🧭 Overview
🧠 One-sentence thesis
Religion persists in modern society not simply as a set of supernatural beliefs, but as a complex social institution that provides meaning, solidarity, and identity through shared beliefs, rituals, experiences, and community forms that adapt to contemporary conditions.
📌 Key points (3–5)
- What sociologists study: Religion as a social phenomenon—how it shapes behavior, creates solidarity, and functions in society—rather than the truth of religious claims themselves.
- Four dimensions framework: All religions share (in varying degrees) belief systems, ritual practices, spiritual experiences, and distinctive social/community forms.
- Classical predictions vs. reality: Marx, Durkheim, and Weber predicted secularization would erode religion in modern societies, but contemporary evidence shows religious resurgence, pluralism, and new forms of spirituality instead.
- Common confusion—secularization vs. transformation: Declining church attendance doesn't mean religion disappears; it often transforms into individualized spirituality, fundamentalist movements, or new religious forms.
- Why it matters: Understanding religion sociologically explains social cohesion, moral frameworks, political conflicts, gender relations, and responses to modernity and globalization.
🔍 Defining Religion Sociologically
🔍 Three approaches to definition
Sociologists use three main strategies to define religion, each with trade-offs:
| Definition Type | Core Logic | Strength | Weakness |
|---|
| Substantial | Lists essential characteristics (e.g., "belief in spiritual beings") | Clear boundaries; easy to apply cross-culturally | Too narrow; excludes Buddhism, Confucianism, neo-paganism |
| Functional | Defines by what religion does (e.g., "struggles with ultimate problems of human life") | Captures diverse forms; explains persistence | Too broad; hard to distinguish religion from non-religion |
| Family resemblance | Cluster of shared attributes (belief, ritual, experience, community)—not all present in every case | Flexible; captures complexity without being vague | "Religion" becomes somewhat hazy as a category |
Example: The Céu do Montréal church uses ayahuasca (a controlled psychedelic substance) as a sacrament. Because it has formal church-like organization, it gained legal exemption as a religion in Canada. Other groups using ayahuasca in traditional healing ceremonies—without formal church structure—remain criminalized. The definition of religion has real legal and social consequences.
🧩 The four dimensions of religion
Rather than a single definition, sociologists examine religion through four dimensions present (in varying intensity) across all religious traditions:
🧩 Belief (cognitive dimension)
Religious beliefs: A generalized system of ideas and values that shape how members understand the world.
- Not just "what you think" but frameworks for interpreting existence, suffering, morality, and the cosmos.
- Includes formal creeds (e.g., Nicene Creed in Christianity) and informal stories, myths, songs.
- Theodicy is a key belief function: explaining why a good/powerful God allows suffering (e.g., karma, predestination, dualism).
Don't confuse: Belief systems with mere opinions—religious beliefs are taught, shared, and claim authority over ultimate questions that science or politics cannot answer.
🔁 Ritual (behavioral dimension)
Rituals: Repeated physical gestures or activities (prayers, mantras, ceremonies) that reinforce beliefs, elicit spiritual feelings, and connect worshippers with the sacred.
- Rituals divide the sacred (set apart, forbidden, touched by divine presence) from the profane (ordinary, everyday objects and activities).
- Rites of passage (baptisms, Bar Mitzvahs, Sun Dances) mark identity transformations and sacralize vulnerable transitions.
- Psychological functions: Rituals relieve anxiety (e.g., Trobriand Islanders' fishing rituals before dangerous ocean voyages) or enforce norms through taboos (prohibited acts that create fear/anxiety to maintain social order).
Example: In many Native American Sun Dance rituals, young men fast and dance for days, connected to a pole by rawhide through their chest skin. Friends and family pray for protection during this "liminal" state—neither the old self nor the new. The ritual confers prestige but also involves real danger of failure, reinforcing social cohesion and spiritual transformation.
✨ Experience (emotional/mystical dimension)
Spiritual experience: The feeling of immediate connection with a higher power—transformative, indescribable, and often overwhelming.
- Not about thinking a certain way but feeling a certain way: visions, revelations, altered states, expanded consciousness.
- Examples: Buddha's enlightenment, Saul's conversion on the road to Damascus (blinded for three days by a vision of Jesus), speaking in tongues in Evangelical congregations.
- Religions vary in who can access these experiences (spiritual elites vs. all members) and whether they are cultivated (Zen meditation) or spontaneous (divine inspiration).
Don't confuse: Spiritual experience with mere emotion—these are experiences interpreted as encounters with the divine that often lead to permanent identity transformation.
👥 Community (social/organizational dimension)
Religious community: Specific forms of social organization that unite believers into a "single moral community" (Durkheim).
Four social functions of religious community:
- Credibility through shared belief: Easier to believe when others around you believe.
- Moral authority: Provides ethics, proper behaviors, and normative basis for the community.
- Social control: Shapes behavior through both external enforcement and internal self-control.
- Social hub: Places of worship provide entertainment, socialization, support (though declining in Canada).
Example: Even as many Canadians move away from traditional religion, they still draw values from religious origins (e.g., "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you").
📊 Types of religious organization
Religious organizations vary by size, influence, and relationship to society:
| Type | Definition | Relationship to Society | Examples |
|---|
| Ecclesia | Large church with formal state ties | Integrated; most/all citizens are members | Anglican Church (England), Catholic Church (Spain), Salafi Islam (Saudi Arabia) |
| Denomination | Large church without formal state ties | Integrated but separate from state; coexists with other denominations | United Church, Catholic Church, Anglican Church in Canada |
| Sect | Small group that breaks away from larger church | Conflicts with some societal norms; seeks to restore "original" religion | Hutterites, Mennonites, Quakers, Doukhobors |
| Cult / New Religious Movement | Small group originating outside mainstream tradition | At odds with societal norms; often secretive; charismatic leadership | Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, Unification Church (Moonies), Aquarian Foundation |
Don't confuse: Sects with cults—sects break away from existing religions to restore original beliefs; cults originate outside mainstream traditions. Also, "cult" is a loaded term; many major religions (Christianity, Islam, Mormonism) began as cults.
Common confusion—brainwashing: Research (e.g., Eileen Barker's study of Moonies) finds no evidence that cults brainwash members or that members are mentally ill. Most cults are not violent, though a few (Aum Shinrikyo, Branch Davidians, Solar Temple, People's Temple) have committed violence or mass suicide.
🧠 Why Does Religion Exist? Sociological Theories
🧬 Evolutionary psychology perspective
Core claim: Religion enhances human survival by providing competitive advantages, so genes favoring religious disposition (self-transcendence) were naturally selected.
🧬 The self-transcendence trait
Psychologist Roger Cloninger identifies three measurable components:
- Self-forgetfulness: Absorption in tasks; losing oneself in concentration.
- Transpersonal identification: Feeling spiritual union with the cosmos; reducing boundaries between self and other.
- Mysticism: Accepting things that cannot be rationally explained.
Dean Hamer found the VMAT2 gene correlates with self-transcendence and produces monoamines (neurotransmitters causing euphoria). About 40-50% of self-transcendence is heritable, suggesting evolution favored genes displayed in religious populations.
🧬 Survival benefits of religion
- Disease prevention: Many religions emphasize cleanliness (compared to spiritual purity), which minimized communicable diseases when disease was a constant survival threat.
- Social cohesion and altruism: Religion creates frameworks for mutual support, solidarity during loss/grief—a crucial competitive strategy. Rather than "survival of the fittest" individualism, religious self-transcendence enables individuals to sacrifice for the group or abstract beliefs.
- Modern evidence: Religious attendance correlates with reduced maladaptive behaviors (smoking), maintained social relations, marriage stability, and self-perceived happiness.
Richard Dawkins' meme theory: The idea of God is a "meme" (cultural unit like a gene) that spreads because it provides tangible benefits (answers to transcendence questions, comfort) even though God is a human creation. Religious memes colonized societies; secular memes could replace them as modern institutions provide the same social functions without "irrational" restrictions.
Don't confuse: Evolutionary psychology's claim that religion aids survival with the claim that religious beliefs are true. The theory explains religion's persistence without addressing whether God exists.
⚙️ Karl Marx: Religion as opium
Core claim: Religion is a human creation that projects human qualities onto a supernatural reality, then submits to this projection, preventing people from perceiving their true conditions of existence.
"Man makes religion, religion does not make man."
⚙️ Religion as illusion and protest
- "Opium of the people": Religion is a narcotic fantasy that prevents people from seeing that their suffering is caused by historical, economic, and class relations—not by their relationship to God or the state of their souls.
- "Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering." Suffering is real, but the religious explanation is false.
- Compensation for inequality: Religion provides illusory rewards in the afterlife (heaven, reincarnation) that compensate for real suffering in "the here and now," preventing collective action to change material conditions.
⚙️ The task of critical sociology
- "The criticism of religion is the supposition [beginning] of all criticism." Until humans recognize their power to change circumstances in the present rather than the beyond, they will grasp at religious illusions to cope.
- Disillusionment as liberation: "Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chains not so that man may bear chains without any imagination or comfort, but so that he may throw away the chains and pluck living flowers."
Example: A worker suffering under exploitative labor conditions might accept poverty as God's will or a test of faith, rather than organizing with other workers to demand better wages and conditions.
Don't confuse: Marx's claim that religion is false consciousness with the claim that religion will simply disappear. Marx recognized that as long as conditions of suffering persist, religion will persist to provide comfort—even if that comfort prevents addressing the real causes of suffering.
🔗 Émile Durkheim: Religion as social solidarity
Core claim: Religion exists because it performs necessary social functions—reinforcing mental states, sustaining solidarity, establishing norms, concentrating collective energies—regardless of whether religious beliefs are "true."
Religion: "A unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."
🔗 Sacred vs. profane
- Sacred: Objects, states, practices set apart and considered forbidden because of their connection to divine presence (touched by divine presence).
- Profane: Everyday objects, states, practices with no spiritual significance.
- The act of setting sacred and profane apart creates their spiritual significance—not anything that inheres in them. This division creates codes of behavior and spiritual practices.
🔗 Totemism as the elementary form
Durkheim studied Australian Aboriginal totemism (worship of totemic animals/plants as sacred symbols of spirits/gods) as the most basic, ancient form of religion.
Social functions of totemism:
- Social solidarity: Totemic worship brings clans together, focuses attention on shared ritual, increases cohesion.
- Social rules and norms: The sacred/profane division establishes ritually reinforced structure of rules.
- Social cohesion: Shared belief in transcendent power enforces cohesion.
- Mutual protection: All members become sacred as participants in the religion.
Key insight: In worshipping the sacred, people worship society itself—finding themselves together as a group, reinforcing ties, reasserting solidarity. Religious belief and ritual project the real forces of society onto sacred objects and powers.
🔗 Collective consciousness and effervescence
- Collective consciousness: The shared set of values, thoughts, ideas that emerge when a society's combined knowledge manifests through a shared religious framework.
- Collective effervescence: The elevated, positive feeling of excitement individuals experience when they come together to express beliefs and perform rituals as a group. Interpreted as connection with divine presence, but in reality it is the material force of society itself.
Example: When individuals actively engage in communal activities (singing hymns, chanting, dancing), their belief system gains plausibility and the cycle intensifies. The feeling of being "filled with the spirit" is actually the feeling of being part of a unified group.
🔗 Three ongoing functions in modern society
Even as other institutions provide bases for solidarity, religion persists because it still serves three functions:
- Social cohesion: Creates shared consciousness through participation in rituals and belief systems.
- Social control: Formally enforces norms and expectations, ensuring predictability and control of human action.
- Meaning-making: Answers universal "meaning of life" questions that other institutions (science, politics) cannot answer.
Don't confuse: Durkheim's claim that religion serves social functions with the claim that religion is only about society. For believers, the experience of the sacred is real and transcendent—even if sociologists explain it in social terms.
🔄 Max Weber: Religion and rationalization
Core claim: Religion provides meaning in the conduct of life, particularly through theodicies, and plays a key role in social change—both enabling and resisting the rationalization of modern society.
🔄 Theodicy: explaining suffering
Theodicy: An explanation for why all-powerful Gods allow suffering, misfortune, and injustice to occur, even to "good people" who follow religious practices.
Three dominant forms:
- Dualism (Zoroastrianism): Powers of good and evil coexist and conflict; suffering occurs when evil occasionally wins.
- Predestination (Calvinism): God predetermines individuals' fates; suffering is part of a higher divine reason that is inscrutable to believers.
- Karma (Hinduism, Buddhism): Suffering is a product of acts committed in former lives; individuals must struggle in this life to rectify past evils.
Each theodicy provides "rationally satisfying answers" to why gods permit suffering without undermining the obligation to pursue the religion's values.
🔄 Disenchantment of the world
Disenchantment: The elimination of a superstitious or magical relationship to nature and life; the replacement of "mysterious incalculable forces" with technical calculation and rational organization.
- How it happens: Religious interdictions and restrictions against certain types of development (e.g., Chinese geomancy preventing railroad construction to avoid disturbing spirits) are overcome. The world becomes calculable: "One can, in principle, master all things by calculation."
- Consequence: "One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage. Technical means and calculations perform the service."
- Weber's ambivalence: Disenchantment is a source of Western society's rapid development and power, but also a source of irretrievable loss (loss of meaning, enchantment, mystery).
🔄 The Protestant Ethic and capitalism
Weber argued that a specific religious ethic—the Protestant work ethic—became a central material force of social change by enabling the rise of capitalism.
The Protestant Ethic:
- Duty to work hard in one's calling: Protestant sects (Calvinism, Pietism, Baptism) saw continuous hard labor as a spiritual end in itself—not just a means to maintain life.
- Ascetic technique: Hard labor was a defense against temptations, distractions, and religious doubts.
- Sign of God's favor: Under predestination, God's disposition toward the individual is predetermined and unknowable. But material success and steady wealth accumulation through personal effort were seen as signs of God's favor and one's state of grace.
Irony: The Protestant Ethic created conditions for capital accumulation and an industrious labor force, but eventually capitalism dispensed with the religious goals of the ethic. Modern capitalist rationality is "haunted by the ghosts of dead religious beliefs"—the duty to work hard persists, but the belief in God that produced it is replaced by secular belief systems.
The iron cage: Weber's metaphor for modern humanity in a technical, rationally defined, efficiently organized society. Having forgotten spiritual goals, humanity succumbs to pure efficiency: "only a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism which prescribes an essentially fixed route of march."
Don't confuse: Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis with the claim that religion always enables social change. Weber also showed how religion can prevent rationalization (e.g., religious interdictions against certain technologies or practices).
🕊️ Peter Berger: The sacred canopy
Core claim: Religion arises from the phenomenological experience of individuals as a solution to the inherent fragility of cultural meaning systems, providing an "ultimate shield" by grounding the social order in a supernatural reality.
🕊️ Phenomenological foundations
- Human condition: Unlike animals with in-born biological programming, humans lack instincts for survival. Humans must create cultural knowledges, techniques, technologies and pass them down.
- Culture as artifice: Culture mediates between humans and nature, providing stability and predictability. It creates the world as a stable, objective social reality outside the subject (objectification) and simultaneously creates social roles and expectations within the subject (interiorization).
- Nomos: The stable, regular, predictable, taken-for-granted, reassuring world—or normative order—created by culture.
🕊️ Religion as solution to fragility
- The problem: Culture's stability is inherently fragile. Events occur that are not explainable; they fall outside cultural categories and threaten to put the whole framework (nomos) into question. "Every nomos is an edifice erected in the face of the potent and alien forces of chaos."
- The solution: Religion postulates a supernatural agency or cosmological view unaffected by everyday inconstancy and uncertainty. In a religious cosmology, the cultural order is the natural order—the way the gods decided things must be.
Sacred canopy: Religion provides an "ultimate shield" that protects the meaningful world of the cultural order and fixes it in place by reference to a divinity outside the fragile human order.
🕊️ Ultimate legitimation and alienation
- Ultimate legitimation: Religion provides the social order with an unquestionable foundation—the way things are is the will of the gods.
- The price: For this legitimation to work and be plausible, humans must forget that they themselves created religion. They must forget that religion is a human accomplishment. This is a mode of forgetfulness and alienation.
🕊️ Secularization prediction (later revised)
In The Sacred Canopy (1967), Berger argued that secularization would erode religion's plausibility:
- Pluralism: Multiple cultural and religious systems compete; no single religion can offer ultimate stability.
- Privatization: Religion becomes a matter of private, individual choice rather than the center of collective/public life.
- Crisis of plausibility: Isolated, private beliefs cannot be the basis of a common shared cosmological order.
Later revision (1999): Berger abandoned this prediction, noting that modern society is as "furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more than ever." Examples: Islamic upsurge, worldwide evangelical Protestantism (40-50 million converts in Latin America alone).
Don't confuse: Berger's phenomenological approach (how religion arises in experience) with psychological approaches (individual traits) or functionalist approaches (social functions). Berger focuses on how the world comes to presence as religious before it becomes a structure or institution.
💰 Rodney Stark: Rational choice theory
Core claim: Religious belief persists because people use rational cost-benefit analysis to choose beliefs that maximize rewards and minimize costs—and the most coveted rewards (eternal life, end to suffering) can only be provided by supernatural sources.
💰 Rational choice principles
- Basic human motive: Individuals seek rewards and avoid costs.
- Rational decision-making: All social activities are products of rational decision-making in which individuals weigh benefits against costs.
- Bounded rationality: Choices are confined by personal knowledge, understanding, and beliefs. Even seemingly irrational decisions (religious belief in the supernatural) are rational from the individual's point of view.
Example: For a religious believer whose worldview assumes invisible supernatural powers affect the material world, it is completely rational to worship and make offerings to these powers to gain rewards and avoid misfortune.
💰 Compensators: IOUs from God
Compensators: Promises or IOUs of a reward at an unspecified future date, along with an explanation of how they can be acquired.
- Scarce rewards: The rewards people desire most intensely (end to suffering, eternal life) are often scarce or unavailable.
- Supernatural source: "Systems of thought that reject the supernatural lack all means to credibly promise such rewards as eternal life in any fashion." Only a supernatural power is capable of providing these rewards.
- Rational exchange: A person must believe a supernatural power exists and is capable of providing the reward in order to rationally believe it is attainable. Religious devotion and practice are exchanged for future spiritual "pay offs."
Example: An individual accepts the promise of eternal life after death in compensation for not having it here and now, but "pays" for it upfront through a lifetime of religious devotion, ritual observance, self-denial, and faith.
💰 Why religion persists
"So long as humans intensely seek certain rewards of great magnitude that remain unavailable through direct actions, they will be able to obtain credible compensators only from sources predicated on the supernatural."
As long as people desire solutions to essential human questions and these are not provided by other sources, there will be a rational cost-benefit analysis that favors choosing religious devotion for future spiritual rewards.
💰 Testable propositions
Stark develops 344 deductive, testable propositions. Example: "As societies become older, larger and more cosmopolitan they will worship fewer gods of greater scope."
Criticisms:
- Many propositions are difficult to test (e.g., how to quantify the "scope" of a god?).
- Inherent bias toward monotheistic and Protestant Christian measures of religion (e.g., valuing belief and doctrine over ritual aspects of Hinduism or Catholicism).
Don't confuse: Stark's claim that religious belief is a rational choice with the claim that religious beliefs are true. The theory explains why people choose to believe, not whether the beliefs correspond to reality.
👩 Feminist approaches: Gender and religion
Core claim: Religious texts, practices, and institutions are gendered—they portray and subordinate (or empower) women, femininity, and female sexuality in ways that reflect and reinforce broader gender inequalities in society.
👩 Key questions
- Representation: How are women portrayed in sacred texts? (e.g., God as male in Abrahamic religions)
- Power: Why are power relationships within religious institutions typically gendered? (e.g., ministers, imams, rabbis, Brahmin priests are traditionally male)
- Paradox: Why do women—who are proportionately more religious than men—support religions that subordinate them?
👩 Mary Daly's insight
"If God is male, then the male is God."
Individuals are socialized to see men and masculinity as having greater importance than women and femininity, perpetuating gender ideologies that legitimate women's subordination.
👩 Linda Woodhead's four strategies
Women differ in how they "negotiate" their gender status and religious practice. Woodhead identifies four strategic positions:
| Strategy | Orientation to Status Quo | Orientation to Narrative | Description |
|---|
| Consolidating | Confirmatory | Mainstream | Accept existing gendered distribution of power as a means of affirming traditional gender roles' security and predictability |
| Tactical | Confirmatory | Mainstream | Use religion for intimate interaction and support of other women |
| Questing | Challenging | Marginal | Seek different forms (New Age, meditation, Wicca) for inner spiritual quest rather than addressing power structures directly |
| Counter-cultural | Challenging | Marginal | Reject traditional religion; create communities that empower women (e.g., goddess feminist movement) |
Key insight: Women are not simply manipulated by patriarchal religion but exercise agency with different orientations and goals.
👩 Control over female sexuality
Fundamentalist movements focus on controlling female sexuality to "reclaim the family as a site of male power and dominance" in the face of modern challenges to male privilege:
- Islamic fundamentalism: Purdah (seclusion within home, veiling in public) to protect male lineage honor; women regarded as property.
- Hindu fundamentalism: 1986 Indian parliament bill disallowing women to file for divorce; violence against women to maintain social dominance.
- Christian fundamentalism: Decades-long effort to reverse Wade-vs.-Roe decision guaranteeing women's reproductive rights; partial success with 2003 "partial-birth abortion" law.
Don't confuse: Western feminist critiques of non-Western religions with the actual experiences of women in those traditions. Attempting to speak on behalf of non-Western women risks Orientalist bias and distortion. It is imperative to gather perspectives of women in the movements themselves.
🌍 Religion and Social Change
🌍 Secularization debate
Secularization: The decline of religiosity as a result of modernization; the process by which religion and the sacred gradually have less validity, influence, and significance in society and individuals' lives.
🌍 Three types of secularization
- Societal secularization: The shrinking relevance of church religion for integration and legitimation of everyday life (e.g., Quebec's "Quiet Revolution"—state took over health care, education, welfare from Catholic Church).
- Organizational secularization: Modernization of religion from within (e.g., ordaining female ministers, using commercial marketing to attract congregations).
- Individual secularization: Decline in involvement in churches/denominations or decline in belief and practice of individual members.
🌍 Evidence for secularization in Canada
- 1957: 82% of Canadians were official church members → 1990: 29%
- 2011: 7,850,605 Canadians had no religious affiliation (second largest group after Catholics at 12,810,705)
- 1971: Only 202,025 Canadians claimed no religious affiliation
🌍 Religious resurgence globally
Peter Berger (1999) reversed his earlier secularization thesis: Most of the world is as "furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever."
- Growth in Islam worldwide
- Growth and export of Pentecostalism from the United States
- Fink and Stark (2005): Americans actually became more religious as society modernized
🌍 Canada's exception
Canada (like most of Europe) is an exception to the trend of religious resurgence—less emergence of new and revived religious groups compared to the U.S. and rest of the world.
Reginald Bibby's three trends in Canada since 1960s:
- Secularization (1950s-1990): Steady decline in church attendance
- Revitalization (1990s): Small increases in attendance; fourfold increase of non-Christians; high spiritual belief among non-attenders
- Polarization (since 1990s): Public divided into highly religious vs. non-religious poles
Critique: Bibby's polarization trend ignores the ~50% in the middle (neither highly religious nor completely non-religious) and longitudinal measures showing continued decreases among highly religious and increases among non-religious.
🌍 Revised thesis
Peter Berger's revised view: "Modernity does not necessarily produce secularity. It necessarily produces pluralism, by which I mean the coexistence in the same society of different worldviews and value systems."
In modern societies there is neither steady secularization nor religious revitalization, but growing diversity of belief systems and practices.
Don't confuse: Secularization (decline of religion) with privatization (religion becomes a matter of private choice rather than public/collective life). Privatization can occur even as religiosity remains high.
🌈 Religious diversity
Religious diversity: A condition in which a multiplicity of religions and faiths co-exist in a given society.
🌈 Canada's changing landscape
- 1951: 96% Christian (50% Protestant, 46% Catholic)
- 21st century: 80 different religious groups surveyed (2011)
- Christian decline: From 88% (1970s) to 66% (2011)
- Other religions increase: From 4% to 11% (Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Judaism, Eastern Orthodox)
- Religious "nones" increase: From 4% (1980s) to 24% (2011)—atheists, agnostics, and those subscribing to no religion in particular
🌈 Three societal responses to diversity
- Exclusion: Majority does not accept varying beliefs; other religions should be denied entry (e.g., early Canadian policy toward Jews—university quotas, turning away refugees fleeing Nazi Germany).
- Assimilation: People of all faiths welcomed on condition they leave beliefs behind and adopt majority's faith (e.g., outlawing and suppressing Aboriginal spiritual practices like sun dance, spirit dance, sweat lodge ceremonies between 1880 and mid-20th century).
- Pluralism: Every religious practice is welcome regardless of how divergent its beliefs or norms (official Canadian response through Multicultural policy and Charter protections).
🌈 Challenges of pluralism
- Privatization strategy: Regard religious practice as purely private matter; ban all religious expressions in public spaces to avoid privileging one belief system (e.g., using "holiday season" instead of "Christmas"; Quebec Charter of Values proposal to ban conspicuous religious symbols for public personnel).
- Problem: People's religious identities are often part of their public persona and inform their political/social engagement. Artificially restricting religion to the private sphere limits pluralism in the guise of implementing it.
Evidence: As people become more exposed to religious diversity and interact with people of other religions more frequently, they become more accepting of beliefs and practices that diverge from their own.
Don't confuse: Pluralism (accepting all religious practices) with relativism (believing all religious truth claims are equally valid). Pluralism is a social policy; relativism is a philosophical position.
🆕 New religious movements and trends
Despite secularization predictions, the relationship of believers to their religions changes through time. Religion is not static.
🆕 Believing without belonging
Grace Davie (1994): People retain fairly high levels of belief in God, supernatural forces, prayer, or ritual practices even though they might never attend conventional churches or services.
New religious sensibility: People seek more holistic, flexible, "spiritual growth" oriented types of religious experience.
New Age spirituality: Various forms and practices of spiritual inner-exploration that draw on non-Western traditions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Indigenous spirituality) or esoteric Western traditions (witchcraft, Gnosticism).
🆕 Six characteristics of new religious sensibility (Dawson, 1998)
- Individualistic: Locus of the sacred is found within; goal is to express inner authenticity of personal identity, not conform to external codes.
- Experiential: Emphasis on attaining direct spiritual experiences through practices of transformation (meditation, yoga) rather than formal beliefs, doctrines, rituals.
- Pragmatic: Approach to religious authority is pragmatic evaluation of ability to facilitate spiritual transformation, not submission.
- Relativistic: Tolerance and acceptance toward other religious perspectives; syncretistically borrowing and blending appealing elements of different traditions.
- Holistic: Emphasis on interconnectedness of all things rather than dualisms (God/human, spirit/body, good/evil, human/nature).
- Organizationally open and flexible: Tendency to model interaction as clients seeking and receiving services to maximize individual choice, rather than traditional commitments to a religious organization.
Implication: Significant numbers of people retain interest in or "need" for what religions provide, but seek it through individualistic, non-dogmatic, non-institutional frameworks of spiritual practice. Religious practices are subject to "do-it-yourself" bricolage, assembled from a multiplicity of religious "symbolic stocks" accessible through globalized media and interaction.
Don't confuse: New Age spirituality with traditional religion. New Age emphasizes individual spiritual quest and inner transformation; traditional religion emphasizes communal worship, doctrine, and institutional authority.
⚡ Contemporary Fundamentalist Movements
⚡ Defining fundamentalism
Fundamentalism (Ruthven, 2005): "A religious way of being that manifests itself in a strategy by which beleaguered believers attempt to preserve their distinctive identity as a people or a group in the face of modernity and secularization."
⚡ Origins in Christian Protestantism
- The Fundamentals: A Testimony of Truth (early 20th century): Pamphlets sponsored by oil tycoons Milton and Lyman Stewart presenting core beliefs said to be fundamental to Christianity:
- Biblical inerrancy: The inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible
- Creationism: God's direct creation of the world
- Divine intervention: The existence of miracles
- Divinity of Christ: The virgin birth of Jesus as the son of God
- Redemption: Redemption of sins through Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection
- Pre-millenarian dispensationalism: The Second Coming of Jesus, end times, and rapture
Key insight: These pamphlets were both a response to modernity (defensively challenging modernist movement) and a product of modernity (using modern mass communication and commercial promotion techniques).
⚡ Family resemblance definition
Because strict definition limits fundamentalism to this specific 20th century Christian movement, Ruthven proposes a family resemblance definition with characteristics shared by most (but not all) religious fundamentalisms:
- Return to roots of scripture: Common style of reading holy texts
- Texts as blueprints for action: Using religious texts for practical action rather than simply spiritual/moral inspiration
- Search for secure foundations: Seeking personal identity and cultural authenticity in a modern pluralistic world
- Rejection of pluralism: Rejecting cultural pluralism and diversity in favor of religious monoculture
- Projection of ignorance and Golden Age: Myth of a period of ignorance prior to revelation and a Golden Age when religious tradition held sway
- Theocratic ideal: Political order ruled by God
- Messianism: Belief in end times when the divine will return to Earth
- Patriarchal principles: Reaffirmation of traditional, patriarchal principles including subordination of women and strict, separate gender roles
Common sociological feature: Fundamentalisms are modern reinventions of traditions in response to the complexity of social change brought about by globalization and diversification. "Fundamentalism is one response to the crisis of faith brought on by awareness of differences."
Don't confuse: Fundamentalism with traditionalism. Fundamentalism is a modern movement that selectively reconstructs tradition in response to modernity; traditionalism is simply the continuation of pre-modern practices.
⚡ Fundamentalism and women
Paradox: If fundamentalist movements primarily serve and protect men's interests, why do women support and practice these religions in larger numbers than men?
⚡ Three perspectives
- Feminist view: Women's subordinate role is a manifestation of patriarchy; subjects them to oppressive norms and prevents social mobility.
- Clarity view: Traditional gender roles provide welcome clarity about men's and women's roles and responsibilities in a period when gender roles appear increasingly diverse and uncertain.
- Empowerment view (Mahmood, 2005): Leading chaste, pious, disciplined lives of ritual practice apart from men and secular life is a form of spiritual exercise that empowers women and gives them strength. Strict observance is a choice women make to bring themselves closer to God.
⚡ Control over female sexuality
Fundamentalist movements focus on controlling female sexuality to "reclaim the family as a site of male power and dominance":
- Islamic fundamentalism: Purdah (seclusion, veiling) to protect male lineage honor; women regarded as property; rape can only be proven with perpetrator's confession or four witnesses (Saudi Arabia).
- Hindu fundamentalism: 1986 Indian parliament bill disallowing women to file for divorce; violence against women to maintain dominance.
- Christian fundamentalism: Efforts to reverse Wade-vs.-Roe decision; partial success with 2003 "partial-birth abortion" law.
Riesebrodt (1993): Fundamentalism is a "patriarchal protest movement"—efforts to shape gender relations through enacting new social and political limitations on women.
Don't confuse: Western feminist critiques with the actual experiences of women in non-Western traditions. Women's roles in Muslim or Hindu traditions are so different from Western roles that characterizing them as inferior or subservient in Western terms risks Orientalist distortion. Gather perspectives of women in the movements themselves.
⚡ Science and faith
⚡ Disenchantment and the shift to science
Weber (1919/1958): The transition to a secular, rationalized, scientific worldview is the disenchantment of the world. Explanations for events are no longer based on mysterious or supernatural powers; everything, in principle, can be reduced to calculation.
The division between fact and value (Berman, 1981): The Scientific Revolution created a division between the worlds of fact (what things are, how things work) and the worlds of value (why things are, the purpose of things). Humans went from being part of a rich and meaningful natural order to being alienated observers of a mechanistic and empty object-world.
Weber's prediction: Science is "meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: 'What shall we do and how shall we live?'" The outcome of disenchantment would be "ethical anarchy"—science can answer practical questions of how to do things effectively, but cannot answer ultimate human questions of value, purpose, and goals.
⚡ Galileo and the Catholic Church
When Galileo confirmed Copernicus's heliocentric model (sun is the immobile center of the solar system) based on telescope evidence in 1610, he was tried for heresy because his model contradicted Holy Scripture. He was forced to denounce his support and lived out his life under house arrest—although his ideas were later proven scientifically correct.
Source of conflict: Not that the Church completely rejected everything scientific, but that Galileo's claims were in direct contradiction of what was stated in Holy Scripture. Conflicts arise when competing claims are made or when the morality of science is questioned by religion (e.g., embryonic stem cell research rejected for moral reasons).
⚡ Creationism vs. Darwinian evolutionary theory
Darwinian evolutionary theory: Complex nature of life on earth can be explained by genetic mutations and small changes that, over time, result in "natural selection." Humans are biological animals who evolved from primitive primate ancestors to contemporary Homo sapiens.
Creationism: The world was created by God ex nihilo (from nothing) as is, not through evolution. To dispute this goes against everything the Bible stands for. The turn to biblical inerrancy (everything in the Bible is completely true in a factual sense) made evolution problematic because Genesis states God created the universe in 6 days and the Great Flood destroyed all life except the Ark's occupants.
Creation science: Attempts to discredit evolution and support creation by asserting evolution is "riddled with guesses, errors, and inconsistencies":
- Radiometric and other dating techniques are mere guesses
- Basic laws of physics (thermodynamics) contradict evolution
- Mathematical probability demonstrates evolution's extreme unlikeliness
- Evolutionists frequently disagree, proving they offer opinion, not science
Contemporary controversy: In the 1980s, states like Arkansas and Louisiana passed legislation mandating biblical creation be taught in science classes alongside evolution. Christian fundamentalists continue to lobby to reintroduce creationism into education or set up parallel private school systems/home schooling networks.
Opponents' argument: Common educational basis is essential to democratic society because it lays foundation for evidence-based decision making and rational debate. From a scientific point of view, creationism has no scientific validity.
Don't confuse: Conflicts between science and religion with complete rejection of science by religion (or vice versa). Most religious people seek out scientific knowledge; conflicts arise only when competing claims are made (e.g., creation vs. evolution) or when morality of science is questioned (e.g., stem cell research).