Sociology of Religion

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The sociology of religion is a special field of sociology and at the same time of religious studies . It deals with the social requirements of religion , with the social forms that religion takes, and the influence of religion on societies, as well as with the influence of the changed society on religion. The sociology of religion covers a wide field and ranges from contributions to social theory (which, for example, describe the function of religion for society as a whole) to the microsociological investigation of individual religious groups and religious practices.

Basic concepts

religion

Sociology has not developed a uniform concept of religion, rather the authors start from different religious concepts. A distinction is made between substantive and functional definitions of religion:

  1. Substantial definitions attempt to determine characteristic features of religion that distinguish it "substantial" (in terms of its nature, content) from other social phenomena, for example the experience of God or the sacred . Immanent actions and beliefs are only religious if they have a reference to transcendence (God, higher being, angels, etc.).
  2. Functional definitions, on the other hand, try to determine religion through its function for individual members of society or for society as a whole. Functions of religion can, for example, be the explanation of otherwise inexplicable phenomena or the legitimation of rule . Usually, however, specific functional relationships are used to define something as religious. According to Durkheim these are the function of integration, according to Marx the function of compensation or the function of coping with contingency.

In addition, there are mixed definitions that include both substantial and functional elements. Functional sociological definitions of religion have also spread due to the long prevalence of functionalist theories in international sociology. The conceptual history also speaks in favor of a functional definition of religion : The concept of religion comes from the Christian-Occidental tradition and is therefore not immediately applicable to societies outside this cultural area (see for more details: Religion ). Its simultaneous expansion to include phenomena that are difficult to understand as religious for the majority of people, as well as its limitation due to the functional reason (e.g. integration) speak against its use.

secularization

The process of secularization describes the increasing separation of religion and social processes and institutions that used to be religious. Secularization goes further than the mere abolition of spiritual dominion within the framework of secularization . While the Middle Ages were characterized by a profound religious influence on all areas of human life, religion becomes one system alongside others in the process of secularization. For example, nowadays hospitals are no longer organized solely on the basis of Christian mercy , but are considered secular (secular) institutions for the common good and are accordingly financed by the state and run professionally. Likewise, the role of the clergy in society has been subject to social change over the course of European history .

The secularization thesis or theory of secularization used in current discussions of the sociology of religion focuses on researching the binding force of religious norms for citizens and the change in religious behavior. Due to a tension between religion and modernity - or rather between religious vitality and modernization - secularization occurs in this sense. Although the process of secularization is undoubtedly associated with a loss of the influence of institutionalized religiosity (especially church- institutionalized religiosity) in many areas of life, it is still disputed whether secularization entails a loss of meaning for religion or religiosity as such, or whether it is rather a structural change in religion represents, so the religiosity of the people only changes in its form and in the way it is practiced. In this context, Thomas Luckmann speaks of secularization as a “de-churchization” or “privatization” of religiosity. In contrast, Detlef Pollack , Steve Bruce , Gert Pickel , David Voas and other religious sociologists try to use empirical studies to show that the decline in institutionalized religiosity has also been accompanied by a decline in individual religiosity.

The original theory of secularization, which in many cases assumed that religion would disappear and was the predominant paradigm of the sociology of religion until the 1960s, is generally no longer supported, as are the opposing positions in the form of religious sociological approaches such as the individualization thesis ( Thomas Luckmann , Grace Davie ) or the US market model of the religious ( Rodney Stark ). This market model has been considered the “new paradigm” of the sociology of religion since the early 1990s (Warner 1993), but it did not gain acceptance. More recent analyzes in the tradition of secularization theory emphasize the path dependency of secularization ( Ronald Inglehart , Pippa Norris, Gert Pickel ), but do not abandon the basic assumption of a loss of social significance of religion in modern societies with reference to internationally comparative survey studies.

ritual

The practice of religion is usually connected with the practice of rituals and ceremonies with which the followers of a religion shape their religious lifestyle, express their worldview or demonstrate and celebrate belonging to a community. In the context of cult and worship , such rituals very often serve the experience of transcendence , the symbolically or symbolically conveyed (but under certain circumstances definitely felt or interpreted as "real") connection with the divine or absolute (however understood) , the production and the experience of community or an interpretation that is perceived as meaningful and exaggeration of everyday life through religious symbols and ritual practices.

See also: Religious rites

Religious organizations

Religion manifests itself not only in the religious practice of rituals, but also in religious organizations , which differ in structure, hierarchy and membership requirements. Even Weber made a distinction between sects the one hand and churches other. The term 'sect', which was originally used in a scientifically neutral way, is usually clearly negative in the non-scientific context. In addition to the categorical differentiation between certain forms of organization such as church and sect, the sociology of religion also focuses its interest on the emergence of such forms of organization and the transition from one form of organization to another. Manfred Hermanns has examined the structures of governance and participation in the organization church.

Religious roles

The development of organized religiosity in rituals and organizations is accompanied by the emergence of certain social roles , such as that of the priest and the prophet . Religious leaders or groups of religious functionaries (e.g. the clergy ) can occupy an important social position in a religiously shaped society , with which social influence and privileges can be connected up to actual or claimed political rule ( clericalism ).

Religion Sociological (sometimes from the pastoral theology relied on) research dealt with the practical role of chaplains and pastors in the modern, through differentiation and competition of systems and ideologies marked social context. Their role as representatives of religion can be described sociologically (based on Anthony Giddens ) as an “expert system” that has taken the place of the traditional all-encompassing and generally applicable “system of symbols”.

History of theory

As early as the pre-Socratic Greek thinker Xenophanes († 470 BC), fragments of the sociology of religion have been passed down. The orientalist Johann David Michaelis , who was influenced by Charles de Montesquieu with his L'esprit du lois (1749), with his work Mosaic Law from 1793 is to be regarded as an important forerunner of the Enlightenment . It was here that the social 'reasonableness' of the Mosaic Laws was demonstrated in the Bible for the first time, and to test his hypotheses Michaelis also worked out an empirical questionnaire that he gave to Carsten Niebuhr and Pehr Forsskål on their famous Arab expedition.

The writings of Max Weber ( The Protestant Ethics and the “Spirit” of Capitalism , The Business Ethics of World Religions ) and Émile Durkheim ( The Elementary Forms of Religious Life ) are fundamental to the development of the sociology of religion itself .

Criticism of religion

Auguste Comte understood sociology as a natural science which, as a result of the Enlightenment , was to establish itself as a control instrument of a rational society, social physics. A sociology of religion therefore precedes the legacy of the criticism of religion , which, in addition to philosophical and psychological arguments, was always pursued with sociological arguments. The theological age was followed by a scientific one, according to Auguste Comte.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx also formulated an important contribution to the criticism of religion from a sociological perspective . In his social theory, he assumes that in the course of the alienation of the worker through the forced sale of his labor in capitalist society, religion has the function of covering this alienation with religious consolation and an orientation towards the hereafter (compensation function). Marx therefore adopts Engels ' characterization of religion as the " opium of the [common] people " (to whom genuine, material opium was not accessible) and consequently regards the criticism of religion as the beginning of all criticism . For him, religion represents the superstructure of the socio-economic basis of society and contributes to the stabilization of this form of society. But this - and this is his central criticism - prevents social change, the relationships of dependency are fixed.

Emile Durkheim

In his main work on the sociology of religion, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life , Émile Durkheim describes religion as an expression of the social. Whereas in the past religion was the link between traditional societies, in modern society this is largely replaced by social contexts. Accordingly, he develops the fundamental distinction between “ holy ” and “ profane ”. In addition, he placed the great importance of the integration performance of religion for societies at the center of his considerations. Correspondingly, Durkheim contains both elements of a substantial definition of religion and a functional definition of religion. Central to Durkheim is the role of collective religious experience.

In the thirties of the last century, the sociologists and intellectuals of the Collège de Sociologie , based on Durkheim and his students ( Marcel Mauss , Robert Hertz and Henri Hubert ), tried a sociologically based theory of religion and z. Sometimes also to develop practice that should prevent the ideological influence of National Socialism on the individual. However, it was only able to assert itself to a limited extent in the German and Anglo-Saxon language areas.

Max Weber

Max Weber's most important contribution to the sociology of religion is his so-called Protestantism thesis, which he developed in his paper The Protestant Ethics and the “Spirit” of Capitalism from 1904. Weber tries to answer the question of why modern (= rational ) capitalism developed in the West of all places (more precisely: in the Anglo-Saxon countries)  . Weber explains this through Protestantism, especially the doctrine of predestination . This led on the one hand to an inner-worldly asceticism (and the necessary accumulation of capital ), on the other hand to a way of life that considered economic success to be worth striving for because it was viewed as a sign of divine chosenness. Even if the religious basis changed in the course of time, this way of life remained. Weber examined other religions in the collection of essays The Business Ethics of World Religions .

In addition to the Protestantism thesis Weber in his major work economy and society systematically basic concepts such as the sociology of religion. B. Sect dealt with. His concept of charisma , which became known primarily in the context of the types of rulership he defined , has been used profitably in the sociology of religion but also in political sociology since the 1990s .

Georg SImmel

In Georg Simmel's work , religion echoes the “Philosophy of Money”. His statement “Money becomes God” is symbolic of this (as an extension of Nietzsche's: “God is dead”). According to Simmel, money and capitalism take the place of religion before. Linguistic relationships make this clear: revelation and oath of revelation, guilt and debts, creed and credit, proceeds and redemption, holy and commercial mass, profession and calling. In terms of the sociology of religion, it is important to distinguish between religious and religioid ideas. The latter represent "religious semi-products" which look similar to religion and religiosity, but are not.

Important developments are: cognitive rationalization (money leads to the necessity of daily mathematical operations), money as a value system and quasi-religion (capitalism transforms money from a means into an end in itself), individualization (money as a pacemaker of individual freedom).

Talcott Parsons

From the point of view of Talcott Parsons’s structural-functional system theory, religion is an essential element for the establishment of values ​​and basic patterns of social systems. It represents an important subsystem that provides a central service for the system. In modern societies, ideologies or civil religion can gain importance as functional equivalents to religion.

Based on Parsons' considerations, Robert N. Bellah developed his model of the "civil religion" in the USA. It assumes that some kind of common religion is necessary for the preservation of a state. At the same time, this must not be a specific religion, but must be above its formative power. For the USA, which was Bellah's example, this is the mixture of the reference to God, the chosen nation America and democracy.

Thomas Luckmann

Thomas Luckmann puts the positive, constructive social role of religion in the foreground by pointing out its potential in overcoming crises and in stabilizing the community in phases of social upheaval (cf. Berger). For Luckmann, religiosity is an anthropological constant that only seeks new forms of representation in modernity and does not - as the secularization thesis claims - disappear. The functional differentiation of modern societies, however, means that religion is restricted to the private, i.e. H. the area of ​​life that is not subject to the functional logic of social functional areas. New forms of religion arise because religion in the private sphere is no longer subject to the control of the churches (as ideological institutions).

Niklas Luhmann

In Luhmann's systems theory , religion is functionally defined as a separate subsystem or subsystem of society. In the course of the functional differentiation of modern societies, a. In addition to economy, politics and art, it has its own religious system. In contrast, Andreas Dorschel argues that religion, with its own claim to the highest relevance, is poorly suited to the "subsystem" and is only partially compatible with differentiation: "Religion is religion in its immodest pretensions."

Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge

With their basic study A Theory of Religion , the two American sociologists bring Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge (among other) the theory of rational decision ( rational choice theory , and economic theory of action a) in the sociology of religion. You dispute the statement of the secularization thesis, according to which religion and religiosity lose importance with advancing modernization. Rather, they assume that the religious needs of people have not changed despite the general rationalization of the way of life, and instead focus on the supply side of religion: on the religious communities and churches. Whether it comes to a secularization in society or not depends more on the nature of the "market of religions". The existence of a large number of religious communities within a society forces religious providers to make their “goods” as attractive as possible, and thus leads to a flourishing of religiosity as a whole. On the other hand, the dominance of a single religion (such as a state or subsidized church ) would rule out competition, hinder incentives to increase the attractiveness of the religious offering and thus lead to the death of active religiosity as a whole. Your considerations have led to the development of the market model of the religious.

Ulrich Oevermann

The “Structural Model of Religiosity”, first presented by Ulrich Oevermann in an essay in 1995 and later further developed in further articles, applies alongside the approaches of Thomas Luckmann and Niklas Luhmann to the three influential paradigms of the sociology of religion in Germany. Of these three approaches, it is also by far the youngest paradigm. In his model, Oevermann differentiates between the "structure" of religiosity, which is considered universal, and its "content", which is viewed as historically variable in the form of myths of origin and probation. The process of secularization is taken against this background as a transformation of the contents, as the transformation of religious beliefs in secular, in continuation of the basic structure of religiosity.

In its structuralist-pragmatic model, the universal structure of religiosity is directly related to the universal structural properties of human life. At its center is the “linguistic meaning and predication function” that emerged in terms of the history of the genre with the transition from nature to culture and that a dualism between the symbolically “representing world” of hypothetical possibilities in the past and future on the one hand and the “represented world” of reality in the here and now of the present on the other hand. According to Oevermann, this dualism results in “the awareness of the finiteness of life”, which in turn creates “the problem of the dynamic of probation that cannot be stopped”.

According to Oevermann, religiosity consists of “three structural properties” that follow one another in the sense of a phase model: “1. the probation problem "due to the awareness of the finiteness of life, which sets free a probation dynamic that cannot be stopped," 2. the myth of probation ”, which guarantees a necessary hope of being proven, and“ 3. the evidence of the myth based on communal practice ”. The first structural element is culturally universal, the second is culture-specific and the third is both universal, which relates to communalization as a structure, as well as culture-specific, which relates to its social form, which is dependent on the respective content and the rites and cult forms that follow from it.

Empirical Sociology of Religion

Quantitative approaches

Questions about religion are an integral part of large-scale surveys such as the European Values ​​Study , the World Values ​​Survey , ALLBUS and the Shell Youth Study . The aim of the quantitative access to the sociology of religion is a view of the distribution of churchliness and religiosity on the macro level. Corresponding studies are often close to considerations of modernization theory and secularization theory. The global empirical studies by Ronald Inglehart are of particular importance here . They point to a close connection between modernization, secularization and democratization. Other important studies are the focus surveys of the International Social Survey Program 1998 and 2008 or the Bertelsmann Religionsmonitor 2008 and 2013.

See also

literature

Overview representations

Classic of the sociology of religion

  • Max Weber : Collected essays on the sociology of religion. first published 1920, ISBN 3-8252-1488-5 (contains among other things the "Protestant Ethics", first published 1904/05)
  • Émile Durkheim : The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. 1981 [1912], ISBN 3-518-28725-7
  • Marcel Mauss : The gift. Frankfurt am Main 1990 [1924]! Writings on the sociology of religion. , Berlin 2012
  • Gustav Mensching : Sociology of Religion. Bonn ²1968 [1947]
  • Gustav Mensching : Sociology of the great religions. Bonn 1966
  • Joachim Wach : Sociology of Religion. 1951
  • Harry Hoefnagels SJ: Church in a changed world - Religious sociological thoughts. Driewer-Verlag Essen 1964

Empirical studies

  • Franzmann, Manuel: Secularized Faith. Case reconstructions for the advanced secularization of the subject. Weinheim 2017, ISBN 978-3-7799-2939-0 .
  • Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart: Sacred and Secular. Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge 2004, ISBN 0-521-54872-1
  • Gert Pickel, Olaf Müller: Church and Religion in Contemporary Europe. Results from Empirical and Comparative Research. Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-531-16748-0 .
  • Gert Pickel, Kornelia Sammet: Religion and Religiosity in the United Germany. Twenty years after the upheaval. Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 978-3-531-17428-0 .
  • Gergely Rosta, Detlef Pollack: Religion in the Modern Age: An International Comparison. Campus, Frankfurt am Main / New York 2015.
  • Maik Sadzio: Turning of cultures - transcultural and transreligious identities. Evaluation of an empirical study among educational multipliers in Belém-Pará / Brazil. 2010, ISBN 978-3-8391-5006-1 ( PDF file ).

Remarks

  1. ^ Harry Hoefnagels: Church in a changed world - Religionssociological thoughts, Hans Driewer-Verlag Essen 1964
  2. ↑ Detlef Pollack, Gergely Rosta: Religion and Modernity: An International Comparison. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2017.
  3. ↑ The Consequences of Modernity (1990), German: Konsequenzen der Moderne (1996) [ ISBN 3-518-28895-4 ]
  4. ↑ Lit .: Klaus Hock: Introduction to Religious Studies , 2002. Thomas Luckmann: Die invichtbare Religion , 1991.
  5. ^ Niklas Luhmann : Function of Religion , Frankfurt / M. 1977.
  6. ↑ Andreas Dorschel : Religion as a "subsystem"? On Niklas Luhmann's 'The Distinction of God' , in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 11 (1986), p. 16; also - with reference to Dorschel - Hartmann Tyrell : Religionssoziologie , in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996), p. 448.
  7. ↑ Cf. overall Oevermann, Ulrich (1995): A model of the structure of religiosity. At the same time a structural model of life practice and social time. In: Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika (eds.), Biography and Religion. Between ritual and self- search, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 27–102; ders .: Dynamics of probation and concepts of the afterlife. Constitutional conditions of life practice. In: W. Schweidler (Ed.): Rebirth and cultural heritage. Academia, St. Augustin 2001, pp. 289-338; ders. (2003): Structural religiosity and its manifestations under conditions of complete secularization of consciousness . In: Christel Gärtner / Detlef Pollack / Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (eds.): Atheism and religious indifference . Opladen: Leske + Budrich, pp. 339-387
  8. ↑ [1]
  9. ↑ [2]

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