Religion

• Emile Durkheim

  The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)

  ● Surveyed religious around the world
• Emile Durkheim

  The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)

  ● Could find no specific belief or practice that all religions share
• Emile Durkheim

  The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)

  ● All religions develop a community around their practices & beliefs
• Emile Durkheim

  The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)

  ● All religions also separate the sacred from profane
• Sacred - Aspects of life having to do with the supernatural that inspire awe, reverence, deep, respect and even fear
• Profane - Aspects in life that are not concerned with religion or religion’s purpose but are part of ordinary everyday life
• Religion is defined by three elements:

  1. System of Beliefs
  2. Practices
  3. Community of Believers
• For Durkheim, “A religion is a unified system of beliefs & practices relative to sacred things..things set apart & forbidden - beliefs & practices which unite into one single moral community called a church.”
• Church defined by Durkheim

  ❏ A moral community centered on beliefs and practices regarding the sacred
• Church defined by Durkheim

  ❏ A group of people who are united by their religious practices
• Religion - a belief in spiritual beings (Tylor 1903)

  ● Human beings developed religious beliefs in order to explain dreams, visions, unconsciousness, and deaths
• Functionalist Perspective

  • Religion fosters social solidarity by uniting believers for a community that shares values and perspectives
• Functionalist Perspective

  ● Marriage links the bride and groom with a broader community that wishes them well
• Functionalist Perspective

  ● Helps people adjust to life’s problems and provide guidelines for daily life
• Functionalist Perspective

  ● Religion is often associated with prevailing social order that it resists social change but religion occasionally spearheads change
• Religion and Health - Suggests that churchgoers have lower mortality

  ● Involvement in social roles that produce a sense of self-worth and purpose in life
• Religion and Health - Suggests that churchgoers have lower mortality

  ● Experiencing positive emotions from worship and interacting with like-minded people
• Religion and Health - Suggests that churchgoers have lower mortality

  ● Learning calming ways of coping with crises from compassionate role models
• Dysfunctions of Religion

  ● Religion as justification for persecution
• Dysfunctions of Religion

  ● War and terrorism
• Religious Persecution

  Inquisition - special commissions of the Roman Catholic Church that tortured women to make them confess that they were witches & then burned them at stake
• 1692 - Protestant leaders in Salem, Massachusetts executed twenty-one women and men who were accused of being witches
• 2001 - Democratic Republic of Congo hacked to death 1000 allegedly witches in a single purge
• Aztec religion - the virgins who were offered to appease angry gods
• War and Terrorism - Christian monarchs conducted nine bloody crusades in an attempt to wrest control of the region they called the Holy Land from the Muslims
• Symbolic Interactionist - All religions use symbols to provide identity and social solidarity for their members
• Rituals and Beliefs

  Rituals (ceremonies or repetitive practice) are also symbols that help to unite people into a moral community
• Rituals

  1. Bar Mitzvah of Jewish boys
  2. Holy Communion
• Beliefs

  ● Symbols and rituals developed from beliefs
• Beliefs

  ● Religious beliefs include not only values but also a cosmology (a unified picture of the world)
• The Conflict Perspective - Conflict theories are highly critical of religion. ● Stress that religion is used to support the status quo, that it is a means to perpetuate social inequality
• Opium of the People Karl Marx (1844/1964) - “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world.. it is the opium of the people”
• Legitimation of Social Inequalities

  ● Religion teaches that the existing social arrangements of a society represent what God desires
• Religion and the Spirit of Capitalism

  1. For Weber, capitalism flourished in Protestant countries, while he noted that Roman Catholic countries held on to tradition and were relatively untouched by capitalism
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

  • Capitalism represents a fundamentally different way of thinking about work and money
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

  • People started accumulating money (capital), not only for spending, but to invest it in order to to make profits
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

  2. Capitalism flourished when Protestantism came on the scene
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

  ❏ Capitalism developed in Europe, not in India or China
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

  3. Protestant’s concept of predestination (Calvinism)

  ❏ Heaven or hell
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

  3. Protestant’s concept of predestination (Calvinism)

  ❏ Lead Calvinist to moral lives, work hard, to not waste time and to be frugal