Introduction

Abstract

It is a strange contradiction that while sociological studies of religion are generally regarded as being towards the fringes of the discipline, those who are normally regarded as the founding fathers of sociology gave considerable prominence to religion in their work. Emile Durkheim devoted a lengthy volume to the analysis of religion and Max Weber’s scholarship in this area produced no less than five volumes in English translation.¹ Marx, it is true, had much less to say about it although the little he did have to say was no less profound than the work of the other founding fathers, and has had no less influence. Also striking about the work of the founding fathers is their interest in, and appreciation of, the importance and relevance of the religious systems found in other cultures and civilisations, while much contemporary sociology of religion, in contrast, has confined itself to the study of religion in contemporary Western societies and even then rather narrowly to esoteric sects and cults, and to the study not of religion but of its absence, that is to say of secularisation. Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life relies almost entirely upon data relating to the native peoples of Australia while Weber looked to China, India and to Ancient Palestine as much as to the Christian world.