research topics in sociology of religion

15.1 The Sociological Approach to Religion

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

• Discuss the historical view of religion from a sociological perspective
• Describe how the major sociological paradigms view religion

From the Latin religio (respect for what is sacred) and religare (to bind, in the sense of an obligation), the term religion describes various systems of belief and practice that define what people consider to be sacred or spiritual (Fasching and deChant 2001; Durkheim 1915). Throughout history, and in societies across the world, leaders have used religious narratives, symbols, and traditions in an attempt to give more meaning to life and understand the universe. Some form of religion is found in every known culture, and it is usually practiced in a public way by a group. The practice of religion can include feasts and festivals, intercession with God or gods, marriage and funeral services, music and art, meditation or initiation, sacrifice or service, and other aspects of culture.

While some people think of religion as something individual because religious beliefs can be highly personal, religion is also a social institution. Social scientists recognize that religion exists as an organized and integrated set of beliefs, behaviors, and norms centered on basic social needs and values. Moreover, religion is a cultural universal found in all social groups. For instance, in every culture, funeral rites are practiced in some way, although these customs vary between cultures and within religious affiliations. Despite differences, there are common elements in a ceremony marking a person’s death, such as announcement of the death, care of the deceased, disposition, and ceremony or ritual. These universals, and the differences in the way societies and individuals experience religion, provide rich material for sociological study.

In studying religion, sociologists distinguish between what they term the experience, beliefs, and rituals of a religion. Religious experience refers to the conviction or sensation that we are connected to “the divine.” This type of communion might be experienced when people pray or meditate. Religious beliefs are specific ideas members of a particular faith hold to be true, such as that Jesus Christ was the son of God, or that reincarnation exists. Another illustration of religious beliefs is the creation stories we find in different religions. Religious rituals are behaviors or practices that are either required or expected of the members of a particular group, such as bar mitzvah or confession of sins (Barkan and Greenwood 2003).

The History of Religion as a Sociological Concept

In the wake of nineteenth century European industrialization and secularization, three social theorists attempted to examine the relationship between religion and society: Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx. They are among the founding thinkers of modern sociology.

As stated earlier, French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) defined religion as a “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things” (1915). To him, sacred meant extraordinary—something that inspired wonder and that seemed connected to the concept of “the divine.” Durkheim argued that “religion happens” in society when there is a separation between the profane (ordinary life) and the sacred (1915). A rock, for example, isn’t sacred or profane as it exists. But if someone makes it into a headstone, or another person uses it for landscaping, it takes on different meanings—one sacred, one profane.

Durkheim is generally considered the first sociologist who analyzed religion in terms of its societal impact. Above all, he believed religion is about community: It binds people together (social cohesion), promotes behavior consistency (social control), and offers strength during life’s transitions and tragedies (meaning and purpose). By applying the methods of natural science to the study of society, Durkheim held that the source of religion and morality is the collective mind-set of society and that the cohesive bonds of social order result from common values in a society. He contended that these values need to be maintained to maintain social stability.

But what would happen if religion were to decline? This question led Durkheim to posit that religion is not just a social creation but something that represents the power of society: When people celebrate sacred things, they celebrate the power of their society. By this reasoning, even if traditional religion disappeared, society wouldn’t necessarily dissolve.

Whereas Durkheim saw religion as a source of social stability, German sociologist and political economist Max Weber (1864–1920) believed it was a precipitator of social change. He examined the effects of religion on economic activities and noticed that heavily Protestant societies—such as those in the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and Germany—were the most highly developed capitalist societies and that their most successful business leaders were Protestant. In his writing The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), he contends that the Protestant work ethic influenced the development of capitalism. Weber noted that certain kinds of Protestantism supported the pursuit of material gain by motivating believers to work hard, be successful, and not spend their profits on frivolous things. (The modern use of “work ethic” comes directly from Weber’s Protestant ethic, although it has now lost its religious connotations.)

Big Picture

The protestant work ethic in the information age.

Max Weber (1904) posited that, in Europe in his time, Protestants were more likely than Catholics to value capitalist ideology, and believed in hard work and savings. He showed that Protestant values directly influenced the rise of capitalism and helped create the modern world order. Weber thought the emphasis on community in Catholicism versus the emphasis on individual achievement in Protestantism made a difference. His century-old claim that the Protestant work ethic led to the development of capitalism has been one of the most important and controversial topics in the sociology of religion. In fact, scholars have found little merit to his contention when applied to modern society (Greeley 1989).

What does the concept of work ethic mean today? The work ethic in the information age has been affected by tremendous cultural and social change, just as workers in the mid- to late nineteenth century were influenced by the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Factory jobs tend to be simple, uninvolved, and require very little thinking or decision making on the part of the worker. Today, the work ethic of the modern workforce has been transformed, as more thinking and decision making is required. Employees also seek autonomy and fulfillment in their jobs, not just wages. Higher levels of education have become necessary, as well as people management skills and access to the most recent information on any given topic. The information age has increased the rapid pace of production expected in many jobs.

On the other hand, the “McDonaldization” of the United States (Hightower 1975; Ritzer 1993), in which many service industries, such as the fast-food industry, have established routinized roles and tasks, has resulted in a “discouragement” of the work ethic. In jobs where roles and tasks are highly prescribed, workers have no opportunity to make decisions. They are considered replaceable commodities as opposed to valued employees. During times of recession, these service jobs may be the only employment possible for younger individuals or those with low-level skills. The pay, working conditions, and robotic nature of the tasks dehumanizes the workers and strips them of incentives for doing quality work.

Working hard also doesn’t seem to have any relationship with Catholic or Protestant religious beliefs anymore, or those of other religions; information age workers expect talent and hard work to be rewarded by material gain and career advancement.

German philosopher, journalist, and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx (1818–1883) also studied the social impact of religion. He believed religion reflects the social stratification of society and that it maintains inequality and perpetuates the status quo. For him, religion was just an extension of working-class (proletariat) economic suffering. He famously argued that religion “is the opium of the people” (1844).

For Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, who were reacting to the great social and economic upheaval of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Europe, religion was an integral part of society. For Durkheim, religion was a force for cohesion that helped bind the members of society to the group, while Weber believed religion could be understood as something separate from society. Marx considered religion inseparable from the economy and the worker. Religion could not be understood apart from the capitalist society that perpetuated inequality. Despite their different views, these social theorists all believed in the centrality of religion to society.

Theoretical Perspectives on Religion

Modern-day sociologists often apply one of three major theoretical perspectives. These views offer different lenses through which to study and understand society: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and conflict theory. Let’s explore how scholars applying these paradigms understand religion.

Functionalism

Functionalists contend that religion serves several functions in society. Religion, in fact, depends on society for its existence, value, and significance, and vice versa. From this perspective, religion serves several purposes, like providing answers to spiritual mysteries, offering emotional comfort, and creating a place for social interaction and social control.

In providing answers, religion defines the spiritual world and spiritual forces, including divine beings. For example, it helps answer questions like, “How was the world created?” “Why do we suffer?” “Is there a plan for our lives?” and “Is there an afterlife?” As another function, religion provides emotional comfort in times of crisis. Religious rituals bring order, comfort, and organization through shared familiar symbols and patterns of behavior.

One of the most important functions of religion, from a functionalist perspective, is the opportunities it creates for social interaction and the formation of groups. It provides social support and social networking and offers a place to meet others who hold similar values and a place to seek help (spiritual and material) in times of need. Moreover, it can foster group cohesion and integration. Because religion can be central to many people’s concept of themselves, sometimes there is an “in-group” versus “out-group” feeling toward other religions in our society or within a particular practice. On an extreme level, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, and anti-Semitism are all examples of this dynamic. Finally, religion promotes social control: It reinforces social norms such as appropriate styles of dress, following the law, and regulating sexual behavior.

Conflict Theory

Conflict theorists view religion as an institution that helps maintain patterns of social inequality. For example, the Vatican has a tremendous amount of wealth, while the average income of Catholic parishioners is small. According to this perspective, religion has been used to support the “divine right” of oppressive monarchs and to justify unequal social structures, like India’s caste system.

Conflict theorists are critical of the way many religions promote the idea that believers should be satisfied with existing circumstances because they are divinely ordained. This power dynamic has been used by Christian institutions for centuries to keep poor people poor and to teach them that they shouldn’t be concerned with what they lack because their “true” reward (from a religious perspective) will come after death. Conflict theorists also point out that those in power in a religion are often able to dictate practices, rituals, and beliefs through their interpretation of religious texts or via proclaimed direct communication from the divine.

The feminist perspective is a conflict theory view that focuses specifically on gender inequality. In terms of religion, feminist theorists assert that, although women are typically the ones to socialize children into a religion, they have traditionally held very few positions of power within religions. A few religions and religious denominations are more gender equal, but male dominance remains the norm of most.

Sociology in the Real World

Rational choice theory: can economic theory be applied to religion.

How do people decide which religion to follow, if any? How does one pick a church or decide which denomination “fits” best? Rational choice theory (RCT) is one way social scientists have attempted to explain these behaviors. The theory proposes that people are self-interested, though not necessarily selfish, and that people make rational choices—choices that can reasonably be expected to maximize positive outcomes while minimizing negative outcomes. Sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (1988) first considered the use of RCT to explain some aspects of religious behavior, with the assumption that there is a basic human need for religion in terms of providing belief in a supernatural being, a sense of meaning in life, and belief in life after death. Religious explanations of these concepts are presumed to be more satisfactory than scientific explanations, which may help to account for the continuation of strong religious connectedness in countries such as the United States, despite predictions of some competing theories for a great decline in religious affiliation due to modernization and religious pluralism.

Another assumption of RCT is that religious organizations can be viewed in terms of “costs” and “rewards.” Costs are not only monetary requirements, but are also the time, effort, and commitment demands of any particular religious organization. Rewards are the intangible benefits in terms of belief and satisfactory explanations about life, death, and the supernatural, as well as social rewards from membership. RCT proposes that, in a pluralistic society with many religious options, religious organizations will compete for members, and people will choose between different churches or denominations in much the same way they select other consumer goods, balancing costs and rewards in a rational manner. In this framework, RCT also explains the development and decline of churches, denominations, sects, and even cults; this limited part of the very complex RCT theory is the only aspect well supported by research data.

Critics of RCT argue that it doesn’t fit well with human spiritual needs, and many sociologists disagree that the costs and rewards of religion can even be meaningfully measured or that individuals use a rational balancing process regarding religious affiliation. The theory doesn’t address many aspects of religion that individuals may consider essential (such as faith) and further fails to account for agnostics and atheists who don’t seem to have a similar need for religious explanations. Critics also believe this theory overuses economic terminology and structure and point out that terms such as “rational” and “reward” are unacceptably defined by their use; they would argue that the theory is based on faulty logic and lacks external, empirical support. A scientific explanation for why something occurs can’t reasonably be supported by the fact that it does occur. RCT is widely used in economics and to a lesser extent in criminal justice, but the application of RCT in explaining the religious beliefs and behaviors of people and societies is still being debated in sociology today.

Symbolic Interactionism

Rising from the concept that our world is socially constructed, symbolic interactionism studies the symbols and interactions of everyday life. To interactionists, beliefs and experiences are not sacred unless individuals in a society regard them as sacred. The Star of David in Judaism, the cross in Christianity, and the crescent and star in Islam are examples of sacred symbols. Interactionists are interested in what these symbols communicate. Because interactionists study one-on-one, everyday interactions between individuals, a scholar using this approach might ask questions focused on this dynamic. The interaction between religious leaders and practitioners, the role of religion in the ordinary components of everyday life, and the ways people express religious values in social interactions—all might be topics of study to an interactionist.

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/1-introduction

• Authors: Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Introduction to Sociology 3e
• Publication date: Jun 3, 2021
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/1-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/15-1-the-sociological-approach-to-religion

© Jan 18, 2024 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

ABOUT OUR JOURNAL: SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

Sociology of Religion , the official journal of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, is published quarterly for the purpose of advancing scholarship in the sociological study of religion. The journal publishes original (not previously published) work of exceptional quality and interest without regard to substantive focus, theoretical orientation, or methodological approach. Although theoretically ambitious, empirically grounded articles are the core of what we publish, we also welcome agenda setting essays, comments on previously published works, critical reflections on the research act, and interventions into substantive areas or theoretical debates intended to push the field ahead.

Articles published in Sociology of Religion have won many professional awards, including most recently the ASA Religion Section’s Graduate Student Paper Award (Darwin in 2019), the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Distinguished Article Award (Whitehead, Perry, and Baker in 2019), and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Graduate Student Paper Award (Rotolo 2021). Building on this legacy, Sociology of Religion aspires to be the premier English-language publication for sociological scholarship on religion and an essential source for agenda-setting work in the field.

Click HERE to visit the journal page at Oxford University Press

Sor journal submission.

ASR Members can submit articles to the journal for free. Sign into the Member Section on the Home Page to submit an article.

Non-members must pay a submission fee, to cover the cost of editorial review. (This fee is not refundable.) Go to the Home Page and scroll down the left column, then click the Pay Now button to pay your fee.

The Journal staff sponsors a podcast series highlighting recent articles. Click the image below to visit the podcast page on the Oxford University Press site.

Sociology of Religion Journal Podcasts

Click HERE to visit the Podcast Page (opens in a new tab)

• How It Works
• PhD thesis writing
• Master thesis writing
• Bachelor thesis writing
• Dissertation writing service
• Dissertation abstract writing
• Thesis proposal writing
• Thesis editing service
• Thesis proofreading service
• Thesis formatting service
• Coursework writing service
• Research paper writing service
• Architecture thesis writing
• Computer science thesis writing
• Engineering thesis writing
• History thesis writing
• MBA thesis writing
• Nursing dissertation writing
• Psychology dissertation writing
• Sociology thesis writing
• Statistics dissertation writing
• Buy dissertation online
• Write my dissertation
• Cheap thesis
• Cheap dissertation
• Custom dissertation
• Dissertation help
• Pay for thesis
• Pay for dissertation
• Senior thesis
• Write my thesis

215 Religion Research Paper Topics for College Students

Studying religion at a college or a university may be a challenging course for any student. This isn’t because religion is always a sensitive issue in society, it is because the study of religion is broad, and crafting religious topics for research papers around them may be further complex for students. This is why sociology of religion research topics and many others are here, all for your use.

As students of a university or a college, it is essential to prepare religious topics for research papers in advance. There are many research paper topics on religion, and this is why the scope of religion remains consistently broad. They extend to the sociology of religion, research paper topics on society, argumentative essay topics, and lots more. All these will be examined in this article. Rather than comb through your books in search of inspiration for your next essay or research paper, you can easily choose a topic for your religious essay or paper from the following recommendations:

World Religion Research Paper Topics

If you want to broaden your scope as a university student to topics across religions of the world, there are religion discussion topics to consider. These topics are not just for discussion in classes, you can craft research around them. Consider:

• The role of myths in shaping the world: Greek myths and their influence on the evolution of European religions
• Modern History: The attitude of modern Europe on the history of their religion
• The connection between religion and science in the medieval and modern world
• The mystery in the books of Dan Brown is nothing but fiction: discuss how mystery shapes religious beliefs
• Theocracy: an examination of theocratic states in contemporary society
• The role of Christianity in the modern world
• The myth surrounding the writing of the Bible
• The concept of religion and patriarchy: examine two religions and how it oppresses women
• People and religion in everyday life: how lifestyle and culture is influenced by religion
• The modern society and the changes in the religious view from the medieval period
• The interdependence of laws and religion is a contemporary thing: what is the role of law in religion and what is the role of religion in law?
• What marked the shift from religion to humanism?
• What do totemism and animalism denote?
• Pre Colonial religion in Africa is savagery and barbaric: discuss
• Cite three religions and express their views on the human soul
• Hinduism influenced Indian culture in ways no religion has: discuss
• Africans are more religious than Europeans who introduced Christian religion to them: discuss
• Account for the evolution of Confucianism and how it shaped Chinese culture to date
• Account for the concept of the history of evolution according to Science and according to a religion and how it influences the ideas of the religious soul
• What is religious education and how can it promote diversity or unity?7
• Workplace and religion: how religion is extended to all facets of life
• The concept of fear in maintaining religious authorities: how authorities in religious places inspire fear for absolute devotion
• Afro-American religion: a study of African religion in America
• The Bible and its role in religions
• Religion is more of emotions than logic
• Choose five religions of the world and study the similarities in their ideas
• The role of religious leaders in combating global terrorism
• Terrorism: the place of religion in promoting violence in the Middle East
• The influence of religion in modern-day politics
• What will the world be like without religion or religious extremists?
• Religion in the growth of communist Russia: how cultural revolution is synonymous with religion
• Religion in the growth of communist China: how cultural revolution is synonymous with religion
• The study of religions and ethnic rivalries in India
• Terrorism in Islam is a comeback to the crusades
• The role of the Thirty Years of War in shaping world diplomacy
• The role of the Thirty Years of War in shaping plurality in Christianity
• The religion and the promotion of economics
• The place of world religions on homosexuality
• Why does a country, the Vatican City, belong to the Catholic Church?
• God and the concept of the supernatural: examine the idea that God is a supernatural being
• The influence of religion in contemporary Japan
• Religion and populism in the modern world
• The difference between mythical creatures and gods
• Polytheism and the possibility of world peace
• Religion and violence in secular societies?
• Warfare and subjugation in the spread of religion
• The policies against migrant in Poland is targeted against Islam
• The role of international organizations in maintaining religious peace
• International terrorist organizations and the decline of order

Research Paper Topics Religion and Society

As a student in a university or MBA student, you may be requested to write an informed paper on sociology and religion. There are many sociology religion research paper topics for these segments although they may be hard to develop. You can choose out of the following topics or rephrase them to suit your research interest:

• The influence of religion on the understanding of morality
• The role of religion in marginalizing the LGBTQ community
• The role of women in religion
• Faith crisis in Christianity and Islamic religions
• The role of colonialism in the spreading of religion: the spread of Christianity and Islam is a mortal sin
• How does religion shape our sexual lifestyle?
• The concept of childhood innocence in religion
• Religion as the object of hope for the poor: how religion is used as a tool for servitude by the elite
• The impact of traditional beliefs in today’s secular societies
• How religion promotes society and how it can destroy it
• The knowledge of religion from the eyes of a sociologist
• Religious pluralism in America: how diverse religions struggle to strive
• Social stratification and its role in shaping religious groups in America
• The concept of organized religion: why the belief in God is not enough to join a religious group
• The family has the biggest influence on religious choices: examine how childhood influences the adult’s religious interests
• Islamophobia in European societies and anti-Semitism in America
• The views of Christianity on interfaith marriage
• The views of Islam on interfaith marriage
• The difference between spirituality and religion
• The role of discipline in maintaining strict religious edicts
• How do people tell others about their religion?
• The features of religion in sociology
• What are the views of Karl Marx on religion?
• What are the views of Frederic Engels on religion?
• Modern Islam: the conflict of pluralism and secularism
• Choose two religions and explore their concepts of divorce
• Governance and religion: how religion is also a tool of control
• The changes in religious ideas with technological evolution
• Theology is the study of God for God, not humans
• The most feared religion: how Islamic extremists became identified as terrorist organizations
• The role of cults in the society: why religious people still have cults affiliations
• The concept of religious inequality in the US
• What does religion say about sexual violence?

Religion Essay Topics

As a college student, you may be required to write an essay on religion or morality. You may need to access a lot of religious essay topics to find inspiration for a topic of your choice. Rather than go through the stress of compiling, you can get more information for better performance from religion topics for research paper like:

• The origin of Jihad in Islam and how it has evolved
• Compare the similarities and differences between Christian and Judaism religions
• The Thirty Years War and the Catholic church
• The Holocaust: historic aggression or a religious war
• Religion is a tool of oppression from the political and economic perspectives
• The concept of patriarchy in religion
• Baptism and synonym to ritual sacrifice
• The life of Jesus Christ and the themes of theology
• The life of Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) and the themes of theology
• How can religion be used to promote world peace?
• Analyze how Jesus died and the reason for his death
• Analyze the event of the birth of Christ
• The betrayal of Jesus is merely to fulfill a prophecy
• Does “prophecy” exist anywhere in religion?
• The role of war in promoting religion: how crusades and terrorist attacks shape the modern world
• The concept of Karma: is Karma real?
• Who are the major theorists in religion and what do they say?
• The connection of sociology with religion
• Why must everyone be born again according to Christians?
• What does religious tolerance mean?
• What is the benefit of religion in society?
• What do you understand about free speech and religious tolerance?
• Why did the Church separate from the state?
• The concept of guardian angels in religion
• What do Islam and Christianity say about the end of the world?
• Religion and the purpose of God for man
• The concept of conscience in morality is overrated
• Are there different sects in Christianity?
• What does Islam or Christianity say about suicide?
• What are the reasons for the Protestant Reformation?
• The role of missionaries in propagating Christianity in Africa
• The role of the Catholic church in shaping Christianity
• Do we need an international religious organization to maintain international religious peace?
• Why do people believe in miracles?

Argumentative Essay Topics on Religion

Creating argumentative essay topics on religion may be a daunting exercise regardless of your level. It is more difficult when you don’t know how to start. Your professor could be interested in your critical opinions about international issues bordering on religion, which is why you need to develop sensible topics. You can consider the following research paper topics religion and society for inspiration:

• Religion will dominate humanity: discuss
• All religions of the world dehumanize the woman
• All men are slaves to religion
• Karl Marx was right when he said religion is the return of the repressed, “the sigh of the oppressed creature”: discuss
• Christianity declined in Europe with the Thirty Years War and it separated brothers and sisters of the Christian faith?
• Islamic terrorism is a targeted attack on western culture
• The danger of teen marriage in Islam is more than its benefits
• The church should consider teen marriages for every interested teenager
• Is faith fiction or reality?
• The agape love is restricted to God and God’s love alone
• God: does he exist or is he a fiction dominating the world?
• Prayer works better without medicine: why some churches preach against the use of medicine
• People change religion because they are confused about God: discuss
• The church and the state should be together
• Polygamous marriage is evil and it should be condemned by every religion
• Cloning is abuse against God’s will
• Religious leaders should also be political leaders
• Abortion: a sin against God or control over your body
• Liberty of religious association affects you negatively: discuss
• Religious leaders only care about themselves, not the people
• Everyone should consider agnosticism
• Natural laws are the enemy of religion
• It is good to have more than two faiths in a family
• It is hard for the state to exist without religion
• Religion as a cause of the World War One
• Religion as a tool for capitalists
• Religion doesn’t promote morality, only extremisms
• Marriage: should the people or their religious leaders set the rules?
• Why the modern church should acknowledge the LGBTQ: the fight for true liberalism
• Mere coexistence is not religious tolerance
• The use of candles, incense, etc. in Catholic worship is idolatrous and the same as pagan worship: discuss
• The Christian religion is the same as Islam

Christianity Research Paper Topics on Religion

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Christian or not as you need to develop a range of topics for your essay or project. To create narrow yet all-inclusive research about Christianity in the world today, you can consider research topics online. Rather than rack your head or go through different pages on the internet, consider these:

• Compare and contrast Christian and Islam religions
• Trace the origin of Christianity and the similarity of the beliefs in the contemporary world
• Account for the violent spread of Christianity during the crusades
• Account for the state of Christianity in secular societies
• The analysis of the knowledge of rapture in Christianity
• Choose three contemporary issues and write the response of Christianity on them
• The Catholic church and its role towards the continuance of sexual violence
• The Catholic church and the issues of sexual abuse and scandals
• The history of Christianity in America
• The history of Christianity in Europe
• The impact of Christianity on American slaves
• The belief of Christianity on death, dying, and rapture
• The study of Christianity in the medieval period
• How Christianity influenced the western world
• Christianity: the symbols and their meaning
• Why catholic priests practice celibacy
• Christianity in the Reformation Era
• Discuss the Gnostic Gospels and their distinct historic influence on Christianity
• The catholic church in the Third Reich of Germany
• The difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament
• What the ten commandments say from a theological perspective
• The unpredictable story of Moses
• The revival of Saul to Paul: miracle or what?
• Are there Christian cults in the contemporary world?
• Gender differences in the Christian church: why some churches don’t allow women pastors
• The politics of the Catholic church before the separation of the church and the state
• The controversies around Christian religion and atheism: why many people are leaving the church
• What is the Holy Trinity and what is its role in the church?
• The miracles of the New Testament and its difference from the Old Testament’s
• Why do people question the existence of God?
• God is a spirit: discuss

Islam Research Paper Topics

As a student of the Islamic religion or a Muslim, you may be interested in research on the religion. Numerous Islam research paper topics could be critical in shaping your research paper or essay. These are easy yet profound research paper topics on religion Islam for your essays or papers:

• Islam in the Middle East
• Trace the origin of Islam
• Who are the most important prophets in Islam?
• Discuss the Sunni and other groups of Muslims
• The Five Pillars of Islam are said to be important in Islam, why?
• Discuss the significance of the Holy Month
• Discuss the significance of the Holy Pilgrimage
• The distinctions of the Five Pillars of Islam and the Ten Commandments?
• The controversies around the hijab and the veil
• Western states are denying Muslims: why?
• The role of religious leaders in their advocacy of sexual abuse and violence
• What the Quran says about rape and what does Hadiths say, too?
• Rape: men, not the women roaming the street should be blamed
• What is radicalism in Islam?
• The focus of Islam is to oppress women: discuss
• The political, social, and economic influence of modernity on Islam
• The notable wives of prophet Muhammad and their role in Islam: discuss
• Trace the evolution of Islam in China and the efforts of the government against them
• Religious conflict in Palestine and Israel: how a territorial conflict slowly became a religious war
• The study of social class and the Islamic religion
• Suicide bombers and their belief of honor in death: the beliefs of Islamic jihadists
• Account for the issues of marginalization of women in Muslim marriages
• The role of literature in promoting the fundamentals of Islam: how poetry was used to appeal to a wider audience
• The concept of feminism in Islam and why patriarchy seems to be on a steady rise
• The importance of Hadiths in the comprehension of the Islamic religion
• Does Islam approve of democracy?
• Islamic terrorism and the role of religious leaders
• The relationship of faith in Islam and Christianity: are there differences in the perspectives of faith?
• How the Quran can be used as a tool for religious tolerance and religious intolerance
• The study of Muslims in France: why is there religious isolation and abuse in such a society?
• Islam and western education: what are the issues that have become relevant in recent years?
• Is there a relationship between Islam and Science?
• Western culture: why there are stereotypes against Muslims abroad
• Mythology in Islam: what role does it play in shaping the religion?
• Islam and the belief in the afterlife: are there differences between its beliefs with other religions’?
• Why women are not allowed to take sermons in Islam

Can’t Figure Out Your Religion Paper?

With these religious research paper topics, you’re open to change the words or choose a topic of your choice for your research paper or essay. Writing an essay after finding a topic is relatively easy. Since you have helpful world religion research paper topics, research paper topics on religion and society, religion essay topics, argumentative essay topics on religion, Christianity research paper topics, and Islam research paper topics, you can go online to research different books that discuss the topic of your choice.

However, if you require the assistance of professional academic experts who offer custom academic help, you’ll find them online. There are a few writing help online groups that assist in writing your essays or research paper as fast as possible. You can opt for their service if you’re too busy or unmotivated to write your research paper or essay.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment * Error message

Name * Error message

Email * Error message

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

As Putin continues killing civilians, bombing kindergartens, and threatening WWIII, Ukraine fights for the world's peaceful future.

Ukraine Live Updates

• Skip to main content
• Skip to primary sidebar

IResearchNet

Academic Writing Services

Sociology of religion.

The task of building a scientific understanding of religion is a central part of the sociological enterprise. Indeed, in one sense the origins of the sociology can be attributed to the efforts of nineteenth-century Europeans to come to grips with the crisis of faith that shook Western society during the revolutionary upheavals of its industrial transformation. Most of the great European intellectuals of this era sought to formulate some sort of rational scientific paradigm to replace the religious foundations of Western culture, and such founding sociologists as Comte, Marx, and Durkheim were no exceptions.

Introduction

What is religion, durkheim and the functionalists, weber and the historical-comparative approach, the sacred canopy, the religious marketplace, the religious experience, religion and identity, conversion and commitment, religious movements, religion and social structure, religion in an age of globalization, the future of the sociology of religion.

Since the early sociologists were trying to break free from the hegemonic religious paradigm that had long dominated European thought, it is not surprising that they were fascinated with the phenomena of religion itself. As they became increasingly aware of the fecund diversity of religious life around the world, a number of basic questions arose that still lie at the heart of the quest for a sociological understanding of religion. Why are religious beliefs and practices so universal? Why do they take such diverse forms? How do social forces help shape those beliefs and practices? What role does religion, in turn, play in social, economic , and political life?

The first step in understanding religion is obviously to decide what it is, but as is so often the case, defining this basic concept is a far more difficult business than it appears at first glance. A good place to start is with Émile Durkheim. According to this classic sociologist, religion is a “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church , all those who adhere to them” (Dukheim [1915] 1965:62). Although this definition clearly requires some surgery to remove its Eurocentrism, it shows remarkable insight into the fundamental sociological characteristics of religion. The most obvious change that needs to be made is to remove the word “church,” because that normally refers only to Christian religions. There are, however, some more fundamental problems especially with Durkheim’s inclusion of the concept of the sacred in his definition. While “sacred things” play a major role in most religions, they are certainly not the sine qua non of religious life. In the Buddhist view, for example, there is nothing “set apart and forbidden” about meditation, ethical behavior, the cultivation of wisdom, or the other central tenets of their beliefs and practices. On the other hand, however, it doesn’t seem justified to call any system of beliefs and practices a religion. The Christian theologian Paul Tillich’s (1967) contention that religion involves issues of “ultimate concern” is far more broadly applicable (see Kurtz 1995:8–9).

For sociological purposes, at least, we can then say that religion involves three key elements: beliefs, practices, and a social group. Although religious beliefs are not always as systematically organized as Durkheim seemed to believe, those beliefs do deal in some way or other with the questions of ultimate concern the believers face. The realm of religious practice is too vast to enumerate here, because it involves everything from rituals and ceremonies to dietary and behavioral standards and various spiritual disciplines, but it is clearly a central part of religious life. Finally, religion is a social phenomenon that involves groups of people. The solitary philosopher does not become a religious figure until one shares his or her ideas with a group of people.

Sociological Theories of Religion

Sociology starts with the rather eccentric figure of August Comte (1798–1857). Like many young intellectuals of his time, Comte believed that religion was an archaic holdover from the past. Comte held that in the course of history, theological thinking gave way to metaphysical thinking, which in turn gave way to scientific thinking or what he called “positive philosophy.” Science, then, was the replacement for religion. When applied to the systematic study of society, it could be used to construct a rational social order guided by the sociologists that would eliminate the ancient problems that plagued humanity. Ironically, this determined opponent of religion suffered a mental breakdown toward the end of his life and refused to read anything but a medieval devotional text known as The Imitation of Christ.

Marx (1818–1883) was of course far more influential than Comte, and he was the first of the sociological giants to address the issue of religion. Although he shared the idea with many nineteenth-century thinkers that religious faith was an unscientific holdover from earlier times, his economic determinism and revolutionary commitment gave his views a particular slant. Religion in his perspective was merely part of the ideological superstructure erected on and shaped by the underlying economic realities and had no kind of independence of its own. Nonetheless, religion does play an important and clearly negative social role. For Marx (1844), religion was a profound form of social alienation because

the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. . . . The more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself. It’s just the same as in religion. The more of himself man attributes to God the less he has left in himself. (P. 122)

Religion in capitalist society provides a comforting illusion that obscures the realities of class conflict and class interest and, thus, is a profound example of false consciousness. By consoling the frustrated and oppressed, it helps prevent collective action to change the real source of their problems. Thus, religion was, in Marx’s famous phrase, “the opiate of the masses.”

Others in the Marxist tradition have taken a more nuanced position on religion, including his benefactor Fredrich Engels. Engels recognized that religion in some circumstances actually supported the struggle of the oppressed, as he felt was the case with early Christianity (Marx and Engels 1957). Most contemporary Marxists follow Engels’s position holding a general skepticism and suspicion of religious institutions, but recognizing that some religious developments, such as liberation theology in Latin American Catholicism , can be a progressive force.

While religion was of only a passing concern to Marx, it was central to the foundational French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). In his major work on the sociology of religion, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim ([1915] 1965) studied the religious life of the Australian aborigines on the questionable assumption that it was more primitive and simple than in the European nations and thus reflected religion in its most basic forms. Durkheim was particularly fascinated with the totemistic aspects of aboriginal religion. He concluded that the totems, objects or animals held in special awe by a particular clan, actually had little to do with the supernatural but were in fact symbols of the social group. He went on to argue that if the totem “is at once the symbol of the god and of the society, is that not because the god and the society are only one?” (Durkheim [1915] 1965:236). Thus, even in European society, Durkheim saw the worship of God to be nothing more than the worship of society. Society is the transcendent reality that religion symbolizes, and it not only has its own needs but even takes on a kind of anthropomorphic form in some of his writings. Society personifies itself in the form of totems or Gods to be revered and worshiped because it needs to reaffirm its legitimacy and worth to its members. And just as the Gods symbolize society, the soul is the symbol of the social element within the individual that lives on long after the people themselves.

Although the almost metaphysical elements in Durkheim’s thought were not particularly influential, his idea that religion functioned to meet basic social needs became a sociological truism. Over the years, functionalist theory grew more complex and sophisticated and is now one of the most widely used theoretical paradigms in the sociology of religion. Of particular importance was the contribution of Robert Merton (1957), who introduced the concept of the dysfunction. In his view, social institutions not only perform functions for society, but they also have dysfunctional consequences. Over the years, functionalists have developed a long list of the functions and dysfunctions of religion. Following O’Dea (1966:4–18), we can divide the human needs that religion meets into two categories—expressive and adaptive. Religion helps meet our expressive emotional needs by providing a supernatural context in which the hard realities of human life— powerlessness, uncertainty, injustice, and the inevitability of death—can be given meaning and purpose. Religion provides support and consolation, and its cult and ceremonies can encourage a sense of security and identity with something larger than the self. According to the functionalists, religion’s most important adaptive function is the way it sacralizes and reinforces the norms and values on which social order depends. Common rituals and common beliefs also help bind people together into a common community. In a different context, however, each function can become a dysfunction. By comforting and consoling people, religion may also discourage action for the needed social change. By making norms and values sacred, it not only strengthens them, but it may make them much harder to change when the times require it.

Like Durkheim, Max Weber (1864–1920) devoted a great deal of his enormous intellectual energy to the study of religion. Ever the rationalist, however, he was disinclined toward Durkheim’s kind of philosophical speculation or Marx’s political partisanship. If there is one underlying objective of Weber’s richly detailed historical and comparative examination of religion, it was to understand the relationship between religion and economic life. Where Marx saw a simple economic determinism, Weber saw a complex reciprocal interaction. In his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber (1930) argued the revolutionary thesis that Puritanism was one key factor in the Industrial Revolution. It was not, as Weber’s argument is sometimes misconstrued, just that Puritanism encouraged hard work (a strong work ethnic is certainly found in many non-European cultures). But also that Puritanism saw economic success as a sign of divine favor while demanding extreme rational self-control and a frugal lifestyle—conditions ideally suited to encourage the capital accumulation needed for the process of industrialization. Weber subsequently expanded his studies by examining the obstacles to economic rationalization posed by the religious and cultural traditions in other parts of the world, especially in China (1951) and India (1958).

Weber (1952, 1963) saw the influence of socioeconomic forces on religion in terms of what he called elective affinities. Weber felt that people in social groups with different lifestyles had an affinity for different kinds of religious beliefs. Those affinities may be based on the characteristics of entire societies, such as the tendency for foragers to believe in nature spirits or the appeal to monotheism for pastoralists. Or they may affect smaller-status groups, such as merchants who are attracted to rational calculating religions, or privileged elites with their proclivity for elaborate ritual and ceremony. However, Weber saw these relationships only as affinities, not as fixed and deterministic. Historical forces such as a foreign conquest can induce persons from a particular status group to adopt a religion for which they do not have a natural affinity.

One of the most popular of the more recent sociological theories of religion is built around Peter Berger’s (1969) metaphor of the “sacred canopy.” Drawing on the phenomenological and interactionist traditions, Berger holds human society to be an enterprise of world-building. It is, in other words, an effort to create a meaningful reality in which to live. This is a dialectical process that has three underlying movements. The first is “externalization,” which “is the ongoing outpouring of human beings into the world, both in the physical and the mental activities of man” (Berger 1969:4). Next comes the process of “objectivation,” which gives the products of this activity a reality and power that is independent of those who created it. Finally, individuals take this socially constructed reality into their own inner life in the process of “internalization.” Through this process society creates a nomos—a meaningful order that is imposed on the universe. The most important aspect of this socially established nomos is that it is “a shield against terror” protecting us from the “danger of meaninglessness” (Berger 1969:22).

Religion plays a key role in this process because it is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established. It is, in turn, the awesome mysterious power of the sacred that confronts the specter of chaos and the inevitability of death. According to Berger (1969), the “power of religions depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk inevitably, toward it” (p. 51).

Despite the powerful way Berger’s theory links the existential and the social dimension of religion, the idea that religion provides a single scared canopy over today’s pluralistic societies has it limitations. A number of current scholars are now using a different theoretical paradigm— rational choice theory—to construct a model that explicitly recognizes the reality of religious diversity (Stark and Bainbridge 1985; Finke and Stark 1992; Warner 1993; Iannaccone 1994). The basic idea is that the kind of consumer decision making analyzed by economic theory also applies to religious behavior. This approach looks at the public as consumers of religious who are out to satisfy their needs by obtaining the best “product.” Religious organizations are entrepreneurial establishments competing in a religious marketplace ruled by the laws of supply and demand.

Although religious “merchandise” is considered in just the same way as any other product, there is one important difference. The costs and benefits the consumers must weigh are often supernatural (such as the promise of an afterlife) and therefore cannot be empirically proven. This leaves the religious organization free to make almost any kind of claims it wishes, but it also creates the problem that the consumers are often uncertain about whether or not they will actually receive the benefits it promises. Thus, demanding groups that require high commitment often have the most attractive product, because they create greater feelings of certainty among consumers that they will actually receive the promised rewards. Another important point stressed by these theorists is that greater religious pluralism will encourage greater religiosity among the public, because it stimulates competition among different religious groups to improve their “product” in order to protect and expand their market share. Societies with a state religion, on the other hand, will tend to have less religious vitality because the established religion will be less responsive to the needs of the public (Finke and Stark 1992).

The metaphor of the marketplace is a useful tool for sociological analysis, but it can also be seriously misleading because there are also some fundamental ways in which religion is unlike an economic commodity. One of the most obvious is that the majority of people stay in the religion into which they were born and do not change even if another religion in the “marketplace” offers more benefits and less costs. Moreover, “religious products” are not really subject to market exchange, because they have no direct monetary value. A church cannot put its product on sale if the customers don’t come. Finally, as in other aspects of human life, rational choice theory fails to recognize the deep emotional forces involved in religious life that are often quite impervious to the beckonings of reason.

The Social Psychology of Religion

This examination of the theory of religion would not be complete without mentioning one other great nineteenth-century thinker, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). His thinking contains many similarities to the more sociological-oriented theorists who have grappled with the problem of religion. Like Berger, for example, Freud saw religion as an attempt to deal with the fundamental problem of human existence. For Berger, that problem was the need for meaning, whereas for Freud, it was our inability to obtain the things we want and need. Religion in Freud’s (1957) words “is born of the need to make tolerable the helplessness of man” (p. 54). Religion helps create a world in which we feel less threatened and more at home. But like so many other social scientists of this time, Freud felt that while religion may be comforting, it is a comforting illusion. Thus, religion is a kind of infantile wish fulfillment. In the face of our helplessness and defenselessness, we crave the solace and support we received from our parents when we were children, so we project a father figure into the heavens and call it God. While more recent psychological thinkers do not necessarily share Freud’s metaphysical position, the idea that the patriarchal God of Western monotheism is a father figure and that the female Goddesses in other traditions are symbolic representations of the mother is widespread.

Because these sociological and psychological theorists focus on the roles religion plays and the needs it meets, they often lose sight of the experiential foundations of religious life. But no matter how skeptical one may be about their meaning, there is no doubt that many people have religious or mystical experiences. Indeed, most of the world’s major religions trace their origins to such events. The experience Moses had when Yahweh gave him the Ten Commandments, Mohammad’s experience as the Angel Gabriel revealed Allah’s words in the Koran, and Siddhartha Gautama’s great enlightenment experience under the Bodhi tree are just a few examples of religious experiences that have literally changed the course of human history. But how, then, is the social scientist to understand such events? Freud, Durkheim, and Marx along with many of the other founders of the sociology of religion would dismiss such experiences as hallucinations, but that hardly seems to do such momentous events justice. Believers in the various faiths founded on such visions would say their accounts of what happened are literally true, but that of course leaves the problem that the “truths” revealed in one religious tradition often contradict the “truths” of another. The inescapable fact is that fact experiences that lie completely beyond the bounds of the ordinary must be still expressed in terms of the cultural expectations, assumptions, and language of the individuals who try to report them.

In his classic study The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto (1923) argues that religious experiences involve what he calls mysterium tremendum et fascinosum. That is, the experience of the holy is one of a terrifying power, fascinating yet absolutely unapproachable and wholly other. Ironically, most mystics in the Asian tradition and many Westerners as well describe such peak experiences in just the opposite way—a complete dissolution of the bounds of the normal self that produces an absolute unity with the entire universe (see Anonymous 1978; Kapleau 1989).

Of course, all religious experiences are not so overwhelming and profound. Like other experiences, they come in all ranges of intensities and in countless different forms. The feeling of holiness and tranquility one feels when entering a beautiful church or the sense of wonder and joy when seeing a mountain sunset are milder forms of religious experience, as are the states produced by effective rituals that invoke a sense of reverence and awe in the participant.

There is often a considerable difference in the importance placed on religious experience even among religious groups with relatively similar backgrounds. Among Protestant Christians, for example, the Pentacostalists give great importance to the direct emotional experience of the spirit of God, whereas the Puritans reject such emotionalism in favor of Bible studies and ethical discipline.

In societies with a single dominant faith, religious affiliation often becomes a taken-for-granted assumption and does not necessarily play a significant role in personal identity. The more religiously divided a society is, however, the more central the religion is likely to become in defining who one is. In pluralistic countries such as the United States, religious affiliation commonly provides a sense of belonging amid the anonymous institutions of mass society.

Religious identity is often mixed with ethnic identity— to be an Arab in many parts of the world is to be a Muslim, just as Serbs are identified with Orthodoxy , Croatians with Catholicism, and Thais with Buddhism . This combination can be an explosive one in areas with high levels of ethnic conflict. Religious differences aggravate ethnic conflict by providing emotionally charged symbols, systems of meaning that compete for cultural dominance, and a certain tendency to see one’s own group as having a monopoly on the truth.

Religion can play another role in personal identity by reinforcing a definition of oneself as a particular kind of person. Those with high levels of religious involvement and commitment often define themselves as more moral, more spiritual, or more wise than other people. Many religious groups hold that their faith is the one true faith, and even that fellow believers are an elite group that will receive heavenly rewards in the afterlife, whereas all others will suffer horrible torments. So the members of such groups tend to see themselves as part of a special elite of the “saved.” Although such beliefs can obviously reinforce self-esteem, they can also foster fear and anxiety if one fails to live up to the expectations of the religious group or begins to doubt the truth of its doctrines. They can also encourage a sense of hostility or even violence toward nonbelievers.

Religion may also have a critical role in sustaining identity change. In most societies, religiously rooted rites of passage publicly declare and reinforce changes in social status and the new identity that goes with them, for example, coming of age or marriage ceremonies. Religious groups may play a critical role in helping individuals make other radical changes in their lives as well. Religious organizations have often succeeded in helping drug abusers and compulsive gamblers where other programs have failed, because they offer an attractive new identity and a strong community to support it. A religious conversion or recommitment often follows various kinds of personal crises for much the same reasons.

Although there is a considerable amount of sociological research about “religious conversion,” the concept is in some ways an unfortunate one for it seems to imply an all-or-nothing dichotomy. One is a member of one religion and then “converts” to a different one. In many cases, however, a “conversion” is more like a renewal or return to existing religious beliefs. Moreover, despite the exclusivity of many Western religions, there is no particular reason to assume that people must leave their old religion before joining a new one. A substantial percentage of the population of Japan would, for example, identify themselves as both Shintoists and Buddhists.

Most of the sociological research on conversion and commitment focuses on one of two types of religions— fundamentalist Christians and members of what are called the new religious movements . The most striking finding of the research on conservative Christian faiths is that most of their “converts” actually came from the same kind of conservative Christian background. Richardson and Stewart’s (1978) study of the Jesus Movement in the 1960s and 1970s found that most of their converts were “hippies” who were returning to their original fundamentalist roots. Bibby and Brinkerhoff’s (1974) study of fundamentalist churches in a large metropolitan area in the United States also found that most converts were already religious insiders from evangelical backgrounds. Unlike the popular image of religious conversion, Zetterberg (1952) found that only 16 percent of converts to the Christian Church he studied experienced a sudden change in lifestyle. For most of his subjects, religious “conversion” was more like a “sudden role identification” in which they identified themselves more clearly in religious terms.

The media attention in the 1960s and 1970s to religious cults that appeared to be brainwashing young converts stimulated considerable sociological attention on this subject. To avoid the stigma attached to the term cult, however, sociologists now more often use the term new religious movements (NRMs) (see Roberts 2004:187–197). But somewhat confusingly, the term does not apply to any new religion only but to groups outside the religious mainstream that have an intense encapsulating community and often a strong charismatic leader. The most well-known study of conversion to NRMs is John Lofland’s work on the Unification Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Lofland (1966) found that conversion to the Unification Church followed a series of stages. First, the potential convert was “picked up” by members of the group, then he or she was showered with attention and “hooked.” In the next stage, they are “encapsulated”—isolated from contacts with those outside the group—and the final result is “commitment” to the group. Lofland’s model has been criticized for giving potential converts too passive a role in the process, something he himself later recognized (Snow and Phillips 1980; Lofland and Skonovd 1981).

Like other researchers, Lofland (1966) concluded that people with high levels of emotional tension and dislocations are more prone to religious conversions. Conversion or a renewed religious commitment is, then, one possible response to intractable personal problems. Thomas O’Dea (1966) argued that religious conversion was also part of a “quest for community.” Migrants, marginalized people seen as deviants by mainstream society, and others suffering from anomie and social disorganization are therefore prime candidates for a transforming religious commitment.

Sociologists, however, often neglect the obvious point that in addition to the desire to deal with pressing personal difficulties and to be part of a supportive community, people also make religious conversions for religious reasons. That is, they seek some kind of spiritual growth or religious experience. The members of the Western Buddhist groups that Coleman (2001) surveyed ranked the desire for spiritual growth as a more important reason for getting involved in Buddhism than a desire to deal with personal problems or to be with other members of those groups. More tellingly, the average respondent reported that they began to meditate about four years before they joined a Buddhist group—obviously, not something we would expect of someone whose primary goal was to find a supportive social community.

There is probably no other sphere of human life in which more effort is made to maintain unchanging traditions than in religion. Yet religious life everywhere is in a constant state of dynamic change. Even in the most stable eras, religious beliefs and practices are undergoing continual change from generation to generation, and new religious movements often spring up unexpectedly to challenge orthodox views.

Weber traced the origins of most religious movements to charismatic leaders, who are often the bearers of radical new religious ideas. The charismatic leader, according to Weber (1947), has “a certain quality of . . . individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities” (pp. 358–59). The qualities and insights of the charismatic leader are creative, out of the ordinary, and spontaneous, and as such she or he is a major source of social change and innovation. When the charismatic leader issues a call, people follow, and things change. Thus, charismatic leaders are often seen as a threat to established religion, which may respond with various repressive measures.

In its early days, the charismatic religious movement draws its legitimacy and inspiration from its leader. But once the charismatic leader dies, the movement is thrown into crisis. If the movement is to survive, it must undergo a process Weber termed the “routinization of charisma.” The special inspiration and magical quality of the leader must be incorporated into the routine institutionalized structures of society. In literate societies, the words and actions of the leader are written down and become revered holy books. The followers who gathered around the leader are typically subsumed into a formalized religious institution with the charismatic figure’s inner circle as its leaders. Rules, rituals, and specialized roles are developed to keep the leader’s message and the religious movement going.

This process of institutionalization is essential if the movement is to survive, but ironically, it can also sap its religious vitality and even subvert the intentions of the founder. As religious institutions become more powerful and more bureaucratic, the goals of the leaders are often displaced from spiritual objectives to the maintenance and enhancement of their own positions. Rituals and practices that were once vital and alive become stale, and the enthusiasm of the original converts is replaced by the complacency of those born into the faith. As this trend continues, the religion often generates revival movements that seek to shake things up and return to the original message of its charismatic founder.

The success of a new religious movement depends on both the qualities and skill of the charismatic leader and its sociological context. The religious message of the successful movement must have a stronger affinity to the needs and aspirations of particular status groups than competing religions. Political power is often critical to the expansion of the religion, as when conquering Islamic warriors propagated their faith across North Africa and the Middle East, or when the Christian faith of the European colonialists was spread throughout the vast empires they subjugated.

The most widely used typology of religious organization is probably Weber’s church- sect dichotomy. This useful, if somewhat Eurocentric, typology has been the subject of repeated elaborations and refinements over the years. Niebuhr (1957) added a third category, the denomination , between the first two, and some add a fourth (the cult), while still others have created subcategories within each broad type (Troeltsch 1931; Yinger 1970; Stark and Bainbridge 1985). Unfortunately, as the categories proliferated and their contents were elaborated in different ways by different sociologists, the classificatory scheme has become increasingly unwieldy.

The basic idea behind Weber’s original classification is, however, still a valuable one especially when conceptualized as a continuum rather than a series of ideal types. At one end is the “church” or, less Eurocentrically, the “established religion.” It is broad and universal and its members are usually born into the faith. It is well accommodated to the established order and, indeed, often receives official state support. At the other end is the sect, which is small and exclusive. Membership in the sect is by choice, and it demands a high degree of commitment and involvement. The roots of sectarianism are usually in some kind of protest movement, and in contrast to the established religion, there is an ongoing tension between the sect and the social order. As time goes by, however, both extreme types of religious organization tend to move more toward the middle. As the original members of the sect are succeeded by later generations, it tends to accommodate itself with the dominant social order, while established religions eventually split or see their hegemony eroded by new religious competition. European Christianity, for example, started as a sect, grew into an established religion, and then fragmented into multiple denominations.

Sectarian movements are most popular among the poor and disprivileged, groups that are naturally in a greater state of tension with the established order. But there are significant class differences even within established religions. In general, lower social strata have an affinity for emotional and expressive religion, while the middle and upper middle classes prefer more self-controlled rationalistic practice, and the upper class shows an attraction to elegant ceremony. In traditional Japan, for example, devotional Pure Land Buddhism was most popular among the peasants, and the disciplined Zen sect among the samurai, while the ritualistic Shigon held special appeal to the royalty.

Religion commonly plays another important role in the stratification system by legitimizing social inequality. One classic example concerning class inequality is the Hindu belief that someone who diligently carries out the obligations of their caste will be reborn into a higher caste in the future. Religion often plays a similar role in perpetuating gender inequality. First, many religious doctrines explicitly relegate women to subordinate positions. The Koran, for example, instructs women but not men to obey their spouse, dress modestly, and limit themselves to a single marital partner. Second, religious organizations often themselves discriminate against women as a matter of official policy. In Christianity, for example, the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and many Protestant churches categorically exclude women from the clergy. Many religions, especially in the Western tradition, also encourage or even require discrimination based on sexual orientation. However, because organized religion has often sided with the privileged and the powerful, it does not mean that it always does, and there are also numerous examples of religious movements that sought to overturn or reform an unjust social order.

The relationship between religion and politics is therefore a complex one. In some cases, religious groups are an oppositional force challenging the established order, although some form of accommodation or active support is far more common. But even in the latter case, the relationship between religion and government takes many forms. At one extreme we have the theocracy, such as contemporary Iran, in which religious elites dominate state organization. At the other extreme are the totalitarian states that rigidly control religious practice, as occurred in most of the Communist countries, or that use religion as a tool of government policy, as was the case with State Shinto in Meiji Japan. Religion offers a way to legitimize ruling elites in much the same way as it does for the overall stratification system as, for example, in the European belief in the divine right of kings. Equally important, it can provide a palate of powerful symbols that can be used to justify specific government actions. In the contemporary conflicts in the Middle East, for example, one side justifies its actions in terms of an Islam Jihad, whereas the other does the same in terms of what Bellah (1970) termed America’s “ civil religion ” (the belief that God supports America and that it has a moral duty to spread freedom and democracy around the world).

Like all social institutions, religion has undergone a sweeping transformation as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the global changes it has wrought. Many of the early founders of the sociology of religion saw this religious change in relatively simplistic terms as a process of secularization in which old religious ideas and institutions were being replaced by new rational-scientific ones. Over the years, the advocates of this secularization thesis moderated their claims holding merely that the influence of religion on society and social life has declined as a result of this process of modernization (Roberts 2004:305–28). More recently, a number of scholars have challenged this thesis holding that people are as religious as they ever were and that the process of secularization has ground to a halt (e.g., Stark and Bainbridge 1985). Such claims touched off a powerful counterattack, and this remains one of the most hotly debated issues in the sociology of religion (Bruce 1996).

Much of the differences between the contestants rest on conflicting definitions of secularization, and, polemics aside, several points seem clear. First, although the trend is more marked in the core than the periphery, societies in all parts of the world are becoming more secular if by that we mean mythical and magical thought is being replaced by rational-scientific thought in many (but certainly not all) areas of social life. The world, in Max Weber’s term, is being “disenchanted.”

Second, there has been a sharp decline in the political and social hegemony of organized religion in European societies as they have undergone the process of modernization. This trend is, however, much less pronounced or nonexistent in other parts of the world. In societies where hegemonic monotheism never took root, religion played a much weaker political role from the start. The Animistic religions do not have much in the way of distinct religious institutions, and Asian societies have always tended more toward totalitarianism than theocracy. For example, the Chinese government under Mao Tse-tung began a harsh repression of organized religious activities before any significant process of modernization had taken place, and since then has slowly been loosening its grip as industrialization has proceeded. In recent years, religion has also become an organizing principle for various movements reacting against the contradictions and dislocations caused by the process of modernization and the global spread of consumer capitalism. The Islamic fundamentalist movement is a political/religious response both to the relegation of the Islamic cultures to a peripheral position in the world system with the foreign domination that that implies and to the spread of Western consumer values. Interestingly, Islamic fundamentalism was stimulated to a significant degree by the success of another political/religion movement, Zionism, in taking control of formerly Islam territories. And the growing militancy of Islamic fundamentalism, in turn, stimulated a counterreaction in India sometimes known as Hindu fundamentalism. Even the United States, with its hegemonic position in the world system, has seen the growth of its own political/religious movements. The rise of the religious right in America was, however, obviously not the result of foreign domination, but a response to changes in traditional family institutions and sexual mores that resulted from the growth of consumer capitalism.

Third, although individual religiosity is difficult to measure, there seems little reason to believe that people are any less interested than they ever were in the matters of “ultimate concern” that are the foundation of most religions. Of course, social crises can stimulate a change or intensification of religion interests. The rise of Sufism after the Mongolian conquest of the Middle East is one example, as was the rapid growth of new religions known as the “rush hour of the Gods,” which occurred in Japan following its devastating defeat in World War II. Nonetheless, no matter what form of social organization we adopt and what our historical circumstances are, the existential dilemmas that give rise to the religious impulse remain a fundamental part of the human condition.

Whatever the excesses of its early days, the sociology of religion played a vital role in establishing the independence of the social sciences from the religious worldview that dominated European thought. By making religion an object of scientific investigation like any other social phenomena, it broke through a deep cultural barrier to the understanding of the social world. Today, this critical freedom is often taken for granted, but it ranks as one of the major successes of the sociological enterprise.

As the twenty-first century unfolds, the challenges before the sociology of religion are quite different ones. The roots of the global political economy go back at least as far as the fifteenth century, but only with relatively recent advances in communications and transportation are we seeing the emergence of a truly global community. As the peoples of the world are bound ever more inextricably together, the protective social distance between the hegemonic claims of different religious groups have evaporated and smoldering conflicts burst into flame. The critical task of the sociology of religion in this new era is to free itself from its remaining bonds of Eurocentrism and to provide a balanced vantage point from which to begin unraveling the twisted knots of religious claims and conflicts. It is relatively easy for sociologists to laud the contribution that different religions have made to the common weal. It is a far greater challenge to point out the ways in which they foster violence, bigotry, and intolerance without fanning the flames of sectarian conflict. The sociology of religion is, nonetheless, in a unique position to provide the kind of cool rational voice needed to help foster a just pluralistic foundation for the emerging world community. But the success of this enterprise depends on sociology’s ability to live up to its own illusive ideals of objectivity and impartiality.

References:

• [ca. 14th century] 1978. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works. Translated by C. Wolters. Reprint, London, England: Penguin Classics.
• Bellah, Robert. 1970. Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. New York: Harper & Row.
• Berger, Peter. 1969. The Sacred Canopy. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
• Bibby, Reginald and Merlin B. Binkerhoff. 1974. “When Proselytizing Fails: An Organizational Analysis.” Sociological Analysis 35:189–200.
• Bruce, Steve. 1996. Religion in the Modern World. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
• Coleman, James William. 2001. The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Durkheim, Émile. [1915] 1965. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by J. W. Swain, Reprint, New York: Free Press.
• Finke, Roger and Rodney Stark. 1992. The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Freud, Sigmund. 1957. The Future of an Illusion. Translated by W. D. Robson-Scott. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday.
• Iannaccone, Laurence R. 1994. “Why Strict Churches Are Strong.” American Journal of Sociology 99:1180–211.
• Kapleau, Philip. 1989. Three Pillars of Zen. Rev. ed. New York: Anchor.
• Kurtz, Lester. 1995. Gods in the Global Village: The World’s Religions in Sociological Perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge.
• Lofland, John. 1966. Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization and Maintenance of Faith. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Lofland, John and Norman Skonovd. 1981. “Conversion Motifs.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 3:294–308.
• Marx, Karl. 1844. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” Pp. 43–59 in Early Writings, edited by T. Bottomore. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1957. On Religion. New York: Schocken Books.
• Merton, Robert K. 1957. Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
• Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1957. The Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York: Meridian Books.
• O’Dea, Thomas F. 1966. The Sociology of Religion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Otto, Rudolf. 1923. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by J. W. Harvey. London, England: Oxford University Press.
• Richardson, James T. and Mary Stewart. 1978. “Conversion Process Models and the Jesus Movement.” Pp. 24–42 in Conversion Careers: In and Out of the New Religions, edited by J. T. Richardson. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
• Roberts, Keith A. 2004. Religion in Sociological Perspective. 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson.
• Snow, David A. and Cynthia Phillips. 1980. “The Lofland-Stark Model: A Critical Reassessment.” Social Problems 27:430–47.
• Stark, Rodney and William Simms Bainbridge. 1985. The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Tillich, Paul. 1967. Systematic Theology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Troeltsch, Ernst. 1931. The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches. Translated by O. Wyon. New York: Macmillan.
• Warner, R. Stephen. 1993. “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 98:1044–93.
• Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by T. Parsons. New York: Scribners.
• Weber, Max. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by A. M. Henderson and T. Parsons. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Weber, Max. 1951. The Religion of China. Translated by H. H. Gerth. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
• Weber, Max. 1952. Ancient Judaism . Translated by H. H. Gerth. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
• Weber, Max. 1958. The Religion of India. Translated by H. H. Gerth and D. Martindale. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
• Weber, Max. 1963. The Sociology of Religion. Translated by E. Fiscshoff. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
• Yinger, Milton. 1970. The Scientific Study of Religion. New York: Macmillan.
• Zetterberg, Hans. 1952. “The Religious Conversion as a Change of Social Roles.” Sociology and Social Research 36:159–66.

Secondary Menu

Sociology of religion, sociol 775s, cross-listed as.

• RELIGION 775S

Typically Offered

• Department Resources
• Statement on Workplace Environment
• Major Requirements
• Optional Concentrations
• MMS Certificate
• What Can You Do with a Sociology Degree?
• Honors Program
• Trinity Ambassadors
• Current Opportunities
• Career Development Resources for First Gen & Low Income Students
• Commencement 2024
• Coursework Requirement
• Professional Development Requirement
• Exams and Milestones Requirement
• Dissertation
• How to Apply
• Financial Support
• Graduate Placements
• Living in Durham
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Policies, Forms & Information
• Statement on Mentoring
• Colloquium Calendar
• Fall 2024 Schedule
• Primary Faculty
• Secondary Faculty
• Visiting Faculty
• Instructors and Lecturers
• Postdoctoral Fellows
• Research Staff
• Graduate Students
• Culture, Affect, & Cognition
• Health, Demography, & the Life Course
• Organizational & Economic Sociology
• Race, Ethnicity, & Inequality
• Religion & Social Change
• Social Networks & Computational Social Science
• Selected Faculty Books
• Undergraduate Research
• For Current Students
• Assisting Duke Students

(Why) is the Sociology of Religion Marginalized? Results from a Survey Experiment

• Published: 06 October 2023
• Volume 54 , pages 485–511, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• Samuel L. Perry   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6398-636X 1  

323 Accesses

3 Citations

3 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

By several metrics, the sociology of religion subfield and its specialists are marginalized within academic sociology. Though various reasons for that marginalization have been ventured, systematic evidence is limited. This study used a 2022 survey experiment to assess how academic sociologists perceive the sociology of religion and its specialists and the potential biases influencing their evaluations. Sociology faculty and trainees (N = 536) were randomly assigned to evaluate one of six sociology subfields and their respective specialists. Sociology of religion was rated as the least mainstream, but was rated middle-of-the-pack in scientific rigor, need within sociology departments, and interest to undergraduates. Though sociologists of religion were rated comparably to specialists in other subfields on characteristics indicating intellectual rigor, they were more often characterized as “religious” and “conservative,” and participants who characterized religion specialists as such downgraded the subfield on nearly every metric. Additional analyses show lower ratings were not due to generalized negativity toward “me-search.” And secular sociologists were more likely than religiously affiliated ones to downgrade the religion subfield when its specialists were perceived as “conservative.”

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Source : American Sociological Association ( 2023 )

Source : Subfields in Academic Sociology Survey (N = 53). Note: Asterisks indicate significant difference from comparison group. * p  < .05

Source: Subfields in Academic Sociology Survey (N = 83) Note: Asterisks indicate significant difference from comparison group. +  p  < .10; ** p  < .01

Source : Subfields in Academic Sociology Survey (N = 83). Note:  + indicates significant difference from comparison group at p  < .10

Source : Subfields in Academic Sociology Survey (N = 83). Note: Asterisks indicates significant difference from comparison group. +  p  < .10; * p  < .05; ** p  < .01

Similar content being viewed by others

When Perception Strikes Back: Testing Popular Agreement with Blank and Schmidt’s Item Categorization

Marco Bitschnau & Marlene Mußotter

Investigating “Spirituality”: Between Survey Data and the Study of Biographies

What personal value types are associated with beliefs on the social value of religion.

Allan B. I. Bernardo, Jose Antonio R. Clemente & Ma. Jenina N. Nalipay

Availability of Data and Material

The author will make the data fully available at http://www.TheARDA.com .

Code Availability

This will be included in the data.

Motivating his study, Mills ( 1983 :339) explained, “My impression is that, as a group, American sociologists of religion walk at a considerable distance from the rest of the discipline. We seem to organize separately…When we enter the job market we discover that our specialty is not in high demand, and especially not as a primary field.”.

The disparities are also misleading given the clear overlap between high-demand subfields. If I combine subfields related to crime (crime/delinquency; criminal justice), these interests have been listed 873 times since 2016, those mentioning race (racial and ethnic relations; race, class, and gender) 716 times, and those mentioning gender (sex and gender; race, class, and gender) 482 times, compared to religion’s 39 mentions.

Though it is difficult to quantify the influence of this fact, it should also be acknowledged that among prominent sociologists known for holding conservative political and religious views, most are connected with the sociology of religion subfield. This may also form the basis of stereotypes in the minds of academic sociologists.

Given this method of recruitment, there is no way to discern response rates. However, the goal of this experimental design is not population estimates but rather to discern effects through random assignment. Nevertheless, the demographic patterns I document in Table 1 suggest the sample is similar to those used in previous studies (Beit-Hallahmi, 2015 ; Blanton & Krasniki, 2022 ; Ecklund & Scheitle, 2007 ; Gross & Simmons, 2009 ; Klein & Stern, 2005 ; Rothman et al., 2005 ; Thalheimer, 1973 ).

Because of how participants were recruited, “International” would likely include mostly Canadian and UK faculty and trainees. And because there is so much cross-pollination with US sociology in terms of PhD programs, publications, and culture, they are included. All results were tested with and without the International participants and the results do not change in substance or statistical significance. Standard errors just increase slightly due to smaller sample size.

All results presented in the study were tested with and without the sociology faculty and trainees who indicated religion as their primary area of interest/expertise so as to ensure the results were not being biased by this group. Their responses were comparable to others in the sample. Moreover, because these participants were randomly assigned to one of six subfields (not just religion), their influence would be mitigated regardless. Among the 83 participants assigned to the religion subfield, 7 specialized in religion. Removing these cases did not substantively influence the results on any analysis.

As of 2022, the “sex and gender” section of the American Sociological Association ( 2022 ) has 1,050 members; “race and ethnic minorities” has 972 members; “economic sociology” has 716 members; “sociology of education” has 712 members; “sociology of population” has 507 members; and the “sociology of religion” section has 447 members. Though these membership disparities could arguably influence lower perceptions of the religion subfield as “mainstream,” it would not explain why the section closest to religion (population) is viewed as so much more mainstream than religion and indistinguishable from sections with considerably larger memberships (see Fig.  2 ). It would also not account for differences I find across these subfields in ratings of rigor, importance to the discipline, or interest to undergraduates.

These patterns are partly consistent with the findings of Rios and Roth ( 2020 ) who found that religion specialists in social and personality psychology were also associated with being religious, compassionate, and contemplative. However, participants in their study also associated religion specialists with being “subjective,” and they were less likely to associate such scholars with being “intelligent” than every other subfield.

Another nuance that could be explored in future studies is whether subfield labels like “religion” are too broad, and if other topics were included like the study of “Islam” or “white Christian nationalism,” would not only be regarded as more mainstream and important given the current historical moment, but also conflated with race/ethnicity research, consequently increasing the cache of researchers on these topics.

Altenmüller, M. S., Lange, L. L., & Gollwitzer, M. (2021). When research is me-search: How researchers’ motivation to pursue a topic affects laypeople’s trust inscience. Plos One, 16 (7), e0253911.

American Sociological Association. (2023). Positions Advertised in the ASA Job Bank . Available Reports from 2016 to 2022. https://www.asanet.org/academic-professional-resources/data-about-the-discipline/asa-reports/

Baker, Joseph O., & Smith, Buster G. (2015). American secularism: Cultural contours of nonreligious belief systems . NYU Press.

Google Scholar  

Barnes, M. Elizabeth., Truong, Jasmine M., Grunspan, Daniel Z., & Brownell, Sara E. (2020). Are scientists biased against Christians? Exploring real and perceived bias against Christians in academic biology. PloS one, 15 (1), e0226826.

Article   Google Scholar  

Beckford, J. A. (1985). The Insulation and Isolation of the Sociology of Religion. Sociological Analysis , 46 (4), 347–354.

Beit-Hallahmi, B. (2015). Explaining the Secularity of Academics: Historical Questions and Psychological Findings. Science, Religion and Culture, 2 (3), 104–19.

Blanton, M., & Krasniki, D. (2022). Value-conditioned interest: Religiosity, Institutional Support, and the Sociology of Religion in Top Graduate Departments. Working Paper .

Brown, M. V., Yau, J., Jiang, Y. H., & Bonner, P. (2014). Christians in Higher Education: Investigating the Perceptions of Intellectual Diversity Among Evangelical Undergraduates at Elite Public Universities in Southern California. Journal of Research on Christian Education, 23 (2), 187–209.

Buren, V., Harry, J., Syed, J., & Mir, R. (2020). Religion as a Macro Social Force Affecting Business: Concepts, Questions, and Future Research. Business & Society, 59 (5), 799–822.

Cadge, W., & Barton, B. (2016). Where Are You Organizationally Situated? Views from Here. Critical Research on Religion, 4 (3), 279–285.

Cavendish, J., & Starks B. (2021). Communicating religion’s relevance .  https://www.sociologyofreligion.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/ASR-2021-Preliminary-Program-3.pdf .

Devendorf, A. R., Victor, S. E., Rottenberg, J., Miller, R., Lewis, S. P., Muehlenkamp, J. J., & Stage, D. R. L. (2023). Stigmatizing our own: Self-relevant research (Me-search) is common but frowned upon in clinical psychological science. Clinical Psychological Science (forthcoming).

Ecklund, E. H. (2010). Scientists vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ecklund, E. H., & Scheitle, C. P. (2007). Religion among Academic Scientists: Distinctions, Disciplines, and Demographics Social Problems, 54 , 289–307.

Fox, J. (2021). Religion as an Overlooked Element of International Relations. International Studies Review, 3 (3), 53–73.

Gross, N. (2013). Why Are Professors Liberal And Why Do Conservatives Care? Harvard University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Gross, N., & Simmons, S. (2009). The Religiosity of American College and University Professors. Sociology of Religion, 70 (2), 101–29.

Grossmann, M. (2021). How the Social Sciences Got Better . Oxford University Press.

Grzymala-Busse, A. (2012). Why Comparative Politics Should Take Religion (More) Seriously. Annual Review of Political Science, 15 , 421–42.

Guhin, J. (2014). Religion as Site Rather Than Religion as Category: On the Sociology of Religion’s Export Problem. Sociology of Religion, 75 (4), 579–93.

Hadden, J. K. (1974). A brief social history of the Religious Research Association. Review of Religious Research, 15 (3), 128–136.

Harris, J. L. (2021). Black on Black: The Vilification of ‘Me-Search’, Tenure, and the Economic Position of Black Sociologists. Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, 4 (2), 77–90.

Iyer, S. (2016). The New Economics of Religion. Journal of Economic Literature, 54 (2), 395–441.

Kettell, S. (2012). Has Political Science Ignored Religion?  PS: Political Science & Politics, 45 (1), 93–100.

Kettell, S. (2023). Is Political Science (Still) Ignoring Religion? An Analysis of Journal Publications , 2011–2020. PS: Political Science & Politics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096523000598 .

Klein, D. B., & Stern, C. (2005). Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Viewsof Social Scientists. Critical Review, 17 (3–4), 257–303.

Manejwala, R., & Abu-Ras, W. (2019). Microagressions on the University Campus and the Undergraduate Experiences of Muslim South Asian Women. Journal of Muslim Mental Health, 13 (1).

Markofski, W. (2015). The Public Sociology of Religion. Sociology of Religion, 76 (4), 459–475.

Marti, G. (2014). Present and Future Scholarship in the Sociology of Religion. Sociology of Religion, 75 (4), 503–510.

Mills, E. W. (1983). The Sociology of Religion as an ASA Subdiscipline. Sociology of Religion, 44 (4), 339–353.

Newman, W. M. (1974). The society for the scientific study of religion: The development of an academic society. Review of religious research, 15 (3), 137–151.

Perry, S. L. (2022). American religion in the era of increasing polarization. Annual Review of Sociology, 48 , 87–107.

Perry, S. L. (2024). Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion—Now More than Ever . Oxford University Press.

Perry, S. L., & McElroy, E. E. (2020). Does the Bible Tell Me So? Weighing the Influence of Content versus Bias on Bible Interpretation Using Survey Experiments. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 59 (4), 569–585.

Philpott, D. (2009). Has the Study of Global Politics Found Religion? Annual Review of Political Science, 12 , 183–202.

Reed, M. S. (1974). The Sociology of the Sociology of Religion: A Report on Research in Progress. Review of Religious Research, 15 (3), 157–167.

Rios, K., Cheng, Z. H., Totton, R. R., & Shariff, A. F. (2015). Negative Stereotypes Cause Christians to Underperform in and Disidentify with Science. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6 (8), 959–67.

Rios, K., & Roth, Z. C. (2020). Is ‘me-search’ necessarily less rigorous research? Social and personality psychologists’ stereotypes of the psychology of religion. Self and Identity, 7 , 825–40.

Rothman, S., Lichter, S. R., & Nevitte, N. (2005). Politics and professional advancement among college faculty. The Forum, 3 (2).

Scheitle, C. P., & Dabbs, E. (2021). Religiosity and identity interference among graduate students in the sciences. Social Science Research, 93 , 102503

Scheitle, C. P., & Ecklund, E. H. (2018). Perceptions of Religious Discrimination Among U.S. Scientists. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 57 (1), 139–55.

Scheitle, C. P., Remsburg, T., & Platt, L. F. (2021). Science Graduate Students’ Reports of Discrimination Due to Gender, Race, and Religion: Identifying Shared and Unique Predictors. Socius . https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231211025183

Schnabel, L., Zaslavsky, K. A., Haggard, B., Pihl, A., Chiedu, A., Conte, A., ... & Zuckerman, P. (2023). An invitation to the sociology of religion: important questions answered by scholars in the field. The American Sociologist . https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-023-09578-z

Shults, F. L., Wildman, W. J., Taves, A., & Paloutzian, R. F. (2020). What do religion scholars really want? Scholarly values in the scientific study of religion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 59 (1), 18–38.

Smith, C., Vaidyanathan, B., Ammerman, N. T., Casanova, J., Davidson, H., Ecklund, E. H., Evans, J. H., Gorski, P. S., Konieczny, M. E., Springs, J. A., Trinitapoli, J., & Whitnah, M. (2013). Roundtable on the Sociology of Religion: Twenty-Three Theses on the Status of Religion in American Sociology—A Mellon Working Group Reflection. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 81 (4), 903–938.

Stark, R. (1999). Atheism, Faith, and the Social Scientific Study of Religion. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 14 , 41–62.

Stark, R., & Glock, C. L. (1968). American piety . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Thalheimer, F. (1973). Religiosity and Secularization in the Academic Professions. Sociology of Education, 46 (2), 183–202.

Tobin, G. A., & Weinberg, A. K. (2006). A Profile of American College and University Faculty: Political Beliefs and Behavior . Institute for Jewish and Community Research.

Wald, K. D., & Wilcox, C. (2006). Getting Religion: Has Political Science Rediscovered the Faith Factor? American Political Science Review, 100 (4), 523–529.

Wuthnow, R. (2014). General Concepts and Domain-Specific Concepts: An Argument about the Study of Religion in Sociology. Sociology of Religion, 75 (4), 594–606.

Yancey, G. (2011). Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education . Baylor University Press.

Yancey, G., Reimer, S., & O’Connell, J. (2015). How Academics View Conservative Protestants. Sociology of Religion, 76 (3), 315–36.

Download references

There is no funding to report for this study.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of Oklahoma, Department of Sociology, 780 Van Vleet Oval, Kaufman Hall, 73019, Norman, OK, USA

Samuel L. Perry

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

Corresponding author.

Correspondence to Samuel L. Perry .

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest.

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Consent to Participate

The research was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Oklahoma.

Consent for Publication

Additional information, publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Perry, S.L. (Why) is the Sociology of Religion Marginalized? Results from a Survey Experiment. Am Soc 54 , 485–511 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-023-09597-w

Download citation

Accepted : 08 September 2023

Published : 06 October 2023

Issue Date : September 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-023-09597-w

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Religion Scholarship
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

Research Topics & Ideas: Sociology

50 Topic Ideas To Kickstart Your Research Project

If you’re just starting out exploring sociology-related topics for your dissertation, thesis or research project, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we’ll help kickstart your research by providing a hearty list of research ideas , including real-world examples from recent sociological studies.

PS – This is just the start…

We know it’s exciting to run through a list of research topics, but please keep in mind that this list is just a starting point . These topic ideas provided here are intentionally broad and generic , so keep in mind that you will need to develop them further. Nevertheless, they should inspire some ideas for your project.

To develop a suitable research topic, you’ll need to identify a clear and convincing research gap , and a viable plan to fill that gap. If this sounds foreign to you, check out our free research topic webinar that explores how to find and refine a high-quality research topic, from scratch. Alternatively, consider our 1-on-1 coaching service .

Sociology-Related Research Topics

• Analyzing the social impact of income inequality on urban gentrification.
• Investigating the effects of social media on family dynamics in the digital age.
• The role of cultural factors in shaping dietary habits among different ethnic groups.
• Analyzing the impact of globalization on indigenous communities.
• Investigating the sociological factors behind the rise of populist politics in Europe.
• The effect of neighborhood environment on adolescent development and behavior.
• Analyzing the social implications of artificial intelligence on workforce dynamics.
• Investigating the impact of urbanization on traditional social structures.
• The role of religion in shaping social attitudes towards LGBTQ+ rights.
• Analyzing the sociological aspects of mental health stigma in the workplace.
• Investigating the impact of migration on family structures in immigrant communities.
• The effect of economic recessions on social class mobility.
• Analyzing the role of social networks in the spread of disinformation.
• Investigating the societal response to climate change and environmental crises.
• The role of media representation in shaping public perceptions of crime.
• Analyzing the sociocultural factors influencing consumer behavior.
• Investigating the social dynamics of multigenerational households.
• The impact of educational policies on social inequality.
• Analyzing the social determinants of health disparities in urban areas.
• Investigating the effects of urban green spaces on community well-being.
• The role of social movements in shaping public policy.
• Analyzing the impact of social welfare systems on poverty alleviation.
• Investigating the sociological aspects of aging populations in developed countries.
• The role of community engagement in local governance.
• Analyzing the social effects of mass surveillance technologies.

Sociology Research Ideas (Continued)

• Investigating the impact of gentrification on small businesses and local economies.
• The role of cultural festivals in fostering community cohesion.
• Analyzing the societal impacts of long-term unemployment.
• Investigating the role of education in cultural integration processes.
• The impact of social media on youth identity and self-expression.
• Analyzing the sociological factors influencing drug abuse and addiction.
• Investigating the role of urban planning in promoting social integration.
• The impact of tourism on local communities and cultural preservation.
• Analyzing the social dynamics of protest movements and civil unrest.
• Investigating the role of language in cultural identity and social cohesion.
• The impact of international trade policies on local labor markets.
• Analyzing the role of sports in promoting social inclusion and community development.
• Investigating the impact of housing policies on homelessness.
• The role of public transport systems in shaping urban social life.
• Analyzing the social consequences of technological disruption in traditional industries.
• Investigating the sociological implications of telecommuting and remote work trends.
• The impact of social policies on gender equality and women’s rights.
• Analyzing the role of social entrepreneurship in addressing societal challenges.
• Investigating the effects of urban renewal projects on community identity.
• The role of public art in urban regeneration and social commentary.
• Analyzing the impact of cultural diversity on education systems.
• Investigating the sociological factors driving political apathy among young adults.
• The role of community-based organizations in addressing urban poverty.
• Analyzing the social impacts of large-scale sporting events on host cities.
• Investigating the sociological dimensions of food insecurity in affluent societies.

Recent Studies & Publications: Sociology

While the ideas we’ve presented above are a decent starting point for finding a research topic, they are fairly generic and non-specific. So, it helps to look at actual sociology-related studies to see how this all comes together in practice.

Below, we’ve included a selection of recent studies to help refine your thinking. These are actual studies,  so they can provide some useful insight as to what a research topic looks like in practice.

• Social system learning process (Subekti et al., 2022)
• Sociography: Writing Differently (Kilby & Gilloch, 2022)
• The Future of ‘Digital Research’ (Cipolla, 2022).
• A sociological approach of literature in Leo N. Tolstoy’s short story God Sees the Truth, But Waits (Larasati & Irmawati, 2022)
• Teaching methods of sociology research and social work to students at Vietnam Trade Union University (Huu, 2022)
• Ideology and the New Social Movements (Scott, 2023)
• The sociological craft through the lens of theatre (Holgersson, 2022).
• An Essay on Sociological Thinking, Sociological Thought and the Relationship of a Sociologist (Sönmez & Sucu, 2022)
• How Can Theories Represent Social Phenomena? (Fuhse, 2022)
• Hyperscanning and the Future of Neurosociology (TenHouten et al., 2022)
• Sociology of Wisdom: The Present and Perspectives (Jijyan et al., 2022). Collective Memory (Halbwachs & Coser, 2022)
• Sociology as a scientific discipline: the post-positivist conception of J. Alexander and P. Kolomi (Vorona, 2022)
• Murder by Usury and Organised Denial: A critical realist perspective on the liberating paradigm shift from psychopathic dominance towards human civilisation (Priels, 2022)
• Analysis of Corruption Justice In The Perspective of Legal Sociology (Hayfa & Kansil, 2023)
• Contributions to the Study of Sociology of Education: Classical Authors (Quentin & Sophie, 2022)
• Inequality without Groups: Contemporary Theories of Categories, Intersectional Typicality, and the Disaggregation of Difference (Monk, 2022)

As you can see, these research topics are a lot more focused than the generic topic ideas we presented earlier. So, for you to develop a high-quality research topic, you’ll need to get specific and laser-focused on a specific context with specific variables of interest.  In the video below, we explore some other important things you’ll need to consider when crafting your research topic.

Get 1-On-1 Help

If you’re still unsure about how to find a quality research topic, check out our Research Topic Kickstarter service, which is the perfect starting point for developing a unique, well-justified research topic.

You Might Also Like:

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Print Friendly

• Search Menu
• Advance articles
• Author Guidelines
• Book Reviewer Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access Options
• Why Submit?
• About Journal of the American Academy of Religion
• About the American Academy of Religion
• Books for Review
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Dispatch Dates
• Terms and Conditions
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

Why american sociology taking religion seriously had to fail (or nearly so), positive signs, future directions and challenges.

• < Previous

Roundtable on the Sociology of Religion: Twenty-Three Theses on the Status of Religion in American Sociology—A Mellon Working-Group Reflection

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Christian Smith, Brandon Vaidyanathan, Nancy Tatom Ammerman, José Casanova, Hilary Davidson, Elaine Howard Ecklund, John H. Evans, Philip S. Gorski, Mary Ellen Konieczny, Jason A. Springs, Jenny Trinitapoli, Meredith Whitnah, Roundtable on the Sociology of Religion: Twenty-Three Theses on the Status of Religion in American Sociology—A Mellon Working-Group Reflection, Journal of the American Academy of Religion , Volume 81, Issue 4, December 2013, Pages 903–938, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lft052

• Permissions Icon Permissions

American sociology has not taken and does not take religion as seriously as it needs to in order to do the best sociology possible. Despite religion being an important and distinctive kind of practice in human social life, both historically and in the world today, American sociologists often neglect religion or treat it reductionistically. We explore several reasons for this negligence, focusing on key historical, conceptual, methodological, and institutional factors. We then turn to offer a number of proposals to help remedy American sociology's negligence of religion, advance the study of religion in particular, and enhance sociology's broader disciplinary capacity to improve our understanding and explanation of human social life. Our purpose in this analysis is to stimulate critical and constructive discussion about the significance of religion in human life and scholarly research on it.

DOES AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY take religion seriously? Does sociology understand all that it should about religion, if only in order to do its descriptive and explanatory job well? And how does the specific field of sociology of religion fit within or relate to the larger discipline of sociology? We believe that the answers to these questions are that American sociology too often neglects religion or treats religion reductionistically, and ought to improve itself by taking a more robust understanding of religion more seriously in research and teaching. We addresses questions about religion as a social object, sociological knowledge about religion, religious claims about social life, and the character and future of the larger discipline of sociology itself.

At the initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with the University of Notre Dame, we—a group of mostly American sociologists interested in the study of religion—take up these questions and reflect critically and constructively about the relationship between religious knowledge and the discipline of sociology. 1 We offer this article to stimulate greater disciplinary self-reflection and more constructive discussions about religion in sociology. We offer our thoughts as a small contribution to much larger conversations that have unfolded around the world in recent decades about the meaning, social role, and future of religion and secularity. We speak mostly as Americans about American sociology, yet hope that our particular perspective might make some useful contribution to these larger global conversations.

This article proceeds in three parts. We first describe problems and challenges facing the study of religion within sociology. We then describe positive signs. Finally, we offer constructive proposals for future directions.

In this section, we examine the reasons—historical, conceptual, methodological, and institutional—why American sociology has had difficulty taking religion seriously. To approach this issue, and the questions that opened the article, it is necessary to first set them in their larger historical context and then place them in the contemporary landscape of American sociology.

Historical Problems

First, since its inception, American sociology has had a complicated, shifting relationship with “religion.” 2 In its earliest years, American sociology germinated in the soil of a socially activist American Protestantism. Many first-generation sociologists came from Christian backgrounds, hoped to use sociology to promote religiously inspired and informed social reforms, and even spoke confidently about visions for “Christian sociology.” The Social Gospel leader, Shailer Mathews, for instance, published an eight-part series of essays titled “Christian Sociology” in the first two volumes of the American Journal of Sociology in 1895–96. Mainline and progressive evangelical Protestantism was the traditional institutional authority exercising control over socially legitimate cultural knowledge ( Smith 2003b ). Beginning in the twentieth century, however, American sociology began to marginalize “religious sociology” as a misguided attempt to make claims to knowledge. University-based sociologists, seeking to turn their nascent field into a legitimately viewed profession, began intentionally drawing a sharp distinction between scientific sociology (said to be good and authoritative) and religious “do-goodism” (said to be bad and illegitimate). As such, American sociology was established discursively and institutionally as a structural rival of religion, in some sense, a secularized version of American Protestant Christianity (as the discipline of anthropology was, similarly, a secular complement to the Christian missionary movement abroad). From the start, then, American sociology got off on the wrong foot in its ability to take religion seriously. 3

Second, in the particular history of American thinking about religion and society, certain dimensions of religion and the “spiritual” were unjustifiably removed from the roster of serious academic topics that merit scholarly description, understanding, and explanation . An evolutionary theoretical heritage that posited religion, particularly the dominant form of Christianity, as the most highly evolved form of the “natural spiritual quest of man” dominated the latter half of the nineteenth-century. In retrospect, scholars now see that heritage as not only self-aggrandizing, but also false. In turn, other forms of practices concerning transcendent, spiritual, supernatural, and mystical matters—such as magic, cultic practices, mysticism, and nonobvious forms of spiritual searching—were largely removed from sociological consideration. Given the evolutionary assumptions about religion common in the nineteenth century, it was easy to discard these as primitive and inferior superstitions and residues destined for extinction. These all remain important religious or quasi-religious realities in the contemporary world, however, and deserve more and better study than they typically receive by sociologists. 4

Third, the larger academy's current renewed attention to religion is driven not by a native academic interest in things sacred and transcendent but, rather, by the external imposition of undeniably important religious movements and events building over the past forty years . The founding thinkers of sociology understood religion to be important, but also believed that it would wither away in relevance and strength with the development of modernity. In fact, to the contrary, a host of social, political, and theological movements, revolutions, events, and trends in recent decades have forced mainstream American academics, whether they like it or not, to take religion seriously. These developments include the rise of the Moral Majority and religious right in the United States; the Iranian revolution; Catholic Solidarity in Poland; the role of Pope John Paul II in challenging communism; liberation theology in Latin America; the religious energy in the antiapartheid movement in South Africa; ongoing conflict between Hindus and Muslims in and around India and Pakistan; a resurgent evangelicalism in American culture and politics; the massive growth of Pentecostalism and charismatic evangelicalism in the Global South; and the surging growth of multiple religions in China, South Korea, and other Asian countries. September 11, 2001, put a massive exclamation point at the end of these profound phenomena to open up the twenty-first century.

The recent renewal of scholarly interest in religion has thus resulted not from any internally driven enlightenment about the subject of religion among faculty in universities. It has rather been forced upon the academy by the reality of religion's continued presence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These facts have forced American academics to reconsider problems in the secularization-theory model, to learn more about the empirical realities of religion in the contemporary world, and to adjust their interests, understandings, and analyses to better account for the religious realities and religious facts of the real world. But the deeper effect on the discipline of sociology itself has been arguably limited. That is, something big has happened in the world in last forty years that has thrown the standard, received views of religion into flux, provoked renewed interest in things religious or spiritual, and underscored the limits of the old paradigm. But many American academics, often ill-prepared intellectually, seem to have met these changes and challenges with surprise and perhaps with some begrudging resistance.

Fourth, the apparent “resurgence” of public religion around the world transpired when American social scientists were focused primarily on theories and explanations that could not properly account for that resurgence . During the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, American sociology was preoccupied with rejecting the Parsonian structural functionalism that had dominated the discipline during the mid-twentieth century and replacing it with theoretical alternatives. Some of that reaction took the form of various micro-sociologies—symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, enthnomethodology, dramaturgy, and so on—which were relatively neutral in their ability to accommodate a renewed interest in religion. But the more influential movements in American sociology during these decades were expressed in “rational choice” theory and various “structural” approaches to social analysis, including versions of neo-Marxism and state-centered theories. Central to these latter approaches are the commitment, rooted deeply in Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and others, to rational egoism, materialism, and a focus on resource or utility gain. Consequently, much of the discourse of the “structural” outlook of those years concerned interests, resources, domination, and the determinative power of social structure. Other matters, such as culture, belief, ideology, nonrational behavior, ritual, and “superstition,” were considered marginal. So when religion began in the 1970s to show that it was not going away, many social scientists of the era were unprepared intellectually to make sense of it. That influence continues to this day. To the extent that the theoretical worldviews of sociologists today still revolve primarily around matters of material interests, economic forces, political interests, social dominance, relational power, and so on, religion remains largely reducible and ignorable. By theoretical presupposition, the former are taken to be “real” while religion is believed to be peripheral or epiphenomenal. But, we believe, religious commitments in the end cannot be completely reduced to interests, power, and material resources, so an interest- and resource-based general sociological model cannot account for religion well.

Even today, Western nations largely frame processes such as global socioeconomic development in ways that do not involve religion in any serious way. Worse yet, leaders of liberal democracies cling to an old faith in the positivist account of modernization, presuming that the processes of development are solvent enough to neutralize or subdue the antimodernizing impulses of religious belief. This has perpetuated patterns of Orientalism and colonialist relations between “developed” and “developing” countries. Instead of understanding religion as it operates on its own terms within the developing world—not to mention in “advanced” countries—Western leaders react with dismay, ignorance, and despair over the “staying power” of religion across the globe. As a result of this ignorance about the roles that religion plays in various national contexts, development projects, state-building, peace building, the promotion of democracy, and even trade agreements have often failed. Thus, as global religion becomes increasingly difficult to ignore, we believe an appropriate sense of urgency for taking religion seriously is still lacking in important power centers of the West, let alone amongst scholars. Yet, as the waves of “world problems” inevitably crash onto local shores in a globalizing world, we can no longer afford to ignore the important matter of religion as it exists in human life around the globe.

Fifth, the resurgent American cultural sociology since the 1980s has proven only marginally interested in religion and, in fact, tends to treat religion as indistinguishable from other social realities. Hitting the real limits of the rational choice and structural sociologies that dominated the discipline in the United States during the 1970s helped to give rise to a resurgent cultural sociology in the 1980s and beyond. We view that as a good movement overall, although much of the work in the new cultural sociology turned out to ignore religion. With few exceptions, little was done on the theoretical front of the new cultural sociology to take on religion as a particular social object and to significantly improve our sociological understanding of it. If anything, religion became viewed as simply another “ideology”—ontologically and conceptually indistinct from any other belief system. Indeed, dominant sociological views of culture secularize religion, treating it as a subcomponent of culture, when, we think, a plausible historical and sociological argument can be made that culture is actually a subcomponent of religion.

As a result, many cultural sociologists saw little reason to theorize religion as a particular kind of social entity—even though cultural sociology should be well-equipped theoretically to study religion as a distinctive kind of social object. Within this larger intellectual and analytical movement that might have served to revive a robust understanding of religion, the latter was instead melted into the larger mix of all things ideological, symbolic, and meaningful. Arguably, too, the ability of cultural sociology to adequately understand religion was weakened by the neo-positivism and empiricism advocated by some in the subfield. Recent developments in the field have increasingly called into question the link between discourse and practice, leading to focused studies of either discursive structures or popular material culture. Consequently, cultural sociology has constrained its own ability to make adequate sense of the subjective aspect of human existence, which we think is important (though not exclusive) in religion.

Conceptual and Methodological Problems

Sixth, many of our standard methodological tools reflect assumptions about and treatments of religion that are so thin, skewed, and misleading that they constitute a serious obstacle to understanding and explaining the complexity of real religious phenomena. Methodologically, sociology has generally not thought of religion as an important variable. Mainstream surveys simply do not ask enough in-depth questions about religion, nor are our concepts about religion deep or interesting enough to generate many really good survey questions. Several sociological studies of religion presuppose, for example, that religion can be adequately captured for most analyses by a limited set of standard survey-measure variables entered into multiple regression equations—“church attendance,” “affiliation,” “Bible views,” and the like. In certain circumstances, that may work. But the common tendency is to proceed with little reflection on or conceptualization of the subject of study, slapping standard measures and methods on a variety of matters “religious,” and concluding that what is to be learned will either come out in the findings or, if nothing comes out, that there is nothing important to learn. Attempting to “pay more attention to religion” while relying on such flawed assumptions and measures may actually make matters worse and inhibit future investigation. As a simple example, for a long time, sociological surveys of religion asked one religion question about affiliation: “Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Other.” Those categories proved grossly simplistic for capturing real distinctions of consequence that existed in American religion. Often, dummy variables for these gross religious types produced no significant results, and so analysts concluded that “religion does not matter.”

Subsequent improvements in religion survey measures (e.g., Steensland et al. 2000 ) have improved our ability even with statistical analyses of religion to find significant and sometimes powerful religion effects. But we think the conceptual and theoretical work that needs doing is much more extensive than the incremental improvements in measurement we have seen in recent years. Knowing something about the complexities of religion in most cases, we suspect that far more rethinking of the tools we use for capturing different aspects of religious practices, rituals, affiliations, attitudes, habits, beliefs, and so on—inductively driven by significant qualitative field research—would have a big payoff in revealing the intricate and subtle ways that religion actually influences people's lives and the social world. We also think sociology of religion needs to consider the ways in which too many of its assumptions, concepts, and measures are governed by a normative evangelical Protestant view of religion. In short, religion is much “thicker” than what many of our standard measures and methods capture, and most of our (neo-positivist) methodologies cannot adequately test our theories about religion. If we hope to adequately grasp the social significance of religion in social life, we need to improve our measures and methods.

Seventh, disciplinary preoccupations and trends often include conceptual inadequacies and biases that impede the serious study of religion . In general, mainstream American sociology has a strong antimentalist outlook. Because the discipline commonly discounts “beliefs,” attitudes, and mental life in motivating and guiding social action and behavior ( Campbell 1996 ), sociology has difficulty taking religion seriously. Underlying this trend are many basic theoretical misunderstandings, including, for example, the failure to recognize that “social structures” are always culturally constituted, including by sets of cultural beliefs such as religion. More broadly, we detect here an inadequate familiarity with important issues in the philosophy of science that affect our work, including questions about causation, empiricism, emergence, and the ontology of unobservable entities. At a much more simple level, for decades, secularization theory dominated social science's view of the fate of religion in modern society. As this theory has proven untenable, scholars since the 1980s have found themselves without an adequate conceptual apparatus at hand to respond to the very-real religious world that imposed itself upon their crumbling academic verities.

For another example, some scholars, especially postmodern and postcolonial critics in religious studies, have challenged the very idea of “religion” as a universal, basically human, and coherent concept. We think such critiques are partly insightful and correct (see below), but also misleading on the particular question of defining religion. It is true that the use of the idea of “religion” as a singular category can be misleading in various ways, including wrongly suggesting that all “religions” in the world are natural kinds that share identifiable sets of properties, tendencies, teachings, and practices. At the same time, we believe that, by shifting our focus from largely exclusive concerns with discourse and concepts to a more expansive view that takes seriously practices and actions, we can identify a particular type of human activity and orientation that shares features that can be rightly described under the rubric of “religion.” 5 However, we think it best (as much as possible) to refer to “religions” in the plural, to remind ourselves of the multiplicity and diversity of the subjects of study. And we think it important to intentionally distinguish different aspects of religious phenomena, such as religious practices, rituals, beliefs, organizations, dispositions, material artifacts, and so on. To improve the definitional adequacy of our concepts in a way that will enhance our ability to understand religion well will require much more theoretical work ( Edgell 2012) .

In this larger context, however, sociologists have also paid insufficient attention to how the study of religion has itself participated in and authorized the discourses of colonialism and “Orientalism.” On this point, we think many of the postcolonial critics are correct. Too often, we have overlooked the complicity of academic concepts such as “religion” in authorizing historical power restructuring, domination, and direct and cultural violence, both domestically and globally. Interrogating this legacy entails ramifications for the global and comparative academic study of religion, calling religion scholars to overcome our too-common national and Christocentric parochialisms. Further, the modern project itself has involved “migrating the holy” to the political construct of the nation state (see Cavanaugh 2011 ). The nation has become not merely a replacement of religion but, at times, instrumental to the fulfillment of religious objectives. This is not only the case with Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories, for example, but also motifs located in the mythologies of Sinhala Buddhism, Hindutva, Hamas, and a host of other explicitly religious nationalisms. None of these, however, can be explained outside intersecting discursive formations, from colonialism to Orientalism and to the very logic of nationalism. Nor can they be reduced to these formations either. To make sense of the reality of religion around the world, we need to become more self-reflexive about these kinds of processes and dynamics.

Contemporary Institutional Problems

Eighth, the sociology of religion in the United States continues to remain somewhat institutionally isolated . For much of the twentieth century, sociology of religion in the United States was organized into largely autonomous professional associations. These, most notably, include the Association for the Sociology of Religion, the Religious Research Association, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. It was not until 1995 that a religion section even began in the American Sociological Association, ninety years after the ASA's founding. These independent associations have helped the field's development in some ways. They all enjoy significant material resources to carry on their work, publish their own field-specific journals (e.g., the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion ), and organize their own conferences. But, in doing so, they have also segregated sociologists studying religion from their sociological colleagues in other, often more central fields of study in the discipline (e.g., social inequality, organizations, gender, and race and ethnicity). An unintended consequence of this particular organizational structuring has been to culturally define “religion” among sociologists as a distinct, isolated field of study. This has a silo effect, isolating scholars who think a lot about religion from colleagues who do not, and sending a message that “religion is being taken care of” by specialists, so those who are not sociologists of religion can largely ignore it. (This dynamic is not unique to the sociology of religion—many fields of sociology encounter it too—but it is still a fact that we think helps to explain the difficulty of sociology taking religion adequately seriously.)

Ninth, the isolation of religion has been reinforced organizationally at the university-level through the creation and expansion of religious studies departments . Historically, universities concentrated the study of religion into distinct departments, most of which emerged out of religious seminaries, divinity schools, and other semi- and quasi-confessional programs in academia. Departments of religious studies worked hard to define and protect the specific subject matter over which they presided. They also developed distinct methodologies believed to be uniquely suited to research on the sacred. For example, phenomenological approaches provided a means for taking seriously people's reports about religious experiences and beliefs in a way that potentially protected the latter from reductionistic, subject-dissolving analyses (like those that neuroscience might provide). While religious studies departments rightly gave “religion” a real place at the academic table, this often had the negative consequence of excusing scholars in other disciplines from also taking religion seriously. In effect, other scholars, including those in sociology, were able to overlook or ignore religion as a relevant social reality in their research because of religious studies' specialization in and dominance of the topic. This fact becomes clear when we compare how much attention major European sociologists, such as Ulrich Beck, pay to religion relative to their counterparts in the United States. As a result of this academic division of labor, many scholars in many disciplines, including sociology, are not particularly well prepared to understand and explain religion well.

Tenth, the sociology of religion is at the lower end of the disciplinary status hierarchy in the academy . Within sociology generally, the subfield of religion occupies a low status; moreover, within the social sciences, sociology has become somewhat marginal especially compared with the rise of positivistic economics in shaping policy and public discourse in recent years. These status hierarchies have become even more heightened with the growing prominence of a new scientific discourse shaped by neuroscience and neo-Darwinian approaches, which are arguably marginalizing all of the social sciences. Further, dominant trends in science suggest a growing scient ism that reduces numerous phenomena, including religion, to the neurological, genetic, and biological levels—privileging magnetic resonance images (MRIs), for instance, as the method by which we can arrive at our best knowledge of complicated social realities. Certainly, there is a diversity of voices among scientists in their views of and attitudes toward religion, but often the loudest voices are those that assume reductionist accounts of religion.

Eleventh, understanding religion is hampered by a larger inability in the discipline to think broadly, which is reinforced by current institutional structures and standard practices . The institutional reward structures in sociology do not incentivize studying religion, let alone big-picture social-theoretic questions that are relevant to religion. Yet such big-picture questions are foundational to sociology and ignoring them undermines the quality and significance of our sociological work. These forces are especially evident during graduate training and for junior professors. Graduate training in sociology across most American universities increasingly pressures students to generate publishable articles as quickly as possible, to make students more competitive on the job market, and to improve the rankings of their departments. Junior scholars face similar pressures as they navigate the tenure process; success and security depend on establishing an early and steady production of publications. What junior scholars often develop as a result, whether intentionally or as an unintended by-product, is a mentality that privileges the use of available survey data sets to run quick quantitative analyses to address some minor lacuna in a particular body of literature. Such training generally does not encourage in-depth and broad reading on difficult problems. It rather fosters a careerist mentality that sees the pursuit of big and difficult questions as grit thrown into the machinery of scholarship. Engaging big questions slows down the prolific manufacturing of published articles and is a risk to short-term achievement and, hence, a threat to professional survival. The requirements of major, sought-after funding sources (such as the National Science Foundation) to couch research in scient istic frameworks that privilege “hypothesis testing” also arguably inhibit the pursuit of serious, in-depth research on religion exploring territory beyond well-worn paths and formulas. The institutional reward structures in the academy may thus obstruct the pursuit of big theoretical questions as well as moral visions of sociology's possible contributions to society which might shape the discipline. We may rely on training in sociological theory to address such questions, yet even this as normally taught in graduate programs can be quite narrow, even perfunctory, and is often skewed by a common, underlying picture of human persons as essentially interested in political, status, and material ends.

Twelfth, the relative lack of personal religious commitment, identity, and knowledge among mainstream American sociologists arguably provides an obstacle to taking religion seriously in scholarship . We assume that, in general, the more personal, substantive knowledge a scholar has about an object of study, the more comfortable and competent the scholar can be in studying it ( Polanyi 1962) . We also assume that academics, who value competence and nuanced understanding in the topics they study, are less likely to turn their focus to subjects that would require significant investment in basic and professional knowledge. It is problematic, then, for the study of religion that American social scientists, and sociologists specifically, are disproportionately less religious than the U.S. population overall ( Ecklund 2010) . One consequence, we think, is that many social scientists may consider religion to be unfamiliar, unknown, and perhaps alien. This unfamiliarity may not necessarily make sociologists hostile to religion—although anecdotal evidence suggests that hostility toward religion is by no means absent in the discipline—but it may still have other consequences for taking religion seriously in scholarship. Without first making a substantial investment to learn more about religion, religiously unfamiliar scholars who address religion in their work risk getting their analyses and interpretations wrong. The majority of academics who are not personally familiar with religion, therefore, have incentives to simply steer clear of religion as “not something they study.”

In addition, some social scientists are suspicious of bias among religion scholars, whose knowledge of religion may stem from personal experience as believers and practitioners. Indeed, many American sociologists of religion in the 1950s and 1960s were often pastorally oriented—that is, they were practitioners interested in using sociological research to improve their religious institutions. However, there is no reason to think that a scholar with experience in a religion and commitment to a religious identity is any more likely to be biased than a scholar committed to any other identity (such as gender, class, or race) or political stance (such as feminism or Marxism). In fact, we question whether lack of personal experience with religion is a justifiable reason for ignoring the presence and effects of religion in sociological work. Sociologists often lack personal experience with the things we study: privileged scholars often study underprivileged peoples and communities, male scholars often study women, scholars of different racial and ethnic backgrounds often study people and communities of different backgrounds, and so on. In some cases, personal unfamiliarity or distance is analytically advantageous. That same principle ought to function similarly when it comes to religion, one of the fundamental fields and sources of solidarity and social cleavages in social life. In the particular case of religion, the obstacle may not simply be unfamiliarity, but also what we believe is widespread and growing misinformation about religion in recent years, driven by the fear in various communities of “fundamentalism” and some New Atheism discourse. When personal unfamiliarity is coupled with readily available public discourse characterizing religion as essentially evil and irrational, it may not be surprising that scholars are reluctant to undertake the serious study of religion.

Despite the problems and weaknesses we have presented above, we do not think the future of the field is bleak. American sociology has seen a growing openness to the importance of studying and understanding religion since the 1990s. Many sociologists have realized that the traditional critique of religion, in the form of secularization theory, is misguided, empirically flawed, and uninteresting. As a result, the discipline has seen a growing interest in the study of religion at many levels. Evidence suggests, for example, a growing demand from undergraduate students for courses that can help them to better understand religion and its role in the contemporary world—a demand that many sociology departments do not yet seem to be meeting. The quantity and quality of sociology graduate students interested in studying religion also seems to have increased in recent years. So, too, has interest in religion among established sociology faculty, journal editors, and book publishers in the last two decades.

In addition, sociology of religion as a field in the United States has produced a lot of theory and empirical work seeking to account for the persistence of religion in the modern world. Most scholars (though not all) in American sociology of religion have overcome the traditional presupposition—found in Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and other classical thinkers—that religion is inherently irrational and is a negative force in personal and social life. Indeed, some contemporary observers claim that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, suggesting that American sociology of religion has developed too much of a “pro” view of religion and of the human goods that it promotes; they call instead for a more balanced view of religion's ambivalent capacity for causing both positive and negative outcomes ( Levitt et al. 2010 ). Recent analysis has also identified a significant shift in sociological treatments of religion over time: religion is analyzed less often as a “dependent variable” (the outcome or effect of other causal influences) and more often as an “independent variable” (the influence or cause operating on other outcomes) ( Smilde and May 2010) . These shifts indicate that scholars are at least interested in trying to understand the phenomenon of religion more adequately.

We can consider a further example here. Above, we noted that the designated “study of religion” as it evolved in the modern university consequently defined “religion” as a self-contained entity separable from other aspects of life; its study was cordoned off (by a theory of political liberalism) as having to do mainly with a particular dimension of people's private lives. This tended to set up scholars to miss the many ways that religion was in fact part of everyday life in all spheres of society, but recent work on “everyday religion” has helped to correct this myopia regarding empirical reality (for example, Ammerman 2007 ; McGuire 2008) . This suggests that some in the discipline are committed to more adequately grasp religion as an object of study. It also suggests that, in the course of rethinking the role of knowledge about religion in the discipline of sociology, we need to pay close attention to the very conceptual boundaries and categories of religion that we presuppose and sustain in our scholarship.

Many sociologists still do not know what religion is and how and why it may have such consequences. But, more and more, sociologists seem in principle to be open to the fact that people are religious and that religion may have consequences in those people's lives. In fact, compared to the disciplines of economics and political science, for example, where religion is nearly excluded from serious consideration by the presupposed axioms and focuses of the mainstream of those disciplines, sociology is positively enlightened and dynamic on matters religious. Some evidence also suggests that many good sociologists who study religion avoid parochialism, purposely framing their scholarship, which by any account is essentially about religion, in terms of interests in different fields, such as political sociology, marriage and family, economic sociology, and so on. While this may suggest something amiss about the community of sociologists who study religion, it may also broaden the intellectual and network reach of the study of religion in the discipline.

More generally, most of the old disciplinary boundaries and categories are being reconsidered or challenged. Western “Enlightenment” when it comes to religion appears to be intellectually and academically stunting. People around the globe are transcending the standard Western story about “modernization” and its attendant doctrines about the “warfare of science and religion,” the obvious good of the liberal individual subject, and the teleological evolutionary destiny of religion to become privatized and subjectivized. This kind of fundamental intellectual churning and rethinking is happening not only (or even mostly) in the United States, but also in Europe, China, south Asia, and elsewhere. For instance, in Germany today, about one-third of the academic “clusters of excellence” are about religion. Thinkers outside of the cultures most influenced by Western Enlightenment skepticism appear to be more creative and open in their reflection on these matters than most scholars within those cultures. This appears to be a moment of flux provoking a foundational rethinking around the globe of terms and issues that have until recently been largely stable and taken for granted (in the West) since the seventeenth century.

Sociologists interested in improving the way that religion is understood and treated in sociology more broadly should recurrently ask and answer questions like these: What specifically would success look like? What do we need to understand about the nature of society in the twenty-first century that requires us to understand religious groups, practices, identities, rituals, beliefs, sensibilities, affiliations, and movements? How specifically would better debates about religion and social life sound? With whom should sociologists, both those who specialize in religion and those who do not, be talking? How could understanding religion better and taking religion more seriously improve the quality and fruitfulness of our disciplinary discourse? The task of reimagining the future is a crucial to moving forward the state of the relationship between sociology and religion. In what follows, we advance a set of proposals that we believe could help move sociology in the right direction.

Overcoming Parochialism: Transcending National and Disciplinary Boundaries

Our thirteenth thesis is that sociology must expand its conceptual and theoretical focus to address a wider variety of disciplines, nations, and religions. Debates about the proper role of religion are churning all over the world, in academia and beyond. All of the social sciences today are struggling to come to terms with the fact that religion has not disappeared as a result of modernization but continues to exert significant influences in a host of ways in many institutions and nations around the world. The issues addressed here, in short, are very big and must be understood in such global, foundational terms. To the extent that we fail to expand the focus of our research, not only will religion remain regrettably marginal in sociology, but sociology will also increasingly marginalize itself in the broader world of practical and theoretical knowledge about human social reality.

Commensurate with the real globalization of social life today, the sociology of religion in America needs to globalize its vision—to address broader histories, cultures, and religious experiences. The discipline needs to focus on big issues, questions, and debates, and show how religion must be taken into account to address and answer them well. American sociology of religion has a strong bias toward studying the United States, particularly American Christianity ( Smilde and May 2010 ; Cadge et al. 2011 ). In and of itself, this is perfectly legitimate and valuable. But changes in the world around us require a more international, multireligious, comparative perspective in order to acquire a more adequate understanding of religion—even for scholars just studying the United States. One positive example is the creation of programs in religion and politics at major universities like Berkeley, Columbia, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Harvard, and Princeton. Until sociology expands its focus to incorporate a greater variety of religions from all regions of the world, it will not only remain parochial in its substantive focus, but will be hindered in its ability to imagine new theories and paradigms for making sense of religion in the world as it is unfolding.

In addition to globalizing in meaningful ways, for the study of religion in sociology to flourish, it must shift into a more extradisciplinary or interdisciplinary mode. Sociology has developed a particular perspective on understanding the world that we think is valid and useful, but much of the best work on religion in recent years has been produced by scholars outside of sociology. All sociologists trying to better understand religion must make efforts to learn outside of the discipline from the best in anthropology, religious studies, psychology, history, philosophy, and theology, as appropriate. No one discipline can adequately address and make sense of the new realities of religion in the world today. However, we do not think that sociology's role in such global and disciplinary exchanges should be exclusively passive and receptive. Sociology has much to bring to the table in terms of its theoretical and methodological resources, as well as its history of debates. Enriching sociology with the knowledge and perspectives of scholars in other disciplines will both elevate the quality of our own sociological work and generate interest and visibility outside of our own silo. We need both new ideas and new organizational forms, such as multidisciplinary centers for the study of religion, which are more adequate to the real world in which we now live. Connecting with other disciplines and scholars from different cultures around the world will not only promote cultural diversity but also move us past the constraints of the dominant epistemologies that govern and constrain American sociology.

The Need to Historicize Sociology and Religion

Fourteenth, it is essential to take a longer-term view and recognize the deep cultural assumptions and categories that have set up all of modern social science to think and behave in certain ways toward religion . 6 By self-reflexively historicizing the study of religion and sociological theory itself, we can see the discipline's real points of connection to moral, historical, philosophical, and ontological questions. Most pressing for our purposes is why religion is an “other” in sociology. That is, why does religion seem to occupy a separate category among all human phenomena that scholars past and (often) present think can be ignored or explained away?

To answer these questions, we point to the impact of the Enlightenment, a transformation of fundamental cultural categories in Europe between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, a shift which changed what was taken for granted about religion. During this time, the “otherness” of Christianity's God was redefined to be brought within the known world of “creation,” through a theological shift from analogical knowledge of God to nominalism's univocal knowledge of God. Transcendence was “domesticated” in ways that had huge cultural, social, religious, and political implications ( Placher 1996) . (That decisive shift was itself set up by the nominalist movement of William of Ockham, among others, in the late medieval period [ Gregory 2012] .) Christian apologetics also abandoned claims to theology as a rational enterprise, operating with the sharp divide between “nature” and “the supernatural.” With Immanuel Kant, religion became subjectivized, as simultaneously humanly unknowable and personally experienced in a subjective way. The basis for future arguments about religion and its legitimacy were then grounded in inner, subjective experience (e.g., Friedrich Schleiermacher and much of liberal Protestantism). Religion also was redefined to be about ethics and morals, often construed as rule-following. In the end, theology became cast as a nonrational enterprise and ethics as a discipline that did not reference empirical reality (as ethics does, say, in the Aristotelian approach of virtue ethics [ eudemonian ]). These lines of thought passed through Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, and others. Hence, the very foundations of sociology are rooted in an “othering” of religion and everything else “pre-Enlightenment” while keeping liberal Protestantism's outlook and progressivism.

The formative role of a variety of historical developments in the West is also critical for understanding religion and how intellectuals now define its “proper place” in social scientific research and higher education. One such important development was the outcome of the Western so-called wars of religion in early modern Europe (see Cavanaugh 2009) . Another is the emergence of the secular state and forms of nationalism. Yet another was the rise of the modern research university and philosophies of science that informed its work in different ways along the path. For instance, the expansive German notion of Wissenschaft , in which philosophy and theology are inclusively considered particular forms of science, is remarkably different from the early twentieth-century approach of positivist scient ism , which excluded theological claims, among others, as literally meaningless. Even further back in time, one can examine the impact of the “Axial Age,” a period between 800 and 200 BCE in which key philosophical and religious developments took place across civilizations, including the emergence of perspectives such as individualism and universalism, as well as new social forms such as a religious elite and traveling scholars (see Jaspers 1953 ; Eisenstadt 1986) . New theoretical perspectives such as Multiple Modernities and Comparative Civilizational Analysis encourage a comparative cultural and historical approach ( Eisenstadt 2003) . Such work has been done by people like Robert Bellah, David Martin, and Peter Berger ( 1967 ), and we encourage other scholars to undertake answering these questions.

Conceptual and Methodological Reconfigurations

Questions about the role of religion in sociology also highlight the need for much better theorizing about religion broadly. In other words, simply giving more attention to religion, if religion is conceptualized in its current, problematic terms, could make matters worse. Improving religion's treatment in the structure and practices of the discipline of sociology will be fruitful only if it provokes scholars to rethink many of the assumptions, categories, and expectations that define the current approaches to religion in sociology. To begin, fifteenth: among the numerous conceptual issues needing to be addressed is the very distinction between “religious” and “secular.” In most of social science, the received presupposition is that the secular or secularity is a kind of space created with the disappearance or exclusion of religion. For most who operate under categories inherited from the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century social-evolutionism, the “secular” suggests a kind of natural resting place—that is, a neutral territory or condition achieved when the superstitions and irrationalities of religion are dispelled, or perhaps a final destiny for ever-evolving humanity. In this sense, secularity itself is naturalized, made neutral or objective, and de-problematized as a particular historical and social formation needing explanation itself. Scholars are now challenging that Eurocentric and totalizing notion ( Asad 2003) . In fact, some scholars have recently asserted that secularity is not some kind of natural, neutral, and ultimately universal space or condition toward which humanity moves as it discards the irrationalities and oppressions of religion. Rather, it is a particular social condition created at a specific time in mostly post-Christian circumstances ( Buckley 1987 ; Taylor 2007 ; Warner et al. 2010) . Scholars must therefore view “the secular” as a construction that comes after and out of particular religious traditions (i.e., there is a distinctly Catholic secular, a Turkish secular, and so on). This process of relativizing secularity opens important questions about how such constructions happen, historically and culturally, both religious and not. It also raises larger questions about the nature of humanity, personhood, and history as they relate to matters of transcendence, the sacred, and the like. We need, in short, a sociology of secularism, even a sociology of comparative secularisms. 7

In reflecting on these matters, we realize how easy it is to confuse terms in ways that trip up our thinking. For example, sociologists can easily forget that Emile Durkheim actually wrote about the sacred versus the profane , not the sacred versus the secular . The difference matters significantly for how we conceptualize things religious and their place in the larger order of cognition, culture, and society. For instance, we can certainly distinguish the “sacred secular” from the “secular profane,” including in the former category things such as the U.S. Constitution, human rights, and so on. Thus, we need to seriously consider distinctions between concepts such as “religious,” “sacred,” and “transcendent,” and, as we argue below, do more to define and conceptualize religion. We need to re-read and re-think the classics and examine—perhaps dissolve or reframe—intellectual problems that may be inherent to our original foundations.

The task of historicization described above can also aid the task of reconceptualization. We can ask why, for instance, such a thin definition of religion has persisted for so long. In American sociology, we can easily recognize the legacy of certain kinds of Protestant theology, whose heavily creedal and voluntaristic natures, along with their relatively narrow, privatized accounts of divine involvement in history and life, have defined the way most Americans understand religion. This theology also belies an intellectualist error that treats practices as propositions. Recognizing this legacy should strengthen the imperative to eschew reductionistic accounts of religion and to turn instead to a more practice-theoretic understanding of what religion is, focusing not so much on ideas in the minds of individuals as their participation in communities of discourse (but without making the error of dismissing the role of beliefs altogether).

We must also attend to the fact that debates over and renegotiations of the “secular” take place within the nexus of the nation-state, which is always a contested construct. The colonial legacy's definitional hold on religion has led to what we call “methodological nationalism”—the presupposition that “the social” and “the national” are interchangeable, settled categories and realities. Moving forward, sociology needs to overcome this analytic parochialism. This would involve, for example, thinking more critically about Islam and the Orient as “The Other” and acknowledging the modern, liberal West as a normatively guided geopolitical project. Denaturalizing what may seem to be axiomatic (e.g., who or what is the nation? Religion?) does not require giving up the analytic distinctness and efficacy of religion. In fact, it may actually attune analysts to a nonreductionistic account of religion, in part because such approaches would necessarily depart from modernist biases and paradoxes. So, while imagining modern nationalism as a first instance where religion intersects with sociological realities to generate cultural and political boundaries coincides with the complementary invention of religion as a transcultural and ahistorical essence to be domesticated and interiorized, a more critical view provides us greater and much-needed self-reflexivity.

Sixteenth, sociology would do well to pay closer attention to its motivations for studying religion, as well as our assumptions about religion reflected in these motivations . Our motivations affect our perceptions, interpretations, and theorizations. Human interests always shape human thinking, even scientific thinking. All human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, has always been, always is, and always will be personal knowledge—always historically, culturally, and morally situated in ways that affect it, for better or worse ( Polanyi 1962 ). We know that the distinction in scholarship between value-driven motivations and (compulsory) value-free objectivity is hard—and probably impossible—to maintain in practice, regardless of Weber's injunctions. This need not mean the automatic loss of balance, fairness, and the search for truth in scholarship. And this need not mean that truth statements are impossible to make. But it complicates matters and certainly disrupts our foundations in epistemological foundationalism and positivism. Increasing our self-reflexivity about our motivations for studying religion may provide clues about how we approach, perceive, and interpret religion in our work. And this may enable us to study religion in a way that improves sociology and, in turn, broadens our knowledge about human social life.

What Is Religion? (And Why Does the Question Matter?)

Seventeenth, we need more clarity on what “religion” even is . When we discuss what religion is and how it works, we are often addressing different issues. One concerns differentiating the “thing” religion as an object in reality from things not religious. 8 For another, there is the phenomenological question or approach, which deals with how people experience religious phenomena. While this captures something important about religion for people, it is inadequate to treat a phenomenological account as a definition of religion's ontology. This raises the issue of whether there are ontic facts behind “religion.” That is, is religion something more than human construction? While sociology is not suited as a discipline to answer this question, we need to recognize that our work carries presuppositions about the nature of the world, reality, and religion's place in it. These discussions often also address whether a general theory of religion is even possible, compared to a more strictly historicist approach. Another set of distinctions has to do with levels of analysis at which we could examine the phenomenon of religion. One could talk about individual-level religious beliefs, practices, and experiences of the sacred or spiritual or transcendent. Then there are practices and shared beliefs at the level of groups, communities, and congregations. At another level, there exist global “imagined communities,” for instance, in Hinduism, Islam, or Roman Catholicism. One could even talk about the emergence of a “global sacred” with the sacralization and global diffusion of human rights.

Then there is the question of why the study of religion is worthwhile at all. One rationale for the study of religion is that it is “out there” as a matter of institutional fact that seems to matter in the world. A second rationale is phenomenological: many people, by all their accounts, actually experience “religion” as something transcendent, sacred, and important. They experience it as making a difference in their lives. For at least those kinds of reasons, religion deserves its own field of study. We simply cannot understand the nature of the world well, we think, without understanding religion and its role in human life. More broadly, it would be difficult to understand the historical emergence of the human species itself without religion. Religion, language, narratives, and rituals are crucial in the formation of the human species. Myths and sagas are crucially important to humans, who are mimetic animals. Contrary to the assumptions of some in modern science, whether humans can even live as purely rational animals without religion, narratives, rituals, and myths is questionable in our view.

In addressing these issues, the fundamental question that sociologists of religion need to answer is: Exactly what about religion warrants identifying it as a distinct human activity, formation, or cultural or organizational expression deserving its own specialized focus and field of study? It is clear that religions operate in social life through many of the same causal mechanisms that other, nonreligious phenomena do. In other words, religious and nonreligious phenomena alike shape beliefs and desires, organize communities of discourse that exert social influence on members, provide content for socialization, transfer information and resources through social networks, and so on. Indeed, many in sociology tend to treat religion as mere “ideology,” which, while not totally reductionistic, does not recognize any distinctively religious aspect of religion. (The assumption here is that the same mechanisms involved in religious phenomena, such as beliefs, are also at work in other, nonreligious beliefs that cause action. If this is the case, the thinking goes, why not dissolve “religion” into organizations, resources, ideologies, or other categories?)

But what, if anything, makes religion distinctive among other ideologies, cultural formations, and social organizations that warrants particular attention? Answering this question requires developing a theory that treats the religious dimensions of human experience as real in their own right—a theory we believe is still lacking. Some thinkers focus on transcendence—the engagement with superhuman powers. Others object that people pursue transcendence in all sorts of ways, including nonreligious ones. Still others argue that religion involves a particularly powerful version of transcendence that is both qualitatively and quantitatively distinct from other experiences or ideologies. Martin Riesebrodt's recent work (2010) is an important step in explicating a practice -based conceptualization centered on people seeking help from superhuman entities. 9 Even so, transcendence itself can be seen as a historically emergent category arising in the Axial Age, as religious community became differentiated from society based on kinship and city-gods and critiques of cultic sacrifice took hold. Prior to this period, religious experience was arguably characterized more by modes of immanent sacreds, similar to what Durkheim describes. Definitions of religion focused exclusively on the concept of salvation arguably neglect such earlier modes of religion.

Further work to define religion must resist the prevailing attempts to subsume religion into culture, ideology, psychological coping, or other categories. We do not anticipate a quick and easy resolution, especially the roots of our very discipline contain the seemingly incommensurable definitions of religion by Durkheim and Weber. But we need to promote fruitful discussion on this question, if only because real-world groups have beliefs and practices that they themselves consider religious and which we as scholars need to do a better job of understanding.

This all requires yet another shift: from ideas in the minds of individuals to participation in communities of discourse. Eighteenth, methodologically, this entails adopting more thickly historical, ethnographic, and comparative approaches when these are better suited to answer our questions about religion . Although we are wary of the presumptions built into survey methods, we do not advocate the rejection of these research methodologies altogether. They do have important advantages in that, when done well, they are able to make claims about populations, map the prominence of various phenomena, and spot trends whose importance could be assessed over time. At the same time, we do need to be careful of the problems and limits with these approaches—for instance, despite the advantages of longitudinal surveys, a serious problem with them is that the meaning of a survey question can—and often does—change over time. Further, many of our standard methodologies do not have the capacity to grasp deeper and more complex aspects of religion. But this does not mean we should simply stick to what we already know how to do with our existing methods or let them serve as perennial constraints on what we are able to see. We certainly need to acknowledge that “religion” is harder to measure than concepts such as “income,” but at the same time, it is comparable to other elusive and less tractable concepts, such as “power” or “capitalism.”

As noted above, better work to conceptualize and measure religion, even in standard instruments such as surveys, requires breaking with the biased standards of American conservative Protestantism, such as frequency of Bible-reading. One tangible improvement would be the development of survey questions designed to capture aspects of everyday “lived religion” (e.g., how people are involved in practices of informal prayer such as asking God or a higher power for help) or to gauge the importance of place and materiality (e.g., ways in which particular places might be “set apart,” either physically or metaphorically, from routine life; or ways in which religion has to do with objects that people own, wear, or contact in certain situations). Importantly, improved measures of religion need to find their way into general surveys—not just religion-focused ones. Religion should be as common a variable as race, class, and gender in quantitative analyses. That this is not yet the case is, we believe, largely due to the inadequacy of our standard measures.

Is a Two-way Dialogue Possible, and What Would It Look Like?

Nineteenth, we propose the idea of a two-way stream between religion and sociology . But what would that possibly look like? Why and how might each benefit from the other? We observe that the social sciences have much to offer other disciplines in driving empirical inquiry on religion. In theology, for example, interest has grown in how scientific and social scientific knowledge can inform reflections and understandings in that discipline (for example, Placher 1989 ; Martin 1997 ; Flanagan 2007 ; Mathewes 2007 ; Ward 2012 ). The field of religious studies also benefits by importing tools of systematic data collection and analysis first developed in the social sciences. However, much less is said, among social scientists in any case, on what theology (very broadly conceived) might be able to offer our conversations and debates. Indeed, it is not clear that social scientists can even imagine the possibility or be willing to consider the discussion. Still, we might ask, what theological or more broadly religious research could shed light on work in the social and behavioral sciences? What are the philosophical anthropologies of different forms of religion, and how might they shape the way social scientists think about their objects of study and explanations?

One starting point might be to examine how religious traditions influence conceptualizations of agency and personhood, which would then influence our use of those concepts in the social sciences ( Smith 2003a , 2010) . More generally, engaging in greater reflexivity concerning basic sociological ideas of explanation, causation, and motivation could reveal the extent to which these are still deeply rooted in Protestantism. Comparing religious traditions—for instance, by examining Buddhist conceptions of the person—may likewise alter our understandings of causality as involving co-dependent co-arising phenomena. Such investigations might help us work on a thicker understanding of religions specifically and human personal and social life more broadly.

Another rationale for intentionally integrating both knowledge about religion and religious knowledge into the discipline of sociology follows from the observation that at least some schools of thought in our discipline unapologetically begin with particular intellectual and moral locations, commitments, presuppositions, and interests; some even argue that these particular positions privilege their sociological understandings. Examples include feminist theory, Marxism, queer theory, some forms of critical theory, and projects of “real utopias.” One might ask why or how such value-committed scholarly approaches that start with particularistic intellectual and moral presuppositions are legitimate in sociology, while religious perspectives on human person and social life are a priori excluded. The uneven privileging of certain intellectual and moral positions deserves ongoing questioning and consideration. At the very least, examining such issues seriously will force sociologists to be more self-aware and self-reflexive.

All of this obligates sociologists to invest more into learning about religion, just as they invest in learning about race and ethnicity, class, gender, and other important aspects of social life. We do not mean that sociologists of religion should be personally convinced about the truth-claims of any religion. Rather, we refer to the sort of seriousness about religion and religious phenomena that is evident in scholars as professedly “religiously unmusical” as Max Weber. This would entail being open to the possibility that disciplines such as theology or traditions of spiritual disciplines may contain valuable insights for sociologists of religion. This would also entail a greater basic literacy about religion, in the sense of what religious beliefs and practices mean to the people who adopt them and the communities that sustain them. Rather than imposing secularist assumptions about how people operate and about the proper role of religion in society, it would obligate sociologists to consider religious beliefs, practices, and experiences as reflecting modes of knowledge about the world worth engaging to better understand human history, culture, and social life—even when we disagree with their claims.

We therefore urge scholars today to not prematurely limit ourselves to what may feel like “safe” and “obvious” categories and lines of thought. The construction and policing of strong traditional boundaries will only stunt the intellectual vibrancy of the contemporary university. Our discipline and its comfortable tendencies and practices—including the dominant secularist assumptions that tend to reduce religion to other categories such as ideology, power, insecurity, and so on—are a product of a particular, path-dependent, noninevitable historical process. Questioning some of these basic presuppositions and categories will not hurt sociology or sociologists ( Milbank 2006 ).

In fact, most social theory is about the intellectual push and pull of life in a post-Kantian dispensation. And most of the theoretical issues we wrestle with today have roots that go all the way back to the ancients. Might it help us to begin to question the very reasons for believing in the modern fact–value divorce? How might we benefit from questioning the widespread assumption that human action is always based on interests and rules? Might we have something to learn from reconsidering the possibility that there is something like a natural law? Might ancient knowledge accumulated through millennia of religious experience—including teleological and eudaimonian views—have something to tell modern inquirers into human social life (insights that Enlightenment skepticism and rationalism have ignored)? Raising such questions underscores the need for further reflection on what the dominant epistemology or epistemologies in the field are and should be, since this has bearing on how sociologists approach the study of religion.

What Are (or Should Be) the Big Questions in Sociology of Religion?

Twentieth, we need to better identify and focus on big questions . There are numerous important, broad questions that contemporary research in the sociology of religion should be addressing. Some of these are longstanding problems, others have only received recent attention, and still others have hardly been considered. Some of these questions are more empirically tractable, whereas others deal with deep cultural forces that are not observable on the surface.

A first category of questions asks what is the role of religion in generating or sustaining or challenging different cultural structures in the modern world. Several examples merit consideration here. One is the relationship of religion to certain types of individualism. 10 Another pressing question is the role of religion in creating and rectifying social inequalities. We need a better understanding of the relationships between religion and race, class, and gender stratification (see, for example, Emerson and Smith 2000; , Keister 2011) . Analyses focused on race, class, and gender may help us to better understand religion in the first place. Turning to the political arena, open questions concern the relationship between religion and sources of power such as states and governments, especially the role of religion in state formation and peace-building. For example, what are the various institutional and juridical mechanisms by which democratic polities manage and accommodate pluralism? Under what conditions do religious cleavages lead to intractable forms of conflict, including violence? In economics, what is the role of religion in sustaining and challenging economic systems? How did American Protestantism make peace with neoliberal capitalism? Relatedly, one avenue for examination is the historical imprint of religion on present-day processes such as globalization. The Jesuits, for example, were a globalizing force long before neoliberal capitalism. An even more macrohistorical exploration would consider the cultural innovations generated during the Axial Age such as the emergence of transcendence as a preoccupation of religions, or the ways in which religion began to challenge violence. 11 Such historical questions are critical to challenging the pervasive (and we think erroneous) assumption that everything begins with modernity and that we can conveniently ignore what came before.

A second set of questions concerns factors that foster the emergence and sustenance of secularism—including the ways in which religion is a contributing factor in this regard. One dimension of this question is to study people and societies who are irreligious or indifferent to religion. Phil Zuckerman, for instance, claims that in Scandinavian societies such as Denmark, which have the lowest rates of religious belief and participation, people are more content and society is more effective in resolving issues such as poverty. His recent edited collection sets an agenda for the social-scientific study of atheism and secularity ( Zuckerman 2008 , 2010) . But much more scientific work remains to be done along those lines. More historical questions merit investigation as well. One such issue is the now-pervasive notions of “freedom” or “liberty.” How did these concepts emerge historically? What role did religion play in shaping whether they were considered natural or cultivated capacities or rights? Comparing our dominant Western views to other conceptions of freedom, autonomy, and agency would be instructive in this regard (as Saba Mahmood does with Islam, for example) ( Mahmood 2005) . Agency is typically framed from a Western liberal viewpoint, but in order to better understand how it is differently conceived in non-Western and nonliberal societies, we need to consider the role of religion in sustaining our own liberal presuppositions. Along these lines, it is worth examining the role of religion in the emergence of political liberalism in general. Scholars such as Michael Gillespie, Pierre Manent, and Charles Taylor have examined the role of religion in the intellectual history of modernity, although more sociological treatments of this question are needed ( , Manent 1994 , 1998 ; Taylor 2001 ; Gillespie 2008). This could help us understand, for instance, why, in spite of the seeming collapse of Christianity in Europe, religion—and Christianity in particular—is arguably still fundamental in structuring politics and economics in Europe.

A further question regards the role of religion in shaping the current belief in (a certain form of) science as a way to explain the world. Understanding this would entail examining, for instance, the relationship between scientism and creationism in the contemporary United States. All such questions would require historical, cultural, and comparative methods of research. A still further set of questions, also entailing comparative cultural inquiry, concerns the forms and meanings of “spirituality” worldwide. As Peter van der Veer suggests, “spirituality” in its meanings and manifestations in modern societies shows significant cross-cultural diversity ( van der Veer 2009) . A related issue worth addressing is the emergence of the historically recent category of “spiritual but not religious.” For instance, when, where, and to what extent do we find spirituality that is meaningfully disconnected from religion? To what extent is this discourse a boundary-maintenance mechanism having to do with, perhaps, embeddedness in social networks in which being “religious” is perceived as a bad thing? Also relevant here is the importance of understanding and explaining variation in how people engage with the supernatural and with superhuman powers. For instance, examining the role of “spiritual insecurity” and the continued prominence of witches in the lives of many modern Africans can illuminate the relationship between religion and uncertainty and how this shapes people's behavior and decisions ( Ashforth 2005 ; Trinitapoli and Yeatman 2011) . This allows for a more adequate understanding of the role of risk and insecurity in modernity than, for instance, its treatment by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (2004) . In addition, we need to better understand the emergence, sustenance, and diffusion of new religious movements in the world today, such as Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. We do not sufficiently understand how new religious movements are generated. For example, how it is possible for a movement to be cobbled together from disparate traditions yet “stick” and gain traction among followers around the world? What binds people to these beliefs and practices, and how do global and local processes interact? And how are these processes similar to or different from other globally diffusing phenomena, such as multinational corporations?

Institutional Reconfigurations

Twenty-first, we need some tangible changes in the broader institutional setup and reward structures of the discipline . We note a contradiction between the agenda we are setting forth here, which calls for more in-depth intellectual work on big questions, and the nature of graduate training, which increasingly emphasizes quick publications and tries to push students through programs ever faster. With few exceptions, graduate programs in sociology are designed to produce technicians and not intellectuals. The limited financial resources of departments play an important role here; in many cases, departments are unable to support students beyond the third, fourth, or fifth years of their graduate programs. The sort of training and research we are proposing would take longer than most departments can—or are willing to—support. And in addition to in-depth reading to address big questions (rather than simply a topic-focused approach that characterizes most students' interests), our call for more interdisciplinary and international research calls for institutional interventions that would support good graduate students studying religion as they pursue such ends.

Part of the difficulty in rewarding big thinking is the increasing corporatization and commodification of education. The past decade has seen an increasing shift toward the quantification of academic goals and achievements that resemble the dynamics of a for-profit corporation, driven by boards of trustees and corporate CEOs looking for achievement metrics that might be comparable to those of a corporate sales division. Add to this the sacralization of the college degree in our culture, and we can better understand the dwindling support for the kind of research that we are calling for. One solution to this problem would be the establishment of generous dissertation fellowships, postdoctoral fellowships, grants for international research, and sabbatical grants for early- and mid-career scholars pursuing bigger questions. Another possibility is the development of think-tanks and institutes for the study of religion that can bring scholars together and support them in the focused pursuit of their research for a period of time. But given that some foundations have been reducing their investments in scholarship on religion, this might prove a formidable challenge. Given the globalized perspective required in the study of religion today, the additional investments in travel, languages, fieldwork, education in new literatures, and so on will need significant institutional financial support.

In addition to reward structures, a crucial institutional issue is the supply of courses. For graduate students, this is a serious issue because it affects the availability of jobs and thus what scholars-in-training choose to study. The dearth of courses in the sociology of religion adversely affects the availability of the next generation of scholars. But university departments across the country need not provide more course offerings in this area in order to generate employment for our specific subfield. Rather, universities ought to measure student interest and demand in sociology of religion and adjust their supply of courses. Deans should then act accordingly to create new positions and courses. This is an issue that institutional gatekeepers need to take more seriously.

Publishing Outside Specialty Sociology-of-Religion Journals

The community of sociologists interested in religion have four different associations, three religion-specialty journals, and three annual conferences. 12 While a unique strength of our subfield, the drawbacks of this structural arrangement are worth considering, too. We suspect that having three sociology-of-religion journals, for example, fosters scholarly isolation by enabling scholars to limit their contributions to specialty journals, where their work will remain invisible to readers who do not already follow these. “Religion” as a topic is thus concentrated: strong but also cordoned off from the rest of the discipline. Having three of its own journals does not push scholarship on religion to “spread out” and speak more broadly to a wider constituency of colleagues. But if that were to happen, religion might be better integrated in the discipline as a whole—even if this made it harder (at least initially) to publish peer-reviewed articles on religion. We think at the very least that, twenty-second, sociologists of religion should make efforts to overcome their insularity by being more vocal in journals and conferences outside the subfield . Established scholars who publish articles in other journals, making in those contexts the points about the study of religion we have discussed here, will both add legitimacy to the subfield and do a service to the discipline as a whole. More generally, we think we need to seriously ask what purposes our many religion associations and specialty journals do and should serve. Should some of our associations and journals merge?

Rethinking Teaching

Finally, twenty-third, we need to reconsider our teaching of sociology, sociology of religion, and social theory. How should we introduce undergraduates to the study of religion? What are the most important things we want to communicate to students? What do they most need to learn to be good citizens of the world today? What should be in a syllabus, how should we engage students, what projects ought to be assigned? Such questions raise larger questions about the boundaries of the sociological canon. How, for instance, do Weber and Durkheim fit into a longer tradition of history and philosophy? Are there other thinkers in theology, philosophy, and religious ethics that students in the sociology of religion ought to read early on, perhaps people like Reinhold Niebuhr or Michael Polanyi? What do we assume and teach about the philosophies and meta-theories that underwrite our sociology? Then there is the issue of mentoring: what sorts of research are we encouraging graduate students to conduct? Should we be encouraging something different instead? What problems and questions are worth investigating?

Certainly, there are many important topics to address in the sociology of religion courses we teach. Notable among these are religion and immigration; religion in global cities; religion and youth; global Pentecostalism; the globalization of Islam; religious individualism in the West and other places; religion and conflict, violence, and peace-building; the “resurgence” of religion; and addressing and demystifying “fundamentalism.” These courses can help students understand, for example, the uniqueness of religion in America, the role of race in American exceptionalism, and the complexity of religion in the contemporary global context, such as global Islam or religion in China. Our discipline offers analytical categories and techniques that are useful for making sense of these phenomena. Moreover, the work that some of us assign students as part of these courses, such as observing a religious congregation that is different from their own tradition and writing religious autobiographies from a sociological perspective, can have significant and even transformative impacts on them. Such projects guide students (most of whom consider themselves to be religious to some degree) in the experience of looking at a religious tradition or institution—even their own—from the “outside,” without having to either discard their own beliefs and traditions or to attack (or embrace) those of another. Our courses provide a structure within which such difficult experiences can be navigated.

In addition, sociological tools can allow students to critically engage with religion based on a hermeneutic of not only suspicion but one of generosity and genuine understanding. More than simply “critical thinking,” our courses can cultivate a way of constructively engaging in meaningful discourse about religion, across all sorts of boundaries. To have such an engaged civil discourse first requires students to develop more accurate understandings of what people actually believe and what religion means to its adherents and practitioners. Simply correcting misperceptions and simplistic ideas about religion can be a great service. For instance, it comes as surprising news to many evangelical Protestant college students that they belong to a broader tradition that was once part of Roman Catholicism. Similarly, it is worth debunking the myth that “all religions are the same” (see Prothero 2010) .

Classes in sociology of religion can cultivate the habit of civilly disagreeing with others. The pedagogical aim of this endeavor should therefore be to generate practices of civil relations and discourse that enables students, regardless of whether they are personally supportive, hostile, or indifferent to religious claims, to engage in conflictual or agonistic but constructive thinking over differences that really matter. It would show that, despite the toxic conflicts of our broader culture, it is still possible to generate “civic friendship”—to have discussions across difference, not in a simplistic “politically correct” way that merely maintains decorum, but to engage productively in discussions that take seemingly intractable differences seriously. This requires the cultivation of humility; it entails openness to learning from people students disagree with, rather than rendering such differences irrelevant by a relativistic approach.

Our position on teaching the sociology of religion represents a deeper moral vision for the field and a commitment to a kind of “public sociology.” Teaching religion at this moment inescapably entails taking on such a responsibility. Sociologists will do a bad job in helping students become good citizens of the world if we do not understand religion, provide adequate knowledge about religious phenomena, and model how such constructive conversations can take place around contentious and divisive issues related to religion. The sociology of religion and individual sociologists who take religion seriously can provide a much-needed challenge to certain contemporary views, which—encouraged by vocal proponents of the New Atheism—foster reductive views of religion and outright dismissal of if not hostility toward religion. Further, we can challenge the idea that civility requires leaving religion at the door, and we can support a more robust understanding of pluralistic, democratic engagement and citizenship. Our discipline can also serve as an endeavor in peace-building if we move beyond our current semi-parochialism toward conversations with peace studies and political science.

In our twenty-three points, we have tried to lay out what we see as the main causes of sociology's difficult dealings with religion and offer some suggestions for improving the situation into the future. We hope that by publicly advancing these views, we might foster more critical and constructive conversations among a variety of sociologists coming from different approaches—all toward the larger goal of improving sociology's engagement with and understanding of religion. Finally, it is our hope that such improvements within the sociology of religion will improve more generally the quality and contribution of sociology, social science, and higher education broadly.

Google Scholar

Google Preview

The term “religious knowledge,” provided by the Mellon Foundation, means what academic studies have come to understand about the nature of religion and its role in human life, as well as knowledge that religions claim to have about different aspects of reality. Our appreciation goes to the Mellon Foundation and to the University of Notre Dame for their funding and support of this project. The views contained within do not necessarily represent theirs. Many thanks, too, go to Atalia Omer and Katherine Sorrell for extremely helpful suggestions for revisions of this article—although they share no responsibility for any possible errors or problems in the article. Not every author necessarily agrees with every specific point advanced here, although this article reflects the general thinking of the authors as a group.

The twenty-three “theses” of our working group are given in italics.

To keep this story realistically complicated, however, we do note the contributions to studying religion made by the early-twentieth-century Community Studies tradition (e.g., “Middletown”); by Talcott Parsons, for whom religion played a central (if abstract) role in social theory; and by the occasional serious scholars like Gerhard Lenski ( 1963 ).

For an anthropological example that takes “primitive” religion seriously, see Ashforth (2005 ), in addition, obviously, to much anthropological work in this area.

See Riesebrodt (2010 ), which most, though not all, of us find highly persuasive.

We do not promote historicizing as a means to dissolve the subject of “religion,” or to suggest that all of these matters are “relative” in the sense that any one position is as good as another; we historicize to foster a historical awareness that enables us to take stock of our situation and of the means we have for dealing with it.

Some of this work is being done, especially outside the United States, but it remains an open question as to whether that work will influence mainstream American sociology. See, for example, Warner et al. ( 2010 ).

From certain perspectives, “religion” is only or mainly a modern phenomenon or category, but such perspectives make the mistake of reducing religion (only) to institutionalized religions or belief systems. See Asad (1993) .

Riesebrodt also provides a strong argument for the continued relevance of religion as a universal concept.

This was addressed in Bellah et al. (1985) .

Good examples are recent works by Hans Joas and William Cavanaugh that demolish the idea that it is only through modern secularism that violence is challenged, and Jurgen Habermas' work on the emergence of prophets as a critique of state power.

These include the American Sociological Association religion section, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR), the Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR), and the Religious Research Association (RRA), the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , Sociology of Religion , Review of Religious Research (in addition to Social Compass and other non-US-based specialty associations, journals, and meetings).

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to your Librarian

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1477-4585
• Print ISSN 0002-7189
• Copyright © 2024 American Academy of Religion
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

• Publications
• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

Religious restrictions around the world

For more than a decade, Pew Research Center has been tracking global patterns in restrictions on religion – both those imposed by governments and hostilities committed by individuals and social groups. Scroll down to explore restrictions in 198 countries and territories, and see how each country’s restrictions have changed since 2007.

For more details on restrictions on religion around the world, read our latest report on the topic, “Globally, Government Restrictions on Religion Reached Peak Levels in 2021, While Social Hostilities Went Down.”  

Note: Government restrictions include laws, policies and actions by authorities that impinge on religious beliefs and practices, while social hostilities involving religion include actions by private individuals or groups in society that limit such practices.

1615 L St. NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Age & Generations
• Coronavirus (COVID-19)
• Economy & Work
• Family & Relationships
• Gender & LGBTQ
• Immigration & Migration
• International Affairs
• Internet & Technology
• Methodological Research
• News Habits & Media
• Non-U.S. Governments
• Other Topics
• Politics & Policy
• Race & Ethnicity
• Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Copyright 2024 Pew Research Center

Terms & Conditions

Privacy Policy

Cookie Settings

Reprints, Permissions & Use Policy