This document discusses different conceptualizations of religion that are currently used or emerging in sociological studies of religion. It outlines five main conceptualizations: 1) religion as belief and meaning, 2) religion as identity, 3) religion as structured social relations, 4) religion as discourse, and 5) religion as practice. It also discusses criticisms of defining and studying religion, including that the concept of religion is too narrow and that groups classified as religious may not use that term themselves.

1. Week 3
Dr. Tolga Kobas
SOC 032
SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

2. • various 􏰀 and changing 􏰀 uses of the term
• three main uses are currently dominant:
1. religion as belief/meaning,
2. religion as identity, and
3. religion as structured social relations.
FIVE CONCEPTS OF RELIGION

3. • By contrast, some uses which were once
important are currently recessive, including
Marxist approaches to religion as ideology, and
Parsonian conceptions of religion as norms
and values.
• Some new uses are also emerging, including
‘material’ religion, religion as discourse, and
religion as practice.
THE OLD & THE NEW

4. • ‘religion’ is a modern concept which carries a baggage of
secular presuppositions, and which narrows, distorts that
which it attempts to dissect.
• the concept of religion is too Christian rather than too secular.
• the concept of religion should be tied more closely to its
contexts of use (Beckford 2003).
• There is no singular essence of religion
• The concept should be taken as essentially contested.
CRITICISMS

5. • individuals and groups regularly classified as ‘religious’
may not use or accept the term themselves.
• Nor do they necessarily use other staple terms of
scholarly discussion, such as Christian, Buddhist,
theist, agnostic, New Age, sectarian, and so on.
‘RELIGION’
THE CONCEPT

6. • One of the most popular –modern, conceptions of religion
today.
• being religious has to do with believing certain things, where
that amounts to subscribing to certain propositions and
accepting certain doctrines.
• bound up with a scientism and empiricism which assumes that
all knowledge is primarily a matter of (testable) propositional
belief, and with a shift of attention from the oral and practiced
to the literate and encoded.
RELIGION AS CULTURE
RELIGION AS BELIEF AND MEANING

7. • A similarly culturally oriented understanding of religion, but with a
much broader conception of culture than ‘belief’, is evident in
sociological and anthropological approaches to religion which
interpret religion as an embracing system of meaning which covers
the whole of life.
• Weber understood religion􏰀 as a cultural, cognitive force which
helps to make sense of the world by providing meaning, values, and
sacred symbols.
• Weber: a key way of classifying religions is in terms of their
theodicies, that is to say, the ways in which they explain the
inexplicable, and hence render life meaningful.
RELIGION AS CULTURE
RELIGION AS MEANING AND CULTURAL
ORDER

8. • Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (1967): religion provides a system of
meaning for making sense of the world, and for covering
contingency with a canopy of sacrality and taken-for-grantedness.
• Berger suggests that human beings need to be able to impose
cognitive order upon the chaotic disorderliness of reality in order to
be able to function at all.
• This is not an individual but a social achievement: cultural order
makes social life possible, and society makes cultural order possible.
WEBER & BERGER

9. Clifford Geertz’s essay ‘Religion as a Cultural System’ (1971, first
published in 1966)
Culture, for Geertz, is made up of interconnected myths, rituals,
symbols, and beliefs which together form enacted and embodied
systems for making sense of the whole of life. For him too, cultural
and religious systems are orders of meaning which hold cultural chaos
and social disintegration at bay.
Geertz also goes further than Berger in stressing the emotional as well
as intellectual dimensions and impacts of culture.
CLIFFORD GEERTZ

10. As he puts it in his famous definition of religion, it is:
‘(1) a system of symbols (2) which acts to establish
powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and
motivations in men (3) by formulating conceptions of a
general order of existence and (4) clothing these
conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the
moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic’ (Geertz
1971, p. 4).
GEERTZ: RELIGION

11. • greater emphasis to the normative dimension of religion. Both
Weber and Durkheim convey a lively sense of religion’s role in
shaping, symbolizing, communicating, stabilizing and sacralizing
shared values.
• all social action is value-directed, and social coherence is
undergirded by value-convergence.
• religion provides a well-functioning society with the shared goals
which make it coherent, and which can maintain coherence even in
the face of differentiation.
RELIGION AS VALUES

12. • Discourse (Foucault): institutionalized knowledges and practices, and the
power relations they enshrine.
• religion as embedded in language and, above all, in narratives.
• i.e., ‘sin and salvation’ had been the predominant grand narrative of the
pre-modern, or classical Catholic Christianity.
• this narrative collapsed in the face of competing narratives, including those
of individual self- fulfillment and personal freedom.
• Lyotard (1979), suggest a collapse of all ‘grand narratives’, including those
which are presumed to be essential to religion.
RELIGION AS DISCOURSE

13. • Religion not essentially different form any other form of culture.
• Callum Brown: the category of religion should be abolished in
academic study, and the study of religion subsumed into the study of
culture.
• religion as a matter of tradition, with a defining ability to make the past
come to life in the present.
• Halbwach (1992): the importance of collective memory in shaping
present social reality
• Danie`le Hervieu-Leger (1993) - an account of religion as a ‘chain of
memory’.
RELIGION AS TRADITION AND
MEMORY