The sociology of religion: a case of status deprivation?

This article ought to begin with the parable of the righteous and the un-righteous students. The latter was a young man in a sociology seminar at London School of Economics in England who appeared to enjoy no righteous indignation about the social structure of Great Britain, as of December 1, 1966. He came from the Catholic working class and intended to make money as an accountant. The earnest and the left-wing found him odd, but never so much as in his attitude to the fact of working class conservatism. They assumed that the Tory working class created a problem to be explained, but to him there was no difficulty. Voting Conservative was evident good sense which the working class possessed in as good measure as anybody else. The more he persisted in rejecting the problem as defined the more it became difficult to establish criteria for showing what should count as problematic and what natural. Like all genuine parables this one has a single point. Sociology as practiced in this country is based on certain assumptions which come more naturally to students from some groups than others.