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Through careful selection and skillful arrangement the editors of this collection of fifty-four documents spanning several centuries of secular thought about the social implications of religion are seeking to perpetuate a theoretical tradition in the sociology of religion which “directly incorporates the problem of historical movement as the basic problem for sociological analysis” (p. 16). Excerpts from the works of the great nineteenth-century European analysts of the role of religion in human history (e.g., Comte, Marx, Spencer, Durkheim, Troeltsch, and Weber) set the tone for the entire volume. What is at issue in the pages of Sociology and Religion is not “the truth or value of religion,” but “the truth and value of society itself' (p. 15).
In Part I, entitled “The Origins of Religion: Historical, Genetic, and Evolution Analyses,” the reader encounters nine selections, which range from Hume's The Natural History of Religion to an essay written in 1964 by Robert Bellah. Part II has four sections, the first showing that religious beliefs and practices often express attempts to achieve social stability in the face of change, the second showing that religious practices and organizations also serve as vehicles for the expression of social differentiation and integration, the third, under the rubric “Religion as an Expression of Personal or Psychic Actualities,” comprised of brief selections from Nietzsche, Freud, and Erikson. The documents in Parts III and IV relate changes in religious beliefs, practices, and movements to economic, political, and ecclesiastical history, introducing procedural, conceptual, and empirical problems which confront investigators when they attempt to understand contemporary religious activities.
The editors have included in this anthology three previously untranslated essays by European scholars: “The New Morality and the New Theology” by Frank Borkenau, “Can Continual Questioning Be Institutionalized?” by Helmut Schelsky, and “Some Problem