ABSTRACT
This chapter is an introduction to the sociological way of looking at and talking about religions and gods. I’ve titled this chapter the “last chapter of ‘God’” to underscore that we now have and have had for decades all the evidence we need to support the Durkheimian anthropology of God. In a sense, the last chapter of God has almost been written many times. Michael Harrington’s book The Politics at God’s Funeral (1963) could have been that chapter but Harrington refused to see the social fact of God in his own conclusions. Harrington was a non-believer who described himself as “religiously musical.” I take this to mean something like Durkheim’s notion of “religious sentiment.” The problem is that Harrington repeats the uninterrogated “truism” that you can’t prove or disprove God and reports the death of the political God but not the death of God. All the material for writing the last chapter of God has been available for a long time and it has never been easier than it is today to collect, organize, and present that material and at last tell the full story.
