Sociology of Religion

The sociology of religion studies religion as a social fact, how it shapes and is shaped by community, authority, class, and social change, and how religious groups form, endure, transform, and dissolve. It is one of the founding subjects of sociology itself, addressed by all three of the discipline's classic figures. Emile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, argued that religion is fundamentally social: the sacred-profane distinction is its defining category, and the real object of worship, behind the totem or the god, is society itself, whose collective effervescence in ritual generates the sense of a power greater than the individual. Max Weber analyzed religion as a force in history and social action, most famously in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which argued that the ascetic discipline of Calvinism helped shape modern capitalism, and gave the field enduring concepts: charisma and its "routinization," the process of rationalization, and the typology of prophet, priest, and sect. Karl Marx offered the influential critique of religion as the "opium of the people," an ideological expression of and consolation for material suffering.

Later sociology developed the church-sect typology (and the study of denominations and new religious movements), theories of secularization and its limits, and the analysis of civil religion, religious markets, and fundamentalism. The field is distinguished by its focus on the collective and institutional life of religion, not what believers believe in the abstract, but how religion works as a structure within, and a shaper of, human society.

For most of the twentieth century the field's organising expectation was secularisation: that modernity, meaning industrial economies, urbanisation, mass education and science, would steadily reduce the social importance of religion, and that the pattern visible in Western Europe was the future everywhere.

It did not happen that way, and the retraction was unusually public. One of the thesis's most prominent exponents stated in the 1990s that he and most of his colleagues had been wrong, and that the assumption of a link between modernisation and decline could not be sustained against the evidence. The United States remained highly religious while becoming highly modern. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity grew rapidly across the global South. Political Islam became a major force. Religion in Eastern Europe survived decades of state atheism and returned.

What replaced the thesis is not a single successor. One line of work treats religious institutions as operating in something like a market, with pluralism and competition producing vitality and state-supported monopolies producing complacency, which accounts for the American case reasonably well and other cases less so. Another argues that what declines with development is not belief but the authority of religious institutions over other spheres, which is a narrower and more defensible claim.

Western Europe now looks like the case requiring explanation rather than the template, which is a considerable reversal for a discipline founded largely in it.