ABSTRACT
Max Weber saw religion as essentially providing theodicies of good and bad fortune. While this is in many respects more of a psychological than sociological approach, it integrates both intellectualist and emotionalist elements with an eminently sociological analysis of the interrelationships between beliefs and social groups. The main source of Clifford Geertz’s theoretical ideas on religion is his article ‘Religion as a cultural system’ where he approaches the subject from what he calls the cultural dimension of analysis. Geertz distinguishes two basic elements — a people’s ethos and their world-view. His first point is that religion is a set of symbols. Geertz is opposed to psychological explanations of why people accept religious conceptions. Clearly, Geertz’s approach is one which is influenced by and attempts to synthesise many of the insights of previous approaches including intellectualism and emotionalism. Similar in this respect is the approach of Peter Berger. Religion, for Thomas Luckmann, is coextensive with social life itself.
