RELIGION

Why do sociologists study religion? For centuries, humankind has sought to understand
and explain the “meaning of life.” Many philosophers believe this contemplation and the desire to
understand our place in the universe are what differentiate humankind from other species.
Religion, in one form or another, has been found in all human societies since human societies
first appeared. Archaeological digs have revealed ancient ritual objects, ceremonial burial sites,
and other religious artifacts. Much social conflict and even wars have resulted from religious
disputes. To understand a culture, sociologists must study its religion.

What is religion? Pioneer sociologist Émile Durkheim described it with the ethereal
statement that it consists of “things that surpass the limits of our knowledge” (1915). He went on
to elaborate: Religion is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is
to say set apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community,
called a church, all those who adhere to them” (1915). Some people associate religion with places
of worship (a synagogue or church), others with a practice (confession or meditation), and still
others with a concept that guides their daily lives (like dharma or sin). All of these people can
agree that religion is a system of beliefs, values, and practices concerning what a person holds
sacred or considers to be spiritually significant.

Religion can also serve as a filter for examining other issues in society and other
components of a culture. For example, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the
United States, it became important in North America for teachers, church leaders, and the media
to educate citizens about Islam to prevent stereotyping and to promote religious tolerance.
Sociological tools and methods, such as surveys, polls, interviews, and analysis of historical data,
can be applied to the study of religion in a culture to help us better understand the role religion
plays in people’s lives and the way it influences society.

Eight Elements of Religions

1. BELIEF SYSTEM or WORLDVIEW: Many beliefs that fit together in a system to make sense
of the universe and our place in it.
2. COMMUNITY: The belief system is shared, and its ideals are practiced by a group.
3. CENTRAL STORIES/MYTHS: Stories that help explain the beliefs of a group; these are told
over and over again and sometimes performed by members of the group. They may or may not
be factual.
4. RITUALS: Beliefs are explained, taught, and made real through ceremonies.
5. ETHICS: Rules about how to behave; these rules are often thought to have come from a deity
or supernatural place, but they might also be seen as guidelines created by the group over time.
6. CHARACTERISTIC EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES: Most religions share emotions such as
awe, mystery, guilt, joy, devotion, conversion, inner peace, etc.
7. MATERIAL EXPRESSION: Religions use things to perform rituals or to express or represent
beliefs, such as: statues, paintings, music, flowers, incense, clothes, architecture, and specific
sacred locations.
8. SACREDNESS: Religions see some things as sacred and some not sacred (or profane). Some
objects, actions, people and places may share in the sacredness or express it.
The Functions of Religion

Much of the work of Émile Durkheim stressed the functions that religion serves for society
regardless of how it is practiced or of what specific religious beliefs a society favors. Durkheim’s
insights continue to influence sociological thinking today on the functions of religion.

First, religion gives meaning and purpose to life. Many things in life are difficult to
understand. That was certainly true, as we have seen, in prehistoric times, but even in today’s
highly scientific age, much of life and death remains a mystery, and religious faith and belief help
many people make sense of the things science cannot tell us.

Second, religion reinforces social unity and stability. This was one of Durkheim’s most
important insights. Religion strengthens social stability in at least two ways. First, it gives people
a common set of beliefs and thus is an important agent of socialization (see Chapter 4
“Socialization”). Second, the communal practice of religion, as in houses of worship, brings people
together physically, facilitates their communication and other social interaction, and thus
strengthens their social bonds.

A third function of religion is related to the one just discussed. Religion is an agent of social
control and thus strengthens social order. Religion teaches people moral behavior and thus helps
them learn how to be good members of society. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Ten
Commandments are perhaps the most famous set of rules for moral behavior.

A fourth function of religion is greater psychological and physical well-being. Religious

faith and practice can enhance psychological well-being by being a source of comfort to people
in times of distress and by enhancing their social interaction with others in places of worship.
Many studies find that people of all ages, not just the elderly, are happier and more satisfied with
their lives if they are religious. Religiosity also apparently promotes better physical health, and
some studies even find that religious people tend to live longer than those who are not religious
(Moberg, 2008). We return to this function later.

A final function of religion is that it may motivate people to work for positive social change.
Religion played a central role in the development of the Southern civil rights movement a few
decades ago. Religious beliefs motivated Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists to
risk their lives to desegregate the South. Black churches in the South also served as settings in
which the civil rights movement held meetings, recruited new members, and raised money
(Morris, 1984).

Religion and Social Support

According to many social science studies, psychological well-being is positively correlated

with religious engagement.

Religion and Health

There is now extensive research suggesting that religious people are happier and less
stressed than their non-religious counterparts. Social scientists have identified a number of
mechanisms that might explain why religion might make an individual happier, none of which rest
on the explanation of divine intervention or supernatural phenomenon. Certain features of
religious practice may facilitate greater well-being for members. These include the following:

• basic social contact

• a large, non-family network of social support
• the positive mental health one derived from optimism and volunteering,
• coping strategies to enhance one’s ability to deal with stress
• a worldview that prevents existential questions from arising

Scientific Studies of Religion and Health

The Legatum Prosperity Index reflects the research that suggests that there is a positive
link between religious engagement and well-being. People who report that God is very important
in their lives are on average more satisfied with their lives, after accounting for their income, age
and other individual characteristics that might bias results. A 1993 study by Kosmin & Lachman
indicated that people without a religious affiliation appeared to be at greater risk for depressive
symptoms than individuals affiliated with a religion. Surveys by Gallup, the National Opinion
Research Center and the Pew Organization conclude that spiritually committed people are twice
as likely to report being “very happy” than the least religiously committed people. An analysis of
over 200 studies contends that high religiousness predicts a lower risk of depression, a lower risk
of drug abuse, fewer suicide attempts. Those same studies associate religious involvement with
reports of higher satisfaction with sex life and a sense of well-being. A review of 498 peer-review
academic studies revealed that a large majority of them showed a positive correlation between
religious commitment and higher levels of perceived well-being of self-esteem. These same
studies revealed a positive correlation between religious involvement and lower levels of
hypertension, depression, and clinical delinquency. A meta-analysis of 34 recent studies
published between 1990 and 2001 found that religiosity has a salutary relationship with
psychological adjustment. Religious involvement was related to less psychological distress, more
life satisfaction, and better self-actualization. Finally, as signaled in a recent review of 850
research papers, the majority of well-conducted studies suggest that higher levels of religious
involvement are positively associated with indicators of psychological well-being (life satisfaction,
happiness, positive affect, and higher morale). In these studies, religious involvement was
associated with less depression, fewer suicidal thoughts, and less drug alcohol abuse.

SECULARIZATION

Jose Casanova, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences

(Second Edition), 2015

The Secularization Paradigm

Secularization might have been the only theory within the social sciences that was able to
attain the status of a paradigm. In one form or another, with the possible exception of Alexis de
Tocqueville, Vilfredo Pareto, and William James, the thesis of secularization was shared by all
the founders. Paradoxically, the consensus was such that for over a century the theory of
secularization remained not only uncontested but also untested. Even Durkheim's and Weber's
work, while serving as the foundation for later theories of secularization, offer scant empirical
analysis of modern processes of secularization, particularly of the way in which those processes
affect the place, nature and role of religion in the modern world. Even after freeing themselves
from some of the rationalist and positivist prejudices about religion, they still share the major
intellectual assumptions of the age about the future of religion.
For Durkheim, the old gods were growing old or already dead and the dysfunctional
historical religions would not be able to compete with the new functional gods and secular
moralities which modern societies were bound to generate. For Weber, the process of intellectual
rationalization, carried to its culmination by modern science, had ended in the complete
disenchantment of the world, while the functional differentiation of the secular spheres had
displaced the old integrative monotheism, replacing it with the modern polytheism of values and
their unceasing and irreconcilable struggle. The old churches remain only as a refuge for those
‘who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man’ and are willing to make the inevitable ‘intellectual
sacrifice.’
Only in the 1960s one finds the first attempts to develop more systematic and empirically
grounded formulations of the theory of secularization in the works of Acquaviva (1961), Berger
(1967), Luckmann (1963), and Wilson (1966). It was then, at the very moment
when theologians were celebrating the death of God and the secular city, that the first flaws in the
theory became noticeable and the first systematic critiques were raised by Martin
(1969) and Greeley (1972) in what constituted the first secularization debate. For the first time it
became possible to separate the theory of secularization from its ideological origins in the
Enlightenment critique of religion and to distinguish the theory of secularization, as a theory of the
modern autonomous differentiation of the secular and the religious spheres, from the thesis that
the end result of the process of modern differentiation would be the progressive erosion, decline
and eventual disappearance of religion. Greeley (1972) already pointed out that the secularization
of society, which he conceded, by no means implied the end of church religiosity, the emergence
of ‘secular man,’ or the social irrelevance of religion in modern secular societies. Yet after three
decades the secularization debate remains unabated. Defenders of the theory tend to point to the
secularization of society and to the decline of church religiosity in Europe as substantiating
evidence, while critics tend to emphasize the persistent religiosity in the United States and
widespread signs of religious revival as damaging counterevidence that justify discarding the
whole theory as a ‘myth.’

Fundamentalism, type of conservative religious movement characterized by

the advocacy of strict conformity to sacred texts. Once used exclusively to refer to American
Protestants who insisted on the inerrancy of the Bible, the term fundamentalism was applied more
broadly beginning in the late 20th century to a wide variety of religious movements. Indeed, in the
broad sense of the term, many of the major religions of the world may be said to have
fundamentalist movements. For full treatment of fundamentalism in American
Protestantism, see fundamentalism, Christian.

The study of fundamentalism

In the late 20th century the most influential—and the most controversial—study of
fundamentalism was The Fundamentalism Project (1991–95), a series of five volumes edited by
the American scholars Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. Marty and Appleby viewed
fundamentalism primarily as the militant rejection of secular modernity. They argued that
fundamentalism is not just traditional religiosity but an inherently political phenomenon, though
this dimension may sometimes be dormant. Marty and Appleby also contended that
fundamentalism is inherently totalitarian, insofar as it seeks to remake all aspects of society and
government on religious principles.

Despite its unprecedented breadth, The Fundamentalism Project has been criticized on a
number of grounds. One objection is that many of the movements that Marty and Appleby
categorize as fundamentalist seem to be motivated less by the rejection of modernity than by
social, ethnic, and nationalistic grievances. Indeed, in many cases the people who join such
movements have not suffered more than others from the stress and dislocation typically
associated with modernization, nor are such stresses and dislocations prominently reflected in
the rhetoric or the actions of these movements. The term modernity itself, moreover, is inherently
vague; Marty and Appleby, like many other scholars, use it freely but do little to explain what it
means.

Another criticism of Marty and Appleby’s approach is that it is inappropriate to use the
term fundamentalism, which originally referred to a movement in American Protestantism, to
describe movements in other religions, particularly non-Western ones. This practice has been
denounced as a kind of Eurocentric “conceptual imperialism”—an especially sensitive charge in
the Islamic world, where those designated fundamentalists are outraged by Western political,
economic, and cultural domination.

A third objection is that the significant negative connotations of the

term fundamentalism—usually including bigotry, zealotry, militancy, extremism, and fanaticism—
make it unsuitable as a category of scholarly analysis. On the other hand, some scholars have
argued that the negative connotations of the term aptly characterize the nature of fundamentalist
movements, many of which seek the violent overthrow of national governments and the imposition
of particular forms of worship and religious codes of conduct in violation of widely
recognized human rights to political self-determination and freedom of worship.

THE FUNCTIONS OF EDUCATION

Functional theory stresses the functions that education serves in fulfilling a society’s
various needs. Perhaps the most important function of education is socialization. If children need
to learn the norms, values, and skills they need to function in society, then education is a primary
vehicle for such learning. Schools teach the three Rs, as we all know, but they also teach many
of the society’s norms and values. In the United States, these norms and values include respect
for authority, patriotism (remember the Pledge of Allegiance?), punctuality, individualism, and
competition. Regarding these last two values, American students from an early age compete as
individuals over grades and other rewards. The situation is quite the opposite in Japan, where, as
we saw in Chapter 4 “Socialization”, children learn the traditional Japanese values of harmony
and group belonging from their schooling (Schneider & Silverman, 2010). They learn to value their
membership in their homeroom, or kumi, and are evaluated more on their kumi’s performance
than on their own individual performance. How well a Japanese child’s kumi does is more
important than how well the child does as an individual.

A second function of education is social integration. For a society to work, functionalists

say, people must subscribe to a common set of beliefs and values. As we saw, the development
of such common views was a goal of the system of free, compulsory education that developed in
the 19th century. Thousands of immigrant children in the United States today are learning English,
U.S. history, and other subjects that help prepare them for the workforce and integrate them into
American life. Such integration is a major goal of the English-only movement, whose advocates
say that only English should be used to teach children whose native tongue is Spanish,
Vietnamese, or whatever other language their parents speak at home. Critics of this movement
say it slows down these children’s education and weakens their ethnic identity (Schildkraut, 2005).

A third function of education is social placement. Beginning in grade school, students are
identified by teachers and other school officials either as bright and motivated or as less bright
and even educationally challenged. Depending on how they are identified, children are taught at
the level that is thought to suit them best. In this way they are prepared in the most appropriate
way possible for their later station in life. Whether this process works as well as it should is an
important issue, and we explore it further when we discuss school tracking shortly.

Social and cultural innovation is a fourth function of education. Our scientists cannot make
important scientific discoveries and our artists and thinkers cannot come up with great works of
art, poetry, and prose unless they have first been educated in the many subjects they need to
know for their chosen path.

Education also involves several latent functions, functions that are by-products of going to
school and receiving an education rather than a direct effect of the education itself. One of these
is child care. Once a child starts kindergarten and then first grade, for several hours a day the
child is taken care of for free. The establishment of peer relationships is another latent function of
schooling. Most of us met many of our friends while we were in school at whatever grade level,
and some of those friendships endure the rest of our lives. A final latent function of education is
that it keeps millions of high school students out of the full-time labor force. This fact keeps the
unemployment rate lower than it would be if they were in the labor force.

EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY

Conflict theory does not dispute most of the functions just described. However, it does
give some of them a different slant and talks about various ways in which education perpetuates
social inequality (Hill, Macrine, & Gabbard, 2010; Liston, 1990). One example involves the
function of social placement. As most schools track their students starting in grade school, the
students thought by their teachers to be bright are placed in the faster tracks (especially in reading
and arithmetic), while the slower students are placed in the slower tracks; in high school, three
common tracks are the college track, vocational track, and general track.

Such tracking does have its advantages; it helps ensure that bright students learn as much
as their abilities allow them, and it helps ensure that slower students are not taught over their
heads. But, conflict theorists say, tracking also helps perpetuate social inequality
by locking students into faster and lower tracks. Worse yet, several studies show that students’
social class and race and ethnicity affect the track into which they are placed, even though their
intellectual abilities and potential should be the only things that matter: white, middle-class
students are more likely to be tracked “up,” while poorer students and students of color are more
likely to be tracked “down.” Once they are tracked, students learn more if they are tracked up and
less if they are tracked down. The latter tend to lose self-esteem and begin to think they have little
academic ability and thus do worse in school because they were tracked down. In this way,
tracking is thought to be good for those tracked up and bad for those tracked down. Conflict
theorists thus say that tracking perpetuates social inequality based on social class and race and
ethnicity (Ansalone, 2006; Oakes, 2005).

Social inequality is also perpetuated through the widespread use of standardized tests.
Critics say these tests continue to be culturally biased, as they include questions whose answers
are most likely to be known by white, middle-class students, whose backgrounds have afforded
them various experiences that help them answer the questions. They also say that scores on
standardized tests reflect students’ socioeconomic status and experiences in addition to their
academic abilities. To the extent this critique is true, standardized tests perpetuate social
inequality (Grodsky, Warren, & Felts, 2008).

As we will see, schools in the United States also differ mightily in their resources, learning
conditions, and other aspects, all of which affect how much students can learn in them. Simply
put, schools are unequal, and their very inequality helps perpetuate inequality in the larger society.
Children going to the worst schools in urban areas face many more obstacles to their learning
than those going to well-funded schools in suburban areas. Their lack of learning helps ensure
they remain trapped in poverty and its related problems.

Conflict theorists also say that schooling teaches a hidden curriculum, by which they mean
a set of values and beliefs that support the status quo, including the existing social hierarchy
(Booher-Jennings, 2008) (see Chapter 4 “Socialization”). Although no one plots this behind closed
doors, our schoolchildren learn patriotic values and respect for authority from the books they read
and from various classroom activities.