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Sociology of religion.

The task of building a scientific understanding of religion is a central part of the sociological enterprise. Indeed, in one sense the origins of the sociology can be attributed to the efforts of nineteenth-century Europeans to come to grips with the crisis of faith that shook Western society during the revolutionary upheavals of its industrial transformation. Most of the great European intellectuals of this era sought to formulate some sort of rational scientific paradigm to replace the religious foundations of Western culture, and such founding sociologists as Comte, Marx, and Durkheim were no exceptions.

Introduction

What is religion, durkheim and the functionalists, weber and the historical-comparative approach, the sacred canopy, the religious marketplace, the religious experience, religion and identity, conversion and commitment, religious movements, religion and social structure, religion in an age of globalization, the future of the sociology of religion.

Since the early sociologists were trying to break free from the hegemonic religious paradigm that had long dominated European thought, it is not surprising that they were fascinated with the phenomena of religion itself. As they became increasingly aware of the fecund diversity of religious life around the world, a number of basic questions arose that still lie at the heart of the quest for a sociological understanding of religion. Why are religious beliefs and practices so universal? Why do they take such diverse forms? How do social forces help shape those beliefs and practices? What role does religion, in turn, play in social, economic , and political life?

The first step in understanding religion is obviously to decide what it is, but as is so often the case, defining this basic concept is a far more difficult business than it appears at first glance. A good place to start is with Émile Durkheim. According to this classic sociologist, religion is 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” (Dukheim [1915] 1965:62). Although this definition clearly requires some surgery to remove its Eurocentrism, it shows remarkable insight into the fundamental sociological characteristics of religion. The most obvious change that needs to be made is to remove the word “church,” because that normally refers only to Christian religions. There are, however, some more fundamental problems especially with Durkheim’s inclusion of the concept of the sacred in his definition. While “sacred things” play a major role in most religions, they are certainly not the sine qua non of religious life. In the Buddhist view, for example, there is nothing “set apart and forbidden” about meditation, ethical behavior, the cultivation of wisdom, or the other central tenets of their beliefs and practices. On the other hand, however, it doesn’t seem justified to call any system of beliefs and practices a religion. The Christian theologian Paul Tillich’s (1967) contention that religion involves issues of “ultimate concern” is far more broadly applicable (see Kurtz 1995:8–9).

For sociological purposes, at least, we can then say that religion involves three key elements: beliefs, practices, and a social group. Although religious beliefs are not always as systematically organized as Durkheim seemed to believe, those beliefs do deal in some way or other with the questions of ultimate concern the believers face. The realm of religious practice is too vast to enumerate here, because it involves everything from rituals and ceremonies to dietary and behavioral standards and various spiritual disciplines, but it is clearly a central part of religious life. Finally, religion is a social phenomenon that involves groups of people. The solitary philosopher does not become a religious figure until one shares his or her ideas with a group of people.

Sociological Theories of Religion

Sociology starts with the rather eccentric figure of August Comte (1798–1857). Like many young intellectuals of his time, Comte believed that religion was an archaic holdover from the past. Comte held that in the course of history, theological thinking gave way to metaphysical thinking, which in turn gave way to scientific thinking or what he called “positive philosophy.” Science, then, was the replacement for religion. When applied to the systematic study of society, it could be used to construct a rational social order guided by the sociologists that would eliminate the ancient problems that plagued humanity. Ironically, this determined opponent of religion suffered a mental breakdown toward the end of his life and refused to read anything but a medieval devotional text known as The Imitation of Christ.

Marx (1818–1883) was of course far more influential than Comte, and he was the first of the sociological giants to address the issue of religion. Although he shared the idea with many nineteenth-century thinkers that religious faith was an unscientific holdover from earlier times, his economic determinism and revolutionary commitment gave his views a particular slant. Religion in his perspective was merely part of the ideological superstructure erected on and shaped by the underlying economic realities and had no kind of independence of its own. Nonetheless, religion does play an important and clearly negative social role. For Marx (1844), religion was a profound form of social alienation because

the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. . . . The more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself. It’s just the same as in religion. The more of himself man attributes to God the less he has left in himself. (P. 122)

Religion in capitalist society provides a comforting illusion that obscures the realities of class conflict and class interest and, thus, is a profound example of false consciousness. By consoling the frustrated and oppressed, it helps prevent collective action to change the real source of their problems. Thus, religion was, in Marx’s famous phrase, “the opiate of the masses.”

Others in the Marxist tradition have taken a more nuanced position on religion, including his benefactor Fredrich Engels. Engels recognized that religion in some circumstances actually supported the struggle of the oppressed, as he felt was the case with early Christianity (Marx and Engels 1957). Most contemporary Marxists follow Engels’s position holding a general skepticism and suspicion of religious institutions, but recognizing that some religious developments, such as liberation theology in Latin American Catholicism , can be a progressive force.

While religion was of only a passing concern to Marx, it was central to the foundational French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). In his major work on the sociology of religion, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim ([1915] 1965) studied the religious life of the Australian aborigines on the questionable assumption that it was more primitive and simple than in the European nations and thus reflected religion in its most basic forms. Durkheim was particularly fascinated with the totemistic aspects of aboriginal religion. He concluded that the totems, objects or animals held in special awe by a particular clan, actually had little to do with the supernatural but were in fact symbols of the social group. He went on to argue that if the totem “is at once the symbol of the god and of the society, is that not because the god and the society are only one?” (Durkheim [1915] 1965:236). Thus, even in European society, Durkheim saw the worship of God to be nothing more than the worship of society. Society is the transcendent reality that religion symbolizes, and it not only has its own needs but even takes on a kind of anthropomorphic form in some of his writings. Society personifies itself in the form of totems or Gods to be revered and worshiped because it needs to reaffirm its legitimacy and worth to its members. And just as the Gods symbolize society, the soul is the symbol of the social element within the individual that lives on long after the people themselves.

Although the almost metaphysical elements in Durkheim’s thought were not particularly influential, his idea that religion functioned to meet basic social needs became a sociological truism. Over the years, functionalist theory grew more complex and sophisticated and is now one of the most widely used theoretical paradigms in the sociology of religion. Of particular importance was the contribution of Robert Merton (1957), who introduced the concept of the dysfunction. In his view, social institutions not only perform functions for society, but they also have dysfunctional consequences. Over the years, functionalists have developed a long list of the functions and dysfunctions of religion. Following O’Dea (1966:4–18), we can divide the human needs that religion meets into two categories—expressive and adaptive. Religion helps meet our expressive emotional needs by providing a supernatural context in which the hard realities of human life— powerlessness, uncertainty, injustice, and the inevitability of death—can be given meaning and purpose. Religion provides support and consolation, and its cult and ceremonies can encourage a sense of security and identity with something larger than the self. According to the functionalists, religion’s most important adaptive function is the way it sacralizes and reinforces the norms and values on which social order depends. Common rituals and common beliefs also help bind people together into a common community. In a different context, however, each function can become a dysfunction. By comforting and consoling people, religion may also discourage action for the needed social change. By making norms and values sacred, it not only strengthens them, but it may make them much harder to change when the times require it.

Like Durkheim, Max Weber (1864–1920) devoted a great deal of his enormous intellectual energy to the study of religion. Ever the rationalist, however, he was disinclined toward Durkheim’s kind of philosophical speculation or Marx’s political partisanship. If there is one underlying objective of Weber’s richly detailed historical and comparative examination of religion, it was to understand the relationship between religion and economic life. Where Marx saw a simple economic determinism, Weber saw a complex reciprocal interaction. In his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber (1930) argued the revolutionary thesis that Puritanism was one key factor in the Industrial Revolution. It was not, as Weber’s argument is sometimes misconstrued, just that Puritanism encouraged hard work (a strong work ethnic is certainly found in many non-European cultures). But also that Puritanism saw economic success as a sign of divine favor while demanding extreme rational self-control and a frugal lifestyle—conditions ideally suited to encourage the capital accumulation needed for the process of industrialization. Weber subsequently expanded his studies by examining the obstacles to economic rationalization posed by the religious and cultural traditions in other parts of the world, especially in China (1951) and India (1958).

Weber (1952, 1963) saw the influence of socioeconomic forces on religion in terms of what he called elective affinities. Weber felt that people in social groups with different lifestyles had an affinity for different kinds of religious beliefs. Those affinities may be based on the characteristics of entire societies, such as the tendency for foragers to believe in nature spirits or the appeal to monotheism for pastoralists. Or they may affect smaller-status groups, such as merchants who are attracted to rational calculating religions, or privileged elites with their proclivity for elaborate ritual and ceremony. However, Weber saw these relationships only as affinities, not as fixed and deterministic. Historical forces such as a foreign conquest can induce persons from a particular status group to adopt a religion for which they do not have a natural affinity.

One of the most popular of the more recent sociological theories of religion is built around Peter Berger’s (1969) metaphor of the “sacred canopy.” Drawing on the phenomenological and interactionist traditions, Berger holds human society to be an enterprise of world-building. It is, in other words, an effort to create a meaningful reality in which to live. This is a dialectical process that has three underlying movements. The first is “externalization,” which “is the ongoing outpouring of human beings into the world, both in the physical and the mental activities of man” (Berger 1969:4). Next comes the process of “objectivation,” which gives the products of this activity a reality and power that is independent of those who created it. Finally, individuals take this socially constructed reality into their own inner life in the process of “internalization.” Through this process society creates a nomos—a meaningful order that is imposed on the universe. The most important aspect of this socially established nomos is that it is “a shield against terror” protecting us from the “danger of meaninglessness” (Berger 1969:22).

Religion plays a key role in this process because it is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established. It is, in turn, the awesome mysterious power of the sacred that confronts the specter of chaos and the inevitability of death. According to Berger (1969), the “power of religions depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk inevitably, toward it” (p. 51).

Despite the powerful way Berger’s theory links the existential and the social dimension of religion, the idea that religion provides a single scared canopy over today’s pluralistic societies has it limitations. A number of current scholars are now using a different theoretical paradigm— rational choice theory—to construct a model that explicitly recognizes the reality of religious diversity (Stark and Bainbridge 1985; Finke and Stark 1992; Warner 1993; Iannaccone 1994). The basic idea is that the kind of consumer decision making analyzed by economic theory also applies to religious behavior. This approach looks at the public as consumers of religious who are out to satisfy their needs by obtaining the best “product.” Religious organizations are entrepreneurial establishments competing in a religious marketplace ruled by the laws of supply and demand.

Although religious “merchandise” is considered in just the same way as any other product, there is one important difference. The costs and benefits the consumers must weigh are often supernatural (such as the promise of an afterlife) and therefore cannot be empirically proven. This leaves the religious organization free to make almost any kind of claims it wishes, but it also creates the problem that the consumers are often uncertain about whether or not they will actually receive the benefits it promises. Thus, demanding groups that require high commitment often have the most attractive product, because they create greater feelings of certainty among consumers that they will actually receive the promised rewards. Another important point stressed by these theorists is that greater religious pluralism will encourage greater religiosity among the public, because it stimulates competition among different religious groups to improve their “product” in order to protect and expand their market share. Societies with a state religion, on the other hand, will tend to have less religious vitality because the established religion will be less responsive to the needs of the public (Finke and Stark 1992).

The metaphor of the marketplace is a useful tool for sociological analysis, but it can also be seriously misleading because there are also some fundamental ways in which religion is unlike an economic commodity. One of the most obvious is that the majority of people stay in the religion into which they were born and do not change even if another religion in the “marketplace” offers more benefits and less costs. Moreover, “religious products” are not really subject to market exchange, because they have no direct monetary value. A church cannot put its product on sale if the customers don’t come. Finally, as in other aspects of human life, rational choice theory fails to recognize the deep emotional forces involved in religious life that are often quite impervious to the beckonings of reason.

The Social Psychology of Religion

This examination of the theory of religion would not be complete without mentioning one other great nineteenth-century thinker, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). His thinking contains many similarities to the more sociological-oriented theorists who have grappled with the problem of religion. Like Berger, for example, Freud saw religion as an attempt to deal with the fundamental problem of human existence. For Berger, that problem was the need for meaning, whereas for Freud, it was our inability to obtain the things we want and need. Religion in Freud’s (1957) words “is born of the need to make tolerable the helplessness of man” (p. 54). Religion helps create a world in which we feel less threatened and more at home. But like so many other social scientists of this time, Freud felt that while religion may be comforting, it is a comforting illusion. Thus, religion is a kind of infantile wish fulfillment. In the face of our helplessness and defenselessness, we crave the solace and support we received from our parents when we were children, so we project a father figure into the heavens and call it God. While more recent psychological thinkers do not necessarily share Freud’s metaphysical position, the idea that the patriarchal God of Western monotheism is a father figure and that the female Goddesses in other traditions are symbolic representations of the mother is widespread.

Because these sociological and psychological theorists focus on the roles religion plays and the needs it meets, they often lose sight of the experiential foundations of religious life. But no matter how skeptical one may be about their meaning, there is no doubt that many people have religious or mystical experiences. Indeed, most of the world’s major religions trace their origins to such events. The experience Moses had when Yahweh gave him the Ten Commandments, Mohammad’s experience as the Angel Gabriel revealed Allah’s words in the Koran, and Siddhartha Gautama’s great enlightenment experience under the Bodhi tree are just a few examples of religious experiences that have literally changed the course of human history. But how, then, is the social scientist to understand such events? Freud, Durkheim, and Marx along with many of the other founders of the sociology of religion would dismiss such experiences as hallucinations, but that hardly seems to do such momentous events justice. Believers in the various faiths founded on such visions would say their accounts of what happened are literally true, but that of course leaves the problem that the “truths” revealed in one religious tradition often contradict the “truths” of another. The inescapable fact is that fact experiences that lie completely beyond the bounds of the ordinary must be still expressed in terms of the cultural expectations, assumptions, and language of the individuals who try to report them.

In his classic study The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto (1923) argues that religious experiences involve what he calls mysterium tremendum et fascinosum. That is, the experience of the holy is one of a terrifying power, fascinating yet absolutely unapproachable and wholly other. Ironically, most mystics in the Asian tradition and many Westerners as well describe such peak experiences in just the opposite way—a complete dissolution of the bounds of the normal self that produces an absolute unity with the entire universe (see Anonymous 1978; Kapleau 1989).

Of course, all religious experiences are not so overwhelming and profound. Like other experiences, they come in all ranges of intensities and in countless different forms. The feeling of holiness and tranquility one feels when entering a beautiful church or the sense of wonder and joy when seeing a mountain sunset are milder forms of religious experience, as are the states produced by effective rituals that invoke a sense of reverence and awe in the participant.

There is often a considerable difference in the importance placed on religious experience even among religious groups with relatively similar backgrounds. Among Protestant Christians, for example, the Pentacostalists give great importance to the direct emotional experience of the spirit of God, whereas the Puritans reject such emotionalism in favor of Bible studies and ethical discipline.

In societies with a single dominant faith, religious affiliation often becomes a taken-for-granted assumption and does not necessarily play a significant role in personal identity. The more religiously divided a society is, however, the more central the religion is likely to become in defining who one is. In pluralistic countries such as the United States, religious affiliation commonly provides a sense of belonging amid the anonymous institutions of mass society.

Religious identity is often mixed with ethnic identity— to be an Arab in many parts of the world is to be a Muslim, just as Serbs are identified with Orthodoxy , Croatians with Catholicism, and Thais with Buddhism . This combination can be an explosive one in areas with high levels of ethnic conflict. Religious differences aggravate ethnic conflict by providing emotionally charged symbols, systems of meaning that compete for cultural dominance, and a certain tendency to see one’s own group as having a monopoly on the truth.

Religion can play another role in personal identity by reinforcing a definition of oneself as a particular kind of person. Those with high levels of religious involvement and commitment often define themselves as more moral, more spiritual, or more wise than other people. Many religious groups hold that their faith is the one true faith, and even that fellow believers are an elite group that will receive heavenly rewards in the afterlife, whereas all others will suffer horrible torments. So the members of such groups tend to see themselves as part of a special elite of the “saved.” Although such beliefs can obviously reinforce self-esteem, they can also foster fear and anxiety if one fails to live up to the expectations of the religious group or begins to doubt the truth of its doctrines. They can also encourage a sense of hostility or even violence toward nonbelievers.

Religion may also have a critical role in sustaining identity change. In most societies, religiously rooted rites of passage publicly declare and reinforce changes in social status and the new identity that goes with them, for example, coming of age or marriage ceremonies. Religious groups may play a critical role in helping individuals make other radical changes in their lives as well. Religious organizations have often succeeded in helping drug abusers and compulsive gamblers where other programs have failed, because they offer an attractive new identity and a strong community to support it. A religious conversion or recommitment often follows various kinds of personal crises for much the same reasons.

Although there is a considerable amount of sociological research about “religious conversion,” the concept is in some ways an unfortunate one for it seems to imply an all-or-nothing dichotomy. One is a member of one religion and then “converts” to a different one. In many cases, however, a “conversion” is more like a renewal or return to existing religious beliefs. Moreover, despite the exclusivity of many Western religions, there is no particular reason to assume that people must leave their old religion before joining a new one. A substantial percentage of the population of Japan would, for example, identify themselves as both Shintoists and Buddhists.

Most of the sociological research on conversion and commitment focuses on one of two types of religions— fundamentalist Christians and members of what are called the new religious movements . The most striking finding of the research on conservative Christian faiths is that most of their “converts” actually came from the same kind of conservative Christian background. Richardson and Stewart’s (1978) study of the Jesus Movement in the 1960s and 1970s found that most of their converts were “hippies” who were returning to their original fundamentalist roots. Bibby and Brinkerhoff’s (1974) study of fundamentalist churches in a large metropolitan area in the United States also found that most converts were already religious insiders from evangelical backgrounds. Unlike the popular image of religious conversion, Zetterberg (1952) found that only 16 percent of converts to the Christian Church he studied experienced a sudden change in lifestyle. For most of his subjects, religious “conversion” was more like a “sudden role identification” in which they identified themselves more clearly in religious terms.

The media attention in the 1960s and 1970s to religious cults that appeared to be brainwashing young converts stimulated considerable sociological attention on this subject. To avoid the stigma attached to the term cult, however, sociologists now more often use the term new religious movements (NRMs) (see Roberts 2004:187–197). But somewhat confusingly, the term does not apply to any new religion only but to groups outside the religious mainstream that have an intense encapsulating community and often a strong charismatic leader. The most well-known study of conversion to NRMs is John Lofland’s work on the Unification Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Lofland (1966) found that conversion to the Unification Church followed a series of stages. First, the potential convert was “picked up” by members of the group, then he or she was showered with attention and “hooked.” In the next stage, they are “encapsulated”—isolated from contacts with those outside the group—and the final result is “commitment” to the group. Lofland’s model has been criticized for giving potential converts too passive a role in the process, something he himself later recognized (Snow and Phillips 1980; Lofland and Skonovd 1981).

Like other researchers, Lofland (1966) concluded that people with high levels of emotional tension and dislocations are more prone to religious conversions. Conversion or a renewed religious commitment is, then, one possible response to intractable personal problems. Thomas O’Dea (1966) argued that religious conversion was also part of a “quest for community.” Migrants, marginalized people seen as deviants by mainstream society, and others suffering from anomie and social disorganization are therefore prime candidates for a transforming religious commitment.

Sociologists, however, often neglect the obvious point that in addition to the desire to deal with pressing personal difficulties and to be part of a supportive community, people also make religious conversions for religious reasons. That is, they seek some kind of spiritual growth or religious experience. The members of the Western Buddhist groups that Coleman (2001) surveyed ranked the desire for spiritual growth as a more important reason for getting involved in Buddhism than a desire to deal with personal problems or to be with other members of those groups. More tellingly, the average respondent reported that they began to meditate about four years before they joined a Buddhist group—obviously, not something we would expect of someone whose primary goal was to find a supportive social community.

There is probably no other sphere of human life in which more effort is made to maintain unchanging traditions than in religion. Yet religious life everywhere is in a constant state of dynamic change. Even in the most stable eras, religious beliefs and practices are undergoing continual change from generation to generation, and new religious movements often spring up unexpectedly to challenge orthodox views.

Weber traced the origins of most religious movements to charismatic leaders, who are often the bearers of radical new religious ideas. The charismatic leader, according to Weber (1947), has “a certain quality of . . . individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities” (pp. 358–59). The qualities and insights of the charismatic leader are creative, out of the ordinary, and spontaneous, and as such she or he is a major source of social change and innovation. When the charismatic leader issues a call, people follow, and things change. Thus, charismatic leaders are often seen as a threat to established religion, which may respond with various repressive measures.

In its early days, the charismatic religious movement draws its legitimacy and inspiration from its leader. But once the charismatic leader dies, the movement is thrown into crisis. If the movement is to survive, it must undergo a process Weber termed the “routinization of charisma.” The special inspiration and magical quality of the leader must be incorporated into the routine institutionalized structures of society. In literate societies, the words and actions of the leader are written down and become revered holy books. The followers who gathered around the leader are typically subsumed into a formalized religious institution with the charismatic figure’s inner circle as its leaders. Rules, rituals, and specialized roles are developed to keep the leader’s message and the religious movement going.

This process of institutionalization is essential if the movement is to survive, but ironically, it can also sap its religious vitality and even subvert the intentions of the founder. As religious institutions become more powerful and more bureaucratic, the goals of the leaders are often displaced from spiritual objectives to the maintenance and enhancement of their own positions. Rituals and practices that were once vital and alive become stale, and the enthusiasm of the original converts is replaced by the complacency of those born into the faith. As this trend continues, the religion often generates revival movements that seek to shake things up and return to the original message of its charismatic founder.

The success of a new religious movement depends on both the qualities and skill of the charismatic leader and its sociological context. The religious message of the successful movement must have a stronger affinity to the needs and aspirations of particular status groups than competing religions. Political power is often critical to the expansion of the religion, as when conquering Islamic warriors propagated their faith across North Africa and the Middle East, or when the Christian faith of the European colonialists was spread throughout the vast empires they subjugated.

The most widely used typology of religious organization is probably Weber’s church- sect dichotomy. This useful, if somewhat Eurocentric, typology has been the subject of repeated elaborations and refinements over the years. Niebuhr (1957) added a third category, the denomination , between the first two, and some add a fourth (the cult), while still others have created subcategories within each broad type (Troeltsch 1931; Yinger 1970; Stark and Bainbridge 1985). Unfortunately, as the categories proliferated and their contents were elaborated in different ways by different sociologists, the classificatory scheme has become increasingly unwieldy.

The basic idea behind Weber’s original classification is, however, still a valuable one especially when conceptualized as a continuum rather than a series of ideal types. At one end is the “church” or, less Eurocentrically, the “established religion.” It is broad and universal and its members are usually born into the faith. It is well accommodated to the established order and, indeed, often receives official state support. At the other end is the sect, which is small and exclusive. Membership in the sect is by choice, and it demands a high degree of commitment and involvement. The roots of sectarianism are usually in some kind of protest movement, and in contrast to the established religion, there is an ongoing tension between the sect and the social order. As time goes by, however, both extreme types of religious organization tend to move more toward the middle. As the original members of the sect are succeeded by later generations, it tends to accommodate itself with the dominant social order, while established religions eventually split or see their hegemony eroded by new religious competition. European Christianity, for example, started as a sect, grew into an established religion, and then fragmented into multiple denominations.

Sectarian movements are most popular among the poor and disprivileged, groups that are naturally in a greater state of tension with the established order. But there are significant class differences even within established religions. In general, lower social strata have an affinity for emotional and expressive religion, while the middle and upper middle classes prefer more self-controlled rationalistic practice, and the upper class shows an attraction to elegant ceremony. In traditional Japan, for example, devotional Pure Land Buddhism was most popular among the peasants, and the disciplined Zen sect among the samurai, while the ritualistic Shigon held special appeal to the royalty.

Religion commonly plays another important role in the stratification system by legitimizing social inequality. One classic example concerning class inequality is the Hindu belief that someone who diligently carries out the obligations of their caste will be reborn into a higher caste in the future. Religion often plays a similar role in perpetuating gender inequality. First, many religious doctrines explicitly relegate women to subordinate positions. The Koran, for example, instructs women but not men to obey their spouse, dress modestly, and limit themselves to a single marital partner. Second, religious organizations often themselves discriminate against women as a matter of official policy. In Christianity, for example, the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and many Protestant churches categorically exclude women from the clergy. Many religions, especially in the Western tradition, also encourage or even require discrimination based on sexual orientation. However, because organized religion has often sided with the privileged and the powerful, it does not mean that it always does, and there are also numerous examples of religious movements that sought to overturn or reform an unjust social order.

The relationship between religion and politics is therefore a complex one. In some cases, religious groups are an oppositional force challenging the established order, although some form of accommodation or active support is far more common. But even in the latter case, the relationship between religion and government takes many forms. At one extreme we have the theocracy, such as contemporary Iran, in which religious elites dominate state organization. At the other extreme are the totalitarian states that rigidly control religious practice, as occurred in most of the Communist countries, or that use religion as a tool of government policy, as was the case with State Shinto in Meiji Japan. Religion offers a way to legitimize ruling elites in much the same way as it does for the overall stratification system as, for example, in the European belief in the divine right of kings. Equally important, it can provide a palate of powerful symbols that can be used to justify specific government actions. In the contemporary conflicts in the Middle East, for example, one side justifies its actions in terms of an Islam Jihad, whereas the other does the same in terms of what Bellah (1970) termed America’s “ civil religion ” (the belief that God supports America and that it has a moral duty to spread freedom and democracy around the world).

Like all social institutions, religion has undergone a sweeping transformation as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the global changes it has wrought. Many of the early founders of the sociology of religion saw this religious change in relatively simplistic terms as a process of secularization in which old religious ideas and institutions were being replaced by new rational-scientific ones. Over the years, the advocates of this secularization thesis moderated their claims holding merely that the influence of religion on society and social life has declined as a result of this process of modernization (Roberts 2004:305–28). More recently, a number of scholars have challenged this thesis holding that people are as religious as they ever were and that the process of secularization has ground to a halt (e.g., Stark and Bainbridge 1985). Such claims touched off a powerful counterattack, and this remains one of the most hotly debated issues in the sociology of religion (Bruce 1996).

Much of the differences between the contestants rest on conflicting definitions of secularization, and, polemics aside, several points seem clear. First, although the trend is more marked in the core than the periphery, societies in all parts of the world are becoming more secular if by that we mean mythical and magical thought is being replaced by rational-scientific thought in many (but certainly not all) areas of social life. The world, in Max Weber’s term, is being “disenchanted.”

Second, there has been a sharp decline in the political and social hegemony of organized religion in European societies as they have undergone the process of modernization. This trend is, however, much less pronounced or nonexistent in other parts of the world. In societies where hegemonic monotheism never took root, religion played a much weaker political role from the start. The Animistic religions do not have much in the way of distinct religious institutions, and Asian societies have always tended more toward totalitarianism than theocracy. For example, the Chinese government under Mao Tse-tung began a harsh repression of organized religious activities before any significant process of modernization had taken place, and since then has slowly been loosening its grip as industrialization has proceeded. In recent years, religion has also become an organizing principle for various movements reacting against the contradictions and dislocations caused by the process of modernization and the global spread of consumer capitalism. The Islamic fundamentalist movement is a political/religious response both to the relegation of the Islamic cultures to a peripheral position in the world system with the foreign domination that that implies and to the spread of Western consumer values. Interestingly, Islamic fundamentalism was stimulated to a significant degree by the success of another political/religion movement, Zionism, in taking control of formerly Islam territories. And the growing militancy of Islamic fundamentalism, in turn, stimulated a counterreaction in India sometimes known as Hindu fundamentalism. Even the United States, with its hegemonic position in the world system, has seen the growth of its own political/religious movements. The rise of the religious right in America was, however, obviously not the result of foreign domination, but a response to changes in traditional family institutions and sexual mores that resulted from the growth of consumer capitalism.

Third, although individual religiosity is difficult to measure, there seems little reason to believe that people are any less interested than they ever were in the matters of “ultimate concern” that are the foundation of most religions. Of course, social crises can stimulate a change or intensification of religion interests. The rise of Sufism after the Mongolian conquest of the Middle East is one example, as was the rapid growth of new religions known as the “rush hour of the Gods,” which occurred in Japan following its devastating defeat in World War II. Nonetheless, no matter what form of social organization we adopt and what our historical circumstances are, the existential dilemmas that give rise to the religious impulse remain a fundamental part of the human condition.

Whatever the excesses of its early days, the sociology of religion played a vital role in establishing the independence of the social sciences from the religious worldview that dominated European thought. By making religion an object of scientific investigation like any other social phenomena, it broke through a deep cultural barrier to the understanding of the social world. Today, this critical freedom is often taken for granted, but it ranks as one of the major successes of the sociological enterprise.

As the twenty-first century unfolds, the challenges before the sociology of religion are quite different ones. The roots of the global political economy go back at least as far as the fifteenth century, but only with relatively recent advances in communications and transportation are we seeing the emergence of a truly global community. As the peoples of the world are bound ever more inextricably together, the protective social distance between the hegemonic claims of different religious groups have evaporated and smoldering conflicts burst into flame. The critical task of the sociology of religion in this new era is to free itself from its remaining bonds of Eurocentrism and to provide a balanced vantage point from which to begin unraveling the twisted knots of religious claims and conflicts. It is relatively easy for sociologists to laud the contribution that different religions have made to the common weal. It is a far greater challenge to point out the ways in which they foster violence, bigotry, and intolerance without fanning the flames of sectarian conflict. The sociology of religion is, nonetheless, in a unique position to provide the kind of cool rational voice needed to help foster a just pluralistic foundation for the emerging world community. But the success of this enterprise depends on sociology’s ability to live up to its own illusive ideals of objectivity and impartiality.

References:

  • [ca. 14th century] 1978. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works. Translated by C. Wolters. Reprint, London, England: Penguin Classics.
  • Bellah, Robert. 1970. Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. New York: Harper & Row.
  • Berger, Peter. 1969. The Sacred Canopy. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
  • Bibby, Reginald and Merlin B. Binkerhoff. 1974. “When Proselytizing Fails: An Organizational Analysis.” Sociological Analysis 35:189–200.
  • Bruce, Steve. 1996. Religion in the Modern World. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
  • Coleman, James William. 2001. The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Durkheim, Émile. [1915] 1965. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by J. W. Swain, Reprint, New York: Free Press.
  • Finke, Roger and Rodney Stark. 1992. The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
  • Freud, Sigmund. 1957. The Future of an Illusion. Translated by W. D. Robson-Scott. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday.
  • Iannaccone, Laurence R. 1994. “Why Strict Churches Are Strong.” American Journal of Sociology 99:1180–211.
  • Kapleau, Philip. 1989. Three Pillars of Zen. Rev. ed. New York: Anchor.
  • Kurtz, Lester. 1995. Gods in the Global Village: The World’s Religions in Sociological Perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge.
  • Lofland, John. 1966. Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization and Maintenance of Faith. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
  • Lofland, John and Norman Skonovd. 1981. “Conversion Motifs.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 3:294–308.
  • Marx, Karl. 1844. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” Pp. 43–59 in Early Writings, edited by T. Bottomore. New York: McGraw-Hill.
  • Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1957. On Religion. New York: Schocken Books.
  • Merton, Robert K. 1957. Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
  • Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1957. The Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York: Meridian Books.
  • O’Dea, Thomas F. 1966. The Sociology of Religion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
  • Otto, Rudolf. 1923. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by J. W. Harvey. London, England: Oxford University Press.
  • Richardson, James T. and Mary Stewart. 1978. “Conversion Process Models and the Jesus Movement.” Pp. 24–42 in Conversion Careers: In and Out of the New Religions, edited by J. T. Richardson. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
  • Roberts, Keith A. 2004. Religion in Sociological Perspective. 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson.
  • Snow, David A. and Cynthia Phillips. 1980. “The Lofland-Stark Model: A Critical Reassessment.” Social Problems 27:430–47.
  • Stark, Rodney and William Simms Bainbridge. 1985. The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Tillich, Paul. 1967. Systematic Theology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  • Troeltsch, Ernst. 1931. The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches. Translated by O. Wyon. New York: Macmillan.
  • Warner, R. Stephen. 1993. “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 98:1044–93.
  • Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by T. Parsons. New York: Scribners.
  • Weber, Max. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by A. M. Henderson and T. Parsons. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Weber, Max. 1951. The Religion of China. Translated by H. H. Gerth. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
  • Weber, Max. 1952. Ancient Judaism . Translated by H. H. Gerth. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
  • Weber, Max. 1958. The Religion of India. Translated by H. H. Gerth and D. Martindale. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
  • Weber, Max. 1963. The Sociology of Religion. Translated by E. Fiscshoff. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
  • Yinger, Milton. 1970. The Scientific Study of Religion. New York: Macmillan.
  • Zetterberg, Hans. 1952. “The Religious Conversion as a Change of Social Roles.” Sociology and Social Research 36:159–66.

This collection of links offers access to many sociology of religion articles available on the web. Articles are listed by author's last name. At the bottom of the list are links to sites with general collections of articles.

Articles with this symbol appear in .pdf format.  If you do not have Adobe Acrobat to read these articles, click the yellow icon to download.

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S   T V W Y Z

Bibliographic Resources

New life for denominationalism Reprinted with permission from The Christian Century (2000).

Golden Rule Christianity:  Lived Religion in the American Mainstream Reprinted from LIVED RELIGION IN AMERICA ( Buy it now ) edited by David Hall (1997), published by Princeton University Press .

Organized Religion in a Voluntaristic Society 1996 Presidential Address in Sociology of Religion , 1997 (available online and in .pdf format)

Telling Congregational Stories The 1993 H. Paul Douglass lecture, in Review of Religious Research

Waco, Federal Law Enforcement, and Scholars of Religion Reprinted from ARMAGEDDON IN WACO ( Buy it now ) published by the University of Chicago, copyright© 1995 by The University of Chicago. 

Report to the Justice and Treasury Departments regarding law enforcement interaction with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, September 3, 1993

Religious Civility, Civil Society, and Charitable Choice:   Faith–Based Poverty Relief in the Post–Welfare Era with co-investigator Helen A. Regis

"Charitable Choice" and the Feasibility of Faith-Based Welfare Reform in Mississippi with Helen A. Regis

Breaking Walls, Raising Fences: Masculinity, Intimacy, and Accountability Among the Promise Keepers

Congregations Adapting to Changes in Work and Family a paper prepared for the New England Religious Discussion Society, September, 1999 Work, Family, and Religious Involvement for Men and Women:   "Family Values" or the Modern Family? a paper contrasting the participation levels between men and women in religious environments, March 2000

Cultural Identity and Modernization A lecture at the Centennial Symposium, Institute for Japanese Culture and Classics Kokugakuin University, 1983

Why do we need a Public Affairs Mission?  The Moral Crisis in American Public Life a lecture given at Southwest Missouri State University, October 17, 1995

The True Scholar An article posted on the web site for the American Association of University Professors.

At Home and Not At Home:  Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth

Finding the Church:  Post Traditional Discipleship

Individualism and the Crisis of Civic Membership

Taming the Savage Market

with Christopher Adams Strong Institutions, Good City

Benson, Peter

Belief Style, Congregation Climate and Program Quality Written with Michael Donahue

Berger, Peter

Epistemological Modesty: An Interview with Peter Berger

Protestantism and the Quest for Certainty

Secularity:  West and East

Reflections of an Ecclesiastical Expatriate

Beyer, Peter 

Postmodernism and Religion From Catholic Issues , an online journal.

Secularization from the Perspective of Globalization: A Response to Dobbelaere

Bibby, Reginald

Religion in the Canadian 1990's: The Paradox of Poverty and Potential

Bloch, John

The New and Improved Clint Eastwood: Change and Persistence in Promise Keepers Self-Help Literature From Sociology of Religion, September 6, 2000

Bouma, Gary

Increasing Diversity in Religious Identification in Australia: Comparing 1947, 1991 and 1996 Census Reports

Brasher, Brenda

Women at the End of the World:  Fundamentalist Millenarianism As An Engendering Machine  

Engendering the Millenium, a special issue of the Journal of Millenial Studies Co-edited series of articles with Lee Quinby (Journal of Millennial Studies Vol. 2, Issue 1, Summer, 1999)

The Cyborg:  Technological Socialization and Its Link to the Religious Function of Popular Culture

Bromley, David

A Tale of Two Theories: Brainwashing and Conversion as Competing Political Narratives  

Bruce, Steve

Christianity in Britain, R. I. P.

Y2K, The Apocalypse, and Evangelical Christianity: The Role of Eschatological Belief in Church Responses

Campbell, George Van Pelt

Everything You Know is Wrong:  How Globalization Undermines Moral Consensus

Carroll, Jackson W.

Toward 2000:  Some Futures for Religious Leadership The 1991 H. Paul Douglass lecture for the Religious Research Association.

Growth and Decline in Presbyterian Congregations Written with Wayne L. Thompson and Dean R. Hoge

Chang, Patricia M.Y.

Enforcing Family Values? The Effects of Marital Status on Clergy Earnings

Are Phone Polls Accurate?  A research note about telephone polls in the media

Chaves, Mark

The National Congregations Study:  Background, Methods and Selected Results

Financing American Religion

Congregations and Social Services: What They Do, How They Do It, and With Whom   A report by Mark Chaves and William Tsitsos, as part of the Nonprofit Sector Research Fund Working Paper Series (2001)

Are We 'Bowling Alone' -- And Does it Matter?

Cieslak, Michael 

Which Elements of Parish Life are Important to Women? Presented at the annual RRA meeting, Oct. 2000.  This paper is also available in a shorter version .

Capturing the Spirit of Catholic Parishes: A Typology Based Upon Measures of Importance   Presented at the annual RRA meeting, Nov. 1999.  This paper is also available in a shorter version as well as the Parishioner Survey used in this study.

Being Creative: Diverse Approaches to Estimating Catholics Presented at the annual RRA meeting, Oct. 1995

Changing Pastors: Does It Lead to a Change in Financial Contributions?  

Clark, Lynn Schofield

Exploring the Role of Media in Religious Identity-construction Among Teens

Philadelphia census of congregations and their involvement in social service delivery

Black church outreach: Comparing how black and other congregations serve their needy neighbors

Social and community involvement of religious congregations housed in historic religious properties: Findings from a six-city study

Coleman, John

The Bible and Sociology  

Davis, Nancy

Theological Modernism, Cultural Libertarianism and Laissez-Faire Economics in Contemporary European Societies

Dawson, Lorne

Doing Religion in Cyberspace:  The Promise and the Perils

Cyberspace and Religious Life:  Conceptualizing the Concerns and the Consequences

Anti-Modernism, Modernism, and Postmodernism:  Struggling with the Cultural Significance of New Religious Movements

Dobbelaere, Karel 

Towards an Integrated Perspective of the Processes Related to the Descriptive Concept of Secularization

Belief Style, Congregation Climate and Program Quality Written with Peter Benson

Latter-Day Saints in a Secular World: What We Have Learned About Latter-Day Saints From Social Research From the Martin B. Hickman Outstanding Scholar Lecture, Brigham Young University, March 4, 1999

Dudley, Carl   home page for Dr. Dudley

Welfare, Faith-Based Ministries, and Charitable Choice

Charitable Choice An article written for Christian Century and reprinted with permission, March 14, 2001

Significant Research:  When Information has Impact The 1998 Presidential Lecture for the Religious Research Association.

From Typical Church to Social Ministry:  A Study of the Elements Which Mobilize a Congregation The 1989 H. Paul Douglass lecture presented at a meeting for the Religious Research Association.

Ebaugh, Helen Rose

Structural Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations

Eck, Diana L.

On Seeking and Finding in the World's Religions

Why Religion Matters: The Impact of Religious Practice on Social Stability

Can Churches Save the City?  A Look at Resources

An Example of Denominational Restructuration?

The Religious Response to Reproductive Technology

A compilation of articles is available within his web site .

Growth and Decline in an Inclusive Denomination:  The ABC Experience Written with Paul Light

Strategies for Evangelism and Growth in Three Denominations (1965-1990)

The Promised Land of Weight Loss

Denominational Growth and Decline Written with David Roozen

New Church Development and Denominational Growth (1950 - 1998):  Symptom or Cause? Written with Dave Roozen

The Growth and Decline of Congregations Written with Dave Roozen

Individuals and Church Choice Written with Dave Roozen

A large collection of other works by Jeff Hadden

Religion and Politics at Century's End A preface to "What Does the Lord Require? How American Christians Think About Economic Justice"( Buy it now )

Religious Independents Within Western Industrialized Nations: A Socio-Demographic Profile

Charismatics and Change in South Africa

Growth and Decline in Presbyterian Congregations Written with Wayne L. Thompson and Jackson Carroll

Religion, Media, and The Cultural Center of Gravity

Holsinger, Donald B.

The Dividends of Religious Freedom: An Empirical Analysis of the Effects of Religious Liberty on Forty Years of Membership Growth for Three, Strict, Evangelizing Christian Religions

Huang, Jianbo

“Who Am I”:  Identity Tensions among Chinese Intellectual Christians

A Short History of Church Growth Research

Theology and the Position of Pastors on Social Issues:  Continuity and Change Since the 1960's The 1996 Religious Research Association Presidential Address

Johnson, D. Paul

The G ülen Hizmet Movement in Turkey: An Islamic Movement to Reduce Violence and Promote Tolerance through Education and Intercultural Dialogue

Baby Boomers and the Return to the Churches Written with Wade Clark Roof

Churched and Unchurched Black Americans Written with Hart Nelsen

Kearns, Laurel

" The Context of Eco-theology ," in Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology, ed. Gareth Jones. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004

" Saving The Creation: Christian Environmentalism in the United States ," Sociology of Religion 57,1 (spring 1996):55-70

Sociology and Public Theology: A Case Study of Pro-Choice/Profile Common Ground

Kopelowitz, Ezra and Israel, Yael

Why has a Sociology of Religion not developed in Israel?  A look at the Influence of Socio-Political Environment on the Study of Religion

Eastern Christianity in North American Religious Landscape: Ethnic Traditionalism Versus Civic Involvement and Social Transformations

From American Church to Immigrant Church: The Changing Face of Seventh-Day Adventism in Metropolitan New York

From Psychosomatic to Theosomatic:  The Role of Spirit in the Next New Paradigm The ISSEEM Presidential Address

Growth and Decline in an Inclusive Denomination:  The ABC Experience Written with Norman Green

Cash and Character:  Talking about Money in the Church

Lummis, Adair    home page for Dr. Lummis

“Heart and Head” in Reaching Pastors of Black Churches A paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, Montreal, August 2006

Program and Policy Research Dynamics in Authority Contained and Dispersed Church Systems A paper presented at the SSSR-RRA Annual Meetings in Rochester, New York, November 2005

Numinous Experiences and Reflexive Spirituality in the Formation of Religious Capital Among Feminist Women Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Association for the Sociology of Religion Philadelphia, August 2005.

What Do Lay People Want in Pastors?  Answers from Lay Search Committee Chairs and Regional Judicatory Leaders from Pulpit & Pew, Research on Pastoral Leadership, Spring 2003

Brand Name Identity in a Post-Denominational Age: Regional Leaders’ Perspectives On Its Importance for Churches   A paper delivered at The Annual Meetings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Columbus, Ohio, October, 2001.

The Art and Science of Subtle Proactivity: Regional Leaders and Their Congregations   A paper being presented at the Religious Research Association Annual Meetings, Columbus, Ohio October 2001.

The Role of Judicatories in Interpreting Denominational Identity A paper presented at the annual meeting of the Religious Research Association Boston, 1999 

Judicatory Niches and Negotiations A paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion San Francisco, 1998.

Women of the Cloth: A New Opportunity for the Churches A 1983 out of print book about changes that cultural images are undergoing as increasing numbers of women enter the ordained ministry of several Protestant denominations

Correlates of Belief in Reincarnation Among Christian Worshippers  

From Church Tradition to Consumer Choice: The Gallup Surveys of the Unchurched American Written with Dave Roozen  

Morality, Mystery, Meaning, and Memory: Decoding Audience Perceptions of Television and New Religiosity

Methods for exploring primordial elements of youth spirituality

Regulation of religious diversity by the institutions of the European Union: from confrontation of national exceptions to the emergence of a European model

Whither Hunter's Culture War? Shifts in Evangelical Morality, 1988-1998

Revisioning the Future of Oldline Protestantism

Miller, Donald E.

The Reinvented Church: Styles and Strategies

Moberg, David O.

Expanding Horizons for Spirituality Research

Molokotos-Liederman , Lina  

The ‘Free Monks’ Phenomenon: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Greek Orthodoxy

Theodicy and Life Satisfaction Among Black and White Americans

Pre- and Post-Vatican II scales From Catholic Issues , an online journal.

Nelsen, Hart

Churched and Unchurched Black Americans Written with Conrad L. Kanagy

Olagoke , Abolade Ezekiel 

Religion and Globalization:  African Christians in the United States

Olson, Daniel V. 

Religious Pluralism and Church Involvement: Steps in the Exploration of a Changing Relationship

Religious Pluralism and US Church Membership: a Reassessment  

Learning from Lyle Schaller:  Social Aspects of Congregations

Change in American Religion   - A speech summarizing trends in American Religion. Delivered at Indiana University South Bend, February 5, 1992.

Congregational Growth and Decline in Indiana Among Five Mainline Denominations

Pettersson , Per

Long and short term values: the different function of long-term church relationships and one-off experiences

Phillips, Rick

Sociology Market Share and Mormon Church Activity

Pollard, Alton

Martin Luther King, Jr. in Sociological Context

Poloma, Margaret

Pilgrim’s Progress:   An Exercise in Reflexive Sociology Paper prepared for "Integrating Spirituality and Social Science" Session at the Southern Sociological Society Meetings in Atlanta, GA (April, 2001)

The Spirit Bade Me Go: Pentecostalism and Global Religion A paper prepared for presentation at the Association for the Sociology of Religion Annual Meetings in  Washington, D.C.

Mysticism and Identity Formation in Social Context:  The Case of the Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement

Pilgrim’s Progress:  Reflections on a Journey An article prepared for Testimonies from the Father’s Blessing.

Reviving Pentecostalism at the Millenium: The Harvest Rock Story

"The Pentecostal Movement" A Chapter in " Christian Millenarianism: Themes and Perspectives" edited by Stephen Hunt

The Spirit and The Bride:  The "Toronto Blessing" and Church Structure Manuscript prepared for the Evangelical Studies Bulletin (July, 1996).

Gamaliel's Admonition and the Toronto Blessing:  A Theo-Sociological Report Article prepared for Rev. Dr. David Hilborn’s edited collection on the "Toronto Blessing".

Toronto Blessing Entry prepared for the Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements ; February, 1998

Charisma and Institution: The Assemblies of God   An article written for Christian Century

Putnam, Robert

Bowling Alone:  America's Declining Social Capital

Rahimi, Babak 

Dying a Martyr’s Death:  The Political Culture of Self-Sacrifice in Contemporary Islamists  

Ronsvalle, John and Sylvia

Giving to Religion: How Generous Are We?

Roof, Wade Clark

The Church in the Centrifuge

Religion and Narrative The 1992 Religious Research Association Presidential Address

Religious Kaleidoscope:  American Religion in the 1990's

Baby Boomers and the Return to the Churches Written with Sr. Mary Johnson

Roozen, Dave   home page for Dr. Roozen

Oldline Protestantism: Pockets of Vitality Within a Continuing Stream of Decline

10,001 Congregations:  H. Paul Douglass, Strictness and Electric Guitars The 2001 H. Paul Douglass lecture presented at the annual meeting of the Religious Research Association.

Four Mega-Trends Changing America's Religious Landscape A presentation at the Religion Newswriters Association Annual Conference, September 22, 2001

Denominations Grow as Individuals Join Congregations

Denominational Growth and Decline Written with C. Kirk Hadaway

New Church Development and Denominational Growth (1950 - 1998):  Symptom or Cause? Written with C. Kirk Hadaway 

The Growth and Decline of Congregations Written with C. Kirk Hadaway 

Individuals and Church Choice Written with C. Kirk Hadaway 

From Church Tradition to Consumer Choice: 

The Gallup Surveys of the Unchurched American Written with Penny Long Marler 

A Study of Doctor of Ministry Programs A 1987 study conducted under the auspices of Auburn Theological Seminary and Hartford Seminary's Center for Social and Religious Research (HIRR).

Empty Nest, Empty Pew:  The Boomers Continue Through the Family Cycle

The Political Frame This is an exceptionally large file.  You may use the link above to read the article in its entirety online or choose to download this file .

Worship and Renewal: Surveying Congregational Life

Royle, Marjorie

The Effect of a Church Growth Strategy on United Church of Christ Congregations

Rozell, Mark

Uneasy Alliance: Conservative Catholics and the Christian Right

Rymarz, Richard and de Souza, Marian

Maintaining Identity: An Examination of Coptic Orthodox Young Adults

Sherkat, Darren 

Investigating the Sect-Church-Sect Cycle: Cohort Specific Attendance Differences Across African American Denominations  

Tracking the Restructuring of American Religion: Religious Affiliation and Patterns of Religious Mobility, 1973-1998  

Shriver, Peggy L.

A Binocular View of Religion and Research The 1994 Religious Research Association Presidential Address

Shupe, Anson

The Reconstructionist Movement on The New Christian Right

Smith, Christian and Sikkink, David

Is Private Schooling Privatizing

Rethinking Religious Social Action: What is "Rational" About Rational-Choice Theory? From Sociology of Religion , September 4, 2000

“Preachers’ kids are the worst” Results of a Survey among Dutch clergy children

Syncretic sociology: Towards A Cross-Disciplinary Study of Religion (1997 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture) From Sociology of Religion , September 5, 2000

Swatos, Bill

Implicit Religion From Catholic Issues , an online journal.

Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept This essay provides an introduction to the secularization debate as it presents itself at the end of the 1990s. From Sociology of Religion , September 6, 2000 written with Kevin J. Christiano.

Swenson, Don

Religious Differences Between Married and Celibate Clergy: Does Celibacy Make a Difference? (The Roman Catholic Priesthood)

A Mighty Fortress From the New York Times Magazine

Growth and Decline in Presbyterian Congregations Written with Jackson Carroll and Dean Hoge

A lecture on Religion and the Internet Given at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this lecture invited Dr. Thumma along with Rev. Charles Henderson and Elena Larsen to discuss how people are using the Internet for religious purposes.  You may also wish to visit the MIT website for a summary, transcript of the discussion, and an audio link to the lecture.

Megachurches Today A Summary of data from the  Faith Communities Today Project .

Nondenominational Congregations Study   A compilation of information from the Faith Communities Today project and the Organizing Religious Work Project.

What God Makes Free is Free Indeed : Nondenominational Church Identity and its Networks of Support presented at an annual meeting for the Religious Research Association.

Nondenominational Congregations Today   A report from the Faith Communities Today project

Negotiating a Religious Identity:  The Case of the Gay Evangelical an article written for Sociological Analysis

Exploring the Megachurch Phenomena A section from Scott's dissertation describing what megachurches are, their characteristics, and their resonance with the modern cultural context.

Summary of a Survey of Church Webmasters Students from Hartford’s Seminary Fall 2000 course on Religion and the Internet surveyed webmasters from 63 U.S. congregational web sites representing Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, and both conservative and liberal Protestantism congregations. 

Walking the Cyber-Labyrinth   A talk on the implications of the web on our spiritual journeys.

"Connectionalism Beyond the Denomination:  Local Religious Ecologies and Beyond"   a paper presented by Scott Thumma

Tinder, Glenn

Can We be Good Without God?  On the political meaning of Christianity

Voye, Liliane

Secularization in a Context of Advanced Modernity

Wang, Yuting

Religious Conversion to Christianity Among Students from the People’s Republic of China: A Comparative Study

Warner, R. Stephen

Approaching Religious Diversity: Barriers, Byways, and Beginnings

Immigrants and the Faith They Bring   Radical Middle   Why More Options Make us Less Happy   Multiethnic Mix

Welch, Michael

Participation and Commitment Among American Catholic Parishoners

Wheeler, Barbara

You Who Were Far Off:  Religious Divisions and the Role of Religious Research The 1995 H. Paul Douglass lecture for the Religious Research Association

Willaime, Jean-Paul

Religion, State and Society in Germany and France

Williams, Rhys H.

Is America In A Culture A War?  Yes-No-Sort Of

Political Theology on the Right and Left

Wind, James P.

Leading Congregations, Discovering Congregational Cultures

Wittberg, Patricia

Declining Institutional Sponsorship and Religious Orders: A Study of Reverse Impacts

Wuthnow, Robert

Is There a Place for 'Scientific' Studies of Religion?

Church Realities and Christian Identity in the 21st Century

Divided We Fall: America's Two Civil Religions

Fundamentalism in the World

Rediscovering the Sacred:  Perspectives on Religion in Contemporary Society *The full text of this book is provided at this link 

What Religious People Think About the Poor

Many of Robert Wuthnow's other articles are available online at his homepage .  

Yamane, David

Narrative and Religious Experience From Sociology of Religion , September 6, 2000

The Essential Half-Truths About Decision-Making in Legislatures:   Lessons For and From Religious Advocacy Organizations Keynote Address to the Wisconsin Interfaith IMPACT 20th Anniversary Year Consultation on Faith-Based Public Policy Work in Wisconsin, November 12, 1998.

Affiliation, Salience, Advocacy:  Three Religious Factors in Legislative Decision-Making Paper to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Anaheim, California, August 2001.

Melting Pots and Salad Bowls at Berkeley: Discourses of Multiculturalism and the American Cultures Course Requirement Revision of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 1992.

Yang, Fenggang

Chinese Conversion to Evangelical Christianity: The Importance of Social and Cultural Contexts

Young, Lawrence

Assessing and updating the Schoenherr-Young projections of clergy decline in the United States Roman Catholic Church (The Roman Catholic Priesthood)

Zrinščak, Siniša  

Why, at all, Do We Need Religion?  Religion and Morality in Post-Communist Europe

General Collections of Articles

Visit the searchable bibliographic database within this site to find many of the major works in sociology of religion.

FindArticles.com - Religion and Sociology Research This link is a listing of over 500 Sociology of Religion articles.  To research other topics or if you are having difficulty with this particular list, use their search option to create other topic specific listings. Weberian Sociology of Religion

Electronic Journal of Sociology www.religion-online.org

Journal of Contemporary Religion  There are several issues of articles in this excellent publication available online.

A comprehensive listing of online religion text sites can be found at Wabash Center's internet resources page.

Resources for American Christianity This site contains articles, information and reflections on many of the projects funded by the Lilly Endowment Inc.

American Journal of Sociology - Electronic Division Published by the University of Chicago Press 

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215 Religion Research Paper Topics for College Students

religion research paper topics

Studying religion at a college or a university may be a challenging course for any student. This isn’t because religion is always a sensitive issue in society, it is because the study of religion is broad, and crafting religious topics for research papers around them may be further complex for students. This is why sociology of religion research topics and many others are here, all for your use. As students of a university or a college, it is essential to prepare religious topics for research papers in advance. There are many research paper topics on religion, and this is why the scope of religion remains consistently broad. They extend to the sociology of religion, research paper topics on society, argumentative essay topics, and lots more. All these will be examined in this article. Rather than comb through your books in search of inspiration for your next essay or research paper, you can easily choose a topic for your religious essay or paper from the following recommendations:

World Religion Research Paper Topics

If you want to broaden your scope as a university student to topics across religions of the world, there are religion discussion topics to consider. These topics are not just for discussion in classes, you can craft research around them. Consider:

  • The role of myths in shaping the world: Greek myths and their influence on the evolution of European religions
  • Modern History: The attitude of modern Europe on the history of their religion
  • The connection between religion and science in the medieval and modern world
  • The mystery in the books of Dan Brown is nothing but fiction: discuss how mystery shapes religious beliefs
  • Theocracy: an examination of theocratic states in contemporary society
  • The role of Christianity in the modern world
  • The myth surrounding the writing of the Bible
  • The concept of religion and patriarchy: examine two religions and how it oppresses women
  • People and religion in everyday life: how lifestyle and culture is influenced by religion
  • The modern society and the changes in the religious view from the medieval period
  • The interdependence of laws and religion is a contemporary thing: what is the role of law in religion and what is the role of religion in law?
  • What marked the shift from religion to humanism?
  • What do totemism and animalism denote?
  • Pre Colonial religion in Africa is savagery and barbaric: discuss
  • Cite three religions and express their views on the human soul
  • Hinduism influenced Indian culture in ways no religion has: discuss
  • Africans are more religious than Europeans who introduced Christian religion to them: discuss
  • Account for the evolution of Confucianism and how it shaped Chinese culture to date
  • Account for the concept of the history of evolution according to Science and according to a religion and how it influences the ideas of the religious soul
  • What is religious education and how can it promote diversity or unity?7
  • Workplace and religion: how religion is extended to all facets of life
  • The concept of fear in maintaining religious authorities: how authorities in religious places inspire fear for absolute devotion
  • Afro-American religion: a study of African religion in America
  • The Bible and its role in religions
  • Religion is more of emotions than logic
  • Choose five religions of the world and study the similarities in their ideas
  • The role of religious leaders in combating global terrorism
  • Terrorism: the place of religion in promoting violence in the Middle East
  • The influence of religion in modern-day politics
  • What will the world be like without religion or religious extremists?
  • Religion in the growth of communist Russia: how cultural revolution is synonymous with religion
  • Religion in the growth of communist China: how cultural revolution is synonymous with religion
  • The study of religions and ethnic rivalries in India
  • Terrorism in Islam is a comeback to the crusades
  • The role of the Thirty Years of War in shaping world diplomacy
  • The role of the Thirty Years of War in shaping plurality in Christianity
  • The religion and the promotion of economics
  • The place of world religions on homosexuality
  • Why does a country, the Vatican City, belong to the Catholic Church?
  • God and the concept of the supernatural: examine the idea that God is a supernatural being
  • The influence of religion in contemporary Japan
  • Religion and populism in the modern world
  • The difference between mythical creatures and gods
  • Polytheism and the possibility of world peace
  • Religion and violence in secular societies?
  • Warfare and subjugation in the spread of religion
  • The policies against migrant in Poland is targeted against Islam
  • The role of international organizations in maintaining religious peace
  • International terrorist organizations and the decline of order

Research Paper Topics Religion and Society

As a student in a university or MBA student, you may be requested to write an informed paper on sociology and religion. There are many sociology religion research paper topics for these segments although they may be hard to develop. You can choose out of the following topics or rephrase them to suit your research interest:

  • The influence of religion on the understanding of morality
  • The role of religion in marginalizing the LGBTQ community
  • The role of women in religion
  • Faith crisis in Christianity and Islamic religions
  • The role of colonialism in the spreading of religion: the spread of Christianity and Islam is a mortal sin
  • How does religion shape our sexual lifestyle?
  • The concept of childhood innocence in religion
  • Religion as the object of hope for the poor: how religion is used as a tool for servitude by the elite
  • The impact of traditional beliefs in today’s secular societies
  • How religion promotes society and how it can destroy it
  • The knowledge of religion from the eyes of a sociologist
  • Religious pluralism in America: how diverse religions struggle to strive
  • Social stratification and its role in shaping religious groups in America
  • The concept of organized religion: why the belief in God is not enough to join a religious group
  • The family has the biggest influence on religious choices: examine how childhood influences the adult’s religious interests
  • Islamophobia in European societies and anti-Semitism in America
  • The views of Christianity on interfaith marriage
  • The views of Islam on interfaith marriage
  • The difference between spirituality and religion
  • The role of discipline in maintaining strict religious edicts
  • How do people tell others about their religion?
  • The features of religion in sociology
  • What are the views of Karl Marx on religion?
  • What are the views of Frederic Engels on religion?
  • Modern Islam: the conflict of pluralism and secularism
  • Choose two religions and explore their concepts of divorce
  • Governance and religion: how religion is also a tool of control
  • The changes in religious ideas with technological evolution
  • Theology is the study of God for God, not humans
  • The most feared religion: how Islamic extremists became identified as terrorist organizations
  • The role of cults in the society: why religious people still have cults affiliations
  • The concept of religious inequality in the US
  • What does religion say about sexual violence?

Religion Essay Topics

As a college student, you may be required to write an essay on religion or morality. You may need to access a lot of religious essay topics to find inspiration for a topic of your choice. Rather than go through the stress of compiling, you can get more information for better performance from religion topics for research paper like:

  • The origin of Jihad in Islam and how it has evolved
  • Compare the similarities and differences between Christian and Judaism religions
  • The Thirty Years War and the Catholic church
  • The Holocaust: historic aggression or a religious war
  • Religion is a tool of oppression from the political and economic perspectives
  • The concept of patriarchy in religion
  • Baptism and synonym to ritual sacrifice
  • The life of Jesus Christ and the themes of theology
  • The life of Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) and the themes of theology
  • How can religion be used to promote world peace?
  • Analyze how Jesus died and the reason for his death
  • Analyze the event of the birth of Christ
  • The betrayal of Jesus is merely to fulfill a prophecy
  • Does “prophecy” exist anywhere in religion?
  • The role of war in promoting religion: how crusades and terrorist attacks shape the modern world
  • The concept of Karma: is Karma real?
  • Who are the major theorists in religion and what do they say?
  • The connection of sociology with religion
  • Why must everyone be born again according to Christians?
  • What does religious tolerance mean?
  • What is the benefit of religion in society?
  • What do you understand about free speech and religious tolerance?
  • Why did the Church separate from the state?
  • The concept of guardian angels in religion
  • What do Islam and Christianity say about the end of the world?
  • Religion and the purpose of God for man
  • The concept of conscience in morality is overrated
  • Are there different sects in Christianity?
  • What does Islam or Christianity say about suicide?
  • What are the reasons for the Protestant Reformation?
  • The role of missionaries in propagating Christianity in Africa
  • The role of the Catholic church in shaping Christianity
  • Do we need an international religious organization to maintain international religious peace?
  • Why do people believe in miracles?

Argumentative Essay Topics on Religion

Creating argumentative essay topics on religion may be a daunting exercise regardless of your level. It is more difficult when you don’t know how to start. Your professor could be interested in your critical opinions about international issues bordering on religion, which is why you need to develop sensible topics. You can consider the following research paper topics religion and society for inspiration:

  • Religion will dominate humanity: discuss
  • All religions of the world dehumanize the woman
  • All men are slaves to religion
  • Karl Marx was right when he said religion is the return of the repressed, “the sigh of the oppressed creature”: discuss
  • Christianity declined in Europe with the Thirty Years War and it separated brothers and sisters of the Christian faith?
  • Islamic terrorism is a targeted attack on western culture
  • The danger of teen marriage in Islam is more than its benefits
  • The church should consider teen marriages for every interested teenager
  • Is faith fiction or reality?
  • The agape love is restricted to God and God’s love alone
  • God: does he exist or is he a fiction dominating the world?
  • Prayer works better without medicine: why some churches preach against the use of medicine
  • People change religion because they are confused about God: discuss
  • The church and the state should be together
  • Polygamous marriage is evil and it should be condemned by every religion
  • Cloning is abuse against God’s will
  • Religious leaders should also be political leaders
  • Abortion: a sin against God or control over your body
  • Liberty of religious association affects you negatively: discuss
  • Religious leaders only care about themselves, not the people
  • Everyone should consider agnosticism
  • Natural laws are the enemy of religion
  • It is good to have more than two faiths in a family
  • It is hard for the state to exist without religion
  • Religion as a cause of the World War One
  • Religion as a tool for capitalists
  • Religion doesn’t promote morality, only extremisms
  • Marriage: should the people or their religious leaders set the rules?
  • Why the modern church should acknowledge the LGBTQ: the fight for true liberalism
  • Mere coexistence is not religious tolerance
  • The use of candles, incense, etc. in Catholic worship is idolatrous and the same as pagan worship: discuss
  • The Christian religion is the same as Islam

Christianity Research Paper Topics on Religion

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Christian or not as you need to develop a range of topics for your essay or project. To create narrow yet all-inclusive research about Christianity in the world today, you can consider research topics online. Rather than rack your head or go through different pages on the internet, consider these:

  • Compare and contrast Christian and Islam religions
  • Trace the origin of Christianity and the similarity of the beliefs in the contemporary world
  • Account for the violent spread of Christianity during the crusades
  • Account for the state of Christianity in secular societies
  • The analysis of the knowledge of rapture in Christianity
  • Choose three contemporary issues and write the response of Christianity on them
  • The Catholic church and its role towards the continuance of sexual violence
  • The Catholic church and the issues of sexual abuse and scandals
  • The history of Christianity in America
  • The history of Christianity in Europe
  • The impact of Christianity on American slaves
  • The belief of Christianity on death, dying, and rapture
  • The study of Christianity in the medieval period
  • How Christianity influenced the western world
  • Christianity: the symbols and their meaning
  • Why catholic priests practice celibacy
  • Christianity in the Reformation Era
  • Discuss the Gnostic Gospels and their distinct historic influence on Christianity
  • The catholic church in the Third Reich of Germany
  • The difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament
  • What the ten commandments say from a theological perspective
  • The unpredictable story of Moses
  • The revival of Saul to Paul: miracle or what?
  • Are there Christian cults in the contemporary world?
  • Gender differences in the Christian church: why some churches don’t allow women pastors
  • The politics of the Catholic church before the separation of the church and the state
  • The controversies around Christian religion and atheism: why many people are leaving the church
  • What is the Holy Trinity and what is its role in the church?
  • The miracles of the New Testament and its difference from the Old Testament’s
  • Why do people question the existence of God?
  • God is a spirit: discuss

Islam Research Paper Topics

As a student of the Islamic religion or a Muslim, you may be interested in research on the religion. Numerous Islam research paper topics could be critical in shaping your research paper or essay. These are easy yet profound research paper topics on religion Islam for your essays or papers:

  • Islam in the Middle East
  • Trace the origin of Islam
  • Who are the most important prophets in Islam?
  • Discuss the Sunni and other groups of Muslims
  • The Five Pillars of Islam are said to be important in Islam, why?
  • Discuss the significance of the Holy Month
  • Discuss the significance of the Holy Pilgrimage
  • The distinctions of the Five Pillars of Islam and the Ten Commandments?
  • The controversies around the hijab and the veil
  • Western states are denying Muslims: why?
  • The role of religious leaders in their advocacy of sexual abuse and violence
  • What the Quran says about rape and what does Hadiths say, too?
  • Rape: men, not the women roaming the street should be blamed
  • What is radicalism in Islam?
  • The focus of Islam is to oppress women: discuss
  • The political, social, and economic influence of modernity on Islam
  • The notable wives of prophet Muhammad and their role in Islam: discuss
  • Trace the evolution of Islam in China and the efforts of the government against them
  • Religious conflict in Palestine and Israel: how a territorial conflict slowly became a religious war
  • The study of social class and the Islamic religion
  • Suicide bombers and their belief of honor in death: the beliefs of Islamic jihadists
  • Account for the issues of marginalization of women in Muslim marriages
  • The role of literature in promoting the fundamentals of Islam: how poetry was used to appeal to a wider audience
  • The concept of feminism in Islam and why patriarchy seems to be on a steady rise
  • The importance of Hadiths in the comprehension of the Islamic religion
  • Does Islam approve of democracy?
  • Islamic terrorism and the role of religious leaders
  • The relationship of faith in Islam and Christianity: are there differences in the perspectives of faith?
  • How the Quran can be used as a tool for religious tolerance and religious intolerance
  • The study of Muslims in France: why is there religious isolation and abuse in such a society?
  • Islam and western education: what are the issues that have become relevant in recent years?
  • Is there a relationship between Islam and Science?
  • Western culture: why there are stereotypes against Muslims abroad
  • Mythology in Islam: what role does it play in shaping the religion?
  • Islam and the belief in the afterlife: are there differences between its beliefs with other religions’?
  • Why women are not allowed to take sermons in Islam

Can’t Figure Out Your Religion Paper?

With these religious research paper topics, you’re open to change the words or choose a topic of your choice for your research paper or essay. Writing an essay after finding a topic is relatively easy. Since you have helpful world religion research paper topics, research paper topics on religion and society, religion essay topics, argumentative essay topics on religion, Christianity research paper topics, and Islam research paper topics, you can go online to research different books that discuss the topic of your choice. However, if you require the assistance of professional academic experts who offer custom academic help, you’ll find them online. There are a few writing help online groups that assist in writing your essays or research paper as fast as possible. You can opt for their service if you’re too busy or unmotivated to write your research paper or essay.

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A-level Sociology (AQA) Revision Notes

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, Ph.D., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years experience of working in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Revision guide for AQA A-Level (7192) and AS-Level Sociology (7191), including straightforward study notes, independent study booklets, and past paper questions and answers. Fully updated for the summer 2021 term.

Download Past Paper Questions With Answers

Thanks to the Hectic Teacher for allowing us to link to these resources:

Paper 1: Education with Methods in Context

  • Study Booklet Part 1
  • Study Booklet Part 2
  • Study Booklet Part 3
  • Complete Revision Notes
  • Short Questions and Answers
  • the role and functions of the education system, including its relationship to the economy and to class structure
  • differential educational achievement of social groups by social class, gender and ethnicity in contemporary society
  • relationships and processes within schools, with particular reference to teacher/pupil relationships, pupil identities and subcultures, the hidden curriculum, and the organisation of teaching and learning
  • the significance of educational policies, including policies of selection, marketisation and privatisation, and policies to achieve greater equality of opportunity or outcome, for an understanding of the structure, role, impact and experience of and access to education; the impact of globalisation on educational policy.

Methods in Context

  • Students must be able to apply sociological research methods to the study of education.

Paper 2: Research Methods and Topics in Sociology

Research methods, topic 2: families and households, topic 5: beliefs in society, topic 6: global development.

  • Revision Notes
  • Knowledge Organiser
  • quantitative and qualitative methods of research; research design
  • sources of data, including questionnaires, interviews, participant and non-participant observation, experiments, documents and official statistics
  • the distinction between primary and secondary data, and between quantitative and qualitative data
  • the relationship between positivism, interpretivism and sociological methods; the nature of ‘social facts’
  • the theoretical, practical and ethical considerations influencing choice of topic, choice of method(s) and the conduct of research
  • the relationship of the family to the social structure and social change, with particular reference to the economy and to state policies
  • changing patterns of marriage, cohabitation, separation, divorce, childbearing and the life course, including the sociology of personal life, and the diversity of contemporary family and household structures
  • gender roles, domestic labour and power relationships within the family in contemporary society
  • the nature of childhood, and changes in the status of children in the family and society
  • demographic trends in the United Kingdom since 1900: birth rates, death rates, family size, life expectancy, ageing population, and migration and globalisation
  • ideology, science and religion, including both Christian and non-Christian religious traditions
  • the relationship between social change and social stability, and religious beliefs, practices and organisations
  • religious organisations, including cults, sects, denominations, churches and New Age movements, and their relationship to religious and spiritual belief and practice
  • the relationship between different social groups and religious/spiritual organisations and movements, beliefs and practices
  • the significance of religion and religiosity in the contemporary world, including the nature and extent of secularisation in a global context, and globalisation and the spread of religions
  • development, underdevelopment and global inequality
  • globalisation and its influence on the cultural, political and economic relationships between societies
  • the role of transnational corporations, non-governmental organisations and international agencies in local and global strategies for development
  • development in relation to aid and trade, industrialisation, urbanisation, the environment, and war and conflict
  • employment, education, health, demographic change and gender as aspects of development

Paper 3: Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods

Crime and deviance.

  • Study Booklet Part 4
  • Example Essays

Theory and Methods

  • Independent Study Booklet Part 1
  • Independent Study Booklet Part 2
  • Methods Flash Cards
  • Theory Flash Cards
  • crime, deviance, social order and social control
  • the social distribution of crime and deviance by ethnicity, gender and social class, including recent patterns and trends in crime
  • globalisation and crime in contemporary society; the media and crime; green crime; human rights and state crimes
  • crime control, surveillance, prevention and punishment, victims, and the role of the criminal justice system and other agencies
  • consensus, conflict, structural and social action theories
  • the concepts of modernity and post-modernity in relation to sociological theory
  • the nature of science and the extent to which Sociology can be regarded as scientific
  • the relationship between theory and methods
  • debates about subjectivity, objectivity and val
  • the relationship between Sociology and social policy

Frequently Asked Questions

What is ao3 in sociology a-level.

AO3 is an assessment objective for analysing and evaluating sociological theories, concepts, evidence and research methods in order to present arguments, make judgements and reach conclusions.

Examples of AO3 points include:

  • Evaluate from other PERSPECTIVES – What would other perspectives say about the theory / concept? Is there a counter-argument?
  • Evaluate – HISTORICAL CRITICISM – Is the theory/ concept dated? When was the concept developed? Is it still relevant today, or has society changed so much that it is no longer relevant? Has society changed in such a way that some aspects of the theory are now more relevant?
  • Evalaute – POWER/ BIAS/ VALUE FREEDOM? Who developed the concept/ theory – whose interests does it serve? For example, “x” theor is ethnocentric because….

What is the fastest way to revise sociology?

There is no great mystery about how to study for sociology A-level. Many students, although they’re not naturally that ‘academic’ still score A and A* grades through sheer hard work, focus and determination.

Before you start you need to satisfy yourself that you have good syllabus notes to work from. Although most textbooks are fine in places they have a tendency to either not give enough detail on certain topics or give too much information (which can be just as bad).

As long as you have great syllabus notes and lots of past paper questions the rest is really up to you. If you want to score an A* or A grade you need to act like someone who’s going to score these grades.

You are competing against people who are going to put in a hell of a lot of hard work so you need to work as hard as or harder than them. And you need to think about what hard work really is.

What are the most effective ways of revising subject knowledge?

  • Ask “How” and “Why” questions  when revising and try to connect ideas (this method is called “elaboration”)
  • No cramming . Distribute your revision over time and use a spaced system of repetition
  • Switch topics regularly  when revising (this is called “ interleaving ” and it will help you to identify connections between different topics)
  • Words and visuals . Combine words and visual representations to create two ways of remembering key ideas (this is called “dual coding”)
  • Teachers! Students! Please get in touch if you have any A-level sociology notes you would like to share. We would really like to cover all 8 topics for paper 2.
  • Please contact us via email [email protected] .

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Sociology Of Culture Research Paper

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Sample Sociology Of Culture Research Paper. Browse other research paper examples and check the list of research paper topics for more inspiration. iResearchNet offers academic assignment help for students all over the world: writing from scratch, editing, proofreading, problem solving, from essays to dissertations, from humanities to STEM. We offer full confidentiality, safe payment, originality, and money-back guarantee. Secure your academic success with our risk-free services.

The word ‘culture’ has completely different meanings in the social sciences and in current language. In the latter, the meaning of the term has for long been mainly influenced by the humanistic conception of culture, which derives from the Roman cultura animi—a term that Cicero seems to have invented in order to translate the Greek concept of paideia. This is the classical sense of the word, based upon high productions of mind and art. Referring to the intellectual, esthetic, and ethical aspects of human beings (for which the German language uses the term Bildung), culture thus involves the legitimacy of value judgments and of the idea of a hierarchy between societies as much as inside them.

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In the social sciences, on the contrary, the term has generally a widely inclusive meaning, which is actually aimed against the humanistic normative conception of culture, since almost anything may be considered as ‘culture.’ This conception, which opens an almost unlimited field to the term ‘culture,’ has been the basis of the ensemble of theories which may be termed ‘culturalist trend.’ It is characterized by a systematical relativism, strongly backed up by the fact that the overall conception of ‘culture’ is in itself a powerful relativistic tool. The popularization of the relativistic use of the term ‘culture’ in postmodern societies since the late 1900s poses a serious danger for culture.

1. The Term ‘Culture’ In The Social Sciences

This term has received, first in anthropology and afterwards in sociology, a very specific meaning, that prevailed despite the reluctance of very important authors, such as Morgan, Durkheim, and Radcliffe-Brown to use it in this way.

1.1 The Tylorian ‘Everything Is Culture’ Conception

At the basis of the concept of culture as it is mostly used in the social sciences stands the well-known founding definition of the English ethnologist Edward Barrett Tylor (1832–1917), in his book Primitive Culture (1871). He borrowed much of the sense he gave to the term from Bismarckian Germany, whose conception of Kultur included any kind of expression of the national character. According to the German usage, Tylor takes culture to be synonymous with civilization, and therefore gives to that word what he calls ‘a wide ethnographic sense.’ For him, culture is ‘that complex whole’ produced by people’s historical experience, of which he gives several examples: ‘know-ledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom.’ But this enumeration is not a closed one. Tylorian culture also ‘includes … any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’ This definition is characterized by the huge breadth of its application.

Derived from the German term Kultur, the idea of a broad ethnographic sense of the word ‘culture’ perfectly suited Anglo-Saxon ethnologists from German or Austrian origin. The German-born US anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) and the British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), who was born in Poland as an Austrian subject, both took an outstanding part in the victorious settlement of the term ‘culture’ in the very core of the social sciences.

Although since Tylor many other definitions of culture have been formulated, his ‘everything is culture’ conception remained a basic creed for nearly all anthropologists during the twentieth century, and it still prevails. In its anthropological sense, culture includes religion, law, art, and literature, as well as all of everyday life in its often prosaic and even trivial aspects, such as cooking, sexual habits, or sanitary practices.

In the early 1900s, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and other French sociologists were reluctant to use the term ‘culture’ in its Tylorian sense, and preferred to go on using the word ‘civilization.’ Yet, the anthropologists’ broad use of the term ‘culture’ has progressively spread to sociology. Nevertheless, during the 1950s, many American intellectuals, like Hannah Arendt, did resist the idea of mass culture, which they deemed to be no culture at all, but a deadly threat to it. In the early 1960s, American sociologists still regarded mass culture as a subject of debate, and the mass media as a most important field for sociological studies. Meanwhile, it was a French sociologist, Edgar Morin (1962) who took mass culture as an essential sociological field of study.

1.2 Radcliffe-Brown’s Attempt To Resist Tylorian Culture

The founder of social anthropology, the British anthropologist Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) based his theory upon the study of ‘social structures,’ along the lines of Durkheim’s sociological concept of function. In order to keep social anthropology completely separated from cultural anthropology, for some 20 years Radcliffe-Brown and his followers avoided using the word ‘culture’ as much as possible. Then, in 1952, he defined culture as ‘the process by which a person acquires, from contact with other persons or from such things as books or works of art, knowledge, skill, ideas, beliefs, tastes, sentiments.’ So culture is for him the process of intellectual, esthetic, and ethical human development. Culture is the process by which one becomes a cultured person.

Though an anthropologist, and although his functionalist theory is as much relativistic and holistic as culturalism is, Radcliffe-Brown has a classical and humanistic conception of culture. This is because the term has no part in his system, not being his own relativistic tool. He states (1952) that ‘the total social structure of a society together with the totality of social usages in which that structure appears and on which it depends for its continued existence’ are constituent of a social system, whereas most anthropologists would have regarded all that as culture. Since he had decided to take as basic the social structure instead of the ‘culture patterns’ of cultural anthropology, Radcliffe-Brown had no need of the Tylorian sense of culture. In fact he had even every reason to refuse that use of the word, which was the basis of a powerful rival theory. Hence his humanistic formulation. Furthermore, Radcliffe-Brown’s functionalism derived from Morgan, Durkheim and the whole French sociological school. As they had not admitted the Tylorian use of the term ‘culture,’ Radcliffe-Brown was naturally induced to follow their example.

However, Malinowski, the other great name of anthropological functionalism, regarded a broad conception of culture as natural. Posthumously published in 1944, his most important book is entitled: A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Thus, in the 1930s and 1940s, anthropological functionalism was divided into two rival schools: ‘social structure’ against ‘culture,’ Radcliffe-Brown’s school versus Malinowski’s school, one of their motives of dis- agreement being opposing ideas about the concept of culture. In the UK, this quarrel was considered as opposing social anthropology to cultural anthropology. But, at the same time, nearly all US anthropologists were adherents of cultural anthropology since studying ‘cultures.’

As a result of that, in the USA, since the end of the 1940s, the functionalist theory has been taken over, in an somewhat attenuated way, by sociologists, chiefly Robert King Merton and Talcott Parsons, who adhered to the social anthropologists’ point of view. Accordingly, they stressed society and not ‘culture’ as the subject of their research. US sociologists thus stood opposed to US cultural anthropologists. So that the past rivalry of the functionalists schools of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown had become a professional quarrel opposing US anthropologists and sociologists, since the former claimed to deal solely with ‘culture,’ and the latter with ‘society.’

Yet, in the early 1950s, some of Radcliffe-Brown’s followers began to use the term ‘culture’ with a very broad meaning: for Raymond W. Firth, it included both the way of life and the content of social relations (1951), and for Meyer Fortes, both social structure and organization (1953). Afterwards, in 1958, Amer-ican anthropologists and sociologists made an end to their quarrel by means of a peace treaty signed by A. L. Kroeber and Parsons, who mutually acknow-ledged the validity of one another’s field of study: society as well as culture. The ‘everything is culture’ conception had won.

2. The Culturalist Trend

The Tylorian ‘omnibus conception of culture’ (Singer 1968) has been the basis of the set of theories known as ‘culturalism,’ and it remains the basis of the culturalist way of thought which still reigns over anthropology and a large part of sociology.

In the first half of the twentieth century, US cultural anthropology has been principally influenced by Tylor, Boas, and through him by the German diffusionists, like Fritz Graebner, who had introduced the idea of Kulturkreis (culture area). In the 1930s, US cultural anthropologists began to develop the idea that each ‘culture’ was an individual unity, well-organized and functioning as a system. This holistic and systemic conception was clearly formulated by Malinowski in the article on ‘culture’ that he wrote for the Encyclopœdia of the Social Sciences (1931). A few years after, Margaret Mead (1935), Ralph Linton (1936) and Abram Kardiner (1939) emphasized the idea of a ‘culture’ being an integrated totality. The aim of ethnologists and anthropologists became to show the inner coherence of each ‘culture’ functioning as an organized whole, in which any component element is linked to all the others.

For the ethnology and cultural anthropology of the 1930s–1950s, the organization of culture systems consisted of a complex architecture of ‘patterns of culture,’ which Ruth Benedict had endeavored to describe and classify (Patterns of Culture,1934). Hence the definition formulated in 1952 by Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn:

‘Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior, acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups … ’

Each society is regarded as a distinctive cultural whole, characterized by its peculiar system of values. The beliefs existing in a given society are thought to be a product of ‘culture.’ Following Linton, several culturalist authors even affirmed that the personality structure of the individuals in a particular group was determined by the group’s ‘culture.’ The most extreme advocate of this opinion was Kardiner, with his idea that each sociocultural system shaped a basic personality, the ‘I’ just being a ‘cultural precipitate.’ Therefore, culturalists deem socialization, the social process through which the main values of a society are transmitted from one generation to the next, to be of the utmost importance, and they believe it to be a very deterministic process. On the whole, those theories led to an extremely mechanic conception, which attributes to ‘culture’ the production of beliefs, and to inculcation and conditioning the power to put them into people’s minds and to determine their behaviors. So the US anthropologist Leslie A. White, the leader of the culturalist school called ‘culturology,’ went so far as writing (1968) that ‘man is, and remains, a puppet of his culture.’

Culturalism has rightly been reproached for its belief in the ability of social systems to work in such a mechanical way that people so much believe what they have to believe that they feel the need to do what they have to do. It has also been established that the culturalists’ holistic conception of a system of values common to a whole society was generally untrue, except perhaps in the very simplest ones. Hence the notion of ‘subculture’ used by culturalists for their study of complex modern societies. As for the culturalist principle of an inner coherence of culture systems, which comes from a counterhistorical method, it maybe partly exist in the most simple societies, but certainly not in complex ones. Against this assumed idea of a whole inside linkage of each ‘culture’, the French sociologists Raymond Boudon and Francois Bourricaud also observed (1982) that the ‘everything is culture’ conception was based upon an erroneous obviousness, so that it would be more adequate to use the term ‘culture’ only when speaking of artifacts and mental products.

A few anthropologists have dared to criticize the mechanical conditioning model of culturalism. It is chiefly the English anthropologist Robin Horton (1973) and the American anthropologist Melford E. Spiro (1987) who disputed the creed according to which belief and behavior did not result from reasons but were just the product of cultural conditioning. Nevertheless, since Boas the culturalist point of view does represent the mainstream in anthropology. And it has also influenced a great deal of sociology, and even philosophy. For instance, Richard Rorty asserts in a perfectly culturalist way that the idea prevailing in democracies of totalitarianism being evil is just the result of cultural conditioning (1989). The culturalist trend always works for the benefit of relativism, and the mere use of the term ‘culture’ in an ‘everything is culture’ sense does just the same.

3. The Comprehensive Sense Of ‘Culture’ : A Relativistic Tool

As an evolutionist, Tylor naturally regarded nine-teeth-century England as the pinnacle of civilization. But since he intended ‘to treat mankind as homogeneous in nature,’ he felt the need of a concept synonymous with ‘civilization,’ but more applicable to everybody and every society, past as well as present. Hence his widely inclusive definition of culture, which permitted him to find evidences of ‘culture’ among all societies and human groups, ‘though placed in different grades of civilization.’ Since everything was asserted to be culture, it became possible to find ‘culture’ everywhere. The Tylor revolution granted a ‘culture’ even to the most primitive peoples.

Yet, the most famous ethnologist in the 1870s and 1880s, the American evolutionist Lewis H. Morgan (1818–81), did not adopt the Tylorian meaning of the term ‘culture.’ In his book Ancient Society (1877), he went on using the notion of ‘society’. Instead of Tylor’s stages of ‘culture’, he prefered to delineate ‘ethnical periods,’ which he considered to be developmental stages leading, through barbarism, from savagery to civilization. But Morgan died and Tylor prevailed, and in the USA, at the end of the 1800s, Boas, being of German origin, naturally used the Tylorian sense of culture.

It was also Boas who threw out of anthropology the very idea of grades of civilization determining a hierarchy of societies and human groups. Rejecting the evolutionist theory, he declared the total relativity of ‘cultures.’ The ‘Boas revolution’ closely followed the Tylorian one. However, through Boas, cultural relativism actually proceeded from Nietzsche, who had brought all traditional values to trial, and announced that they were now delusive, since deprived of basis by the decline of dogmatic creeds. As it is well known, Nietzsche sought to destroy the very idea of objective reality, so that he is the father of modern relativism. The influence of Nietzschean ideas ac- counts for Boas’s basic postulate of the relativity of values in the different ‘cultures’ and his complete rejection of the value judgments of nineteenth-century evolutionism.

In the 1940s, cultural relativism received, through the American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits’s Cultural Anthropology (1948), the support of Ernest Cassirer’s German historical idealism (1942). According to Herskovits, exactly following Cassirer, human beings are living in a symbolic universe built by them: the universe of ‘culture,’ and so know no reality but the symbolic, that is, cultural. Herskovits asserts that all human experience of the physical world as well as of society are determined by enculturation, and accordingly culturally mediated. In this theory, all perceptions, evaluations, and judgments are a function of the cultural system to which one belongs, and are relative to it. Since Herskovits as well as Cassirer consider that all ‘reality’ is perceived through the screen of ‘culture,’ this one is deemed to be the measure of all things.

The Tylorian sense of ‘culture’ has been very useful for cultural relativists, as it permitted them to dispense with the word ‘civilization’ in order to avoid the closely related ideas of hierarchy and comparative judgment. Being based upon the determinist assumption that values are a function or product of each ‘culture,’ cultural relativism does infer that all value judgments are necessarily culturally conditioned or determined. Therefore they are deemed to have no validity outside the cultural context from which they proceed. Value judgments concerning alien ‘cultures’ are therefore strictly forbiden by cultural relativism, which reproaches those judgments with being the product of a preference for one’s own ‘culture’ and a prejudice against the other ones: namely ethnocentrism, which twentieth-century relativistic anthropology has regarded as the supreme offense, as much as evolutionism itself. Since the relativistic postulate of comparative judgment having no validity is asserted to be accurate, the corollary cannot but be the principle of an equivalent validity of all value systems. So that the American anthropologist David Bidney could observe (1968):

‘Reverence for cultural values, rather than reverence for life, becomes the absolute virtue advocated by the cultural relativist.’

The term ‘culture’ used in a comprehensive sense has been the main vector of the egalitarianist assumption ensuing from cultural relativism, according to which all value systems must be considered to be equally legitimate units. If the meaning of the word ‘culture’ is taken to include ways of life as well as social relations, there is ‘culture’ everywhere. Whereas the humanistic idea of culture stands opposite to the absence of culture, or even the barbarity, of certain individuals, groups, or societies, the very fact of absence of culture or barbarity is denied by using the term ‘culture’ about these individuals, groups, or societies. Since everybody belongs to a social structure and a value system, everybody is regarded as belonging to a ‘culture’ or a ‘subculture.’ Sociologists as well as anthropologists consider each society and each social group to have its ‘culture,’ and they usually strictly obey the relativistic prohibition of comparative evaluations of values, which would lead to classifications showing the factual existence of various grades of civilization. The widely inclusive conception of ‘culture’ of the social sciences is used with the purpose of eliminating the very idea of uncultured groups. It allows indeed the social scientist to report the presence of ‘culture’ in the working class or in a primitive tribe as well as in the most learned circles. The ‘everything is culture’ use of the word ‘culture’ works just like an optical illusion. It brings about that fallacious value of equality of all societies and groups which is imperatively ordered by cultural relativism. The term ‘culture’ taken in a comprehensive sense is a necessity of cultural relativism, of which it is the most indispensable tool as well as the very basis.

The theory according to which all reality is symbolic is in no way cogent. As has been noticed by Raymond Boudon and Francois Bourricaud (1982), if that means that all human experience is mediated by a symbolic system like articulate speech or science, it is merely a commonplace statement. And if symbolic is taken as synonymous with ficticious, it is an erroneous idea. Likewise, the rejection of value judgments actually lacks logical validity. As a matter of fact, the assumption of an equivalent value of all ‘cultures’ is itself nothing but a value judgment, hidden behind the virtuous looking facade of cultural relativism. The prohibition of value judgments thus results from a value judgment. As emphasized by Allan Bloom (1987), the assertion of values and ‘cultures’ being relative is by no means proved: it is just a philosophical postulate, which stems from a political intention. And when cultural relativism disclaims freedom of judgment and rational analysis in order to prevent the development of any prejudice against alterity, it is just a way to avoid subjecting our own prejudices to logical criticism. Hence, the social sciences have the utmost need, as David Bidney (1968) had already stressed, ‘to transcend the limitations of both cultural relativism and ethnocentrism through the pursuit of scientific truths concerning facts and values.’

However, the relativistic trend prevails, particularly in anthropology. Since nearly all twentieth-century anthropologists have repudiated evolutionism, Leslie A. White (1968) and his school being the main exception, anthropology has been, through the twentieth century and at the present time, essentially relativistic. Despite the endeavors of some authors like Melford E. Spiro (1987) and Robin Horton (1973), or like the British anthropologist Robin Fox (1989) who has turned to sociobiology, anthropology and cultural relativism may almost be taken as synonyms. The US social anthropologist Clifford Geertz did affirm (1984) that cultural relativism was justified by the factual obviousness that value systems are of course disparate. According to Geertz (1984), relativism has such an obvious validity that it is impossible to resist it. Yet, what is most obvious is that relativism is the core and basis of culturalism, and that twentieth-century anthropology works as a relativistic machine. Accordingly, the relativists’ fancy for anthropology is in no way surprising. They have often stated anthropology to be the queen of sciences. The cognitive relativist Feyerabend even asserted (1975) that it was the sole genuine science.

The use of a broad sense of the word ‘culture’ as a relativistic tool is also present in the other social sciences, especially in sociology. Such is the case in the neomarxist functionalist theory of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1979). In the 1960s and 1970s, Bourdieu emphasized the statement that culture (in the classical and humanistic sense of the term) was nothing but a ‘culture’ expressing the beliefs and behavior of the ‘dominant class.’ According to him, this ‘culture’ is just a ‘culture’ amongst many others, but it is imposed as the only legitimate one by school, universities, and other cultural institutions, in order to bring about what he terms ‘social reproduction.’ Since they have been brought up in other ‘cultures,’ working-class children are considered by Bourdieu to be handicapped when facing at school a ‘culture’ which is not their own one, while children from the dominant class have all the means to be successful with it. So, stresses Bourdieu, the domination of the same upper class can be reproduced from generation to generation. Bourdieu deems culture to have in itself no real superiority, but just to be useful for the members of the dominant class in order to distinguish themselves from the rest of the society. He regards artistic or literary value, which he believes to have no actual existence in itself, as merely resulting from the preferences of the dominant class, and hence as being an illusion. Therefore, the combination of Bourdieu’s Marxist ideology with his perfect relativism leads to an absolute cultural nihilism.

In sociology, the culturalist holistic idea of values being the product of closed wholes has probably been taken in the most absolute way by ethnomethodologists. According to them, ‘cultures’, subcultures, and any other groups are so much closed units that their values have solely an inside meaning. And they even assert that observers can understand nothing of the cultural products of a group in which they are not immersed. So ethnomethodologists deny the validity of outside observers’ studies, affirming that their supposed understanding would be distorted by the fallacy of sociocentrism. Although ethnomethodologists do not consider, as most culturalists do, social actors to be ‘puppets of their culture,’ ethnomethodology is certainly an extremely relativistic sociological theory, based upon an ‘everything is culture’ conception.

Several streams of sociology explain beliefs and behavior by the mechanical model of inculcation and conditioning, just as does cultural anthropology. So does the neomarxist functionalism of Bourdieu (1979), with the theory or habitus thought as a class-conditioned behavior. But the idea of inculcation and conditioning by means of socialization is also present in the whole Durkheimian trend, and even to a certain extent in Parsons ‘functionalism’, since it particularly stresses social integration. And, of course, behaviourists following B. F. Skinner’s positivistic line regard moral instincts as a product of social conditioning.

As they have to study the diversity of ‘cultures,’ and as this term has long been linked to the idea of relativism, anthropologists have a professional slant to take cultural relativism as granted. But the prevailing of relativism in the social sciences is very much strengthened by the general relativistic atmosphere which characterizes postmodern societies. Relativism has invaded literary criticism, with the deconstructionistic theory of the French Heideggerians Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, and the French Heideggerian Michel Foucault has initiated a relativistic interpretation of history. As Allan Bloom (1987) and Raymond Boudon (1990) have pointed out, all those theories mainly derive from the Nietzschean assertion that there are no facts, but only interpretations: a famous phrase that Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and their followers wrongly separated from its context, so that they unduly took it literally. These same authors’ theories have been used as a justification by the relativistic movement known as political correctness, which since the 1980s has dominated US universities. Relativism has even been epistemologicaly theorized, chiefly by Thomas S. Kuhn (1962) and Paul K. Feyerabend (1975). Feyerabend’s anarchist cognitive theory, which does not differentiate science from archaic myths or from magic, is clearly a counter-epistemology. With Feyerabend’s well-known saying, ‘anything goes,’ relativism leads to nihilism.

The lack of validity of these theories has been pointed out by Raymond Boudon (1990, 1995), who demonstrated that cognitive relativism was based upon an epistemological archaism. He also observed, about the assertion of an obvious legitimacy of relativim, that since Geertz (1984) considered all conceptions of the world to emanate from ‘cultures,’ relativism itself was one of these conception. There-fore, in a culturalist perspective, relativism in no way can be a methodological rule that is above suspicion, but just a plain ‘cultural product’ of postmodern societies. In fact, it is because relativism does fit in with them that it is at the present time so fashionable. Here lies its strength, which is extremely dangerous for culture.

4. Cultures Versus Culture

The ‘everything is culture’ conception is no longer confined to anthropological and sociological books and journals, but has spread beyond, so that the broad sense of ‘culture’ now belongs to everyday language. It is daily used by the media, and has become popularized.

There is even in several countries a ministerial department entrusted with ‘culture’—an idea proceeding from the USSR. Such a department was created in France as early as 1958, and departments were established in the 1980s and 1990s in some other Western democracies, such as Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Germany. The French Culture Ministry has adopted since the 1970s, and still more since 1981, a comprehensive sense of ‘culture.’ In the sociological research ordered by this department, the different ways of filling spare time, and all kinds of fun and entertainment, are called ‘cultural habits.’ In a political purpose, the ‘wide ethnographic sense’ of culture is officially acknowledged by the French government.

The term ‘culture’ as it is used in postmodern societies, particularly in the media, has mostly nothing to do with genuine culture, but is more frequently used in order to refer to beliefs, behaviors, ways of life, customs, habits, and even the whole of society: ‘culture’ is now often used instead of the term ‘identity.’

Having a relativistic effect, a broad use of the term ‘culture’ puts everything on the same level, so that fun and entertainment are regarded as equal to genuine culture. As pointed out by Allan Bloom (1987), the failure of culture becomes a ‘culture.’ Though the present democratic societies formally worship ‘culture’, the popularization of the relativistic use of the term actually destroys in the whole society the very idea of the eminent value of culture. Here is indeed the main danger for culture.

Raymond Boudon (1999), following Tocqueville, has shown that relativism is the very theory congruent with democratic societies, as it conciliates their egalitarian passion with the variety of the opinions. Hence, through the popularized relativistic use of the term ‘culture’, it is democratic egalitarianism that stands as an adversary of culture.

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