In this lecture, I’ll talk about the early interest of sociologists in religion, some of the reasons why sociologists are interested in this topic,
what a sociological perspective on religion involves, and the issue of whether religion can be fully explained in sociological terms.
Sociologists have studied religion right from the beginning of the discipline in the nineteenth century.
It was a central concern of the first generation of sociological thinkers and those who influenced them.
Major figures in the history of the discipline, such as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel
all contributed in various ways to the sociology of religion.
The French philosopher, Auguste Comte, who coined the term ‘sociology,’
even saw sociology as a replacement for existing religions, as a new ‘religon’ of ‘positivism’.
For Comte, positivism was the view that only the methods of the natural sciences could provide knowledge of human nature and society.
He thought positivism was valuable for its potential to solve social problems and to reorganise society.
He even developed a blueprint for a new social order which had a ‘religion of humanity’ as its ethical basis.
Comte also recognised the importance of religion in creating social bonds between people.
However, his work has been largely overshadowed by the work of other scholars in the sociology of religion,
such as Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim.
Later work in the sociology of religion has often been developed in dialogue with the work of these early scholars.
Just to pick one example, one of the most famous works in the sociology of religion, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
was concerned with the question of the role played by religion in social change.
Weber wanted to understand why a system of rational capitalism developed in the West, from about the seventeenth century onwards,
when it didn’t develop in other countries, such as China and India, which were more economically and technologically developed than the West.
A key part of his explanation was that the Reformation of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century,
and the rise of Protestantism in Europe, changed people’s attitudes to work, business and money- making.
These, in turn, enabled people to take advantage of the economic opportunities capitalism provided to make money with a good conscience.
Sociologists are interested in studying religion for at least three main reasons.
The first, fairly obvious, reason, is that religion is simply very important in the lives of many people around the world.
About 85 per cent of the world’s population affirm some kind of religious belief
with Christians, Muslims and Hindus making up the three largest religious groups.
In Australia, according to the 2011 Census, 68 per cent of the population
affirmed a religion with Christians making up 61 per cent of the Australian population.
Religious ideas help people to interpret their experiences.
Religious values influence many people’s actions, and religious organisations and communities
provide many people with fellowship, aid and support.
Sociologists seeking to understand people’s culture, forms of social organisation
and practices can’t avoid, then, understanding the role religion plays in their lives.
They also need to understand the consequences of religious beliefs and practices for the wider society
which might contain non-religious elements or a diversity of faiths.
Second, religion seems to exist in all known human societies, but it takes different forms.
This was perhaps first noticed by the ancient Greek philosopher, Xenophanes,
who noted that Ethiopian gods ‘were black and had stub noses’ while Thracian gods had red hair and light blue eyes.
The difference in religious beliefs and practices between societies is something that is noticeable and it needs explanation.
Third, religions change over time in response to different social conditions.
Older religions may decline in membership or popularity and new religions emerge.
One theme in the sociology of religion in Australia, for example, is the rise of New Age religions and spiritual movements as well as neo-paganism.
Established religions may also change as a result of crisis, scandal or changing social conditions.
The child sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, for example,
has exposed the institutional failure of the church to protect children from harm, and to report perpetrators of sexual abuse to the police.
It has been immensely damaging to public trust and confidence in the church.
This can lead people to abandon their faith, leave the church altogether or to decide against becoming a priest or nun.
A sociological perspective on religion is concerned with understanding religion as a social phenomenon.
A sociological interpretation of religion will emphasise that quite apart from the supernatural or spiritual dimensions of religion,
its expression remains anchored in human ideas, symbols, feelings, practices and organisations,
as well as being an active influence on social interactions, structures and processes.
Social scientists are interested, then, both in the way that society affects religion, and the way that religion affects society.
Finally, an important question in the sociology of religion concerns its appropriate scope and limits.
In other words, can the sociology of religion fully explain religious phenomena
or are there aspects of religion that transcend sociological explanation?
One way to think about this is to ask whether the beliefs of a particular religion like Christianity are ‘true’ in the same sense that, say,
the figure provided for the population of Australia is ‘true’.
Many sociologists would be reluctant to face this question head on, and might say that it is not a legitimate issue for them to deal with.
After all religions usually make at least some claims about the world which are not empirically testable.
These might include claims about the existence of God, the existence of an after-life
or claims that God has divinely revealed aspects of His divine plan to chosen human beings.
For many sociologists, these claims would not have any objective answers.
Instead, they should simply be taken as true relative to the social group they emanated from.
The general tendency would be to bracket off the question of
whether religious beliefs are ‘true’, because of the difficulty of empirically testing them,
or because it's not seen as part of sociology’s responsibility in the first place.
Instead, one can accept the fact that religious people have beliefs about things, including supernatural phenomena,
and see the sociologist’s role as one of investigating the social causes of those beliefs.
However, this approach can also be problematic, because for religious believers themselves,
the most important thing about their beliefs is precisely their ‘truth’.
If sociologists completely ignore this and explain people’s beliefs purely in terms of the social factors which caused them,
then they're implicitly raising the possibility that those beliefs are false.
Needless to say, the adherents of any religion are unlikely to be very responsive to this sort of interpretation of their own religion.
What this issue indicates, is that it is important for sociologists to be aware of the problems that can arise from the bracketing of religious truth claims,
and to be reflexive about the extent to which religion can be explained entirely in sociological terms.
In this way, sociologists will be able to contribute a great deal to the understanding of religion with their theories and empirical research,
without necessarily assuming that religion is purely and simply a product of social factors and circumstances.