Sociological Analysis of Religion

Sociological Analysis of Religion

While there are more religions in the world than we can number, each with varying guidelines, structures, and followings, there are common functions of religion that draw people to them. People offer many reasons why they become religious and adhere to religious systems or join religious communities. Sociologists have also offered both “top-down” and “bottom-up” explanations as to why people engage in religion. These explanations, while insulting to some religious people, are readily embraced by others who recognize the social and personal benefits of their religious experiences. While we can try to understand religion from perspectives within and without, a more comprehensive explanation can be offered when we combine both emic and etic perspectives to offer a tentative “why,” as religious experience, reasoning, and formation is as varied as the people who call themselves religious. It is perhaps as flawed for us to dogmatically try to explain religion as it is for religion to dogmatically explain the world.

Adherents of religions tend to express a comfort and security derived from their religion. Most religions seek to answer the “ultimate” questions: why humanity exists, what the purpose of life is, what happens after we die, and how we should relate to other forms of life. The theoretical aspects of religion provide interpretive frameworks for religious communities to operate within—“For adherents, the truths of their religion are the ultimate lenses by which they see themselves and their universe. Religious interpretation assumes its stance directly and faithfully from its own religious language” (Paden, 87). By framing reality in these theoretical ways that often extend beyond what we can consider “objective reality,” religion can provide answers to that which objective observation cannot—by offering an extension of reality for religious believers, meaning can be extended beyond that which can be observed.

While religious institutions may provide answers for some of the most difficult questions to answer, religious communities provide a family-like structure of support. Complete with rules, hierarchies, ritual, and tradition, religious communities are extended families for many who choose to join them. Religion, for many, is social activity and a sense of belonging. Religious communities “unite to become a single unified experience, which points to the ultimate nature of the sacred and becomes a part of the inner life of each person touched by it” (Ellwood, 14). The unifying experience of religion is a large motivating factor in religious participation.

Beyond the observable qualities of religion, religion is felt by its adherents. People feel inspired and moved toward worship. Religion moves people to sing, compose poetry and literature, dance, and can create experience unlike those of everyday life. The mystical elements of religion draw many to it and yet are the least observable and most ineffable.

“It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the ‘promise’ of the dawn and of the rainbow, the ‘voice’ of the thunder, the ‘gentleness’ of the summer rain, the ‘sublimity’ of the stars, and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the religious mind still continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore, the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room or of the fields he still feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help come in reply to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with security and peace.” (James, 145)

The reasons people give for their religious affiliations are extensive and diverse in their reflections on those who call themselves religious. There is no set of characteristics which decisively draws one to religion, nor set of characteristics in a person that decisively make one religious. The reasonings for religiousness are as diverse as the people and vice versa.

Emile Durkheim theorized that religion “united members around common shared values and social goals by providing them narratives about their place within the cosmos, their common historical heritage, and purpose of life.” This top-down approach provides a view of religion as a primarily social institution which internalizes patterns of acceptable behavior and can “sanction the governing structure of a society and the exercise of its political power” (Olson, 210). For Durkheim, religion is an answer to the social needs of human beings and continues to exist in modern society because of humanity’s need for public ceremony. While this approach is certainly plausible and can also be seen compatible with many people’s emic perspectives on religion, it seems lacking as an encompassing explanation of religion.

Max Weber’s more individualistic approach to religion can be seen as the bottom-up counterpoint. Weber saw religion not as a means by which social structure could be validated and maintained, but as a “connection between [individual] motives and intentions (noumenal realm) with acts and events (phenomenal realm)… [by which] religion worked not only to challenge the established order but also created social change” (Olson, 210). Weber’s most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, seeks to exemplify how the motives of the individual (in the form of the Protestant Ethic) create social action (Capitalism). In Weber’s system, individual motivation is equally as important as the societal norms and can even be a motivating force in altering those norms and producing change within society.

While both Weber and Durkheim offer compelling explanations of religious action and the motivations for religion by explaining the functionality of religion, both explanations are incomplete without the consideration of the reasons which believers provide for their own involvement and experiences of religion. Sociological explanations can offer answers for us in trying to understand the absurd nature of religious piety, which in its own self-explanation, can often be understood as devoting enormous amounts of time, energy, and money into worship of entities that cannot be seen or known through any objective experience. The basis of these practices, according to those who perform them, is fundamentally in relation to subjective experiences of the nouminous, which though often lengthily described, are frequently ineffable and seldom can be explained in meaningful ways to those outside of the experience. In this sense, “understanding” the practice must truly be emic, though explaining the practice can easily be done sociologically (as well as through other disciplines).

It could also be noted that the Western world’s bias toward science and scientific objectivity may be fundamentally at odds with a true understanding of religion, which is a primarily subjective of the world, language, and scripture. Much of the Western world has turned away from religion since the scientific revolution, the circulation and consideration of Darwin’s evolutionary model, and the scientific models that can be used to reframe religious experiences as natural processes. The endeavor to understand religion scientifically may be in vain (or at very least, inadequate) simply because of the nature of religion.

Prominent sociologists have attempted to analyze religion from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. These efforts have shown us much about the nature of religion and religious communities, yet they are incomplete on their own. Both perspectives need to be incorporated into our understanding of religion if we are to understand it most completely.

I would suggest that efforts to explain religion are useful, not only for the sake of curiosity, but for the sake of the communities themselves, which can learn from these analyses, and for society at large, that it may learn how to predict and work with religious institutions and religious people. The pluralistic nature of today’s global world and its success as such is dependent on our ability to understand each other—this begins with understanding the cosmologies within which people operate, which are often dominated by their religious frameworks. To understand religion, sociological perspectives are useful in their analyses of group and individual behavior. Etic approaches from a variety of disciplines can provide useful perspectives on religion, religious people, and the belief systems which citizens of this world operate within. However competent these disciplines may be in describing and predicting religious behaviors and religious communities, the incorporation of the adherents’ perspective is essential to understanding how they operate and why. That said, because of the nature of religion’s emphasis on subjective experience, perhaps we cannot completely grasp the internal perspective of religious communities without being sincere members of them. However, this should not halt the continual efforts of sociologists and scientists and scholars within other fields from attempting to describe and understand religion; the endeavor cannot be in vain if it leads to an increased understanding of other people in the world.

Works Cited
Ellwood, Robert S. and McGraw, Barbara L. Many Peoples, Many Faiths: Women and Men in the World Religions. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2005.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Modern Library Publishing, 1994.

Olson, Carl. Theory and Method in the Study of Religion: A Collection of Critical Readings. Belmont, CA: Wordsworth Publishing, 2003.

Paden, William E. Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.