Religious Sociology

Abstract

I have distinguished two topics which differ, but which continually tend to slide into each other — the sociology of religion and religious sociology. The former aims at being an empirical account of how people’s religious ideas and practices can be interpreted through their social relations and the kinds of societies they live in. Religious sociology, on the other hand, is an unashamedly normative exercise. It fastens on respects in which religion can be judged to have a good, and not a bad, influence on a society. It aims at describing what a society would look like in the light of certain religious ideas and ideals; it may be a critique of an existing society seen in this way, or a Utopia describing a society which would exemplify them. The religious ideas and ideals need not of course be Christian, and the societies considered or imagined need not be the kind with which we are familiar. Also there can be different types of religious sociology, of which here are three:

(a) There is the kind which is written in the belief that religious principles support certain forms of social arrangements rather than others; for instance some Christian sociologists in the early part of this century advocated pluralistic forms of society where institutions are largely independent of direction by a centralized state. Or there is a Christian sociology which sees a religious society as essentially hierarchical.