Change in Religion - Key terms

[KALKI]

Key terms:

Collective conscience
The collective sentiments or ideas that give the social group or society its unity and uniqueness.


Sacred/profane
The distinction between people (profane) and society (sacred). The idea that when people worship the sacred they worship society.


Salvation Panic
Not knowing if you are among the ‘saved’.


Universe of meaning
Religion provides the true and objective way of seeing the world.


Cosmology
In an effort to explain mysterious or awesome things and give then meaning, humans place them in a category that Berger calls a cosmology.


Theodicy
The justice of god. In western societies the theodicy has to reconcile apparently contradictory beliefs, the belief in a benelovent and omnipotent god with the existence of a world full of evil and suffering.


Rationality
The rejection of all claims to knowledge other than the scientific.


The Institutional approach
Focuses on the church, church attendance, etc.


The Societal approach
The role and impact of religion on society and the individual.


Disengagement
The detaching of religion from wider society - its loss of wealth, prestige and power.


Religious pluralism
The co-existence of many faiths and varieties of faith in one society.


Transformation
The argument that religious belief has become transformed into Secular guides for action.


Generalisation
Religious values have become generalised because social values are grounded in Christian principles.


De-sacrilisation
The idea that the sacred has little or no place in contemporary western society.




Key names:
Durkheim
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1924).


Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (first published in English, 1930).


Marx
Religion as ‘opium’ a conservative force.


Lenin
Religion as ‘spiritual gin’.


Maduro (1982)
‘Relative autonomy’ of religion.


Thompson (1986)
The ‘it depends’ approach.


Huxley (1965)
Religion and science incompatible.


Berger and Luckmann
The Social Construction of Reality. Claim that a Sociology of knowledge is impossible without a sociology of religion, and vice versa.


Wilson (1966)
Religion in a Secular Society.


Wilson (1977)
‘How Religious are We?’ Points out how, except for the occasional ancient ceremony, such as a coronation, the church has ceased to preside over national life.


Luckmann (1967)
The Invisible Religion.


Lyon (1985)
The incompatibility of rational or 'scientific'.


Shiner (1967)
Six different versions of secularization used by sociologists in empirical work.


Glasner (l977)
The Sociology of Secularisation. Three levels of analysis.


Bruce (l992)
The processes of cultural defence and cultural transmission.


Berger, Berger and Kellner
‘The Homeless Mind’. The idea of the Secularisation of consciousness - the interpretation of the world without reference to religion.


Bruce (1995)
Decline in attendance. According to Bruce the high point for British Churches was between 1860 and 1910.


Bradley, Religious Revival (1987)
Argues that religious programmes are watched or listened to by nearly 60% of the population.


Stark and Bainbridge
Secularisation is a self-limiting process because it always generates religious revival.


Hersberg (1955)
‘Protestant. Catholic, Jew’. Claims that the church in the USA has become obsessed with secular concerns.


Bellah (l976)
‘New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis in Modernity’. Religion is now an activity indulged in at the individual level.