RELIGION: ESTABLISHING MEANING

VI. What Is Religion?

A. According to Durkheim, religion is the beliefs and practices separating the profane from the sacred, uniting adherents into a moral community.

1. Sacred refers to aspects of life having to do with the supernatural that inspire awe, reference, deep respect, or deep fear.
2. Profane refers to the ordinary aspects of everyday life.

B. Durkheim found religion to be defined by three elements: (1) beliefs that some things are sacred (forbidden, set off from the profane), (2) practices (rituals) concerning things that are considered sacred, and (3) a moral community (a church) resulting from a group’s beliefs and practices.

VII. The Functionalist Perspective

A. Religion performs functions such as (1) answering questions about ultimate meaning (the purpose of life, why people suffer); (2) uniting believers into a community that shares values and perspectives; (3) providing guidelines for life; (4) controlling behavior; (5) providing support for the government; and (6) spearheading social change (on occasion, as in the case of the civil right movement in the 1960s).

B. War and religious persecution are dysfunctions of religion.

VIII. The Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

A. Religions use symbols to provide identity and social solidarity for members. For members, these are not ordinary symbols, but sacred symbols evoking awe and reverence, which become a condensed way of communicating with others.

B. Rituals are ceremonies or repetitive practices that unite people into a moral community.

Some are designed to create a feeling of closeness with God and unity with one another.

1. Symbols, including rituals, develop from beliefs. A belief may be vague (“God is”) or specific (“God wants us to prostrate ourselves and face Mecca five times each day”).
2. Religious beliefs include values and a cosmology (unified picture of the world).

C. Religious experience is a sudden awareness of the supernatural or a feeling of coming into contact with God. Some Protestants use the term born again to describe people who have undergone a religious experience.

IX. The Conflict Perspective

A. Conflict theorists are highly critical of religion. Karl Marx called religion the “opium of the people” because he believed that the workers escape into religion. He argued that religion diverts the energies of the oppressed from changing their circumstances because believers focus on the happiness they will have in the coming world rather than on their suffering in this world.

B. Religious teachings and practices reflect a society’s inequalities. Religion legitimates social inequality; it reflects the interests of those in power by teaching that the existing social arrangements of a society represent what God desires.

X. Religion and the Spirit of Capitalism

A. Observing that European countries industrializing under capitalism, Weber questioned why some societies embraced capitalism while others clung to traditional ways. He concluded that religion held the key to modernization (transformation of traditional societies into industrial societies).

B. Weber concluded that:

1. Religion (including a Calvinistic belief in predestination and the need for reassurance as to one’s fate) is the key to the development of capitalism in Europe.
2. A change in religion (from Catholicism to Protestantism) led to a change in thought and behavior. The result was the Protestant ethic, a commitment to live a moral life and to work and be frugal.
3. The spirit of capitalism (the desire to accumulate capital as a duty, as an end in itself), which resulted from this new ethic, was a radical departure from the past.

C. Today, the spirit of capitalism and the Protestant ethic are by no means limited to Protestants; they have become cultural traits that have spread throughout the world.

XI. Types of Religious Groups

A. A cult is a new religion with few followers, whose teachings and practices put it at odds with the dominant culture and religion.
1. All religions began as cults. Cults often emerge with the appearance of a charismatic leader (exerting extraordinary appeal to a group of followers).
2. Each cult meets with rejection from society. The cult’s message is seen as a threat to the dominant culture.

B. A sect is larger than a cult but still feels substantial hostility from and toward society. If a sect grows, its members tend to become respectable in society, and the sect is changed into a church.

C. A church is a large, highly organized religious group with formal, sedate services and less emphasis on personal conversion. The religious group is highly bureaucratized (including national and international offices that give directions to local congregations). Most new members come from within the church, from children born to existing members, rather than from outside recruitment.

D. An ecclesia is a religious group that is so integrated into the dominant culture that it is difficult to tell where one begins and the other leaves off. The government and religion work together to shape the society. There is no recruitment of members, for citizenship makes everyone a member. The majority of people in the society belong in name only.

E. Although religions began as cults, not all varieties of a religion have done so. A denomination—a “brand name” within a religion (e.g., Methodist)—begins as a splinter group. On occasion, a large group within a church may disagree on some of the church’s teachings (but not its major message) and break away to form its own organization.

XII. Religion in the United States

A. Characteristics of membership in U.S. churches:

1. Membership is highest in the South and Midwest and not much lower in the East.
2. Each religious group draws members from all social classes, although some are more likely to draw members from the top of the social class system and others from the bottom. The most top-heavy are Episcopalians and Jews; the most bottom-heavy are the Baptists and Evangelicals.
3. All major religious groups in the United States draw from various racial and ethnic groups; however, people of Hispanic or Irish descent are likely to be Roman Catholics and those of Greek origin to belong to the Greek Orthodox Church; African Americans are likely to be Protestants. Worship services tend to be highly segregated along racial lines.
4. Membership rate increases steadily with age.

B. Characteristics of religious groups

1. There is a diversity of religious groups; there is no state church and no ecclesia, and no single denomination dominates.
2. The many religions compete with one another for members.
3. Today, there is a fundamentalist revival because mainstream churches fail to meet the basic religious needs of large numbers of people.
4. The electronic church, in which televangelists reach millions of viewers and raise millions of dollars, has grown. Recently, the electronic church has moved to the Internet. Some feel that the Internet may fundamentally change our ideas about God.

C. The history of U.S. churches is marked by secularization and the splintering of religious groups.

1. Initially, the founders of religious sects felt alienated from the general cultures, their values and lower social class position setting them apart.
2. As time passes, the members of the group become successful, acquiring more education, becoming middle class, and growing more respectable. They no longer feel alienated from the dominant culture. There is an attempt to harmonize religious beliefs with the new cultural orientation.
3. This process is the secularization of religion, of shifting the focus from religious matters to affairs of this world.
4. Those who have not achieved worldly success feel betrayed and break away to form a new sect.

XIII. The Future of Religion

A. Science cannot answer questions about four concerns that many people have:

the existence of God, the purpose of life, morality, and the existence of an afterlife.

1. Neither science nor political systems can replace religion, and religion will last as long as humanity lasts.