Social Theory and Religion

Abstract

Students of religious groups or activities are often pressed to provide an appropriate theoretical background for their work. The practical difficulty is that much social theory is actually philosophy with little empirical basis. This chapter considers the merits of four different sorts of social theory: normative theory that tells us what is good and bad; zeitgeist metaphors that capture the nature of modernity with some eye-catching word or phrase (for example, Baumann’s ‘liquid modernity’); agenda-setters (such as feminism or postcolonial theory) that want new questions asked in new ways; and sociological explanation grounded in reasonable extrapolations from empirical research. The drawbacks to the first three are identified as a way of advertising the virtues of the last type of theory.