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Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology.This objective investigation may include the use both of quantitative methods (surveys, polls, demographic and census analysis) and of qualitative approaches (such as participant observation, interviewing, and analysis of archival ...
Notwithstanding the long interest in the study of religion, the academic discipline Religious Studies is relatively new. Christopher Partridge notes that the "first professorships were established as recently as the final quarter of the nineteenth century." [20] In the nineteenth century, the study of religion was done through the eyes of science.
The sociology of religion is distinguished from the philosophy of religion in that sociologists do not set out to assess the validity of religious truth-claims, instead assuming what Peter L. Berger has described as a position of "methodological atheism". [161]
In Japan, the academic study of new religions appeared in the years following the Second World War. [11] [12]In the 1960s, American sociologist John Lofland lived with Unification Church missionary Young Oon Kim and a small group of American church members in California and studied their activities in trying to promote their beliefs and win new members.
Much of Lenski's earliest work dealt with the sociology of religion and culminated in the publication of The Religious Factor. [5] He defines religion as "a system of beliefs about the nature of force(s) ultimately shaping man's destiny and the practices associated therewith, shared by the members of a group. [6]
Max Müller (1823–1900) has the reputation of having founded the scientific study of religion; he advocated a comparative method that developed into comparative religion. [ 4 ] Subsequently, Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) and others questioned the validity of abstracting a general theory of all religions.
David G. Bromley (born 1941) is a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, specialized in sociology of religion and the academic study of new religious movements. He has written extensively about cults, new religious movements, apostasy, and the anti-cult ...
In sociology, secularization (British English: secularisation) is a multilayered concept that generally denotes "a transition from a religious to a more worldly level." [1] There are many types of secularization and most do not lead to atheism, irreligion, nor are they automatically antithetical to religion. [2]