ABSTRACT
Classical sociology of religion was based upon the assumption that religion would disappear with the development of an urban industrial capitalist culture. This assumption about the inevitable demise of Christianity was an essential assumption of early Marxism which treated religion as an epiphenomenal problem, where religion functioned as a mystification of real class interests. In the German tradition which followed from Nietzsche there was also a commitment to the assumption that God is dead and that the modern world is characterized by a chaos of values which renders absolute commitment problematic. This Nietzsche tradition found its primary expression in Max Weber’s speeches on science and politics as vocations (Turner 1983). This perspective on secularity was also prominent in Georg Simmel’s views on the tragedy of culture. In the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud, the presence of Nietzsche’s argument is quite clear although disguised in the Freudian orthodoxy, since Freud argues that modern culture is characterized by the collapse of a systematic moral tradition uniting the superego with cultural constraints. In the modern Freudian legacy this problem was expressed primarily by Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966). It was primarily within the Durkheim tradition in sociology that a crucial ambiguity was expressed with respect to the functions of religion in a postreligious era since it was Durkheim who argued that any viable social system had to be grounded in a set of powerful beliefs, symbols and practices.
