A Critique of Religion and Power in the Sociological Sciences.

This paper argues that the relation between religion and politics has been treated quite arbitrarily in the literature of political science, sociology and social anthropology, especially in the area of the political uses of religion. The term sociology is used generally to cover the relevant literature of all three disciplines just mentioned, although the other two terms will sometimes be used too. The antagonism between church and state in the history of western society is paradoxically one of the springs of this view of the role of religion in power. For, if spiritual authority were to compete with temporal power it is only natural that the former would utilize its exclusive source of legitimacy, which is religious, in claiming political obedience. The examples described in this paper illustrate a traditional ideology in which, rather than religion being used for political purposes, the two existed together as an undifferentiated whole. This ideology which we have called integral, was ingrained in the consciousness of the people and was expressed, among other ways, in a diversity of magico-religious and cultic activities. Where religion and politics are thus undifferentiated, the question of using the former for the purposes of the latter is unnecessary.