2 Sociological approaches to the study of Religion in the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Weber

Janaki Somaiya

Introduction:

The geographical discoveries and explorations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exposed western society to the diversity of cultures, religions and thought that existed across the world. The early anthropological enquiries of other religions by the British administrators led to a rise in the study of the origins of religious thought. It was also a beginning of an acceptance and tolerance of other religions. Consequently, it was also a beginning of the process of secularization. Throughout the eighteenth century, scientists of the secular schools of thought blamed religion and superstition for the many ills of society. The traditional idea that society was constructed as preordained by divine law was no longer accepted.

Philosophers could now conjure the possibility of progress without the intervention of religion, morality or the state, by developing ‘scientific’ networks of interaction that would lead to social order. Throughout the eighteenth century the new schools of thought that emerged during the enlightenment blamed religion and superstition for the many ills of society. Philosophers like Bacon and Descartes, in their positive philosophy, thought of religion as an obstacle to the progress of mankind. The beginning of Sociology of religion can be traced within the context of the rise of natural sciences in the second half of nineteenth century, dominated by an evolutionary paradigm. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural Evolution was adapted to be applied as a general theory of social Darwinism.

In this module we will be reviewing the works of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber and their contributions to the discourse of Sociology of Religion. While all three of them offer differing perspectives on the study of religion, never the less, they deal with the question of modernity and the large scale changes that accompanied its advent. Many scholars grappled with the quest for social order amidst the chaos that was generated with the rise of capitalism accompanied by a process of increasing rationalization and the challenges that the advent of modernity posed to traditional social structures.

The Contribution of Karl Marx to the study of Religion

In reviewing the development of the Sociology of Religion, it is necessary to comment on some contributions that stood outside the positivistic, evolutionary tradition. In his early works with Engels, Karl Marx (1818-1883) concentrated on the political aspects of religion and its use or abuse as a means of moral and intellectual repression. According to Marx, the discussion of labour in a capitalist society, the development of the structure of the market and the consequent exploitation of labour by subjugating humans to the products of their own labour, led to a condition of alienation of humans. Humans, who were unable to unable to regulate their own world, turned to religion. This approach precisely shifted the focus to a more materialist, pragmatic critique of religion.

Marx observed that there is a parallel between religious and socio-economic activity. Marx and Engels saw religion as a social product, emerging out of social relations. Religion did not exist all by itself, independent of the social and economic forces. It became a means to control the masses and an instrument in legitimizing injustice.

It was during the Renaissance and the Reformation that the authority of religious institutions was questioned. Science, up until then had been under the direct control of the Church. A protest against religion began with the understanding that it was necessary to get rid of religion if humanity had to progress, as it posed as an obstacle to scientific, rational thought. Up until then, science had been but a humble hand maiden of the Church. At the same time for the growth of material production, the bourgeois required a science that could explain the physical properties of natural objects. When science and reason rebelled against the Church, the bourgeoisie joined this struggle. Along with a struggle against feudalism, it was also a struggle against an older belief system that restricted rational thought. It was the bourgeoisie class that attempted to replace the Church’s feudalism with a religious belief system more compatible with industrial growth and materialism. This led to the resultant Protestant Reformation. (Engels 1880) Protestantism was more compatible with materialism since it preached a doctrine of ‘calling’. For the bourgeois, Protestantism justified accumulation of wealth, while for the lower classes it promoted a strong work ethic of hard work.

Historically, the rise of the new middle class, the bourgeoisie, was also accompanied by a decline of the feudal system. The Roman Catholic Church was the chief centre of feudalism withholding most of the land, becoming directly a propagator of the class system. It formulated an ideology that supported the land-owning classes. According to Marx, religion was not separate from the socio-economic conditions; it was very much a participant in the class struggles.

In his work The Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right(1844), Marx wrote, ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world. It is the opium of the people’1. Fear had created the gods. The helplessness of the oppressed in their struggle against the exploiters led to a belief in a better life beyond the grave. The hope of a reward in the form of seeking heaven after death caused them to be more humble in accepting their sufferings on earth. Escape is the essential thing that religion offered the oppressed. While for those who are the owners of means of production, it offered an ideology, a system that legitimized poverty, injustice and suffering as the will of God. Marx states thus, ‘The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and all they have for the latter is the pious wish that the former will be charitable…The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of the people, is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.2 Religion was a false consciousness, an illusionary happiness. It preached the existence of a class structure and validated its unjust nature. A critique of religion was necessary according to Marx, so as to make humans see reason, to think and act and shape their reality according to reason. While an earlier religion supported the needs of a feudal class in ruling the peasants, it later was challenged and replaced by the bourgeois class that used religion for the same purpose, to make the masses submit. As long as religion could convince the masses that the sufferings in this world could be overcome in the life to come, the masses could be manipulated by those who controlled religious institutions, alongside those who controlled the means of production.

Read Marx/Engels Selected Works Volume One, p.38; Progress Publishers, Moscow, USSR, 1969 for further reference.

In 1841, Ludwig Feuerbach took up a serious critique on the orthodox religion in his book The Essence of Christianity. He also made a parallel attack on almost equally sacred system of Hegel’s abstraction of the absolute. According to him, both Hegel and Christianity made the same error. They both talked about some alien being- a God or the absolute- when what they were really talking about is human nature and nothing else. Both consequently alienated human consciousness by taking what is a human quality and assigning it to some alien essence called the absolute or God. So that in the end, what humans preached was something outside of them. Marx then extended this critique to the capitalist mode of production.

For Marx, religion was only an illusion, God a human creation and not the other way round. Religion and the capitalist mode of production both were the causes of man’s alienation albeit in different ways. Religion stripped humans of their most valued ideals and projected them onto a supernatural being, a deity. Like any other dominant ideology, religion then legitimizes the ideas of the ruling class, in this case, the bourgeois. Capitalism on the other hand, projected human-like values to the products of human labour, alienating man’s labour. Religion’s ideological function is, for Marx, related to the idea of reification. Reification occurs when the social character of labor becomes objectified and obscured by ideologies in which “divine law” (rather than human beings with particular interests) is viewed as the true author of social relations. Reification thus conceals that which is actually arbitrary and socially changeable by representing it as immutably given. As such, reification is an excellent form of social control, since the workers control themselves rather than forcing the owners to control them in visibly unjust or brutal ways (which could lead to rebellion or revolt). (Courses, Soc: Grinell.edu 2001) Capitalist economies take our natural labour and transfer it unnaturally to a material object, something that is bought, sold and owned by others. The worker feels alienated from his own fruits of labour. Under capitalism, no worker can say, “I created this”, though this was not the case in an earlier mode of production. The products of human labour assume an almost a life-like character of being on their own. Objects produced gain human characteristics and qualities, which the workers are stripped of. This Marx terms as the “fetishism of commodities”. As religion robs humans of their merits projecting them to a god, so does the capitalist economy rob us of our labour, transforming it to another commodity, into the hands of those who can buy it. Religion strips humans of qualities and assigns them to a supernatural being, thus being just another kind of fetishism.

Thus Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring (1878) how we have already seen, more than once, that in existing bourgeois society, men were dominated by the economic conditions created by themselves, by the means of production which they themselves have produced, as if by an external force. So religion would not vanish unless the social conditions that accompanied a belief in religion were removed. As long as humans were made to believe that an external force held some power over them, whether economic or social, religion would exist and accompany the ongoing class struggles.

The Contributions of Emile Durkheim to the study of Religion:

There had been several efforts within the anthropological and sociological discourses to define religion. Emile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), offered to find the origins of religion, from a functionalist perspective, by studying the Arunta tribe of the Australian aborigines. Durkheim grew exceptionally fascinated with the primitive aborigine tribes studied by many other anthropologists like William Frazer, Baldwin Spencer and F.J Gillen. Through his study on the primitive communities, he held a view that religion existed in every society, though in different forms, no society was known to have existed without religion.3 He explained that by going back to primitive forms of religion, in his case Totemism, it could be then understood how religion developed and gradually reached a more complex stage. Durkheim’s theory established that no matter where we look for the determining causes of religion, all the causes turn out to be social. They reinforced the need to think first of the group by sacrificing personal well-being. It served a functional purpose by maintaining social order. He rejected all the previous theories that presented religion as some deep rooted error or illusion. In other words, religion, instead of being seen as a human’s relationship to the supernatural, could be seen as a central point of reference and the key to understanding society.

Sacred and the Profane: For Durkheim, none of the earlier theories had pointed out the most important insight in understanding how totemism illustrated the concepts of the sacred and the profane. All religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, classified all things into two groups: things that were ‘sacred’ and the rest as ‘profane’. Sacred things having set apart as superior, powerful, forbidden to normal contact, and deserving of great respect. ‘Sacredness’ was not inherent to these things, whether objects or rituals, but it was the attitude of respect towards these things that symbolized it. Profane things being the opposite; belonging to the ordinary, uneventful and practical routine of everyday life. These rituals and

3  Seeking a common element amongst all religions, Durkheim proposed that ‘all known religions, whether simple or complex present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification if all things real and ideal, of which men think into two classes of opposed groups, designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words- profane and sacred. The division of the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred and the other all that us profane is the distinctive trait of religious thought.” (Durkheim, 1957:37)

religious practices then unite into one moral community called a church and all those who adhere to them. But according to him, the division between sacred and the profane is not a moral one. The sacred can be both, good or evil, but it can never be profane, and vice versa. The sacred arises from additionally that which affects the whole community, while the profane is more a part of the private realm.

Totemism was a belief system wherein the tribal people divided themselves into different clans, each of which was identified with a separate totem animal, plant or any other object, which was considered as sacred to the clan. He observed that in each of these societies, animals other than the totem, which were inadvertently profane, could normally be killed and consumed by the clan, but the totem animal cannot. Because it was considered sacred, it was absolutely forbidden to the clan, except on certain occasions or celebrations when it was ritually sacrificed and consumed. And in that moment specifically, the clan itself was considered sacred as it is now one with the totem. Further, the totem also became the emblem, or a logo, that signified the clan. When the clan gathers together for its ceremonies, it was always the totem symbol, carved into a piece of wood or rock that took centre stage. Totem beliefs, according to Durkheim are extremely fundamental to the life of these simple societies, so much so that everything of importance was ultimately shaped by them. He insists that we speak more accurately of a ‘totemic principle’, which stands at the centre of all of the clan’s beliefs and rituals. Behind the totem is also an impersonal force that possesses enormous power over the life of the clan. Members of the clan feel obligated to respect it, to perform the rituals, and through it feel bound to each other as part of a loyalty to the totem and the clan.

For Durkheim, the explanation of this phenomenon goes deeper. Since totem is first and foremost a symbol. So then it would automatically signify something.

That which is signified by the totem is the ‘totemic principle’. But at the same time the totem is also a concrete, visible image of the clan. Just how in modern societies, a flag or an emblem would be a symbol of the nation’s unity, similarly is the primitive totem a symbolic image of the clan itself. Although in their rituals of worship, the members of the clan would be worshipping some divinity, or power that is ‘out there’, in reality it is something else. They at the same time are expressing and reinforcing their devotion to the clan. Once this point is noted it becomes clear that worship of the totem is nothing but the worship of society. The totem symbol conveys an idea that society is something fixed and permanent. The totem itself is chosen as something concrete, and closely tied to their daily experience with an aim to notice the interconnectedness with nature, and to bind each person to the clan, the clan as a whole to the natural world.

In Durkheim’s view, the “cult”, which consists of the emotional group ceremonies held on certain days, becomes of central importance in the life of the clan. Since their purpose is to promote consciousness of the whole group, to make the members feel a part of it, and to keep it separate from the profane. In practice, the rituals break into two forms: negative and positive. The negative practices consist of prohibitions or taboos. Therefore there might be certain holy days for sacred festivities, and prohibition of any routine activities from profane life. These taboos also reflect the clan’s superiority over the individuals needs and desires, as they often press the need to endure pain, sacrifice for the sake of the group. The positive rituals consist of the ceremonies and rituals that merge the individual into the clan. To stress further on the point that the sacred is off limits, the clans follow the central rite of intichiuma (similar to the Christian communion meal), where in the beginning of every monsoon, men of the clan start a series of celebrations to promote the growth of the clan. In the end of the celebrations, the totem itself is captured, killed and eaten as a sacred meal. According to Durkheim, it is the earliest form of the rite of sacrifice that is seen even today in many religions. It is a sacred exchange where the worshippers give life to their god, and god returns it to them. These rituals in the end are symbolic expressions of social realities. Religious rituals fulfil the function of providing occasions where individuals renew their commitment to the community, putting society, community in the foreground while pushing personal concerns back to their secondary place.i

For Durkheim, religion is something that is essentially social, a representation of collective beliefs and of collective realities. It helps in reinforcing social norms held by the collective and to maintain the solidarity of the group. When people worship the totem, the sacred, they also worship the power of ‘society’ held over the individual. Belonging to the functionalist school, Durkheim explained the existence of religion as serving the function of maintaining social equilibrium. It serves a prescriptive function just like morality and law.

The Contributions of Max Weber to the study of Religion:

Max Weber’s approach to the study of religion was that of an interpretative methodology. For Weber, the understanding of the meaning of any ‘social’ action had to begin with an interpretative understanding. Hence religious behaviour could be understood only from the subjective experiences and ideas of the individual. He stressed on the point that social phenomena could not be assumed as ‘given’ things out there or as ‘facts’ as in the natural sciences. Weber’s work in the field of the Sociology of Religion was based on the assumption that religion was an effective cause of social change. His work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) is regarded as a classical study in the field of Sociology of Religion. The central aim of this work was to show how religious beliefs influenced human actions by establishing a connection between patterns of religious beliefs and social actions.

An investigation of the relationship between religious values and economic interests was the central theme of his work. Also to what extent had religious conceptions of the world influenced the economic behaviour of various societies. Weber’s understanding of modern western societies developed heavily from an understanding of the process of rationalisation. He depicted the movement of modern societies towards increasing secularisation, bureaucratization and rationalisation. While accepting the scientific and industrial progress as a result of rational thought, Weber was also sceptical of it predicting that it would trap people in the iron-cage of rationality and bureaucracy. With rationality he meant a means-end rationality or instrumentality that seeps not only into the economic and political sphere, but also in the socio-cultural spheres. It was also a distinctive feature of the Western civilization having a certain relation to the cultural changes that took place after the Reformation.

According to Weber, Western capitalism was motivated by two contradictory patterns of behaviour: one, a devotion to amassing wealth beyond individual needs and two, by avoiding the use of wealth for personal pleasures or enjoyment, both of which were the ethics central to the Protestant sects.

Weber observed the Protestants, particularly of a certain sect (Calvinism), were the leaders of industry, possessed more wealth and economic means than any other religious groups, notably Catholics. He observed the differences in the two sects in terms of their levels of economic rationalism and general patterns of behaviour which could have been influenced by their religious beliefs.

For Weber, there was no such thing as capitalism, but only capitalisms; as each capitalist society presented peculiar trends that were different from those in the others. In order to simplify the process of defining Capitalism, Weber used the concept of ‘ideal type’. Capitalism as an ideal type was the complex activities designed to maximize profits through the means of rational organisation of work and production. It was only a feature of capitalist societies, unlike the earlier economies, where maximum profits were gained not through conquest, but by discipline. What also made western capitalism different was that there was no restraint or limit to the appetite for accumulation of wealth. Hence, not only maximising profits but ‘unchecked accumulation’ was also the distinguished feature of western capitalism.

To explain this distinctive feature Weber’s hypothesis was that a certain moral or value-orientation had influenced this feature and that a certain interpretation of Protestantism had shaped some of the motivations that were complimentary to the creation of the capitalist regime. He claimed that Protestants of a Calvinist influence were more likely to take up entrepreneurial roles, and to take up work in large-scale modern organizations, than Catholics or Lutheran Protestants. The latter tended to remain in their traditional occupations in farming, small-scale artisans or professions such as law and administration. It followed the ethics of hard work, of systematic enhancement in means towards the goal of increasing production and trade, and of individual rather than collective responsibility to economic life.

For the Calvinists, it was the doctrine of the ‘calling’ and of ‘predestination’ that created the will power necessary to generate the above capitalist spirit. These aspects of the doctrine of calling, seriousness in work and individual duty, which were found among the Calvinists contributed to their economic growth. Another trend common to both the Calvinists and the capitalists was their emphasis on individualism. For Calvinists this crucial development was related to their ‘this-worldly’ interpretation of the doctrine of predestination. They inferred that since no one could know their other-worldly destiny (heaven and hell after death), therefore life should be lived as if salvation had to be attained here through their ‘calling’(work). Calvinists were supportive of the rational accumulation of economic gain and the worldly actions that went into it as it was their ‘calling’. The notion of calling meant that each individual had to take action towards their salvation. On the other hand Catholic Christian religious devotion had historically been accompanied by rejection of routine worldly affairs, including an economic pursuit. The Calvinists also motivated the believers to work hard and keep accumulating wealth by saving it rather than spending it on frivolous pleasures. The belief in predestination made people work towards achievement in this world in order to attain salvation in the ‘other world’.

To further explain this idea he also studied the religious beliefs in other civilizations like China, India, Judaism and Islam. He sought to find out whether it was the religious variable that explained why capitalism had not developed outside the western civilization. Here he made a distinction between the two terms mainly “inner-worldly asceticism” (the concentration of human behaviour upon activities leading to salvation within the context of the everyday world) and “other-worldly asceticism” (giving up on worldly activities to attain salvation). In his second major work Religion in China: Confucianism and Taoism, he tried to explain why capitalism had not developed in China. While Confucianism preached against the pursuit of excess accumulation of wealth, Taoism on the other hand preached how ends can be achieved by withdrawing from activities that carried worldly temptations. Thus abandonment of subsistence rather than acquisition of wealth were the path to achieving salvation.4

The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism was Weber’s third major work on the sociology of religion. Buddhism like Catholicism encouraged an other-worldly self-discipline. Hinduism on the other hand had a distinctive orthodox system of belief in the caste system. The caste system made people believe and accept their suffering to be a result of being born in a certain caste, which had nothing to do with productive activity or hard work. Both the religious ideas of Buddhism and Hinduism held values that opposed the growth of capitalism in India. These comparative studies of world religions helped him to conclude the co-relations between socio-cultural thought and economic activities.

Conclusion:

This module attempts to understand three different perspectives in the study of religion. While Marx held a strong critical view of religion, Durkheim appraised it as the glue that held social groups together. Weber on the other hand made a comparative analysis of world religions and the way in which religious world-views and socio-economic activities influence each other. It is necessary to note that they also followed three different methodologies of research. These works can be utilized to make a comparison between historical materialism, functionalism and interpretative methods of social research. It is necessary to keep in mind the context of the rise of capitalism and the large scale changes that followed while studying this module. The common thread that links these scholarly works is their attempt to grapple with large scale changes that gripped the European society.

4 Read the Introduction of Weber. M, Sociology of World Religions (1993); Translated: Ephraim Fischoff, Boston: Beacon Press for an understanding of what constituted the ‘economic ethic’.

Reference bibliography

•  Feuerbach. L, The Essence of Christianity, (1854) London : John Chapman
• Marx.  Karl,  Engels.  Friedrich,  Marx/Engels  Selected  Works  Volume  One, Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of
• Marx. K (1844), The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; Cambridge University Press, 1970. Edited: Joseph O’Malley; Translated: Annette Jolin and
• Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring: The Revolution in Science (1947), Progress Publishers.
• Durkheim. E, The Elementary Forms Of Religious Life (1995), Translated: Karen Elise Fields, London: Free Press.
• Cipriani, R, Sociology of Religion: An Historical Introduction (1997), New York:   Hawthrone      Publishers.       (Read  Pg.95   onwards,  On Totemism)
• Weber. M, The Sociology of Religion (1993); Translated: Ephraim Fischoff, Boston: Beacon Press.
• Bendix. R, A Review of The Sociology of Religion by Max Weber, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring, 1964), pp. 268-270.
• Bellah, Robert N. Emile Durkheim: On Morality and Society, Selected Writings (1973),  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Courses, Soc: Grinell college. 2001. http://web.grinnell.edu (accessed July 2014).
• Engels, Fredrick. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1880.