Category: Beliefs in Society
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A Merry but Secular Christmas!
A YouGov Poll conducted last year in 2020 shows that the majority of those who celebrate Christmas (and Easter) in the UK do so in an entirely secular way. The survey results provide some useful evidence to support the view that religion does not play a significant role in British society, as this traditionally Christian…
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Spiritual Abuse – its relevance to A-level Sociology
Spiritual abuse can be defined as the weaponisation of religious beliefs in order to coerce or control someone who shares that same set of beliefs. This may take the form of someone with power within a religious institution using their position of authority to manipulate their congregation or followers into doing what they want them…
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Jews and Muslims Unite to Help Combat Poverty
Sociology is usually all doom and gloom, but here’s a nice example of something positive for once… This community food kitchen in Nottingham is a joint project between Jews and Muslims which takes surplus food from supermarkets and cooks it to distribute it to those in financial difficulty. Relevance to A-level Sociology This is a…
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Paedophile-Priests and the Declining Signficance of Religion…..
A recent report found that there have been at least 216 000 child victims of sexual abuse since the 1950s at the hands of clergy and other officials working for the Catholic Church in France. The victims are mainly teenage boys and the figures are probably an underestimate. There could well be over 300 000…
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LifeLines – A Perfect Example of a Postmodern Approach to Religion
Lifelines: Notes on Life and Love, Faith and Doubt is a new book published in November 2018 written by Martin Rowe and Malcolm Doney, and to my mind it’s a perfect expression of a postmodern approach to religious belief. The two authors are (respectively) a volunteer priest and one volunteer vicar in their local parishes,…
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Is Religion a Source of Consensus or Conflict?
Functionalism is the only perspective which has traditionally argued that religion is a source of value consensus, all other perspectives disagree with this in one way or another, but not all believe that religion is necessarily a cause of overt conflict in the world. Functionalism Functionalists generally argue that religion promotes value consensus in a…
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Karen Armstrong – September 11th 2001, Islam and the West
Karen Armstrong argues that there is no inherent incompatibility between the Western and Islamic world, but sees economic and political factors as the main reasons for increasing tensions in recent decades. Armstrong’s arguments can be used to criticise Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civlizations’ thesis, which sees increasing conflict between different cultures/ religions as an inevitable outcome…
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The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel P Huntington
Samuel P. Huntington sees ‘civilizations’ as the most significant grouping in global society, rather than ‘nation states’, or ‘global religions’, although there are often close relationships between religions and Huntington’s concept of ‘civilizations’. Globalization has resulted in the world becoming a smaller place, which means that there are increasing interactions between ‘civilizations’, which intensifies ‘civilization…
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Churches, Denominations, Sects and Cults: Similarities and Differences
The grid below provides a summary of some of the key characteristics of Churches, denominations, sects and cults. As with any ‘scheme of categorisation’, many real-world examples of organisations will not fit exactly into every row. For example, some sects may appeal exclusively to white people, and some may have middle class members. Hence these…
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The causes of Fundamentalism
Steve Bruce argues that the main causes of Fundamentalism are modernisation and secularisation, but we also need to consider the nature of the religions themselves and a range of ‘external factors’ to fully explain the growth of fundamentalist movements. Modernisation has undermined religion in at least three ways: Social life has become separated from religious…
