Toward a Sociological Theory of Religious Movements

Abstract

This study attempts to analyze the characteristics of the religious movements related to societal change. Only by comparing their most recurringly typical attributes in as many diverse cultural contexts as possible do the common patterns of religion and societal change emerge with striking clarity. Data are taken from numerous early Christian, Apostolic Poverty, Croat, Czech, and German movements. These patterns are drawn from empirical evidence as if the term sect was never invented and the church-sect typology (and other labeling inherited from the past) never existed. The results reject Durkheim's dogmatic, unwarranted, and value-permeated statements, but support Weber's qualified, tentative, and neutral propositions. Durkheim's influence on American sociologists, in contrast to the lip service paid to Weber, is in part causative of the poverty of sociological theory on religious movements. This in turn nourished the myth of convergence or synithesis of Weber and Durkheim. lhe purpose of this work is to advance some qualified theoretical schemes concerning religious movements which seem to share basically the same or similar responses to the need for social change. This is an empirical investigation within one neglected aspect of Webers central contribution in the sociology of religion: namely the question of the revolutionary, reform-minded, or at least challenging function of religion. The revolutionary function of religion was formulated by Weber as complementary to Marx's integrative function. Weber accepted the validity of Marx's argument in all instances when and where religion or specific religious institutions were departments of the state and faithfully sanctified, rationalized, and helped perpetuate brutal and corrupt political establishments. This is particularly plausible in a number of great and durable political empires, and this author's study of Russian religious structures (Murvar, 1968) offers evidence to that contention common to Marx and Weber.