Sociology of Religion (book)

Sociology of Religion is a 1920 book by Max Weber, a German economist and sociologist. The original edition was in German.

Max Weber studied the effects of religious action and inaction. He categorized different religions in order to fully understand religion's subjective meaning to the individual (Verstehen).

By viewing religion strictly in the scientific sense, Weber was striving for objectivity, attempting to ignore value judgments, and to understand religion as those human responses that give meaning to the inescapable problems of existence, such as birth, death, illness, aging, injustice, tragedy, and suffering. In The Sociology of Religion, Weber proposes that people pursue their own goals, and that religion facilitates that. He shows how early religious beliefs stem from the work of skillful, charismatic individuals, and how their actions are eventually transformed into a systematic, church-based religion - in other words, how religion begins with charismatic authority and is transformed into traditional authority.

Because religion enables people to pursue their interests, Weber believed that religion actually gave rise to the spread of modern capitalism, as he asserted in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This writing illustrated the way in which religious beliefs steered the direction of the economic and technological forces that were already in motion.

Max Weber takes an objective, distant view of the sociological traditions of the institution of religion. He is standing on the outside, looking in, contrary to the believers whose journey of faith causes them to examine their religion from within. This detached, objective view of religion embodies the objective, modernist practice of the sociological perspective of religion today.