Sociological approaches to religion are still strongly influenced by the ideas of the three ‘classical’ sociological theorists Marx, Durkheim and Weber.

Marx and Religion:

In spite of his influence on the subject, Karl Marx never studied religion in any detail. His ideas were mostly derived from the writings of several early nineteenth century theologists and philosophers. One of these was Ludwig Feuerbach who wrote The Essence of Christianity. According to Feuerbach, religion consists of ideas and values produced by human beings in the course of their cultural development, but mistakenly projected on to divine forces or gods. Feuerbach uses the term ‘alienation’ to refer to the establishment of gods or divine forces as distinct from human beings.

Marx accepts the view that religion represents human self-alienation. He declared in a famous phrase that religion has been the ‘opium of the people’. Religion defers happiness and rewards to the afterlife, teaching the resigned acceptance of existing conditions in this life. Attention is thus diverted from inequalities and injustices in this world by the promise of what is to come in the next. Religion has a strong ideological element, religious beliefs and values often provide justifications for inequalities of wealth and power. In Marx’s view religion in its traditional form will and should disappear.

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Marxism as World Religion

The anti-Christ, that human embodiment of the devil responsible for all evil in the world, is the bourgeoisie. The state of sin is capitalism, which heightens the alienation of man and leads him astray from a proper relationship with his omnipotent and all-knowing God, technology. The major prophets are Marx and Engels and their writings, especially Capital, constitute the Bible. The saints are later Marxists, especially Lenin, Stalin and Mao (though the various sects debate the authenticity of one or other of them). The Christ figure is the proletariat and the holy spirit is revolutionary consciousness. With the aid of technology’s progressive work, the Christ proletariat will eventually bring about the millennium of socialism, setting the stage for the final triumphant transition to the state of ultimate grace, communism.

Such is the dominant theology of the modern world, born in the 19th century and bearing all the marks of the Christian culture that prevailed when it was conceived.

Dukheimand Religion. In contrast to Marx, Emile Durkheim spent a good part of his intellectual effort in studying religion, concentrating particularly on religion in small scale traditional societies. His The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, first published in 1912, is perhaps the single most influential study in the sociology of religion. He based his work upon a study of totemism as practised by Australian aboriginal societies, and urged that totemism represents religion in its most elementary or simple form.

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A totem was originally an animal or plant considered to have a particular symbolic significance for a group. It is a sacred object, integrated with veneration and surrounded by various ritual activities.

Durkheim defines religion in terms of a distinction between the sacred and the profane. Sacred objects are symbols, he holds, and are treated ‘apart’ from the routine aspects of existence or the realm of the profane. Eating the to-temic animal or plant is usually forbidden, and as a sacred object the totem is believed to have divine properties which separate it completely from other animals that might be hunted or those crops that can be gathered and consumed. The profane is the realm of routine experience, which coincides greatly with what Pareto called ‘logico-experimental’ experience.

Why is the totem sacred? According to Durkheim it is so because, it is the symbol of the group itself, it stands for the values central to the group or community. The reverence which people feel for the totem actually derives from the respect they hold for central social values. In religion, the object of worship is the society itself.

Durkheim strongly emphasises the fact that religions are never just a matter of belief. All religions involve regular ceremonial and ritual activities, in which a group of believers meet together. Ceremony and ritual, in Durkheim’s view, are essential to binding the members groups together.

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Durkheim believes that scientific thinking increasingly replaces religious explanation, and ceremonial and ritual activities gradually come to occupy only a small part of an individual’s lives. Yet, he says, there is a sense in which religion, in an altered form, is likely to continue. Even modern societies depend for their cohesion upon rituals that reaffirm their values, new ceremonial activities thus maybe expected to emerge to replace the old.

Max Weber and the World Religions:

Durkheim based his arguments on a very small range of examples, even though he claimed that his ideas apply to religion in general. Max Weber, by contrast, embarked on a massive study of religions worldwide. Weber made detailed studies of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and ancient Judaism and, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, wrote extensively about the impact of Christianity on the history of the West. Weber concentrated on the connection between religion and social change, something to which Durkheim gave little attention. Unlike Marx, Weber argues that religion is not necessarily a conservative force; on the contrary, religiously inspired movements have often produced dramatic social-transformation. Protestantism, particularly Puritanism, was the source of the capitalist outlook found in the modern West. The early entrepreneurs were mostly Calvinists. Their drive to succeed, which helped initiate western economic development, was originally prompted by a desire to serve God. Material success was for them a sign of divine favour.

Analysing the eastern religions, Weber concludes that they provided insuperable barriers to the development of industrial capitalism of the kind that took place in the West. For example, Hinduism is what Weber calls’ an ‘other-worldly’ religion; that is. its highest values stress escape from the toils of the material world to a higher plane of spiritual existence.