The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, seems to be firmly against corporate greed and Tory neoliberal policies which allow Corporations the freedom to exploit workers.
His explicitly political stance against mainstream political and economic institutions seems to be a good example of a religious leader getting involved in political conflict.
At the Trade’s Union conference Just last week Welby described zero hours contracts as ‘the reincarnation of an ancient evil’ and accused Amazon of avoiding tax and ‘leaching’ off the public.
The Archbishop seems to be firmly in the ‘Jeremy Corbyn camp’: he has been speaking out against Tory austerity policies since he took up office in 2013. He has consistently criticized modern capitalism and tory welfare cuts; and has previously stated that he wanted to see the payday loan company Wonga put out of business (so at least he’s got something to be happy about!).
Welby probably has a lot of direct experience to draw on: all over the country Church of England churches have been setting up food banks and acting as night shelters for the homeless, effectively playing a role in filling the Tory’s welfare gap.
Relevance to A-level sociology…
This seems to be a great example of a major religious leader standing up for the poor, in the tradition of Liberation Theology.
Potentially this is religion acting as a source of conflict… here Welby is railing explicitly against mainstream political and economic institutions.
This is most definitely NOT an example of religion acting as a conservative force: this is a religious leader demanding radical change.
Final thoughts….
There is possibly an element of hypocrisy to Welby’s views: The Church of England itself has shares in Amazon, and even uses zero hours contracts.
This further suggests that Welby’s views might be out of step with the rest of the Church of England. Maybe the views of this one individual are genuine, but maybe he actually has any real power to really bring about any kind of far reaching, radical social change?
Girls are unhappier than boys, and they have been getting progressively more miserable since 2009, at least according to the Good Childhood Report, 2017.
The report measures childhood well-being across a number of different ‘domains’ using a number of different sources, drawing on mainly quantitative survey data conducted with 60 000 children.
‘Domains’ are simply different areas of social life, including how satisfied children are with such things as school, family life and their appearance. Some of the questions designed to measure life-satisfaction are as follows:
The main findings of the report…
The average level of well-being reported by girls has declined since 2009, while boys’ reported well-being has remained stable.
Girls report significantly lower levels of satisfaction with their appearance compared to boys.
However, the one area of life where girls report higher levels of satisfaction is within education.
Why are girls less happy than boys?
The report also analyses the gender differences in happiness by looking at different levels of bullying and social media usage. It concludes that:
Differences in reported levels of bullying cannot explain the reported differences in unhappiness by gender. The report says: ‘There were significant gender differences in rates of physical bullying – 23% of boys had been physically bullied compared to 13% of girls. Rates of other bullying were very similar for girls (33%) and boys (31%)
Girls are twice as likely to be intense users of social media (defined as more than 3 hours a day) – 13% of girls and 6% of boys fall into this category. The report states that intense usage of social media is correlated with lower levels of reported subjective well-being, and that this may account for some of the gender differences in happiness shown above, especially where satisfaction (or lack of it) with appearance is concerned.
HOWEVER, the report also says that ‘normal’ levels of social media usage have no impact on happiness level and overall level of social media usage explains less than 2% of differences in reported levels of happiness: other factors are far more important.
Final Thoughts…
While gender differences in reported levels of happiness may look dramatic, this might be a bit of a distraction….. it seems that a poor experience of family life and experience of the social problems associated with deprivation and living in a poor area are far better predictors of child misery than gender!
According to Troeltsch, the Sect is basically the opposite of The Church….
Key characteristics of sects according to Troeltsch…
They have significantly smaller memberships than churches
The membership base of sects is drawn from the lower social classes
Sects are not aligned with the state
Sects do not accept the norms and values of mainstream society. Sects are detached from society, and in opposition to it.
Sects demand a high level of commitment from their members and they have a high level of integration. They may expect members to withdraw from society all together.
They do not have ‘inclusive membership’. Membership has to be conscious and voluntary. Children cannot be born into sects.
Sects tend to possess a monopoly on truth.
Sects have a charismatic leader, who is generally perceived to be special. They do not have an hierarchy of paid officials.
According to Steve Bruce, the first sects in modern Europe were formed when groups of people broke away from a more established religion, because of disagreement over how that religion was interpreted.
Over time, some sects have developed into denominations.
Criticisms of Troeltsch’s ‘sect’ category….
There are very few religious organisations which tick all of the above boxes, meaning the category might be too exclusive to be useful.
Roy Wallis has suggested that it is more useful to distinguish between different types of sect according to their orientation to the wider society – such as world affirming, world accommodating and world rejecting. In other words, he argues that not all sects are ‘world rejecting’.
Sources
Haralambos and Holborn: Sociology Themese and Perspectives
Chapman et al: Sociology AQA A-Level Year 2 Student Book
H.R. Niebuhr (1929) was the first sociologist to distinguish between a church and a denomination. His distinction was based on a study of religion in the U.S.A.
Denominations share some, but not all of the features of churches.
Examples of denominations include the Methodists, the Pentecostals and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
According to Neibuhr, denominations have about 6 characteristics:
Like churches, denominations draw members from all sections of society: they are inclusive.
Like churches, denominations have formal organisations and are hierarchically organised with a bureaucratic structure.
There tend to be several denominations in a society, so they do not have universal appeal
Denominations do not claim a monopoly on truth.
Unlike churches, a denomination does not identity with the state and believes in the separation of church and state.
Some denominations place more restrictions on their members: for example the Methodists and the Pentecostals.
Steve Bruce suggests that denominations have become more important in society with the rise of religious pluralism.
Criticisms of the ‘concept’ of the denomination
The concept may be too broad to be useful. There is disagreement over whether certain religious organisations should be classified as sects or denominations.
Sources
Haralambos and Holborn: Sociology Themese and Perspectives
Chapman et al: Sociology AQA A-Level Year 2 Student Book
Ernst Troeltsch (1931) used the term ‘church’ to refer to a large, hierarchically organised religious institutions with an inclusive, universal membership, typically with close links to the state.
According to Troeltsch* Churches have about 5 characteristics:
Churches tend to have very large memberships, and inclusive memberships.
Churches tend to claim a monopoly on the truth.
Churches have large, bureaucratic, hierarchical structures
Churches have professional, paid clergy
Churches tend to be closely tied to the state.
Criticisms of the ‘concept’ of the church
Steve Bruce (1996) suggests that the above definition of church may have been true in pre-modern Christian societies, but ever since the Reformation, and especially since the increase of religious pluralism, this type of definition of a ‘church’ no longer applies to organisations which formally call themselves churches in modern societies – organisations such as the Church of England.
There are several examples of ‘churches’ which do not fit the above definition:
The Church of England does not have universal membership.
Many churches today do not claim a monopoly on the truth, they tend to be tolerant of other faiths.
The links between the church and the state are not as strong as they once were.
It seems then, that the only ways in which modern churches resemble Troeltsch’s definition lies in their organisational structure.
Sources
Haralambos and Holborn: Sociology Themese and Perspectives
Chapman et al: Sociology AQA A-Level Year 2 Student Book
Durkheim’s view of religion implied that a truly religious society could only have one religion in that society. In Durkheim’s analysis this was the situation in small-scale, Aboriginal societies, where every member of that society comes together at certain times in the year to engage in religious rituals. It was based on observations of such societies that Durkheim theorized that when worshiping religion, people were really worshiping society.
However, in more modern societies, especially postmodern societies, there is no one dominant religion: there are many religions, or a plurality of religions. Sociologists describe such a situation as religious pluralism.
According to Steve Bruce (2011) modernization and industrialization in Northern Europe and America brought with them social fragmentation, such that a plurality of different cultural and religious groups emerged. We see religious pluralism most obviously in the growth of sects and cults and in the increase in ethnic diversity of religion in societies.
Two process happen as a result of this: people find that their membership of their particular group or religion no longer binds them to society as a whole; and the state finds it difficult to formally support one ‘main religion’ without causing conflict.
Bruce thus argues that ‘strong religion’, which influences practically every areas of people’s lives: shaping their beliefs and practices cannot exist in a religiously plural society. Strong religion can only exist in isolated pockets, such as the Amish communities, but these have isolated themselves from society as a whole.
Religiously plural societies are thus characterized by ‘weak religion’ – which is a matter of personal choice and does not dominate every aspect of people’s lives. Weak religions accept that there is room for other religious belief systems and have little social impact.
Examples of weak religions include modern Protestantism, the ecumenical movement and New Ageism.
Arguments against increasing religious pluralism as evidence of secularization
It is possible that religion is just changing to fit a postmodern society rather than it being in decline. Why does a society need to have one dominant religion for us to be able to say that religion is important?
It might be that diverse religions which preach tolerance of other religions are the only functional religions for a diverse postmodern society.
There are societies which have more than one religion where religious beliefs are still strong: for example Northern Ireland and Israel.
The concepts of ‘normal’, and ‘normality’, and the question of what counts as ‘normal behaviour’ has long been of interest to sociologists. Sociologists from different perspectives have very different approaches to answering the basic, but fundamental question, ‘what is normal’?
For the early positivists such as August Comte and Emile Durkheim, uncovering the existence of social norms (or typical patterns of behaviour) was central to their early positivist sociology. However, contemporary sociologists are more likely to question whether or not there is such a thing as ‘normal’ in our postmodern society.
Source: Google Ngram’s viewer
Interest in the word ‘normal’ started to grow in line with early Positivist sociology, peaked during the ‘heyday’ of structuralist sociology in the 1940s-70s and has been in decline since the (contested) shift to postmodern society from the 1980s…
What is Normal?
‘Normal’can be defined as any behavior or condition which is usual, expected, typical, or conforms to a pre-existing standard.
‘Normal behaviour’ may be defined as any behaviour which conforms to social norms, which are the expected or typical patterns of human behaviour in any given society.
It follows that in order to establish what ‘normal’ behaviour is, sociologists firstly need to establish what social norms are present in any given society.
This is actually more difficult than it may sound, because social norms exist at ‘different levels’ of society (at least for those sociologists who actually believe social norms actually exist!)
Some social norms exist at the level of society as a whole, known as ‘societal level norms’, which tend to be very general norms, such as ‘obeying the law most of the time’ or ‘children being expected to not talk to strangers’.
Other norms are context-dependent, and are specific to certain institutions – for example the specific norms associated with sitting a formal examination within an educational setting, or those associated with a funeral. (In some respects the two examples are quite similar!)
Social norms can also vary from place to place, time of day, and different norms may be expected of people depending on their social characteristics: their age, or gender for example.
Given all of the above problems with establishing the existence of social norms, postmodern sociologists have suggested that we need to abandon the concept of normality all together, and just accept the fact that we live in a society of individuals, each of whom is unique.
However, many contemporary sociologists disagree with this postmodern view, given then fact that there do appear to be certain patterns of behaviour which the vast majority of people in society conform to.
The remainder of this post will consider a range of examples of behaviours which might reasonably be regarded as ‘normal’ in the context of contemporary British society….
How might sociologists ‘determine’ what is ‘normal’?
As far as I see it, there are a number of places sociologists can look, for example:
They can simply start out by making observations (possibly backed up by ‘mass observation’ data) of daily life, which will reveal certain General norms of behavior.
They can use statistical data to uncover ‘life events’ or actions that most people will engage in at some point during their ‘life-course’.
They can look at statistical averages.
They can look at attitude surveys and field experiments to find out about typical attitudes towards certain objects of attention and typical behaviours in specific contexts.
They can simply look at the most popular tastes and actions which the majority (or ‘largest minority’ of people engage in.
Below I discuss the first three of these…
Normal behaviour in daily life….?
Simple observations of daily life (backed up with a few basic surveys) reveal there are several social norms that the vast majority of the public conform to. For example:
Wearing clothes most of the time
Despite the fact that according to one survey as many as 1.2 million people in the UK define themselves as naturists (which is about as many as there are members of the Church of England), only 2% of people report that they would ‘get their kit off too’ if they came across a group of naked people playing cricket on a beach while on a coastal ramble’.
You probably don’t think about it very much, but nearly all of us do it – ignoring other people on public transport. So much so that if you type in ‘avoiding people on public transport’ to Google, then the first search return is actually a link to ‘how to do it‘… from ‘sitting by yourself and putting a bag on the seat next to you’ to (most obviously) using your mobile phone or eating something. There’s even advice on how to ‘disengage’ from conversation, just in case some deviant is socially unaware enough to talk to you.
The limitations of establishing ‘normality’ from such ordinary, everyday behaviours…
While most of us engage in such behaviours, is this actually significant? Do these ‘manifestations of similarity’ actually mean anything? Most of us brush our teeth, most of us ignore each other on public transport, most of us wear clothes, but so what?
All of these manifestations of ‘normality’ are quite passive, they don’t really involve much of a ‘buy in’, and there’s still scope for a whole lot of differences of greater significance to occur even with all of us doing all of these ‘basic’ activities in unison…
Life Course Norms…?
It’s probably not as simply as ‘normal life in the U.K.’ as equating to having a 9-5 job, a mortgage, a fuck off big television, walking the dog, paying taxes and having a pension….
But it possible to identify some ‘life-events’ that the vast majority of people in the United Kingdom (or at least England in some of the examples below) will experience at some points in their life. All of the examples below are take from across the A-level sociology syllabus…
Most children in the United Kingdom will go to school….
According to World Bank data, 98.9% of children in the United Kingdom are enrolled in school, so it’s reasonably fair to say that ‘it is normal for children in the UK to go to secondary school’.
NB – it’s probably worth pointing out that ‘secondary school enrollment is much more common in the UK compared to the United States, and especially Uruguay, and various other less economically developed countries.
Of course the fact that nearly 99% of children are enrolled in secondary school in the UK tells us nothing about their experience of education, or how long they actually spend in school, but nonetheless, being enrolled and being subjected to the expectation to attend secondary school in the UK is one of the most universal experiences through the life-course.
Most people in the U.k. will engage in paid work or live with someone who has engaged in paid work at some point in their lives
Only 0.8% of 16-64 year olds live in households where all members have never worked. These figures don’t actually tell us how many people have never worked, but we can say that 99.2% of the adult population has either worked, or is currently living with someone who has, at some point in their lives, worked.
Limitations of establishing ‘normal’ behaviour from these trends
The limitations of deriving an idea of ‘normality’ from life-course data is that you are much less likely to find norms across the generations rather than in one specific age-cohort. More-over, one of main reasons postmodernists argue that it is no longer appropriate to talk about social norms today is that there is a trend away from shared norms in many areas of social life and a movement towards greater diversity.
Social Norms based on statistical averages
A third method of determining what is ‘normal’ is to look at the ‘median’ value of a distribution, that is the value which lies at the midpoint.
In social statistics, it is very like that the median will provide a more representative average figure than the mean because a higher percentage of people will cluster around the median compared to the mean.
Median disposable household income in the UK in 2017 was £27,300
Limitations of establishing ‘normal behaviour’ from medians or means
Is the median the ‘best’ way of establishing ‘what is normal’? Even though it’s the figure around which most people cluster, there can still be enormous differences in those at both ends of the distribution.
As to the mean, as with the household average above…. this might be useful for establishing trends over time, but surely when we look at ‘today’, this is meaningless… there are no households with 2.4 people in!
So… is there such a thing as normal?
While it is possible to identify ‘norms’ using various methods, hopefully the above examples at least demonstrate why postmodernists are so sceptical about the concept of normality today!
A simple definition of secularization is the declining importance of religion in a society.
Wilson (1966) provided a ‘classic’ definition of secularization which has been widely adopted by A-level text book authors, teachers and students for decades:
Wilson (1966) defined secularization as “the process whereby religious thinking, practices and institutions lose social significance”.
This ties in nicely with Clement’s definition of ‘religiosity’ as consisting of the three Bs of belonging (institutions), behaving (practices) and believing (thinking), and has lead to something of a tradition within A-level sociology of assessing the nature and extent of secularization by looking at three broad indicators:
The power and influence of religious institutions in society – e.g. how much of a say do religious leaders have in making political decisions in a nation state.
The extent to which people practice their religions – e.g. how many people get off their backsides and attend a religious ceremony once in a while. Or, in the case of Buddhists, how many of them stay sitting on their backsides.)
The strength of religious beliefs within a society – e.g. how many people believe in some kind of concept of God or an afterlife.
As can be seen from the above indicators of secularization, measuring the significance of religion in a society, and thus measuring its decline (or otherwise) is far from simple: not only do you need to decide which indicators to use to measure each of the above ‘aspects’ of religion (at the institutional, behavioural and personal-belief levels), but you also need to decide on the relative importance of each of these in determining the social significance of religion.
On top of this, further problems in measuring the nature and extent of secularization lie in the fact that measurements have to somehow take into account the fact that religion does not stand still: it has changed considerably over the last 100 years or so. Finally, sociologists need to decide how far back they go, or what the most appropriate time scale is to make a judgement as to the nature nature and extent of secularization.
A fuller definition of secularization is provided by Steve Bruce (2002) who defines secularization as a “social condition manifest in (a) the declining importance of religion for the operation of non-religious roles and institutions such as the state and the economy’; (b) a decline in the social standing of religious roles and institutions; and (c) a decline in the extent to which people engage in religious practices, display beliefs of a religious kind, and conduct other aspects of their lives in a manner informed by such beliefs’.
Professor Steve Bruce, aka Brucey Baby*, not be confused with Steve Bruce, manager of the football club Aston Villa (or to be confused with either Bruce Dickinson, lead singer of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden, or Bruce Forsyth, recently deceased host of both ‘Play your Cards Right’ and ‘Strictly Come Dancing’), is worth a mention as he is one of the main historical contributors to the ‘secularization debate’.
Sociologists use the term ‘religiosity’ to refer to the significance of religion within a society.
There are numerous indicators which sociologists use to measure the degree of ‘religiosity’ within society, such as the strength of religious beliefs, the number of people who actively engage in religious practices, and the amount of power religious institutions have within a society.
“scholars of religion often analyse how faith influences individuals’ experiences, attitudes and values by looking at the three Bs: belonging (identification and membership), behaving (attendance) and believing (in God)
Belonging – this aspect of religiosity is typically measured by how many people are members of religious organisations and actually identify with formal religious institutions.
Behaving – this aspect of religiosity can be measured by the religious activities people actually engage in… such as how often they attend places of religious worship, whether they get married via a religious institution, and how often they pray in private,
Believing – this is the most subjective aspect of religiosity, and can include whether people believe in God, the afterlife, spirits etc…
Problems with measuring ‘religiosity’
Someone’s faith is largely subjective, which makes it very difficult to measure quantitatively.
Changes in religious belief and practice make religiosity difficult to measure…. now we have moved into a postmodern society, which is more individualistic, people are more likely to practice religion privately and individually, and less likely to engage with traditional religious institutions such as the Christian church – but does this shift mean society is necessarily less religious?
Sociologists disagree over how we should define religion, which will influence how religious they perceive a society to be. For example, someone who uses a substantive definition of religion, and says that a religion must involve a belief in God, would probably believe that religiosity is in decline. However, someone who uses a functional definition could argue that religiosity is just as strong as ever, it has just changed – with civil religion having taken over from ‘traditional’ religions, for example.
There are two general approaches to defining religion: functional which tend to have broad, more inclusive definitions of religion and and substantive approaches which tend to have narrower, more exclusive definitions of religion.
Functional definitions of religion
Functional definitions define religion in terms of the functions it performs for individuals and/ or society. For example, Yinger (1995) defines religion as ‘a system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggles with the ultimate problems of human life.’
Problems with functional definitions of religion
They are too inclusive: almost any movement with a belief system of any kind and a committed group of followers would classify as a religion – for example, communism, nationalism, and even atheism.
Because functional definitions are too inclusive, it makes the growth/ decline/ impact of religion impossible to measure.
Functional definitions are based on subjective opinions and assumptions about what the role of religion is. Rather, the role of the sociologist should be to uncover what the functions of religion are through empirical investigation.
Substantive definitions of religion
Substantive definitions of religion define religion in terms of its content rather than its function.
Emile Durkheim‘s, approach to defining religion can be regarded as a substantive definition – Durkhiem argued that religion was the collective marking off of the sacred from the profane.
A common approach to defining religion substantively is to define religion in terms of a belief in a higher power such a god or other supernatural forces. For example Robertson (1970): ‘Religion refers to the existence of supernatural beings that have a governing effect on life’.
Problems with substantive definitions of religion
They can be too exclusive. For example, definitions which are based on a belief in God would exclude Buddhism.
Substantive definitions might still be too inclusive. For example, people who believe in fate, magic, or UFOs might be included as religious according to the above definition.
Defining religion: why it matters
it may well not be possible to come up with a definition of religion that pleases everyone! There is an enormous variety of religious beliefs and practices globally, and the main problem with defining religion is to find a definition which encompasses this variety without including beliefs or practices which most people do not regard as religious.
The definition of religion that a sociologist subscribes to will have a profound impact on their conclusions about the role and impact religion has in society. This is most obviously the case where the secularization debate is concerned: if one adopts a more exclusive definition of religion, then it would appear that religion is in decline. However, if one adopts a more exclusive definition of religion, this decline will not be so apparent.
Signposting and relating posts
This is the first topic students should study as part of the beliefs in society option within A-level sociology.
