Religion: Establishing Meaning
What is Religion?
● Religio is a matter of faith and sociologists deal with empirical matters, things they
can observe and measure.
● Sociologists have no tools for deciding that one course of action is more moral than
another, or what is “the correct” religion.
● Durkheim tried to identify the elements that are common to all religions.
● Durkheim: there is no specific belief/practice that all religions share.
● All religions develop a community around their practices/beliefs.
● All religions separate the sacred from the profane.
● Durkheim: Religion is defined by three elements
●
BELIEFS
Some things are sacred
(forbidden, set apart from
profane)
PRACTICES
Centering on the things
considered sacred
(rituals)
MORAL COMMUNITY
Resulting from a group’s
beliefs and practices (a
church)
Functionalist Perspective: Religion is universal because it meets basic human needs
Functions of Religion:
● Provide answers to questions:
○ Purpose of life
○ Existence of an afterlife
● Fosters social solidarity
● Rituals that marks important human life events:
○ Marriage
○ Birth
○ Death
● Help people adjust to life problems
● Provide guidelines for daily life
● Help people adapt to new environments
○ Immigrants
● Occasionally spreads change
○ 1960 civic rights movements, abolishing racial discrimination led by Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.
Dysfunctions of Religion
● Dysfunctional
○ how it can bring harmful
● Religion as Justification for Persecution
○ 1200s to 1800s, The Inquisition existed
○ RCC tortures women to make them confess that they were witches and
burned them at stake
○ In Massachusetts, 1962, twenty-one women and men were executed
○
●
●
In Democratic Republic of Congo, 2001, around 1,00 alleged witches were
murdered in single purge
○ Aztec religion, offered virgins to appease angry gods
Religion has been used to justify oppression and any number of brutal acts
War and Terrorism
○ History is filled with wars based on religion—commingled with politics.
○ Christians monarchs conducted bloody “crusades”, an attempt to control the
Holy Land from the Muslims
○ Terrorism
Symbolic Interactionism Perspective: Focuses on the meanings and symbols and how they
help forge a community of like-minded people
● Religious symbols
○ Symbols are what separates the sacred from the profane
●
○
Rituals and Beliefs
○ Rituals: ceremonies or repetitive practices, are also symbols that help unite
people into a moral community
■ Bar mitzvah in Jewish boys
■ Communion in Christians
■ Praying, kneeling, bowing, scripture reading, processions, baptisms,
weddings, funerals
Symbolic Interactionist Perspective
● Religious Experience
○ Refers to a sudden awareness of the supernatural or a feeling of coming into
contact with God.
■ Mild religious experience
■ Life-transforming life experience
The Conflict Perspective: Conflict theorist examine how social institution supports the status
quo
● Opium of the People
○ Marx: existence of God is impossible
○ Marx famous statement on religion: Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the sentiment of a heartless word…It is the opium of the
people
○
●
Oppressed workers find escape in religion; like a drug that helps them to
forget their misery.
A legitimation of Social Inequalities
○ Religion teaches that the existing social order is what God desire
■ Divine right of Kings:
■ God determined who would be the King
■ King ruled in God’s place
■ To disobey the King, is to disobey God
○ In India, Hinduism supports the caste system
■ Individual who tries to change the caste system will come back in the
next life as a lower caste or an animal
○ Southern America Ministers used Scripture to defend slavery —-it was God’s
will
○ Northern American Ministers used Scripture to denounce slavery as evil
The Future of Religion
● There is no doubt that Religion will last as long as humanity lasts, for science,
including sociology, cannot answer such questions:
○ The existence of God
○ The purpose of life
○ An afterlife
○ Morality
What is Culture?
- The language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviours, and even material objects that are
passed from one generation to the next
Material Culture
Nonmaterial Culture
Things such as jewellery, art, buildings,
weapons, machines, and even eating
utensils, hairstyles and clothing. There is
nothing inherently “natural” about material
culture
A group’s way of thinking and doing
Neither custom is “right”, people are simply comfortable with the customs.
●
●
Cultural Relativism
○ Looking at how the elements of a culture fit together without judging those
elements as superior or inferior to one’s own way of life.
Critiqued by anthropologist, Robert Edgerton. He suggests we develop a scale for
evaluating cultures on their quality of life
Invitation to Sociology
(Extreme Cultures)
Components of Symbolic Culture
● Symbol
○ Something to which people attach meaning and that they then use to
communicate
● Gesture
○ Using body to communicate; shorthand ways to convey messages without
words
●
○
Language
○ Each word is a symbol, a sound to which we attach a particular meaning.
Language allows culture to exist
○
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
● Anthropologist Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf were intrigued
● Hopi Indians had no words to distinguish among the past, the present and the future
● They concluded that the common-sense idea that words are merely labels that
people attach to things is wrong
● Language has embedded within it ways of looking at the world
● Language not only expresses our thoughts, but shapes how we think. Not only
express what we perceive but determine what we perceive.
Values, Norms, and Sanctions
● Norms
○ Expectations or rules of behaviour
● Sanctions
○ Reactions people get from following or breaking the norms
○ Positive & Negative sanction
Folkways and mores
● Folkways
○ Norms that are not strictly enforced
● Mores
○ Norms essential to our core values and we insist to conform
● Taboo
○ Norms so strongly ingrained that even the thought of its violation is greeted
with revulsion
● One group’s folkways can be another group’s mores
Many Cultural Worlds
● Subcultures
○ A world within the larger world of the dominant culture
● Counter culture
○ Push back on the mainstream culture
● Ethnocentrism
○ Judging culture based on your own standard culture
● Xenocentrism
○ Judging culture based on other standard culture