Religion as a social phenomenon is deeply and complicatedly rooted in the life of humankind. The purpose of its existence can be explained through a multitude of thought schools and approaches.
The raison d’etre and relevance of religion
The very notion of some “purpose” that religion must have is to do with the functionalist approach to sociology that assumes every phenomenon can be explained from the point of functionality. The purpose of religion, exactly why it was initially created at the dawn of history, is that supernatural powers were a suitable explanation of things that could not be explained by science, especially when there was no science to speak of.
People feared the disasters of nature, wild beasts, disease, and death, and tried to attribute some meaning to it – possibly, in an attempt to have at least partial control over what was uncontrollable to them at this stage.
Speaking about control, that is another purpose religion acquired later in history. It added the legal grounding to the power structure stating that the earthly authority was favored by the realm of the divine. Institutionalized religion put some groups in control of other groups and helped them acquire resources – as it does now, in terms of land, workforce, currency, artifacts of excellence, and other such valuables.
This control cannot be gotten without some mythic and moral grounding. It means that religion (which is prescriptive) has a set of norms for its adepts to follow in the pursuit of the greater and usually posthumous good. The Ten Commandments are an obvious example of the moral component of religion. Trying to prescribe and explain the place of a person in life, the good and bad conduct, religion creates a set of values, traditions, and moral standards that act as tenets to unite the followers. Aside from these pragmatic purposes, the tenets are said to attribute some reason to live.
There are opposing opinions on whether religion has lost its relevance or not. One can say, although science has taken on the role of the enlightener, religion is still capable of making life make sense for some, in addition to being a powerful means of control. Sociology of religion is the discipline to research the place of beliefs in society, wherein the trueness of this or that belief is successfully bracketed.
Theoretical approaches
There are five theoretical approaches to the study of religion from the sociological perspective.
Functionalism is the approach most advanced in years and the one that predominates in the theoretical body of the field. It emphasizes applying the scientific method and analogical thinking. The former application implies that the social world can be studied using the means and modes of physical reality exploration. The latter presupposes that society functions in a way that is similar to a living organism.
The abovementioned view about the necessary presence of religion in a society is largely functionalist because it speculates on the role of religion analogizing it to a bodily organ, without which an organism cannot survive (McClelland par. 1-3). Rational choice is a subdivision of the functionalist theory; RCT proponents maintain that a religious person chooses their religious practices and behaves accordingly after having conducted an assessment of the costs and benefits of such practices and behavior.
Conflict theory is based on the school of thought founded by Karl Marx. This theory regards society as a number of competing groups battling to come into control or possession of resources. Religion, as per the conflict theory, is a set of tools that assist in the maintenance of the status quo, which is socioeconomic inequality. Religion propagates a view that justifies oppressive practices and allows a group of divine agents to control the majority. As per this theory, just as any social institution, religious institutions are legalized instruments functioning for the sake of economic gains.
Symbolic interactionism assumes that interaction is based on taking roles; human beings perceive things through the lens of the meaning they attribute to these things. The meanings arise from social interaction and are interpreted individually in each person. In reference to religion, it is the religious experiences that undergo individual interpretation, which is why religion, albeit professing to be the source of objective truth, is in fact subjective. As it were, the experiences and practices are never sacred unless people attribute meaning to them – the one that makes them sacred. Such practices (paired with the sacred meaning ascribed by the adepts) are said to spiritualize life and make it make sense, as described above.
Phenomenology of religion is another approach concerned with the experiences of the adepts. At its baseline, it breaks religions down into components and tries to understand their meaning as experienced by the people who follow this or that religion. A phenomenon has its objective and subjective aspects; one such aspect is understanding, which is individual but not entirely dispensable from the manifest of objectiveness. The way people understand and interpret various phenomena (near-death experiences, visions of ghosts, signs, prophetic dreams, etc.) are the focus of interest here, specifically the meanings that are attributed to them in the context of religion and in the social context.
Another approach is that of social construction which assumes that religion is a product of social agreement. Religious meanings, therefore, are regarded as truths because the given society as a whole deems them to be true. Marx and Durkheim proposed the constructed-ness of God, arguing that God was only there because society expected Him to be there. The Marxist approach is that of functionalism while Durkheim maintained that the role of God was to be the perceived reason some non-understandable phenomena occurred. Additionally, the same principle applied when people felt there was a force superior to themselves, a force they could not explain in rational terms (Christiano, Swatos, and Kivisto 6-7).
Research methods
It was discussed that the trueness of any religious belief as such is quite out of question (Weight 1). The idea is not to confirm or bust a certain belief, and neither is the goal to establish the existence or absence of a deity. Sociology of religion relies on the methods of empirical observation in its research and is perfectly aware that proving whether certain beliefs are true or not is beyond the capacity of these methods. The goal, therefore, to gather data and make sure its meaning is correctly understood.
Data gathering and interpretation can be done using various methods. For one, researchers can use quantitative methods, i.e., collecting data, converting them into numbers, and statistically analyzing. The tools that can be used for such research include questionnaires receiving self-reported experiences and conducting statistical analysis to establish the presence (or absence) of correlation between the groups of data.
The limitations of such a method include the possible researchers’ bias wherein the interpretation of the numbers (although reliant on some existing formulae) can be and often is based on the researchers’ precognitions, experiences, etc. Qualitative methods in the sociology of religion mainly include personal observation in the field. Although the observations are conducted by experts, as a rule, such methods can be also limited. For instance, and apart from any personal bias and self-interest, the observer can fail to register some phenomena, see phenomena that are not there, or make a mistake in their findings.
A method to reduce the limitations is basically a combination of qualitative and quantitative research wherein the personal observations are recorded, coded, analyzed, and interpreted. Such a method of inquiry is optimal when phenomenology is concerned, to balance the subjective and objective (Riis 232). Indeed, when the philosophical perspective of people’s perception of a certain phenomenon needs to be understood, the direct conversation with the sources of experience and subsequent data analysis helps upgrade the personal interpretation to the level of discovering a statistically significant result or a pattern. Such methods should be used not only from the epistemological perspective (although they do facilitate generalizability and causality prediction) but also to get a multisided view on what is observed (Storm 716).
Conclusion
Methodological atheism practiced by sociologists studying religion allows a deeper understanding of religious practices and beliefs without undermining the credibility of any of them. Such an approach makes establishing the purpose and function of religion possible and helps explain its relevance in the modern world.
Works Cited
Christiano, Kevin J., William H. Swatos, and Peter Kivisto. Sociology of Religion: Contemporary Developments. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Print.
McClelland, Kent. “Functionalism.” Theoretical Perspectives in Sociology. Grinnell College. 2000. Web.
Riis, Ole Preben. “Methodology in the Sociology of Religion.” The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. Ed. Peter B. Clarke. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011. 229-244. Print.
Storm, Ingrid. “Halfway to Heaven: Four Types of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48 (2009): 702-718. Print.
Weight, Alden. “SOC 420 Lesson 2: Epistemology and the Sociology of Religion.” Arizona State University. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. (Date).