Explaining Religion Without Asking if It Is True

Since the nineteenth century, sociologists and anthropologists have offered several distinct explanations of religion in terms of what it does in a society or a mind rather than in terms of whether its specific claims are true, a deliberate methodological bracketing this atlas records without adopting. The functionalist account, in the tradition descending from Emile Durkheim, describes religion as binding a society together, marking its boundaries and reinforcing shared values and social solidarity through shared ritual and belief.

Peter Berger's sociology of knowledge describes religion as constructing and sustaining a plausibility structure, a socially maintained sacred canopy that makes a society's account of reality feel self evidently true to its members, an account religion shares this stabilizing function with other socially maintained systems of meaning. Intellectualist and cognitive accounts, descending from older armchair anthropology and developed considerably further by the modern cognitive science of religion, explain religious belief as an outgrowth of ordinary cognitive tendencies, including the mind's propensity to detect agency and intention behind events, applied to questions a society's available scientific knowledge cannot yet answer.