In the Beginning...

Coming into a class that is designated as sociology and religion, I had my reservations about the ability of these separate disciplines to interact with each other.  I know that religion is a powerful social construction but what else can sociology tell us about a topic characterized by violence in the news and passionate radicals?

Peter Berger illuminates some of that interaction between sociology and religion in The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion.  Religion, similar to gender and race by being a social construction, was created by man to assuage his need for an explanation.  Berger explains three steps of this construction:  externalization, objectivation, and internalization.  At first, I was confused as to how this makes sense for religion.  I first understood the steps as they relate to another social construction, gender.  A long long time ago, some human must have seen another human and saw many similarities but also differences.  What we now know as men and women were originally externalized at some point in history to account for human differences.  These differences were accepted in that time and repeated over and over by other humans, objectifying what was originally just an "outpouring of human being into the world." (Berger, 4).  As time goes on eventually the humans were very familiar with the concept of gender and internalized it, and reproduced it back into society.  In this way, society is effected by human activity but also the inverse, human activity is shaped by the society.

Similarly, religion as we know it today started as an externalization.  We know this to be true because of the fact that any religion is only one generation away from extinction.  Think about it, if the older generation does not pass down their beliefs (allowing society to pour back into humans), the belief does not survive.  This is the power of society that religions have lasted for thousands of years and will last far into the future.  I am not here to debate the legitimacy of any religion. I am simply speaking to the beginnings of a source of much conflict in our world today.

Berger ends his intro with a very insightful idea:  "Religion implies the farthest reach of man's self-externalization, of his infusion of reality with his own meanings... religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant."  Humans are always searching for meaning and explanation, and religion is one answer that has the potential to answer many of those questions.  Whether is accomplishes human significance is the universal sense is a debate for another day.

MH