18 Conclusion

It is a commonplace in the social sciences to observe that theories are never superseded. New ones and new interpretations of old ones are simply added to the existing stock. This is no less true of the sociology of religion than for any other area of sociology and yet to say this is not to say that no progress has been made. While none of the theories surveyed in this book can be said to be even close to satisfactory, each has something to contribute. The insights of each approach have largely been retained in the more recent endeavours to provide an overall theory and particularly in meaning theories. This type of approach has the added advantage, also, that it is probably closer to the believer’s own understanding of his or her belief, practice and experience. It avoids the rather crude rejection of religious claims as always plainly false that intellectualist and emotionalist theories have often tended to make while at the same time being less dismissive of the believer’s own account of his or her belief than some sociological, particularly functionalist, theories. To say that religion is the way people seek to give meaning to their lives is not something that many believers would disagree with, although in any specific instance they may agree rather less with the sociologist’s account of why they seek to provide that meaning and of what underlies the specific ways they seek to provide it.

Meaning theories in synthesising the insights of intellectualist, emotionalist and sociological approaches have at least in part transcended the problems of each of them. Intellectualist approaches neglect the emotional dimension of religiosity. Emotionalist approaches throw out the baby with the bath water in dispensing with the explanatory role of religious belief. Religion is, among other things, an attempt to understand but this desire to understand is not, as far as religious belief is concerned, motivated wholly by intellectual puzzlement or curiosity about the world, nor necessarily by a need to manipulate material reality the better to deal with it and to survive and prosper within it. The need to understand stems from emotional sources and may in certain circumstances reach a high degree of intensity. Not to understand is to be bewildered, confused and threatened. The human psyche is such that uncertainty, feelings of unfamiliarity and a sense of the alien are deeply disquieting and discomforting. We do not just seek to understand our world and our place in it out of mere interest and curiosity; we need to know who and what we are and what place we occupy within the

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world. Religion seeks answers to existential questions which go to the heart of our sense of identity, worth and purpose. Such things are of vital significance to us. As Berger (1973) states, we are congenitally compelled to impose a meaningful order upon reality. Whether we are congenitally so compelled or whether it is possible to live without such a sense of order, it is certainly the case that many or most members of almost all known societies have sought such a sense of order and often with such energy and compulsion that it is difficult to deny that it must stem from emotional drives and needs which seem deeply rooted in the human condition. While it may be admitted that some may not feel the force of this need or feel it to a lesser extent than others, and perhaps this is increasingly the case in contemporary society, many seem unable to live without it being met in some way. Even in contemporary industrial society, one suspects that while the unacceptability and implausibility of traditional religious messages, not to mention the competing attractions that modern affluence and a relatively secure existence provide, preclude many people from giving much attention to such questions, they lurk, nevertheless, in the background like unwelcome guests at the party. The however distant but nagging spectre of death, for example, can never be entirely dispelled. The inevitability of death is, of course, something that most theories of religion point to. Death may not so much be feared because it is the unknown or because it brings an end to the individual, but rather because it threatens to make the life the individual does have and live pointless and senseless while living it. To know why we live and why we die is not just intellectually satisfying but allays that potential inner disquiet that otherwise comes from the awful realisation that our individual existence may be quite without any point or purpose. Not that religion is solely about providing meaning, however. We should not forget that, as often as it claims to be able to explain and make things seem meaningful, it claims also to be able to do things for us. It may, for example, offer us eternal life and, in some sense or other, the vanquishing of death. To the extent that rational choice theory is also very much a synthesis of theoretical perspectives that have gone before it is, perhaps, this emphasis upon what religion is perceived to be able to deliver that is one of its strongest points.

In providing meaning, religion is often said not simply to address existential questions relating to the individual but also to play a central social role. It provides justification for actions and legitimation of practices, customs and social arrangements. Sociological approaches to religion have usually stressed its role in upholding the social order. It is certainly clear that religious systems have generally been locked into the wider social order. To explain the world in ways that make it meaningful, inevitably entails explaining also the social order in a meaningful way and thereby legitimating it. Thus religion has a social as well as an individual dimension. On the other hand, in the light of the situation of religion in many contemporary industrial societies, one might question the extent to which this dimension of religion is fundamental. Cognisance of this is, perhaps, what underlies a tendency discerned by Segal (1986) which he refers to as the desociologising of the study of religion. Turner (1991b) has suggested that in modern society it is no longer essential to link systems of belief which provide

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personal meaning with the institutions of public regulation and legitimation. Religion thus becomes privatised and reduced to a ‘range of stylistic options’ (ibid., p. 240). The sociology of religion has conventionally tended to assume that social cohesion requires an interlinking of personal and public orders of meaning. The lesson that can be drawn from the study of religion in modern society is that systems for the maintenance of public order, control and legitimation may follow quite separate paths from those which uphold a personal sense of meaning.

Berger (1979) observes that modernity inevitably promotes pluralism and pluralism leads to fragmentation and the weakening of beliefs dependent upon social support. Modern, some would say post-modern, conditions are characterised by ‘unstable, incohesive, unreliable plausibility structures’ (ibid., p. 19). The individual seeking religious answers is forced to pick and choose, and is, consequently, thrown back upon him or herself such that the subjective dimension is heavily accentuated. There is no certainty in such a world since that is the product of support and maintenance on a societal level.

Nevertheless, while one might acknowledge that religious beliefs become inevitably precarious in such conditions, religion is still essentially a social enterprise rather than a purely individual one as the study of sectarianism amply demonstrates. However much they owe to the insights and revelations of innovative individuals, systems of belief which provide personal meaning are always collectively developed and socially supported even if sometimes on a very small scale. Historically, those that have predominated in a society have tended to be those that are supported by the most powerful and influential groups in that society. As Marx said, the ruling ideas are in any age the ideas of its ruling class. Weber shows how each major religious tradition has its social carrier which is in most cases the dominant group in the society. Questions of meaning, furthermore, often stem from a sense of injustice or discrepancy between what is and what ought to be. Since such matters are bound up with patterns of social advantage and disadvantage, religious answers to such questions inevitably address and reflect aspects of the social order.

Each culture and each society, structured diversely as they are, will produce different sorts of answers to questions of meaning. There may be various interpretations of the dominant religious tradition and often, particularly in modern societies, quite different sub-cultures with wholly different answers to the relevant questions. Religious diversity through history and across and within cultures is truly remarkable and testimony to the inventiveness of the human mind and imagination. Only a small part of that diversity has been touched upon in this book. The selection of substantive topics was that which best illustrates, in the author’s opinion, the application of theories. While other selections could have been made, the fact that, out of the rich diversity of religious experience, this particular selection seemed clearly the most obvious one, demonstrates the as yet undeveloped state of theory in the sociology of religion and the little that has so far been done, relatively speaking, in applying theoretical approaches to the understanding of substantive questions. Where theory has been most closely

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applied, it has been in a rather narrow field confined largely to Christianity and even then to specific aspects of this tradition. Little has been done in the sphere of the world religions generally, with the monolithic exception of the work of Max Weber, only a small part of which it has been possible to discuss here. It is mainly anthropologists who have examined traditions other than that of Christianity and from the perspective one would expect of anthropology, namely participant observation of the small, usually village community.1 Few scholars have aspired to match the broad comparative and historical sweep of Weber. The sociology of religion will need to address this deficiency if it is to advance. There can be no substitute for comparative study in any branch of sociology, least of all in the sphere of religion.