.

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ABOUT OUR JOURNAL: SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

Sociology of Religion , the official journal of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, is published quarterly for the purpose of advancing scholarship in the sociological study of religion. The journal publishes original (not previously published) work of exceptional quality and interest without regard to substantive focus, theoretical orientation, or methodological approach. Although theoretically ambitious, empirically grounded articles are the core of what we publish, we also welcome agenda setting essays, comments on previously published works, critical reflections on the research act, and interventions into substantive areas or theoretical debates intended to push the field ahead.

Articles published in Sociology of Religion have won many professional awards, including most recently the ASA Religion Section’s Graduate Student Paper Award (Darwin in 2019), the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Distinguished Article Award (Whitehead, Perry, and Baker in 2019), and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Graduate Student Paper Award (Rotolo 2021). Building on this legacy, Sociology of Religion aspires to be the premier English-language publication for sociological scholarship on religion and an essential source for agenda-setting work in the field.

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Sociology Of Religion

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Not all religions share the same set of beliefs, but in one form or another, religion is found in all known human societies. Even the earliest societies on record show clear traces of religious symbols and ceremonies. Throughout history, religion has continued to be a central part of societies and human experience, shaping how individuals react to the environments in which they live. Since religion is such an important part of societies around the world, sociologists are very interested in studying it.

Sociologists study religion as both a belief system and a social institution. As a belief system, religion shapes what people think and how they see the world. As a social institution, religion is a pattern of social action organized around the beliefs and practices that people develop to answer questions about the meaning of existence. As an institution, religion persists over time and has an organizational structure into which members are socialized.

It's Not About What You Believe

In studying religion from a sociological perspective , it is not important what one believes about religion. What is important is the ability to examine religion objectively in its social and cultural context. Sociologists are interested in several questions about religion:

• How are religious beliefs and factors related to other social factors like race, age, gender, and education?
• How are religious institutions organized?
• How does religion affect social change ?
• What influence does religion have on other social institutions, such as political or educational institutions?

Sociologists also study the religiosity of individuals, groups, and societies. Religiosity is the intensity and consistency of practice of a person’s (or group’s) faith. Sociologists measure religiosity by asking people about their religious beliefs, their membership in religious organizations, and attendance at religious services.

Modern academic sociology began with the study of religion in Emile Durkheim’s 1897 The Study of Suicide in which he explored the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics. Following Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber also looked at religion’s role and influence in other social institutions such as economics and politics.

Sociological Theories of Religion

Each major sociological framework has its perspective on religion. For instance, from the functionalist perspective of sociological theory, religion is an integrative force in society because it has the power to shape collective beliefs. It provides cohesion in the social order by promoting a sense of belonging and collective consciousness . This view was supported by Emile Durkheim.

The second point of view, supported by Max Weber, views religion in terms of how it supports other social institutions. Weber thought that the religious belief systems provided a cultural framework that supported the development of other social institutions, such as the economy.

While Durkheim and Weber concentrated on how religion contributes to the cohesion of society, Karl Marx focused on the conflict and oppression that religion provided to societies. Marx saw religion as a tool for class oppression in which it promotes stratification because it supports a hierarchy of people on Earth and the subordination of humankind to divine authority.

Lastly, symbolic interaction theory focuses on the process by which people become religious. Different religious beliefs and practices emerge in different social and historical contexts because context frames the meaning of religious belief. Symbolic interaction theory helps explain how the same religion can be interpreted differently by different groups or at different times throughout history. From this perspective, religious texts are not truths but have been interpreted by people. Thus different people or groups may interpret the same Bible in different ways.

• Giddens, A. (1991). Introduction to Sociology. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
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Revue internationale de philosophie 2016/2 no 276, max weber and the sociology of religion.

• By Bryan S. Turner

Pages 141 to 150

Journal article

1 In ‘Nine theses on the future of sociology’, which was originally a lecture to the Eastern Sociological Association in New York in 1986, Anthony Giddens (1987: 26) offered the following verdict: ‘Sociology will increasingly shed the residue of nineteenth-and early twentieth- century social thought’. By that claim, he primarily meant that sociology would shake off its debate with Marxist social thought. He assumed that classical sociology had, alongside the sociology of Karl Marx, regarded the economy as the primary cause of social change. Max Weber was seen in a similar light, because his famous remark about ideas being the ‘switchmen’ controlling the direction of cultural change appeared to give only a limited role to belief and values in historical change. This collection of essays on the legacy of Max Weber goes very much in the opposite direction. Rather than sociology shedding its classical legacy, the work of Weber remains vibrant and central to historical and comparative research, and to the whole vocabulary of the social sciences. Furthermore these essays treat Weber’s interest in religion as a key feature of modernity and hence as a fundamental aspect of his sociology as a whole.

2 Thus almost a century after his untimely death in 1920, Weber continues to influence contemporary social and political thought in both North America and Europe, and increasingly in Asia. For example in Taiwan, the students of Wolfgang Schluchter have been highly active and also in China after the reforms of Den Xiaoping created a more intensive process of modernization in 1975. One example taken more or less at random of Asian interest is Sung Ho Kim’s Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society (2004).

3 Weber’s influence has of course been neither continuous nor unchallenged. In the United States Weber’s insertion into mainstream sociology owed a great deal to Talcott Parsons’s translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1930 and to his analysis of Weber’s place in the development of theories of action in The Structure of Social Action (Parsons 1937). However, for reasons I will explore shortly, Weber’s status in American sociology was overshadowed by ‘home-grown’ sociologists such as Robert Park, William E. Ogburn, and Franklin Giddings. In a later generation Weber’s stature was recognized and promoted by conservative figures such as Edward Shils and by radicals such as C. Wright Mills who with Hans H. Gerth edited the influential collection of essays From Max Weber (1946).

4 In the American positivist and empirical tradition, when Weber does make an appearance, he is typically employed to justify sociology as a science by reference to his notions of value-neutrality in the essays on objectivity and ethical neutrality in The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Weber, 1949). Immanuel Wallerstein (2007: 435) comments that Weber’s notion of ‘value neutrality’ was central to the heyday of quantitative sociology between 1945 and 1968, after which it was subject to critical re-evaluation by a new generation of sociologists. The principal assumption of Wallerstein’s interpretation of Weber was that there was a clear distinction between philosophy and sociology, and that the collection of empirical data was prior to any ethical discussion. In North American professional sociology Weber’s status has waxed and waned. In his recent American Sociology , Stephen Turner (2014) does not once refer to Weber.

5 The ambiguity surrounding Weber was well expressed by Leo Strauss (1953: 36) who began his discussion of Weber in Natural Right and History with the famous comment ‘Whatever may have been his errors, he is the greatest social scientist of our century’. The ‘errors’ in Weber, according to Strauss, related to inconsistency and the general problems of value relativism. Strauss, correctly in my view, draws attention to Weber’s commitment to the overall importance of ‘personality’ for an individual who takes a calling as being important for self-development as a rational process. But for what reason would one prefer rational self-determination over a life of sensual pleasure? Why would one prefer intellectual honesty over pleasing delusions? Strauss also asks, quoting the famous conclusion of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1958: 182) ‘Weber saw the following alternative: either a spiritual renewal or else “mechanized petrifaction”, .i.e. the extinction of every human possibility expect that of “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart”’. Weber then draws back by recognizing that these statements can receive no support from purely historical research. A modern translation by Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells has the following: ‘Here, however, we are getting into the area of judgments of value and belief, with which this purely historical study should not be encumbered’ (Weber, 2002: 121). Strauss then pounced on this rejection of encumbrance with ‘ It is not proper, then, for the historian or social scientist, it is not permissible, that he truthfully describe a certain type of life as spiritually empty or describe specialists without vision or voluptuaries without heart as what they are’. Strauss clearly thought they should and went on to show that in fact Weber constantly made such observations despite himself.

6 Weber frequently entered into ‘the area of judgments of value and belief’ and no more so than in his sociology of religion. Strauss suggested that Weber made a distinction between taking religion seriously (such as the religious virtuosi) and the masses for whom religion is ultimately a collection of techniques. The distinction between charisma and tradition also carries the implicit criterion of authenticity. I have suggested elsewhere that Weber followed Immanuel Kant’s distinction in Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason (1960) between reflecting faith and cultic religion in which the former is the rational, individualistic world of Lutheranism and the latter refers to the ritual practices that are designed to influence the gods and spirits (Turner, 2009). For Weber Roman Catholicism and Hinduism were cultic religions, while the pietist sects were exemplary carriers of a rationalist spirit. Weber also disapproved of enthusiasm and emotional conversion. In some critical comments on the Gifford Lectures (1901-2) of William James (1929) in The Varieties of Religious Experience , Weber (2002: 144) asserted ‘Religious experience as such is, of course, irrational, like every experience… it is distinguished by its absolute incommunicability’. There are many examples of value judgment in Weber that went well beyond ‘purely historical study’. For example, Weber made many controversial judgments about the character of Islam. However for Strauss this tendency to stray into judgment did not necessarily diminish what Weber had to contribute to the analysis of religion; it simply meant that his philosophy of science was often out of kilter with his actual practice of sociology.

7 While Weber, along with other figures of classical sociology, has had an uneven reception in professional American sociology, in European social science he has enjoyed a longer and more continuous period of influence, but his work is often narrowly understood in terms of the Protestant Ethic thesis – at least among historians such as Hugh Trevor Roper. The thesis has been consistently rejected. For example Andrew Greeley, calling for a ‘moratorium’ on the debate, claimed there was no empirical confirmation of the theory. However, in modern sociology, the number of major figures who are indebted to Weber is extensive: Raymond Aron, Randall Collins, Ralph Dahrendorf, Jurgen Kocka, Robert K. Merton, Guenter Roth, Freidrich Tenbruck and Wolfgang Schluchter. Somewhat surprisingly in a recent interview, Pierre Bourdieu (2011: 111) recognized Weber’s influence, especially in his interpretation of the ethic of the Kharijities in North Africa. Weber’s European influence has also been important in political theory where his work received sympathetic and extensive treatment by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, J. P. Mayer, and Wilhelm Hennis. In recent years Weber’s influence in political thought has been reviewed and revised in conjunction with the revival of interest in Carl Schmitt (Mehring, 1998).

8 What immediate conclusions can we draw from this brief sketch of the reception of Max Weber through the twenty and twenty-first centuries? Weber’s presence in the legacy of classical sociology remains a major influence, but the interpretation of his work continues to be unsettled and often controversial, especially around the issues of scientific objectivity and value-neutrality. Secondly the interpretation of his oeuvre is somewhat skewed towards the legacy of the Protestant Ethic thesis, which was in reality only two essays that explored an issue that was already well known in German academic circles. The opening paragraph of the thesis starts with a recognition that the connection between religion and occupational structure in Germany, where business leaders and owners of capital were overwhelmingly Protestant, ‘has frequently been the subject of lively debate’ (Weber, 2002: 1). Finally, I want to suggest and subsequently develop the idea that his political ideas have been somewhat marginal to the focus on such themes as rationalization and modernization. The Axial Age religions (Jaspers, 1953; Bellah, 2011) and the subsequent debate owes a great deal to the influence of Weber. The Axial Age religions emerging between 800 and 200 BCE created the foundations of the world religions in developing an idea of transcendence that could foster a critical view of the everyday empirical world.

9 If the narrow issue in the legacy of Weber is the Protestant Ethic thesis, then the larger issues raised by Weber’s sociology are the tragic relationships between violence and the ethic of brotherly love. The ethical question is simply this: can we live in a world where the role of violence, if not eliminated, is at least controlled and modified? Weber’s political sociology suggests that this aspiration for a peaceful world is merely a ‘pipe dream’, while in his methodological essays he flatly proclaimed, with reference to value judgments, ‘This question cannot be discussed scientifically’ (Weber, 1949: 1). Many of Weber’s disciples have found his answer morally unpalatable. However in raising this question, we can uncover much of the weakness of the conventional approach to Weber’s ideas about ‘ethical neutrality’.

10 Why has Weber’s sociology survived both radical criticisms of his work and major disagreements about its coherence and significance? We can offer a few general observations. Firstly the sheer scale of his work, including the sociology of religion, the study of music, the contributions to legal theory, the economic analyses, the study of the Russian revolutions, slavery and the economy of ancient societies and so forth, is unmatched in sociological scholarship. Secondly he produced a set of basic concepts – perhaps most famously the distinction between class, status and power, and the analysis of charisma, tradition and legal rational authority – that has remained the taken-for-granted language of sociologists. Thirdly he addressed issues in modern societies that remain both important and troublesome: disenchantment, rationality and violence.

11 However this legacy, while important and fruitful, cannot explain the persistent interest in and importance of Weber to modern social science. I want to suggest – and this is a theme running through this collection of articles – that it is the tension around religion, rationality, disenchantment and secularism that makes Weber such an important figure in contemporary debates about the general direction of modern societies and the dilemmas of the human condition. While Weber is inevitably connected with the (now discredited) secularization thesis, his relationship to religion (and we can add philosophy and ethics) is both more interesting and unresolved than any simple secularization thesis can sustain. Let us examine this in more detail.

12 Among major social scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Weber was alone in placing religion at the core of his sociological interests. One only has to think of the focus on the world religions in Ancient Judaism (1952) , The Religion of China (1951) , The Religion of India (1958) , and The Sociology of Religion (1966) . Furthermore if one wants to come closer to Weber’s own ethical interests one has to read the essays collected by Gerth and Mills (2009) under the heading ‘Part III: Religion’ in From Max Weber and especially the Zwischenbetrachtung or intermediate reflections on religion. Finally the themes of disenchantment, alienation and personal angst run continuously through the two famous essays on ‘Science as a vocation’ and ‘Politics as a vocation’ which Weber gave in Munich towards the end of his life, and which are published in the Gerth and Mills (2009) collection For Weber . In the light of these works, can we get closer to Weber’s own ethical position, to his anxieties about modernity, and more specifically the fate of Germany and indeed of western civilization?

13 One way into this aspect of Weber’s sociology is through an inspection of the underlying and largely hidden philosophical anthropology of his world-view. This aspect of Weber’s work first came to my attention in the interpretation of Weber by Wilhelm Hennis (1988) in his Max Weber. Essays in Reconstruction, which is a collection of essays that first appeared in Germany in the 1980s. For Hennis, Weber retained many of the foundational questions of moral philosophy from Aristotle onwards which he translated into a language and methodology relevant to the development of modern social science. The central questions and themes of Weber’s sociology are concerned with the transformation of human kind as a consequence of the rationalization processes that were originally generated by the Protestant Reformation in transferring the disciplined life of the monastery into the routines of everyday life. The ethical question of this transformation was concerned with the consequences for ‘personality and life orders’. To get at the core of this issue, I shall quote a lengthy passage from Hennis (1988: 46) which comes under the heading ‘The “Anthropological – Characterological” Principles and the Limits of Empirical Verification’:

14 ‘Weber’s “central” question is in the development of Menschentum and is directed towards anthropological knowledge: “sociology” as a science of the “variety of social relations”, a particular “academic” (ie. necessarily specialized) path to this central cognitive objective. What – “spiritually”, “qualitatively” – will Man become?’

15 Hennis goes on to argue that Weber concentrated on the idea of the regulation of life and its directions ( Lebensfuhrung ) in the ascetic disciplines of various religions (especially in the Protestant sects) and how these principles had become universal through the global spread of capitalism as a rational economic system. The negative aspects of this civilizational development were the problems of disenchantment, the threat of meaninglessness in human affairs, the inability to formulate (let alone answer) moral problems, and the secularizing impulse of Protestantism. In short, the unintended or fateful consequences of rational-secular Lebenfuhrung were summarized in the now famous metaphor of the iron cage. Perhaps less well known is Weber’s horror at the rise of the heartless Fachmenschen  – the dull and ruthless bureaucratic officials who would come to colonize everyday life. The origins of ‘personality and life orders’ were to be found in the disciplinary practices of the world religions, whose origins were associated with the so-called Axial Age.

16 Robert Bellah was a lone voice in American sociology of religion in that he was interested in ‘whole societies’ (Blasi, 2014: 81). Although his essay on ‘civic religion’ was important in post-war debates about the character of American society, his comparative sociology – for example Tokugawa Religion (Bellah, 1957) and Imagining Japan (Bellah, 2003) – was neglected in mainstream sociology. At the end of his life he published Religion in Human Evolution (Bellah 2011) in a context where evolutionary theory had long been abandoned in conventional sociology programmes. These works in historical and comparative sociology were clearly influenced by Weber’s sociology of world religions, but they also connected with Weber’s ethical and religious concerns, especially as those concerns that were expressed in ‘Politics as a Vocation’. Insofar as Religion in Human Evolution examined the origins of world religions and the Axial Age debate, Karl Jaspers’s Origin and Goal of History (1953) played a significant intellectual role. We know that Weber had to some extent anticipated Jaspers’s study which came out in 1949 following the essay ‘The Axial Age of Human History’ in Commentary in 1948. Briefly Jaspers had argued that the major or axial turning point in human history occurred between 800-200 BCE and had been brought about by a cluster of religious and philosophical movements, and figures such as Socrates, the Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster and others. The main theme in this religio-philosophical eruption was a profound dissatisfaction with this worldly existence. Arnaldo Momigliano commenting on this period in his Alien Wisdom (1975) described it as the critical age, because prophets and philosophers became critical of the conditions under which humans lived in the everyday world.

17 There has been much criticism of the Jaspers-Bellah-Joas argument most recently by Iain Provan (2013) in Convenient Myths. Without dwelling on its difficulties as an historical argument, my main interest here is that for Bellah the Axial Age religions were failures in the sense that they could not ultimately resolve the tensions between the ethical life and violence or more specifically between universal religion and the practical necessities of politics which requires the use of violence as the ultimate means to establish a social order. In The Robert Bellah Reader (Bellah and Tipton, 2006) we find various reflections on ‘Politics as a Vocation’ especially where Bellah considers Weber’s relationship to Leo Tolstoy in which the Russian prophet of non-violence is analyzed in terms of the distinction between an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of ultimate ends. Weber came finally to reject Tolstoy as utopian with respect to the inescapable actuality of violence in modern politics. In short there is a tragic dimension to both Weber and Jaspers in their interpretation of politics and modernity. With the rise of the modern state, violence has been organized and legitimized by reference to the defense of sovereignty. I have elsewhere (Turner, 1981) referred to the role of fate in Weber’s sociology in which the unintended consequences of action are always negative; there are no good only bad unintended consequences of human actions. The unintended consequences of Protestant piety were the iron cage.

18 This reference Jaspers takes us back to Hennis’s interpretation of the underlying anthropology of Weber’s interpretation of the fateful character of western history – and world history insofar as western capitalism imposed its economic rationality on the rest of the world. In the 1915 ‘Religious Rejections of the World’ Weber comments bitterly that ‘the world domination of unbrotherliness’ is the fate of human kind (Gerth and Mills, 2009: 357). The failure of the ethic of brotherly love is common not just to the Abrahamic faiths but to the world religions as such. The ethic of absolute ends – such as the Sermon on the Mount – is compromised eventually by purely pragmatic ends and interests. In the Foreword to his study of Weber, Hennis comments on Jaspers’s little book on Max Weber from 1944 –  Deutches Wesen im politischen Denken, im Forschen und Philosophieren –  which is translated and published in Karl Jaspers on Max Weber (Dreijmans, 1989). Hennis (1988: ix) says poignantly ‘Hardly any book has since moved me so deeply’

19 Weber lived through the crisis of Germany from the death of Bismarck to the end of World War 1, and according to Jaspers (Drejmans, 1989: 49) ‘Weber’s pessimism never becomes despondency’. The role of science was to analyze the possibilities of social action and the means to valued ends, but it could neither create nor choose between different ends. Perhaps what ultimately connects us with Weber is our sense of the unpredictable nature of the world in which we live, the sense of disenchantment, the contingencies of the everyday world, the unintended consequences of scientific advances, environmental pollution, the unstoppable loss of species, rainforests and other essential resources such as water, the proliferation of nuclear armaments and the eruption of ‘new wars’. Contemporary pessimism is also fuelled by our awareness that a decade of economic growth and prosperity in the West may be coming to an end. Weber’s tragic view of rationalization has more appeal, both empirically and ethically, than the bland versions of modernization theory that were prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. The only question is whether our modern pessimism will descend into despondency and inaction.

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• TURNER, Bryan S..

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Article contents

Religion, culture, and communication.

• Stephen M. Croucher , Stephen M. Croucher School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing, Massey Business School, Massey University
• Cheng Zeng , Cheng Zeng Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä
• Diyako Rahmani Diyako Rahmani Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä
• , and  Mélodine Sommier Mélodine Sommier School of History, Culture, and Communication, Eramus University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.166
• Published online: 25 January 2017

Religion is an essential element of the human condition. Hundreds of studies have examined how religious beliefs mold an individual’s sociology and psychology. In particular, research has explored how an individual’s religion (religious beliefs, religious denomination, strength of religious devotion, etc.) is linked to their cultural beliefs and background. While some researchers have asserted that religion is an essential part of an individual’s culture, other researchers have focused more on how religion is a culture in itself. The key difference is how researchers conceptualize and operationalize both of these terms. Moreover, the influence of communication in how individuals and communities understand, conceptualize, and pass on religious and cultural beliefs and practices is integral to understanding exactly what religion and culture are.

It is through exploring the relationships among religion, culture, and communication that we can best understand how they shape the world in which we live and have shaped the communication discipline itself. Furthermore, as we grapple with these relationships and terms, we can look to the future and realize that the study of religion, culture, and communication is vast and open to expansion. Researchers are beginning to explore the influence of mediation on religion and culture, how our globalized world affects the communication of religions and cultures, and how interreligious communication is misunderstood; and researchers are recognizing the need to extend studies into non-Christian religious cultures.

• communication
• intercultural communication

Intricate Relationships among Religion, Communication, and Culture

Compiling an entry on the relationships among religion, culture, and communication is not an easy task. There is not one accepted definition for any of these three terms, and research suggests that the connections among these concepts are complex, to say the least. Thus, this article attempts to synthesize the various approaches to these three terms and integrate them. In such an endeavor, it is impossible to discuss all philosophical and paradigmatic debates or include all disciplines.

It is difficult to define religion from one perspective and with one encompassing definition. “Religion” is often defined as the belief in or the worship of a god or gods. Geertz ( 1973 ) defined a religion as

(1) a system which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. (p. 90)

It is essential to recognize that religion cannot be understood apart from the world in which it takes place (Marx & Engels, 1975 ). To better understand how religion relates to and affects culture and communication, we should first explore key definitions, philosophies, and perspectives that have informed how we currently look at religion. In particular, the influences of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel are discussed to further understand the complexity of religion.

Karl Marx ( 1818–1883 ) saw religion as descriptive and evaluative. First, from a descriptive point of view, Marx believed that social and economic situations shape how we form and regard religions and what is religious. For Marx, the fact that people tend to turn to religion more when they are facing economic hardships or that the same religious denomination is practiced differently in different communities would seem perfectly logical. Second, Marx saw religion as a form of alienation (Marx & Engels, 1975 ). For Marx, the notion that the Catholic Church, for example, had the ability or right to excommunicate an individual, and thus essentially exclude them from the spiritual community, was a classic example of exploitation and domination. Such alienation and exploitation was later echoed in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche ( 1844–1900 ), who viewed organized religion as society and culture controlling man (Nietzsche, 1996 ).

Building on Marxist thinking, Weber ( 1864–1920 ) stressed the multicausality of religion. Weber ( 1963 ) emphasized three arguments regarding religion and society: (1) how a religion relates to a society is contingent (it varies); (2) the relationship between religion and society can only be examined in its cultural and historical context; and (3) the relationship between society and religion is slowly eroding. Weber’s arguments can be applied to Catholicism in Europe. Until the Protestant Reformation of the 15th and 16th centuries, Catholicism was the dominant religious ideology on the European continent. However, since the Reformation, Europe has increasingly become more Protestant and less Catholic. To fully grasp why many Europeans gravitate toward Protestantism and not Catholicism, we must consider the historical and cultural reasons: the Reformation, economics, immigration, politics, etc., that have all led to the majority of Europeans identifying as Protestant (Davie, 2008 ). Finally, even though the majority of Europeans identify as Protestant, secularism (separation of church and state) is becoming more prominent in Europe. In nations like France, laws are in place that officially separate the church and state, while in Northern Europe, church attendance is low, and many Europeans who identify as Protestant have very low religiosity (strength of religious devotion), focusing instead on being secularly religious individuals. From a Weberian point of view, the links among religion, history, and culture in Europe explain the decline of Catholicism, the rise of Protestantism, and now the rise of secularism.

Emile Durkheim ( 1858–1917 ) focused more on how religion performs a necessary function; it brings people and society together. Durkheim ( 1976 ) thus defined a religion as

a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things which are set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. (p. 47)

From this perspective, religion and culture are inseparable, as beliefs and practices are uniquely cultural. For example, religious rituals (one type of practice) unite believers in a religion and separate nonbelievers. The act of communion, or the sharing of the Eucharist by partaking in consecrated bread and wine, is practiced by most Christian denominations. However, the frequency of communion differs extensively, and the ritual is practiced differently based on historical and theological differences among denominations.

Georg Simmel ( 1858–1918 ) focused more on the fluidity and permanence of religion and religious life. Simmel ( 1950 ) believed that religious and cultural beliefs develop from one another. Moreover, he asserted that religiosity is an essential element to understand when examining religious institutions and religion. While individuals may claim to be part of a religious group, Simmel asserted that it was important to consider just how religious the individuals were. In much of Europe, religiosity is low: Germany 34%, Sweden 19%, Denmark 42%, the United Kingdom 30%, the Czech Republic 23%, and The Netherlands 26%, while religiosity is relatively higher in the United States (56%), which is now considered the most religious industrialized nation in the world ( Telegraph Online , 2015 ). The decline of religiosity in parts of Europe and its rise in the U.S. is linked to various cultural, historical, and communicative developments that will be further discussed.

Combining Simmel’s ( 1950 ) notion of religion with Geertz’s ( 1973 ) concept of religion and a more basic definition (belief in or the worship of a god or gods through rituals), it is clear that the relationship between religion and culture is integral and symbiotic. As Clark and Hoover ( 1997 ) noted, “culture and religion are inseparable” and “religion is an important consideration in theories of culture and society” (p. 17).

Outside of the Western/Christian perception of religion, Buddhist scholars such as Nagarajuna present a relativist framework to understand concepts like time and causality. This framework is distinct from the more Western way of thinking, in that notions of present, past, and future are perceived to be chronologically distorted, and the relationship between cause and effect is paradoxical (Wimal, 2007 ). Nagarajuna’s philosophy provides Buddhism with a relativist, non-solid dependent, and non-static understanding of reality (Kohl, 2007 ). Mulla Sadra’s philosophy explored the metaphysical relationship between the created universe and its singular creator. In his philosophy, existence takes precedence over essence, and any existing object reflects a part of the creator. Therefore, every devoted person is obliged to know themselves as the first step to knowing the creator, which is the ultimate reason for existence. This Eastern perception of religion is similar to that of Nagarajuna and Buddhism, as they both include the paradoxical elements that are not easily explained by the rationality of Western philosophy. For example, the god, as Mulla Sadra defines it, is beyond definition, description, and delamination, yet it is absolutely simple and unique (Burrell, 2013 ).

How researchers define and study culture varies extensively. For example, Hall ( 1989 ) defined culture as “a series of situational models for behavior and thought” (p. 13). Geertz ( 1973 ), building on the work of Kluckhohn ( 1949 ), defined culture in terms of 11 different aspects:

(1) the total way of life of a people; (2) the social legacy the individual acquires from his group; (3) a way of thinking, feeling, and believing; (4) an abstraction from behavior; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a storehouse of pooled learning; (7) a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems; (8) learned behavior; (9) a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior; (10) a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men; (11) a precipitate of history. (Geertz, 1973 , p. 5)

Research on culture is divided between an essentialist camp and a constructivist camp. The essentialist view regards culture as a concrete and fixed system of symbols and meanings (Holiday, 1999 ). An essentialist approach is most prevalent in linguistic studies, in which national culture is closely linked to national language. Regarding culture as a fluid concept, constructionist views of culture focus on how it is performed and negotiated by individuals (Piller, 2011 ). In this sense, “culture” is a verb rather than a noun. In principle, a non-essentialist approach rejects predefined national cultures and uses culture as a tool to interpret social behavior in certain contexts.

Different approaches to culture influence significantly how it is incorporated into communication studies. Cultural communication views communication as a resource for individuals to produce and regulate culture (Philipsen, 2002 ). Constructivists tend to perceive culture as a part of the communication process (Applegate & Sypher, 1988 ). Cross-cultural communication typically uses culture as a national boundary. Hofstede ( 1991 ) is probably the most popular scholar in this line of research. Culture is thus treated as a theoretical construct to explain communication variations across cultures. This is also evident in intercultural communication studies, which focus on misunderstandings between individuals from different cultures.

Religion, Community, and Culture

There is an interplay among religion, community, and culture. Community is essentially formed by a group of people who share common activities or beliefs based on their mutual affect, loyalty, and personal concerns. Participation in religious institutions is one of the most dominant community engagements worldwide. Religious institutions are widely known for creating a sense of community by offering various material and social supports for individual followers. In addition, the role that religious organizations play in communal conflicts is also crucial. As religion deals with the ultimate matters of life, the differences among different religious beliefs are virtually impossible to settle. Although a direct causal relationship between religion and violence is not well supported, religion is, nevertheless, commonly accepted as a potential escalating factor in conflicts. Currently, religious conflicts are on the rise, and they are typically more violent, long-lasting, and difficult to resolve. In such cases, local religious organizations, places facilitating collective actions in the community, are extremely vital, as they can either preach peace or stir up hatred and violence. The peace impact of local religious institutions has been largely witnessed in India and Indonesia where conflicts are solved at the local level before developing into communal violence (De Juan, Pierskalla, & Vüllers, 2015 ).

While religion affects cultures (Beckford & Demerath, 2007 ), it itself is also affected by culture, as religion is an essential layer of culture. For example, the growth of individualism in the latter half of the 20th century has been coincident with the decline in the authority of Judeo-Christian institutions and the emergence of “parachurches” and more personal forms of prayer (Hoover & Lundby, 1997 ). However, this decline in the authority of the religious institutions in modernized society has not reduced the important role of religion and spirituality as one of the main sources of calm when facing painful experiences such as death, suffering, and loss.

When cultural specifications, such as individualism and collectivism, have been attributed to religion, the proposed definitions and functions of religion overlap with definitions of culture. For example, researchers often combine religious identification (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, etc.) with cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 1991 ) like individualism/collectivism to understand and compare cultural differences. Such combinations for comparison and analytical purposes demonstrate how religion and religious identification in particular are often relegated to a micro-level variable, when in fact the true relationship between an individual’s religion and culture is inseparable.

Religion as Part of Culture in Communication Studies

Religion as a part of culture has been linked to numerous communication traits and behaviors. Specifically, religion has been linked with media use and preferences (e.g., Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 ), health/medical decisions and communication about health-related issues (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), interpersonal communication (e.g., Croucher, Faulkner, Oommen, & Long, 2012b ), organizational behaviors (e.g., Garner & Wargo, 2009 ), and intercultural communication traits and behaviors (e.g., Croucher, Braziunaite, & Oommen, 2012a ). In media and religion scholarship, researchers have shown how religion as a cultural variable has powerful effects on media use, preferences, and gratifications. The research linking media and religion is vast (Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 ). This body of research has shown how “religious worldviews are created and sustained in ongoing social processes in which information is shared” (Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996 , pp. 7–8). For example, religious Christians are more likely to read newspapers, while religious individuals are less likely to have a favorable opinion of the internet (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), and religious individuals (who typically attend religious services and are thus integrated into a religious community) are more likely to read media produced by the religious community (Davie, 2008 ).

Research into health/medical decisions and communication about health-related issues is also robust. Research shows how religion, specifically religiosity, promotes healthier living and better decision-making regarding health and wellbeing (Harris & Worley, 2012 ). For example, a religious (or spiritual) approach to cancer treatment can be more effective than a secular approach (Croucher & Harris, 2012 ), religious attendance promotes healthier living, and people with HIV/AIDS often turn to religion for comfort as well. These studies suggest the significance of religion in health communication and in our health.

Research specifically examining the links between religion and interpersonal communication is not as vast as the research into media, health, and religion. However, this slowly growing body of research has explored areas such as rituals, self-disclosure (Croucher et al., 2012b ), and family dynamics (Davie, 2008 ), to name a few.

The role of religion in organizations is well studied. Overall, researchers have shown how religious identification and religiosity influence an individual’s organizational behavior. For example, research has shown that an individual’s religious identification affects levels of organizational dissent (Croucher et al., 2012a ). Garner and Wargo ( 2009 ) further showed that organizational dissent functions differently in churches than in nonreligious organizations. Kennedy and Lawton ( 1998 ) explored the relationships between religious beliefs and perceptions about business/corporate ethics and found that individuals with stronger religious beliefs have stricter ethical beliefs.

Researchers are increasingly looking at the relationships between religion and intercultural communication. Researchers have explored how religion affects numerous communication traits and behaviors and have shown how religious communities perceive and enact religious beliefs. Antony ( 2010 ), for example, analyzed the bindi in India and how the interplay between religion and culture affects people’s acceptance of it. Karniel and Lavie-Dinur ( 2011 ) showed how religion and culture influence how Palestinian Arabs are represented on Israeli television. Collectively, the intercultural work examining religion demonstrates the increasing importance of the intersection between religion and culture in communication studies.

Collectively, communication studies discourse about religion has focused on how religion is an integral part of an individual’s culture. Croucher et al. ( 2016 ), in a content analysis of communication journal coverage of religion and spirituality from 2002 to 2012 , argued that the discourse largely focuses on religion as a cultural variable by identifying religious groups as variables for comparative analysis, exploring “religious” or “spiritual” as adjectives to describe entities (religious organizations), and analyzing the relationships between religious groups in different contexts. Croucher and Harris ( 2012 ) asserted that the discourse about religion, culture, and communication is still in its infancy, though it continues to grow at a steady pace.

Future Lines of Inquiry

Research into the links among religion, culture, and communication has shown the vast complexities of these terms. With this in mind, there are various directions for future research/exploration that researchers could take to expand and benefit our practical understanding of these concepts and how they relate to one another. Work should continue to define these terms with a particular emphasis on mediation, closely consider these terms in a global context, focus on how intergroup dynamics influence this relationship, and expand research into non-Christian religious cultures.

Additional definitional work still needs to be done to clarify exactly what is meant by “religion,” “culture,” and “communication.” Our understanding of these terms and relationships can be further enhanced by analyzing how forms of mass communication mediate each other. Martin-Barbero ( 1993 ) asserted that there should be a shift from media to mediations as multiple opposing forces meet in communication. He defined mediation as “the articulations between communication practices and social movements and the articulation of different tempos of development with the plurality of cultural matrices” (p. 187). Religions have relied on mediations through various media to communicate their messages (oral stories, print media, radio, television, internet, etc.). These media share religious messages, shape the messages and religious communities, and are constantly changing. What we find is that, as media sophistication develops, a culture’s understandings of mediated messages changes (Martin-Barbero, 1993 ). Thus, the very meanings of religion, culture, and communication are transitioning as societies morph into more digitally mediated societies. Research should continue to explore the effects of digital mediation on our conceptualizations of religion, culture, and communication.

Closely linked to mediation is the need to continue extending our focus on the influence of globalization on religion, culture, and communication. It is essential to study the relationships among culture, religion, and communication in the context of globalization. In addition to trading goods and services, people are increasingly sharing ideas, values, and beliefs in the modern world. Thus, globalization not only leads to technological and socioeconomic changes, but also shapes individuals’ ways of communicating and their perceptions and beliefs about religion and culture. While religion represents an old way of life, globalization challenges traditional meaning systems and is often perceived as a threat to religion. For instance, Marx and Weber both asserted that modernization was incompatible with tradition. But, in contrast, globalization could facilitate religious freedom by spreading the idea of freedom worldwide. Thus, future work needs to consider the influence of globalization to fully grasp the interrelationships among religion, culture, and communication in the world.

A review of the present definitions of religion in communication research reveals that communication scholars approach religion as a holistic, total, and unique institution or notion, studied from the viewpoint of different communication fields such as health, intercultural, interpersonal, organizational communication, and so on. However, this approach to communication undermines the function of a religion as a culture and also does not consider the possible differences between religious cultures. For example, religious cultures differ in their levels of individualism and collectivism. There are also differences in how religious cultures interact to compete for more followers and territory (Klock, Novoa, & Mogaddam, 2010 ). Thus, localization is one area of further research for religion communication studies. This line of study best fits in the domain of intergroup communication. Such an approach will provide researchers with the opportunity to think about the roles that interreligious communication can play in areas such as peacemaking processes (Klock et al., 2010 ).

Academic discourse about religion has focused largely on Christian denominations. In a content analysis of communication journal discourse on religion and spirituality, Croucher et al. ( 2016 ) found that the terms “Christian” or “Christianity” appeared in 9.56% of all articles, and combined with other Christian denominations (Catholicism, Evangelism, Baptist, Protestantism, and Mormonism, for example), appeared in 18.41% of all articles. Other religious cultures (denominations) made up a relatively small part of the overall academic discourse: Islam appeared in 6.8%, Judaism in 4.27%, and Hinduism in only 0.96%. Despite the presence of various faiths in the data, the dominance of Christianity and its various denominations is incontestable. Having religions unevenly represented in the academic discourse is problematic. This highly unbalanced representation presents a biased picture of religious practices. It also represents one faith as being the dominant faith and others as being minority religions in all contexts.

Ultimately, the present overview, with its focus on religion, culture, and communication points to the undeniable connections among these concepts. Religion and culture are essential elements of humanity, and it is through communication, that these elements of humanity are mediated. Whether exploring these terms in health, interpersonal, intercultural, intergroup, mass, or other communication contexts, it is evident that understanding the intersection(s) among religion, culture, and communication offers vast opportunities for researchers and practitioners.

Further Reading

The references to this article provide various examples of scholarship on religion, culture, and communication. The following list includes some critical pieces of literature that one should consider reading if interested in studying the relationships among religion, culture, and communication.

• Allport, G. W. (1950). Individual and his religion: A psychological interpretation . New York: Macmillan.
• Campbell, H. A. (2010). When religion meets new media . New York: Routledge.
• Cheong, P. H. , Fischer-Nielson, P. , Gelfgren, S. , & Ess, C. (Eds.). (2012). Digital religion, social media and culture: Perspectives, practices and futures . New York: Peter Lang.
• Cohen, A. B. , & Hill, P. C. (2007). Religion as culture: Religious individualism and collectivism among American Catholics, Jews, and Protestants . Journal of Personality , 75 , 709–742.
• Coomaraswamy, A. K. (2015). Hinduism and buddhism . New Delhi: Munshiram Monoharlal Publishers.
• Coomaraswamy, A. K. (2015). A new approach to the Vedas: Essays in translation and exegesis . Philadelphia: Coronet Books.
• Harris, T. M. , Parrott, R. , & Dorgan, K. A. (2004). Talking about human genetics within religious frameworks . Health Communication , 16 , 105–116.
• Hitchens, C. (2007). God is not great . New York: Hachette.
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The Sociology of Religion Aspects Essay

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Discussing the aspects of sociology of religion, it is necessary to refer to the religion as the social phenomenon when the religious groups can be determined and analyzed as any other social groups according to their specifics and goals. The sociology of religion as the sphere of knowledge is developed by sociologists in relation to their discussion of the issues of religion in its connection with the society.

There are a lot of problematic questions studied by sociologists in this field of knowledge which are associated with the nature of the people’s religious beliefs and realization of their religious practices in the social life. It is important to pay attention to the fact that religion as the concept within the sociology of religion is discussed and examined with the help of the scientific methods used in the field of sociology.

However, the subject matter of such an examination is the people’s religious beliefs and practices. Thus, following Johnstone’s discussion, it is possible to state that sociology of religion can be defined as the study which focuses on determining and analyzing the people’s attitudes to the sacred notions, their beliefs and practices, and their visions of the definite sacred beings and events.

There are questions about the relevance of discussing religion not as the individual choice or practice but as the social phenomenon studied by sociology of religion. Nevertheless, sociologists provide many arguments to support the idea that religion should be also examined in the context of sociology and that this subject is really important (Furseth).

To support the vision, Johnstone analyzes Simmel’s considerations in relation to the issue and states that “society precedes religion. Before religion can develop, there must first exist general patterns of social interaction – that is, a society – that can serve as a model” (Johnstone 30).

Thus, it is possible to conclude that any religion cannot exist without society because it emerges within it. From this perspective, the subject is important because it refers to both the society as studied by sociology and people’s religious visions. It is important to concentrate on studying sociology of religion because religion develops according to the definite patterns of interactions used within the definite social group (Furseth).

Furthermore, in his statement, Turner provides the answers to the questions about the nature of the sociology of religion and its importance. According to Turner, “religion refers to those processes and institutions that render the social world intelligible, and which bind individuals authoritatively into the social order.

Religion is therefore a matter of central importance to sociology” (Turner 284). Religion is important for the sociological studies because it is one of the major spheres of the people’s life, and it can influence the development of the social group in relation to determining the definite religious practices and rituals along with following the certain moral presumptions.

The religious visions of different groups are also different. That is why, the study of the religious practices can provide researchers with the important information about this or that group of people as a kind of the social community.

According to Turner, the examination of the religious phenomena among which it is possible to determine magic and myth can be effective for developing the sociological knowledge (Turner 284). In his turn, Johnstone states that religion is closely connected with studying the group dynamics as well the social impact that is why religion can be discussed as the subject matter of sociology (Johnstone 2).

Moreover, the study of the members of the group and their interactions is significant to explain their religious beliefs, practices, and rituals. To understand the particular features of the social development, it is necessary to pay attention to the ideas and beliefs which are interesting for the representatives of the social groups at the spiritual level of their perception of the world.

Sociologists are inclined to determine a lot of theories according to which the religious visions were developed and perceived by the public. It is necessary to accentuate the rational choice theory as the most appropriate one to explain the origins of religion from the sociological perspective.

According to Johnstone, the rational choice theory is a theory that tries “to deal seriously with not only the persistence of religion but also the observation that some form of religion appears to be ubiquitous among societies, even if some individuals deny the validity of the religions that surround them” (Johnstone 36).

In spite of the fact there are many opinions that the rational choice theory cannot be discussed as relevant to explain the origins of religion because of its rationality and appropriateness to refer to the economic processes rather than to the moral and spiritual choices, this theory is effective to discuss the people’s choice of religion as the conscious act to receive some benefits from this choice (Bruce).

The rational choice theory can be used to explain how people make the necessary choice in relation to their religious vision. People are inclined to act rationally in almost all the spheres of their life, basing on the definite personal or public’s experience (Corcoran). To make the choice, it is important to examine the situation and its implications with references to the positive and negative perspectives. Johnstone accentuates the fact that people make the similar rational choices also in relation to choosing the religion (Johnstone 36).

This choice is based on the experience and on the proper examination of the information about different religions, their rituals, practices, and moral presumptions. Johnstone stresses that “people have a set of mental images stored in their brains with which they make decisions as rationally and sensibly as they know how” (Johnstone 36). From this point, it is necessary to concentrate on making the right choice because of the variety of the possible religious visions which exist in the contemporary world.

Sociology of religion began to develop in the 19 th century, and a lot of its aspects require their further discussion by researchers because of the significant controversy in vision of the main theories used in sociology of religion to explain its main ideas or the nature of the religion as a phenomenon.

The characteristic feature of sociology of religion as the study discussing the people’s religious beliefs and attitudes to the sacred points is the dependence on the empirical information used to examine the main aspects of this sphere of knowledge. Thus, the religious concepts and the people’s beliefs and practices are examined with the help of the sociological methods which are rather scientific, and they allow speaking about religion as the social phenomenon which can be observed and studied with references to the definite social group.

Works Cited

Bruce, Steve. “Religion and Rational Choice: A Critique of Economic Explanations of Religious Behavior”. Sociology of Religion 54.2 (1993): 193-205. Print.

Corcoran, Katie. “Religious Human Capital Revisited: Testing the Effect of Religious Human Capital on Religious Participation”. Rationality and Society 24.3 (2012): 343-379. Print.

Furseth, Inger. An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives . USA: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2006. Print.

Johnstone, Ronald. Religion in Society: A Sociology of Religion . USA: Pearson, Prentice-Hall, 2007. Print.

Turner, Bryan. “The Sociology of Religion”. The SAGE Handbook of Sociology. Ed. Craig Calhoun. USA: SAGE, 2006. 284-300. Print.

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