The Functions of Religion in Modern Society

2008

Socialisation

In modern societies the major function of religion is to socialise society’s members into a value consensus by investing values with a sacred quality. These values become ‘moral codes’ - beliefs that society agrees to revere and socialise children into. Consequently such codes regulate our social behaviour.

Social Integration

Encouraging collective worship enables individuals to express their shared values and strengthen s group unity. It fosters the development of a collective conscience or moral community so that deviant behaviour is restrained and social change restricted.

Civil Religion

Civil religion refers to a situation where sacred qualities are attributed to aspects of the society. Ritual and ceremony is a common aspect of national loyalties.

Preventing Anomie

Anomie (or a state of normlessness) can be a product of modern industrial life. Religious and civil ceremony prevents this happening by encouraging an awareness of common membership of an entity greater than, and supportive of, the

individual.

Coming to Terms with Life-Changing events

Religion functions to relieve the stress and anxieties created by life crises such as birth, puberty, marriage and death. Such events can undermine people’s commitment to the wider society and therefore social order.

Legitimating social inequality

Religion serves as a means of controlling the subject population by promoting the idea that the existing hierarchy is natural, god-given and therefore unchangeable.

Disguising the True nature of exploitation

Religion explains economic and social inequalities in supernatural terms. The real causes of inequalities are obscured and distorted by religions insistence that inequality is the product of sin or a sign that people have been chosen by God, etc.

Keeping the working class passive and resigned to their fate

Some religions present suffering and poverty as a virtue to be accepted, and even welcomed, as normal. It is suggested that those who do not question their situation will be rewarded by a place in heaven.