ABSTRACT
There is a tendency in some quarters to regard the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a ‘golden age’ for the sociology of religion. The concept of ‘the sacred’ has even been described as the key to the unique role played by sociology in this period. Bryan Wilson’s opinion, for example, is that religion is ‘a subject at the heart of classical sociological theory, and it remains true today that it continues to be at the core of the discipline’ (1982, p. 9).
