Charles Kingsley complained in 1848, “We have used the Bible as if it were a mere constable's handbook—an opium-dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded—a mere book to keep the poor in order.” Kingsley was outraged that religion should be used for the utilitarian purpose of keeping the lower classes in their place. And yet, in most societies religion has traditionally served the very practical purpose of supporting the established social order. To this end the Christian church—and in this regard it is no different than any other institutionalized religion—has preached a social ethic of obedience and submission to the government in power and to the established social order. The church does this by sanctioning a given code of behavior: those people who conform to the prescribed behavioral norm will achieve salvation, while those who fail to conform are ostracized from the religious community and, presumably, are damned. In sociological terms, the code of behavior approved by a given society is most often determined by that society's most influential groups, always with a view (not always conscious or deliberate) of maintaining the groups' dominance. From the point of view of the least influential classes, this didactic function of the church may be seen as an effort at social control, at internal colonialism—in Kinglsey's words, an effort simply to keep the “beasts of burden…, the poor in order.” In terms of biblical imagery the church's didactic function is to separate the sheep from the goats, that is, to set a standard of “respectable” behavior to be followed by the compliant sheep, with probable eternal damnation and temporal punishment for the recalcitrant goats.
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Jan 1, 1976
George J Stack 
