ABSTRACT
Introduction Many twentieth-century commentaries on the later work of Talcott Parsons have neglected to engage with his insights on the sociological problem of religion.1 This neglect is due in large part to the fact that Parsons’s discussion of religion in the early 1950s was closely bound up with his interest in structure-functionalism, whose cargo of ideal-typical, cognitive concepts was long on formal distinctions and short on interesting empirical research findings about religion itself. The potential for clarity tended to vanish in these formal complexities; and with it vanished the possibility that many of Parsons’s readers might ever again willingly venture to read anything let alone incorporate his insights on religion into their own studies (Robertson, 1991, p. 138; Scuilli and Gerstein, 1985, p. 370).
