ABSTRACT
In an article published in 1964, Clifford Geertz observes that in the domain of the sociology of religion, the major theoretical contributions at the turn of the century from Durkheim, Malinowski, Weber, and later from Freud in Totem and Taboo, have not been extended by later developments of equal calibre. These authors, it is true, are far from defending the same conception of religious fact. But they agreed on at
least one point. For all of them except perhaps Freud (who nevertheless takes the greatest pain to point out that religious belief cannot be reduced to a pure delirium and rites to compulsive behaviour), religion is a phenomenon that is a characteristic of all human societies, past, present, and future. In other respects, anthropologists and sociologists claim to give a positive explanation to this phenomenon. For a long time, theologians insisted that the fact of religion should stay out of the clutches of positive science. They set themselves against the inheritors of rationalist tradition who believed in explaining religion in terms of ignorance or impulses of a blind affectivity. The ignorance that it cultivates, according to Voltaire, among its followers (‘Our priests are not that which vain people think/ our credulity is all their science’) and the passive sentimentality that it sustains among their people (‘the sign of the oppressed creature’, as Marx put it) offer the means of manipulation to ‘important people’ who permit the clergy to make the poor stupid in order to hold them in slavery. The conservative variant of this conception is explained by certain liberals of the nineteenth century, notably French, for whom ‘religion is good for the people’; the radical variant is illustrated by the well-known Marxist formula of religion as the ‘opium of the masses’. The contributions of sociology and anthropology consist of treating religion as a ‘social fact’, in other words as a human fact. This results in risks of reductionism that are difficult to control. In this respect, the substitution by Durkheim of the notion of the transcendent for that of the sacred is far from being innocent. We cannot forbid sociologists from concerning themselves with a dimension that is so important in social life by holding against them the accusation of sacrilege.
