Max Weber's Sociology of Religious Belief

Author(s): Werner Stark

Source: Sociological Analysis, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring, 1964), pp. 41-49
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3710542
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 Max Weber's Sociology of Religious Belief*
Werner Stark
Fordham University

Combining the points of view of the sociology of knowledge and the

sociology of religion, Max Weber posed the question as to which classes
are likely to develop a genuinely religious outlook, and which not. In the
latter category he counted the peasants, the aristocrats, the bureaucrats
and the traders; in the former the artisans and the intellectuals, especially
the "pariah"or "proletaroid" intellectuals. The paper endeavours to show
that this analysis suffers from serious shortcomings, and suggests that
Tonnies' dichotomy of community-type and associational societies pro-
vides a better insight into the origins of relatively religious and relatively
irreligious world-views than does Weber's distinctions.

One of the most important formative
influences which made Max Weber a
great scholar and thinker was his early
acquaintance with the philosophy of Im-
manuel Kant which came to him mainly
through the two leaders of the so-called
South German school of Neo-Kantians,
Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich
Rickert. The Kantian element is partic-
ularly strong in Weber's theory and soci-
ology of knowledge, but it also stimu-
lated his thinking on the sociology of
religion. Earlier philosophers had been
very largely preoccupied with what lies
beyond the reach of our senses, beyond
the realm of space and time; they had
speculated about God, freedom and im-
mortality and such metaphysical prob-
lems in general. Kant tried to redirect
human thinking, to turn it away from the
metaphysical, and he did so by demon-
strating that what is metaphysical is at
the same time unknowable and therefore
not a profitable field for the philosopher
to plough. His attacks were directed
particularly against the traditional proofs
* Lecture delivered at St.
John's University,
Brooklyn, N.Y., April, 1964.
for the existence of God. In his opinion,
the existence of God could not be ra-
tionally proved, but it could not be ra-
tionally disproved either. In other words,
man stands on the borderline between
belief and unbelief, and if he cannot
bring himself to remain on that border-
line, then it is as legitimate for him to go
the one way as it is to go the other;
from the point of view of pure reason,
he is as entitled to turn religious as he
is to turn irreligious. It is easy to see that
this attitude raises a secondary problem:
the problem of why some people em-
brace belief and others disbelief, why
some people look to the right and others
to the left. This question springs from
the very logic of the Kantian position
and was never very far from the Kantian
consciousness. Max Weber tried to solve
it in his own way, the way of the sociolo-
gist. Under the title "Status groups,
classes and religion"' he put forward
some very interesting speculations, which
are well worth critical attention.
1 Cf. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Part II,
chapter IV, par. 7. Ed. 1947, pp. 267-296. Cf.
also pp. 793-796 and 805/6. For an English

41
42 SOCIOLOGICALANALYSIS
CLASSESREGARDEDAS RELIGIOUSLYBARREN
In the pages which are devoted to this
subject, Weber works with a simple
dichotomous scheme, although he no-
where says that he is drawing only one
decisive dividing line. Some groups are
predisposed towards a genuine religious-
ness and others produce at best a sham
religiosity, a sort of superstitiousness,
if they are not altogether atheistic. To
the latter class belong first of all the
peasants. In some countries, notably
Russia, the peasants are generally re-
garded as deeply and genuinely religious,
but Weber tries to prove that this is a
false romanticism which has no basis in
the facts. To make his point, he leads us
into the life-experience of the agricultur-
ist. This life-experience is one of com-
plete helplessness. The tiller of the soil
can put the seed into the ground, but
once he has done that, he can do no
more. To what extent his labours will be
crowned by success, indeed, whether
anything will come of them at all, de-
pends upon unpredictable forces, on the
weather, which is altogether capricious,
one thing one year and an entirely differ-
ent thing another year. This dependence
on irrational forces seems to Weber to
lead to a general irrationality. The
peasant is for him the superstitious man
par excellence. Sometimes this supersti-
tiousness is not obvious because it makes
use of forms, for instance, of rites which
stem from genuine religions. But these
forms are abused rather than used; their
religious content is drained out and re-
placed by some sort of magical intention.
For instance-the instance is not taken
from Weber himself, but an illustration
conceived in the spirit of his argument-
if the Czech or the Bavarian peasant
writes the letters K + M + B over his
version of pp. 267-296, cf. Max Weber, The
Sociology of Religion, translated by Ephraim
Fishoff, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, pp. 80-137.
stable door, he does not really want to
remind himself of the three magi who
crossed the stable door at Bethlehem,
Kaspar and Melchior and Balthasar, but
he wants to ward off evil spirits which
might otherwise get in among his cows
and bring them sickness and death. This
is not more than a caricature, an abuse
of religion for Weber; it is simply primi-
tive magic hidden under a Christian
cloak.
The peasants have, throughout history,
been a rather poor and underprivileged
class, but there are also some privileged
classes who, Weber tells us, are apt to
prove religiously barren like the peasants
--the warriors, the bureaucrats and the
traders, especially the rich traders, the
plutocrats as Weber calls them. He sums
them up as the satisfied strata,2 or, as
we might say, bringing out his idea even
more clearly, the smug and satisfied
strata. They do not suffer, and because
they do not suffer, they feel no yearning
for salvation; thus the very root of reli-
giousness is absent from them. Under the
feudal system, such as dominated Eu-
rope for upwards of a thousand years,
the warrior-nobles are simply the pend-
ant to the peasant-serfs: they are the
feudal superiors, the village people are
the feudal inferiors, and so their ideas
hang together, at any rate so far as the
religious field is concerned. The warrior,
whose trade is to kill, does not take
kindly to the conception of a beneficent
providence, nor is he moved by death
and other tragic aspects of existence
which are his everyday experience and
to which he gets thoroughly hardened.
And there is something else: the nobility
develops everywhere a rather formal
style of life. The aristocrat has invariably
been the man of good manners. For this
reason, the aristocrat, just like the peas-
ant, will empty truly religious modes of
2 Cf. ibid., p. 278.
 SOCIOLOGYOF RELIGIOUSBELIEF
expression, where he meets them, of their
genuine content, and substitute some-
thing counterfeit for it. If the peasant
turns religion into magic, the warrior
turns it into formality. The case of the
bureaucrat is different from that of the
warrior, but the upshot is the same: an
outlook without true religiosity in it. For
the administrator, life is a rather rational
affair. He is enclosed in a well-ordered
system-in an office and paper world in
which there are no soul-shaking crises,
no deep tragedies, indeed, hardly any-
thing that is unpredictable, a system in
which everything runs according to a
humdrum routine. This is decidedly not
a world in which prophecy can arise and
engender a prophetic movement. It seems
to Weber supremely characteristic that
Confucianism, which stands before us as
the typical religion of a typical bureauc-
racy, is in reality no religion at all, but
merely a collection of rituals and rules
of behavior. In vain does one look in it
for the image of a personal God. The
rich traders, finally, the plutocrats, are
decidedly men of this world who have
little use for any other. "Skepticism or
indifference," Weber says, "are, and were
everywhere, a very widespread attitude
of the great merchants and financiers
towards religiosity."3 Here, too, there
is no fostering soil for a genuine faith.
To the great merchants and financiers
of history belongs, of course, also the
modern capitalist, and as there was a
similarity of attitude between the upper
and the lower classes of feudalism, so
there is a similarity-Weber says: a com-
plementarity4-of attitude between the
upper and the lower classes of capitalism.
The proletarian inclines towards atheism.
Not that the proletarian is without a
deeply felt desire for salvation. As long
as he is near the starvation line, as long
3 Cf. ibid., p. 274.
4 Cf. ibid., p. 278.
43
as he smarts under humiliation, he will
hope for another world better than the
one in which he is condemned to live.
But the proletarian's misery is easily
seen to be due to social arrangements.
There is wealth galore, only it does not
come his way. So from the very begin-
ning, the working men's mind is directed
towards social revolution or social re-
form, and not towards religion. Weber
comes fairly close here to the Marxist
position, but also at the same time to the
position of those who regard Marxism
as a religion-substitute, a pseudo-reli-
gion. The proletarian will fight rather
than pray. In the words of the poet
Heine, Marx's contemporary, he will
leave heaven to the angels and the
sparrows.
CLASSESREGARDEDAS RELIGIOUSLYCREATIVE
These, then are the classes whose mem-
bers will not easily produce a philosophy
of belief. But over against them stand
others who will, and among them the
small artisans appeared to Weber as the
most significant. Once again he leads us
into a typical life experience in order to
prove his point. Unlike the peasant, who
is the slave of occult forces, the artisan
is master in his own house and in his
own work. The potter is the classical
model of a craftsman. There is nothing
in the process of making pottery that
would induce a man to have recourse to
magic or generally to develop a supersti-
tious world-view. First, there is a lump
of clay; then, the creative artist inter-
venes and forces it into shape; and
finally, there is the finished product, the
creature of his hands and of his will.
What is more simple? Weber was con-
vinced that this ever-repeated experience
of the artist-artisan was the prime root
of the greatest religiousness the world
has ever known, and especially of Chris-
tianity, the Gospel of the Carpenter from
44 SOCIOLOGICALANALYSIS
Nazareth. Perhaps we can sum up
Weber's essential idea most quickly by
saying that the decisive experience of the
craftsman is the experience of creative-
ness, and that it is more apt than any
other to mediate an inspiring insight
into the divine mind, for God, too, is
above all else the Creator-Spirit, He who
forces His form-giving will upon the
inert matter which He finds at His feet
as the potter does the clay of the fields.
At this crucial point of Weber's argu-
ment there looms, in the background,
probably unbeknown to Weber himself,
the deep conviction, ever present in
idealistic thought, that only like will
come to know like, that only he who
is creative, on however small a scale, can
have a chance of understanding Him
who is Creativity itself, Him who creates
on the largest possible scale, the Maker
of the Universe whom the Greek philos-
ophers called the Demiurge and the
philosophers of the eighteenth century,
in so far as they were still deists, liked
to call the Great Mechanic.
How close this thesis is to Weber's
heart can be seen from the fact that he
turns aside here to rebut a possible coun-
ter-argument. Christianity has often been
called a slave religion, and the slaves of
the first centuries were more often than
not agricultural slaves, tillers of the soil.
How is it that they, as typical rural
people, eagerly embraced a religion
which was the product of the small
towns of Palestine, a religion of wander-
ing journeymen, as Weber calls it?5
Against a very widely held opinion,
Weber asserts that Christianity appealed,
not to all slaves, but only to some of
them. "The slaves of the old Christian
communities," he writes, "were part and
parcel of an urban petty bourgeoisie."
On the other hand, the farm workers,
"the 'speaking equipment' of the ancient
5 Cf. esp. ibid., p. 293.
plantations,the lowest layer of the slave
population, was no basis for . . . any
religious propagandaof any kind."6This
is far too absolute and apodictic an
assertion;in fact, it is hardly more than
special pleading to support a specious
theory. Max Weber maintains, though
not in so many words, that Christianity
was from its very inception essentiallya
class religion.But this is simply not true.
It could not have spread over the face
of the earth, it could not, for instance,
have converted the Germanic societies
of the West, includingeven theirwarrior-
nobles, if it had not been much more
than that. We get here a first glimpse of
the weakness of the Weberian position;
but before we begin to criticize him, we
must hear him out. The small townsmen,
important as they are, are not the only
social groupingthat plays a positive part
in the development of true religiosity.
The intellectuals, too, have something
positive to contribute. They, too, are
sourcesof a living faith.
Max Weber distinguishestwo kinds of
intellectuals,both of whom have helped
to initiatepropheticmovements.The one
sub-stratumbelongs to the upper classes
and looks for salvation out of a certain
inner, mental, need; the other sub-
stratumbelongs to the lower classes and
looks for salvationout of a double need,
out of a need which is both inner and
outer, both mental and material. In all
societies, some intellectuals are eco-
nomically secure, because for instance
they possess property or draw rent in-
comes: these people can devote their
lives to the service of what Weber calls
"the metaphysical necessities of the
spirit":7 more soberly expressed, they
can try on their own behalf and that of
their fellow citizens, what every culture
does try, to demonstratethat the world
6 Ibid., p. 277.
7 Ibid., p. 286.
 SOCIOLOGYOF RELIGIOUSBELIEF
is a meaningful cosmos and that life in
it is equally meaningful. Weber echoes
here the words of the Gospel: man does
not live by bread alone; he must put
both his mind and his body to rest, and
Weber allots to the well-to-do section of
the brainworkers the task of assuaging
the spiritual hunger of their societies.
But every society harbours also an intel-
ligentsia which is not well-to-do. Weber
speaks of a proletaroid or pariah intel-
ligentsia and there can be few who have
never encountered men of this type.
There are, in more primitive societies,
the people who make writing for others
their trade; Mahatma Ghandi, for in-
stance, was the descendant of such a
writers' caste: there are, in more devel-
oped societies, the little schoolmasters
who have a moderate education and a
modest kind of income; there are the
artists and the journalists and bohemians
of every description. They feel both the
metaphysical and the physical sting: they
quest for bread as well as for knowledge.
And Weber is inclined-not without
good historical reason-to see them, too,
as prime producers and prime carriers
of religious ideas.
In his sociology of knowledge, Max
Weber upheld a theory which he himself
has described as the theory of elective
affinity. As an idealist, he believed that
ideas are free, that the wind of the spirit
bloweth where it listeth. But he believed
at the same time that free ideas are
without power in the world, that they
need a body as it were in order to be-
come active and effective in our material
world. Ideas are simply in the air until
they find appropriate social strata which
will incarnate them, which will become
their vehicle. Something like this theory
of elective affinity is also behind Weber's
sociology of religion. Briefly expressed,
his view seems to be that great religious
movements-movements of genuine reli-
giosity-get under way when the reli-
45
gious philosophy of some intellectuals
meets and marries a struggling and striv-
ing class of petty existences, such as
the small town artisanate of Palestine
about the year 40 or 50 A.D. It is then
that the lightning strikes and the fire
of a prophetic conflagration is lit.
Though he puts this conviction forward
in a most undramatic way, though it
almost looks as if Weber himself was not
aware that this precisely is his essential
assertions it is clear that a conception
of this kind is the very core, the very
heartpiece, of his whole sociology of
religion, or at least of his sociology of
belief.
Two main examples are given in sup-
port of this analysis. This first is the com-
manding figure of St. Paul. Here we have
a typical small town man, for Tarsus was
a small town; and here, too, we have a
typical craftsman, for Paul was a tent-
maker by trade and plied his craft even
while he was engaged in his missionary
work. And through Paul we can also see
the character of the churches which he
founded or fostered: they are in small
towns like Ephesus or Corinth; conse-
quently they must have consisted of the
kind of people who populated these
cities, craftsmen like Paul himself; there
was nobody else. But these craftsmen
must also have been half-philosophers.
The whole tone of the Pauline epistles is
intellectual. In a happy phrase Weber
says that they presuppose in their recip-
ients a high degree of "logical imagina-
tion," and he sums them up as "the high-
est types of dialectics of petty bourgeois
intellectualism."8 Weber's second exam-
ple is even more characteristic. It is the
Puritans, the left wing of the Protestant
reformation, once again a movement car-
ried by wandering journeymen. Weber
speaks of a pariah intellectualism which
comes to penetrate-to drench, is his
8
Ibid., p. 292.
46 SOCIOLOGICALANALYSIS

actual word-a middle class. And he wife of Charles V, in her coffin, he was
expressly puts these movements into so overcome by the majesty and the
parallel with the movements of which horror of death, that he turned away
St. Paul is the classical exponent. "The from the world and all its vanities and
unheard-of spread of biblical knowl- became a new man: he is known today
edge and of interest in extremely ab- as St. Francis Borgia, one of the finest
struse and sublime controversies," he witnesses Christ has ever had. This is,
writes, "as we find it in the seventeenth of course, merely one case out of hun-
century in puritanical circles, created a dreds or even thousands that might be
religious mass intellectualism which mentioned. Weber talks as if death were
never found its equal in later times and not a problem for the rich and the
can only be compared, in earlier periods, powerful, but this is obviously nonsense.
with . . . the religious mass intellectu- Religion concerns man, all men, not only
alism of the Pauline missionary com- this kind of man or that. Some people
munities."9 As we can see, Max Weber are more inclined to hear its call than
regarded the first Calvinists as the reli- others, but the call itself is to all, and
gious type par excellence; to use the can be heard by any.
lingo of the Calvinist Scots, he saw the As we enter more deeply into the crit-
first generation Calvinists in exactly the icism of Max Weber's conceptions, we
same way in which the first generation must be careful not to lay ourselves open
Calvinist saw himself-as the "guid to the charge that we are bringing reli-
man. gious prejudice into the argument. Now,
we can best avoid this reproach by apply-
THE WEAKNESS OF WVEBER S ANALYSIS
ing his very own tests, by criticizing
This apotheosis of the Puritan-of Weber through Weber himself. We have
figures like Davie Deans of whom Sir spoken all along of genuine religion, as
Walter Scott has given a half-engaging, he does. When is religion genuine, and
half-repulsive picture in his novel The when is it fake? Weber works throughout
Heart of Midlothian-makes it easy to with a definition based on two salient
criticize Max Weber, to show that his points: a religious movement is genuine
sociology of religon is a house built on when it springs from a longing for salva-
sand. Although he insists at times that tion, and when it leads to an ethical
religious movements are not simply class orientation in action. There is no reason
movements,9" his whole approach and why one should not accept this opinion,
his whole argument are an example of at least in a preliminary way. It incor-
what is sometimes called sociologism, porates two elements the importance of
that is to say, the exaggeration of the which nobody can gainsay.
social factor.b Surely, religion, and We must ask, then, first of all, whether
above all genuine religion, springs from the Puritan is the religious man par ex-
experiences which are common to all cellence in so far as his longing for salva-
men, common to Lazarus and Dives. tion is concerned. That he had such a
When the Duke of Gandia, as typical longing must not be denied, and cannot
a nobleman as one is likely to encounter be overlooked. But if ever there was a
in history, saw the Empress Isabella, the movement which tried to stifle and to kill
this sentiment, surely it was Calvinism in
9 Ibid., pp. 294/5. all its shapes. According to the grim
9a Cf.
esp. loc. cit., pp. 795/6. doctrine of predestination, God had
9b This
very passage proves it! divided the sheep and the goats, the
 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF
saved and the damned, "before the foun-
dations of the world were laid," as the
Westminster Confession expresses it; so
there is no point in longing now when
all is over and done with, especially as
the decree was said, by all the Calvinist
divines, to be absolute and irrevocable.
Indeed, the very raising of the question
by a man whether or not he was "fore-
ordained to eternal shame and punish-
ment," to quote the Westminster Confes-
sion again, was considered as an act of
rebellion; man simply had to accept the
decision God had been pleased to make.
It is well known that the God of the Puri-
tans was essentially the God of the Old
Testament; but it was not the God of the
Old Testament, it was the God of the
New Testament who came to save his
people. It was not Jehova, but Jesus-
not the divine principle of power, but
the divine principle of love-which
brought salvation into the world. If sal-
vation is made the cornerstone of gen-
uine religiousness, then Weber's basic
religious type is in reality no more than
marginal, and true faith must be sought
somewhere else.
The second test-the presence or ab-
sence of ethical orientation in action-
leads to the same result. True, the Puri-
tan, as Weber himself has classically
shown, was the very perfection of self-
discipline, of self-control: but self-dis-
cipline and self-control are merely nega-
tive virtues, and so far as the positive
virtues go, for instance the doing of
good to others, nobody will assert that
the Puritans have left behind a brilliant
record. Weber knows this only too well.
Where he discusses Calvinism,10 he em-
phasizes with all desirable clarity that
works meant nothing to these men, that
they were hardly interested in human
10 Cf. esp. ibid., pp. 808-810, and, of course,
Die protestantische Ethik und der "Geist" des
Kapitalismus.
47
beings at all and gave their best en-
deavours to impersonal causes, to their
own businesses, for instance. It should
not be denied that devotion to imper-
sonal causes, including even devotion
to one's own business, can hold deep
religious meaning. To deny or merely to
belittle this, would indeed be showing
religious prejudice.But to assert that an
ethical orientationof actionis a hallmark
of genuine religiousness,and then to go
on to say that that genuine religiousness
is found above all in a type of man who
laid the main emphasis on self-restraint
is, to put it mildly, a piece of inconsis-
tency. An ethical orientation in which
altruism is merely secondary is hardly
more than a contradictionin terms. Nor
can we forget here the historicalrecord
of the Puritans, those hard men who
inspired and produced the English poor
laws against which Charles Dickens
raisedhis indignantvoice in OliverTwist
and other novels. The Calvinists, from
the Puritans down to the Evangelicals,
were religiousmen in the sense that they
feared God; that should be underlined
and admitted without cavil; but they
were hardly religious men in the sense
that they loved their fellows. Even this
attitude was not without its own reli-
gious tinge. To love one's fellows meant
for the Calvinists-meant of necessity-
to love God less, to divert the little stock
of love with which human beings have
to be content, from the direction in
which it all should travel. One can per-
haps call this religious, though some of
us might find it rather difficult,but one
cannotcall it a soundroot for a flowering
charity. All of Max Weber's own work
really tells against his sociology of reli-
gion here. For if he has shown anything,
it is that Calvinism gave birth to capi-
talism, and the device of capitalismhas
always been "everyonefor himself,"and
never "allfor each other."
If the questionis asked as to why Max
48 SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
Weber raised the Puritanto the pinnacle
of glory,the answeris very simple.There
was, to use his own terminology, an
elective affinitybetween himself and the
Puritanintellect. As a rationalist,Weber
could not understandsome forms of reli-
giousness, especially those religious ex-
periences which are in any sense of the
word emotive." But he could under-
stand, and he could sympathize with,
a theology which conceived the divinity
as essentially a form-giver,as Him who
has forced his powerful will on inert but
recalcitrant matter. Calvinistic thought
about God concentrated on these very
aspects, and so it naturally appeared to
Weber as particularlyvaluable, as par-
ticularly near to the heart of the truth.
The rationalism of Calvin was calling
to the rationalismof Weber and evoked
an echo in the latter's intellect. But one
thing should not be forgotten. In spite
of all the common ground, there re-
mained an essential difference between
the Genevan predicant and the German
professor: the idea of God which the
German professor could appreciate was
far, far narrowerthan the idea of God
which the Genevan predicant pro-
pounded, even though that was already
narrow enough. For God was to Calvin
really a creator:He had, on the firstday,
called the universe out of the void. He
was nothing of the sort to Weber: God
operated,accordingto his way of think-
ing, merely within a universewhich was
already there, which God was finding,
half-made as it were, and on which He
merely set to work. If there is any reli-
gion that is truly akin to Weber'sphilos-
ophy, it is not Christianitynot any form
11 Another most serious limitation of Max and technological activity, until there
Weber can be seen in his conviction that the sprang from it the world of capitalism
collection of religious sentiments around a per- which we all know. All this is correctly
son is regularly due to the popularizationof a seen and
religious inspiration,but does not constitute the But
root of it. In reality, of course, it is its very root
and core. Cf. loc. cit., pp. 278/79 and 289.
of Christianity,howevermuch it reduced
and restricted the role of Christ the
Redeemer,but it is Zoroastrianismwith
its duality, with the tension it sees be-
tween Ormuzd,the bringerof order,and
Ahriman,the protagonistof chaos.When
Weber set out to decide what true reli-
giousness was, he went on a quest for
which he was singularlyill equipped.
However that may be, one thing is
certain: Weber's sociology of belief and
unbelief is based on a preconceivedidea,
on a value judgment. This is a partic-
ularly hard accusation to bring against
a man who made freedomfromvaluation
the very hallmarkof scholarship.But the
fact is undeniable-as undeniable as it
is obvious. And-this must be said in
modificationand extenuation-the value
judgment which mars Weber's analysis
is in no way conscious. It was his sub-
conscious self that conjured up before
him a certain supposedly religious ideal
-an ideal which was in reality rational
rather than religious-in the light of
which he judged the facts, giving good
marksto Calvinistsand bad to Catholics,
praise to the craftsmenand blame to the
peasantry. A truly sound sociology of
religious thought will have to be wider
and deeper than that which Weber has
laid before us. Not that his insights will
be excluded from it: far otherwise!It is
easy to see that there is indeed an elec-
tive affinity between Calvinism and its
contemporarypetty bourgeoisie; and it
is also easy to see that the concentration
of Calvinism on God the Creator as
againstGod the Redeemerset up a work-
ing model which men could follow and
which directed human endeavour in-
creasinglyinto the pathwaysof economic
deeply understoodby Weber.
partial insightsdo not make a system
of truth. What we need in the socio-
 SOCIOLOGYOF RELIGIOUSBELIEF
logical exploration of the roots of belief
and unbelief is an open frontier, not an
enclosed precinct, and an open frontier
is not granted by Max Weber and those
who think like him.
AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH: FERDINAND
TONNIES
Perhaps it is not Max Weber, but an-
other great sociologist (who, incidentally,
was no more religious personally than
Weber was) who can lead us out of the
Weberian impasse: Ferdinand Tonnies.
Tonnies has taught us that some societies
(he calls them communities) are more like
families, others (he calls them associa-
tions) are more like business firms. Some
are there before the individual appears
and make him what he is: others are
merely the result of individual strivings,
of the getting together by individuals,
and are made by them what they are.
The former, the communities, are es-
sentially growths, the latter artifacts:
the former spring from the unfathomable
depths of life, the latter from clear and
conscious policies: the former root in
emotions, the latter in interests. This
simple, but all-important distinction
gives us a far better key to the under-
standing of religious and irreligious tend-
encies than anything Weber has to offer;
it promises a convincing answer to the
query, raised by Kant, why some societies
predispose towards belief and others to
unbelief. Communities, whether they like
it or not, are in contact with the ultimate
mystery of existence: characteristically,
there is no point in asking why there
should be communities, for instance,
families: one might as well ask, why
there should be anything at all. It is
different with associations: as these are
made by men for a purpose, it is easy
enough to say why there should be asso-
ciations, for instance, business firms: the
eternal enigma is still there, of course,
but only in the dim distance, masked by
a foreground which makes it possible
49
for men to forget about it. And so com-
munities have a bent towards metaphy-
sics: medieval Europe is a convenient
example, but by no means the only one.
Associational societies, on the other
hand, have a bent towards positivism:
modern Europe and modem America
prove this. Indeed, associational societies
will work as hard to get rid of metaphys-
ical problems as communal societies will
to solve them. For two hundred years,
philosophers have done their best to con-
vince us that metaphysical speculation
is a somewhat unprofitable enterprise
from Kant and Comte who maintained
that we may perhaps formulate meta-
physical questions but can never hope
to find the answers, to the Logical Posi-
tivists of today who even assert that we
cannot as much as sensibly talk about
what is beyond the physical field. But
with the far-reaching abandonment of
metaphysics has come an equally far-
reaching abandonment of prayer, for
both are really two sides of one quest,
the quest for the unknown. As the hu-
man race has turned from community
to association, so has it turned from an
age of belief to an age of unbelief; and
the two changes are in a sense one. And
what is true of societies, is-in principle
-also true of those sub-societies which
we call classes. The nearer a class is to
the pattern of communal living, the
deeper its roots reach into the subsoil of
life, the nearer it will be to religion, to
genuine religiousness. True, sometimes
there may be a magical or superstitious
perimeter around the kernel of faith;
but this should not blind us to the fact
that where the mystery of existence is,
there also will be an effort to penetrate
that mystery-to penetrate it by thought,
and even more to penetrate it in prayer.
For-as the philosopher Wust has rightly
said-it is by prayer rather than by
thought that we can hope to come into
contact with the reality of realities.