Three kinds of belief system

• Religion. Substantive definitions say what religion is (belief in the supernatural — Weber); they are exclusive but ethnocentric, excluding religions without a god. Functional definitions say what religion does (integration, meaning — Durkheim, Yinger); they are inclusive but so broad that almost anything can count. Social constructionist definitions (Aldridge) refuse a single definition and ask instead how people themselves define religion.
• Science. Popper: science is an open belief system, because its claims are falsifiable — they invite refutation, and knowledge grows by conjecture and refutation. Merton argues science flourishes under a set of norms — CUDOS: Communism (knowledge is shared), Universalism (claims judged by objective criteria), Disinterestedness, and Organised Scepticism. Kuhn replies that normal science operates inside a paradigm and punishes those who challenge it, so science is more closed than Popper allows.
• Ideology. For Marx, the ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of the ruling class; religion is 'the opium of the people', a form of false consciousness that dulls the pain of exploitation. Mannheim distinguishes ideological thought (conservative, serving the dominant group) from utopian thought (radical, serving the subordinate). Feminists add that patriarchal ideology is carried by religion too. Gramsci: ideology is not simply imposed — hegemony must be won, and can be contested.

The exam's favourite trap: is science just another belief system? Note that scientific claims are in principle testable and revisable in a way religious dogma is not — but Kuhn shows scientists are human, defend their paradigms and resist inconvenient evidence.

Open and closed belief systems

Functionalism, Marxism and feminism on religion

• Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life) studied Aboriginal Australian clans, in which the clan's totem — a sacred animal or plant — is worshipped. His conclusion: in worshipping the totem, the clan is really worshipping society itself. Religion divides the world into the sacred and the profane, and the collective rituals around the sacred renew the collective conscience and bind people together. Religion, in short, performs social integration.
• Malinowski, from fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, argued religion manages uncertainty. The islanders performed elaborate rituals before dangerous open-sea fishing but none for safe lagoon fishing; and religion clusters around life crises — birth, puberty, marriage, above all death — where it minimises disruption.
• Parsons: religion supplies the ultimate values that underpin the social order and provides answers to the 'problems of meaning' — why do the good suffer? Bellah adds civil religion: in a religiously diverse society like the USA, a quasi-religious faith in the nation itself ('one nation under God') does the integrating work.
• Marxism. Religion is 'the sigh of the oppressed creature... the opium of the people': it dulls the pain of exploitation, promises reward in the next life, legitimates inequality (the divine right of kings), and so produces false consciousness and prevents revolution.
• Feminism. Armstrong argues women's exclusion from religious hierarchies is evidence of the marginalisation of women; de Beauvoir saw religion as a compensation and a means of control; El Saadawi insists it is not religion itself but patriarchal societies' use of religion that oppresses women. Woodhead pushes back further: religion can also be a source of liberation — she points to women who use religious practice (such as wearing the hijab) as a means of gaining autonomy and entering the public sphere on their own terms.

Durkheim's totemism

Weber, Calvinism and the spirit of capitalism

Marx made religion a conservative force. Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is the classic argument that religion can be a force for radical change.

• Calvinism held the doctrine of predestination: God has already decided who is saved, and nothing you do can change it. This produced what Weber called salvation panic — an unbearable psychological uncertainty.
• Calvinists came to read worldly success, achieved through methodical hard work in a calling, as a sign of election. Combined with asceticism — a rejection of luxury and self-indulgence — this produced people who worked relentlessly and yet did not spend. The surplus could only be reinvested.
• That, Weber argued, is the spirit of capitalism: not greed, but a disciplined, rational, systematic pursuit of profit as a duty. Religion was an unintended cause of capitalism's take-off.
• Weber is careful: Calvinism alone was not sufficient. Material conditions (technology, law, a money economy) were also needed — his argument is against Marx's economic determinism, not a claim that ideas alone make history.

Other examples of religion as a force for change:

• Bruce's study of the American civil rights movement: Black churches provided leadership (Martin Luther King), organisation, a moral vocabulary and a shield of legitimacy. Bruce sees religion here as an ideological resource — effective because it shared the wider society's stated values.
• Liberation theology in 1960s–80s Latin America (Maduro): priests sided with the poor against military dictatorship, showing religion working against, not for, the powerful.
• Gramsci captures the dual character of religion: it can legitimate hegemony, but it can also supply the counter-hegemonic ideas and 'organic intellectuals' of resistance.

Weber and Calvinism

Conservative force or force for change?

Tap a claim, then tap the box that fits it.

Churches, sects, denominations, cults and NRMs

• Troeltsch distinguished the church — large, universalistic, bureaucratic, hierarchical, closely linked to the state, claiming a monopoly on truth — from the sect: small, exclusive, hostile to wider society, often led by a charismatic leader, demanding intense commitment, drawn from the deprived.
• Niebuhr added the denomination (a sect that has cooled down: accepts other faiths, imposes fewer demands, no longer opposes the state) and the cult — highly individualistic, loosely knit, with no fixed doctrine and 'customers' rather than members.
• Wallis classified new religious movements by their relationship to the outside world:
  • World-rejecting — hostile to society, communal living, total commitment.
  • World-accommodating — breakaways from mainstream churches, concerned with private religious experience, not with changing the world.
  • World-affirming — accepts the world and offers members techniques to succeed within it; non-exclusive, more like a service or a therapy than a church.
• Stark & Bainbridge prefer to classify by the degree of conflict with wider society, distinguishing sects (which break away from an established church) from cults (which are new and offer this-worldly benefits).
• New Age movements (Heelas) are typically world-affirming, and share two themes: self-spirituality (the sacred is found within) and detraditionalisation (reject external authority; trust your own experience). Heelas links this to postmodernity: religion becomes a spiritual marketplace in which the individual is sovereign consumer.
• Why do people join? Marginality (Weber: sects offer a theodicy of disprivilege — an explanation and compensation for suffering); relative deprivation (spiritually deprived middle-class people); and social change (Wilson: rapid change creates anomie, and sects offer certainty).

Wallis's typology

Is religion in Britain dying?

The case FOR secularisation.

• Weber: disenchantment — the rationalisation of the world drives out magic and mystery.
• Wilson: religious beliefs, practices and institutions have lost social significance. Church attendance, membership, baptisms and religious marriages have all declined; the churches' role in education and welfare has been taken over by the state (disengagement) and the clergy's authority has shrunk.
• Bruce points to rationalisation, societalisation (the loss of the small, close community in which religion was embedded) and religious diversity: once there are many competing faiths, no single one can be taken as self-evidently true — Berger's 'sacred canopy' is torn, and the plausibility structure collapses.

The case AGAINST.

• Davie: religion is not disappearing but privatising — believing without belonging. She adds vicarious religion: a small number practise on behalf of the majority, who still turn to the church at times of crisis and national ritual.
• Religious market theory (Stark & Bainbridge): people have an enduring need for religion, so demand is constant; what varies is supply. Where there is a lively religious 'market' with competing suppliers (the USA), religion thrives; state monopoly churches (Europe) become lazy and lose custom. Secularisation, on this view, is a European illusion.
• Norris & Inglehart offer existential security theory: religiosity is high where life is insecure. Rich, secure societies become more secular; poor, insecure ones stay religious. This explains both Europe's decline and America's exception (given its greater inequality and insecurity), and predicts global religiosity will keep rising because the religious populations grow fastest.
• Hervieu-Léger: spiritual shopping — the chain of memory has broken and people now assemble their own beliefs. And religious participation among many ethnic minority groups remains high, sustaining religion as a source of identity and cultural defence and cultural transition (Bruce's own categories).

Believing without belonging

Who is religious — and why fundamentalism now?

• Gender. Women are consistently more religious than men on most measures. Explanations: differential socialisation (women are socialised into passivity, obedience and nurturing — Miller and Hoffmann); women's greater involvement in birth, care and death, the very life crises Malinowski identified; and lower rates of paid employment historically. Woodhead notes women are also over-represented in New Age and holistic spirituality, which values healing and the caring self.
• Ethnicity. Religious participation is markedly higher among most minority-ethnic groups. Bruce explains this through cultural defence (religion as a focus of identity in a hostile or unfamiliar society) and cultural transition (religion as a support during migration). Modood notes a decline in strict observance across generations, but not in the importance of religion to identity.
• Age. Older people are more religious. Is that the ageing effect (people turn to religion as death approaches), the period effect (particular generations were more religious), or genuine secularisation across cohorts? Voas and Crockett argue the evidence favours generational replacement — which supports secularisation.
• Fundamentalism. Giddens defines fundamentalism as an appeal to tradition and to a single, literal, unquestionable sacred text, in a world where tradition can no longer be taken for granted. It is a product of, and reaction to, globalisation — a defensive response to cosmopolitan uncertainty. Bauman sees it as a flight from the freedom and doubt of postmodernity; Castells distinguishes resistance identity (defensive fundamentalism) from project identity (progressive movements engaging with globalisation).
• Huntington's 'clash of civilisations' thesis argues post-Cold-War conflict is increasingly between civilisations defined by religion. It has been heavily criticised (Jackson) for treating civilisations as monolithic, ignoring internal diversity and conflict, and for stereotyping — a caution worth stating explicitly.

Fundamentalism and globalisation

Sociologist to concept

Match each sociologist to their key contribution.

Judging the secularisation debate

• The measurement problem is fatal to easy answers. Attendance figures measure practice, not belief; survey questions about belief measure self-report, not commitment. Davie's whole argument rests on the gap between the two. Before you claim religion is declining, say which aspect of religion, and how it was measured.
• Secularisation is not one process but several — institutional decline, disengagement of church from state, the privatisation of belief, and disenchantment. They can move in different directions at once, which is why the debate never closes.
• It is also Eurocentric. Norris and Inglehart, and religious market theory, both point out that the secular European story is the exception, not the rule. Globally, religiosity is not in retreat.
• The strongest answers hold together three claims: institutional religion in Britain has declined; belief and spirituality have not simply vanished but changed shape (Davie, Heelas, Hervieu-Léger); and religion remains a powerful source of identity, especially where it does the work of cultural defence.

Exam craft: never answer 'is Britain secular?' with a yes or a no. Answer it with a distinction — which religion, whose, and measured how.

Evaluating secularisation

The big ideas to know

You've covered the AQA Beliefs in Society option. Press Finish to see your score.