ABSTRACT
Will Herberg suggested the triple distinction of American religions: Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The three religions used to comprise the largest religious affiliations in the United States. Massive immigration has contributed a great deal to sociocultural and religious change and differentiation. According to J. Milton Yinger, sociology of religion must have a highly scientific character in examining the different ways the religious experience—its origins, theologies, cultural expressions, and ideological evolution—can be influenced by society, cultures, and individual personalities. Melford Spiro is one supporter of the sociocultural approach. To his researches in Burma, Micronesia, and Israel, he added a psychoanalytic approach. His basic formation, however, remained an anthropological one. He followed a theoretical tradition no longer common at present: the centrality of human needs that would give rise to emotional behaviors. Religion would be one of these behavioral patterns and would have its basis especially in the family group.
