UPSC Sociology Mains Syllabus
Paper 1 – Chapter 8
Religion and Society:
(a) Sociological theories of religion.
(b) Types of religious practices: animism, monism, pluralism, sects, cults.
(c) Religion in modern society: religion and science, secularization, religious revivalism, fundamentalism.
- The social-conflict approach to religion highlights how religion, as a phenomenon of human behavior, maintains social inequality by advancing a worldview that justifies oppression.
- Karl Marx viewed religion as a social control used to maintain the status quo in a given society.
RELIGION PERPETUATUES OPPRESSION
- Marxists believe that religion functions to legitimate the higher position of the capitalists as well as the suffering of the working class.
- Religion can be used as an ideological weapon by the capitalists to justify the suffering of the poor, posing it as god-given and inevitable.
- Therefore, religion creates a ‘false consciousness’, in which this distorted view of reality prevents the poor from acting to change their situation.
- Religion also legitimates the power of the capitalists by making it appear as divinely ordained, meaning decided by God.
MARXIST THINKERS’ VIEW
- According to Marx, ‘Man makes religion, religion doesn’t make man’.
- According to Lenin ‘Religion is a kind of spiritual gin which in which the slaves of capitalism drown their human shapes and their claim to any decent life’.
- One of the most frequently paraphrased statements of Karl Marx is, religion is the opium of the people.
- In Marx’s own words: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. it is the opium of the people’.
- Marx and Engels saw religion as a conservative force which prevented social change by creating false consciousness.
MARX ON RELIGION
- According to Marx, one of the main ‘functions’ of religion is to prevent people making demands for social change by dulling pain of oppression, as follows:
- The promise of an afterlife gives people something to look forwards to. It is easier to put up with misery now if you believe you have a life of ‘eternal bliss’ to look forward to after death.
- Religion makes a virtue out of suffering – making it appear as if the poor are more ‘Godly’ than the rich.
- Religion can offer hope of supernatural intervention to solve problems on earth: this makes it pointless for humans to try to do anything significant to help improve their current conditions.
- Religion can justify the social order and people’s position within that order, as in the line in the Victorian hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’:
“The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate.”
SUBSTANTIATING MARXIST VIEW
- There is a considerable body of historical evidence which supports the Marxist view of the role of religion in society: for example the traditional caste system in India was supported by
- Hindu religious believes (in reincarnation for example); and in Medieval Europe Kings ruled by the ‘divine right of God’. Possibly the most ‘extreme’ example, however, is in ancient the ancient Egyptian belief which held that Pharaohs were both men and gods at the same time.
CRITICISM OF MARXIST PERSPECTIVE ON RELIGION
- Religious belief remained stronger in the 20th century in Russia and Eastern Europe than it did in the capitalist west.
- There are plenty of examples of where oppressed groups have used religion to attempt to bring about social change.
- Religion seems to be more or less universal in all societies, so it is likely that it fulfils other individual and social needs, possibly in a more positive way as suggested by Functionalist theorists such as Durkheim, Malinowski, and Parsons.
