Evaluate sociological explanations of the relationship between gender and religious belief and practice.

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Sakaynah hunter

Evaluate sociological explanations of the relationship between gender and religious belief and practice.

Over the years sociologists have managed to come up with several different explanations to examine the relationship between gender, religious belief and practice. Issues to do with membership of different religious groups, changing forms of worship and belief, ethnicity, social class and age are just some of the issues that been brought up as a topic up for discussion. This essay will look to examine these issues and bring up a range of different views from perspectives such as feminism, functionalism, Marxism and post-modernism.

According to functionalists, religion is one part of society’s social institutions and the idea that they base there ideas on a value consensus results in their belief that religion integrates individuals into society. For Durkheim, religious institutions play a central part in creating and maintaining value consensus, order and solidarity; he believes that the key feature of religion is a fundamental distinction between the sacred and the profane which is found in all religions. Durkheim see society as a symbol which Is able to evoke powerful feelings in religious believers; in his view, although sacred symbols vary from religion to religion, they all perform the essential function of uniting believers into a single moral community. Durkheim’s study of the Arunta explains the way in which bands of kin come together periodically to perform rituals involving worship of a sacred totem; the totemic rituals venerating it serve to reinforce the group’s solidarity and sense of belonging. For functionalists such as Durkheim, clan members are in reality worshipping society when they appear to worship their totemic animal. Furthermore, these sacred symbols represent society’s collective conscience and maintain social integration. Such rituals manage to remind the individual of the power of society. Durkheim sees religion not only as the source of social solidarity, but also our intellectual capacities. This suggests that for Durkheim, religion is the origin of human thoughts, reason and science.

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In contrast, Durkheim’s functionalist approach has been hugely criticised by postmodernists for example who argue that, Durkheim’s ideas cannot be applied to contemporary society because increasing diversity has fragmented the collective conscience, so there is no longer a shared value system for religion to reinforce. Furthermore, Marxist explanations on religion differ majorly from that of functionalists who see society as based on harmony and consensus. Marxism sees religion as a feature only of a class-divided society. In terms of religion as an ideology, Marx sees it as a belief system that distorts people’s perception of reality in ways that ...

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