RELIGION

Durkheim’s Functionalist Approach

• Collective conscience 

  • People come to share common sentiments and value

• Profane: everyday things

• Sacred: religious meaning

Collective effervescence

• When people get together to perform religious acts or rituals, can generate shared emotions

  • Totems: objects symbolizing the sacred

  • Rituals: public practices to connect to the sacred

Conflict theory

• Weber 

• Routinization of charisma

• Charisma is unstable → religion needs to stabilize charisma into institutional structures 

  • Create institutional structures through: succession planning, institutionalization, economic organizations

Routinization of charisma

• term for the transformation of divine enlightenment into a permanent feature of everyday life

• makes religion less responsive to the needs of ordinary people

• supports social inequalities and injustices.

Marxist and feminist critiques

• two main criticisms against Durkheim’s theory:

  • overemphasizes religion’s role in maintaining social cohesion

  • ignores the fact that when religion does increase social cohesion, it often reinforces social inequality.

Religion and the Subordination of Women

• Feminists note that major world religions placed women in a subordinate position → reinforcing patriarchy.

• Major world religions are becoming less patriarchal in many parts of the world

Religion and Class Inequality

• Religion has often supported class inequality.

• Marx called religion: opium of the people

  • tranquillizes the underprivileged into accepting their lot in life.

• Church authorities often support gender and class inequality 

  • religiously inspired protest against inequality often erupts from below

Symbolic Interactionist Interpretation

Weber and the Problem of Social Change

• Weber stressed the way religion can contribute to social change.

• Weber made a connection between the rise of capitalism and meanings people attached to religious ideas

  • Need to prove intense worldly activity through displays of industry, punctuality, and frugality in everyday life

Challenges to Weber’s Symbolic Interactionist Argument

• Protestant ethic and strength of capitalist development correlation is weaker than Weber thought

  • Forms of pro-capitalism had existed previous to protestantism 

• Ex. Catholicism has coexisted with vigorous capitalist growth, and Protestantism with relative economic stagnation in some places

Secularization thesis

• most widely accepted argument in the sociology of religion until the 1990s. 

• Religious institutions, actions, and consciousness are on the decline worldwide

  • will one day disappear altogether

• Medieval and early europe → Church was the centre of life in both its spiritual and its worldly dimensions

• 20th century → scientific and other forms of rationalism were replacing religious authority.

Secular Transition Thesis

• Follows classic secularization thesis, by predicting a longstanding, progressive, and generational decline in religion over time.

Revised secularization thesis

• Holds that an overall trend toward the diminishing importance of religion is unfolding in different ways throughout the world

Individualization

• Instead of being constrained to act according to traditional norms and values, people have greater freedom to decide who they are and what they want to be.

Post-secular

The co-existence and co-mingling of religious and secular tendencies in society

Critiques of secularization theory

• personal subjective religious belief remain strongly present despite declines of Institutional religion

• While the West is secularizing much of the rest of the world is becoming more religious

The Religious Nones

• socially constructed category 

• Have no religious affiliation → they do not gaf

• Constitute the most common religious group in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom

Religious Nones are more likely to be

• Male than female 

• Under the age of 35 than to be 35 or older 

• Unmarried rather than married 

• Born in Canada rather than born elsewhere

Reasons for religious non-identification

• Left religion because of its stance on certain social issues (e.g., same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion) 

• Grew up in irreligious household – socialized to be a religious none 

• Have developed an intellectual disagreement with religious belief

Religious affiliation in Canada from 2011 and 2021

• The proportion of the population with christian religion has been decreasing for 20 years.

• Proportion for other religions or no religious affiliation has been rising 

Retreat

• The decline of religion in Canada is evidenced by the growing segment of religious nones.

Reinvention

Individualizing tendencies present in modern society allows for people to express individually constructed spirituality. (invisible religion)

Resurgence

Those who remain religious become more committed

Market Model (Rodney Stark)

• understand why secularization has not taken its predicted course → proposed viewing religion as a market.

  • services are demanded by people who desire religious activities. 

• Religious denominations are similar to product brands offering different “flavours” of religious experience.

Religious monopoly

• when one religious body has acquired special privileges from the state, preventing other religious bodies from selling their brand to consumers.

• When consumers can access only one brand, satisfaction is limited to those whose needs match what is offered. 

Religious pluralism

• In countries that permit open competition among religions

  • market rewards religious bodies that successfully meet the needs of consumers 

  • The market punishes religious bodies with extinction (that do not attract consumer interest.)

• The end result is religious pluralism, which refers to the diverse array of religions and religious beliefs in a given area.

Sects

• Usually form by breaking away from churches because of disagreement about church doctrine

• Sects are less integrated into society and less bureaucratized than churches are.

Denomination

• Midway on the continuum between church and sect

  • it does not seek to distance itself from the world

  • is bureaucratically organized

  • generally maintains a tolerant relationship with other denominations.

New religious movements (NRM)

• Groups headed by charismatic leaders with a unique religious vision that rejects mainstream culture and society.

Sects and NRMs experience one of three outcomes:

1. They may disappear. 

2. The group persists, but in the process becomes more church-like. 

3. They may become institutionalized.

Market theory of religion is not watertight:

• A near-monopoly in religion exists in many Muslim-majority countries, but religious observance is widespread.

  • widespread observance is a relatively recent phenomenon

• Both Canada and the United States have unregulated markets, but the United States is a more religious nation than Canada is.

The Future of Religion

• In the 21st century → transformation of the religious landscape will likely continue.

• Also at the same time → an expanded menu that is available to Canadians today will likely foster even greater religious pluralism in the future.

Religious Affiliation in Canada

• Europeans who first settled Canada were mostly Christian:

  • English-speaking Protestants 

  • French-speaking Roman Catholics

• Jews arrived beginning in the eighteenth century. 

• Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists arrived in the twentieth century.