ABSTRACT

How important is religion in your life? Why are people in some societies highly religious, whereas religion plays little role in other societies? The topic of religion has been one of the key topics studied by the founding fathers of sociology, such as Durkheim, Weber, Marx and Comte. In this chapter, you will see that the classical sociologists had rather similar ideas about religion. They supposed a deep and intrinsic connection between modernization and religion, such that, with increasing modernity, religious involvement declines. Today, more than 100 years after the classical sociologists developed their arguments, this idea is still at the core of the discussion in the sociology of religion. In this chapter, I guide you through this discussion, presenting the main questions, theoretical arguments and empirical findings in the sociology of religion. This begins with a brief discussion of what we mean by “religion” and relating religion to the themes on culture and social relations (13.1). Then I address the potential role religions have played in establishing human cooperation a long time ago—when large-scale societies emerged (13.2). Subsequently, we come to learn more about the stickiness factor of religion—the phenomenon that religions remain rather stable over time and geography (13.3). After that, we will see that, despite this stickiness, religions can sometimes change and we look in more detail at secularization in Western Europe (13.4). Then I discuss how modernization forces explain this pattern of secularization in Western Europe (13.5). Finally, I review the existential insecurity theory, which attempts to explain more generally patterns of religious stability and change in the world (13.6).