Secularization in Britain- Are people becoming less religeous in the Essay

Secularization in Britain- Are people becoming less religeous in the UK - Essay Example They all assumed that religion would be of declining importance in an industrial society. They all assumed that religion performed social functions that industrialism, capitalism, potential social changes like socialism, and the democratic state would perform. They all operated from a sociological paradigm: They analyzed religion's social implications on a macro-institutional level. â€Å"The three 'classical' sociological theorists, Marx, Durkheim and Weber [all] thought that the significance of religion would decrease in modern times. Each believed that religion is in a fundamental sense an illusion. The advocates of different faiths may be wholly persuaded of the validity of the beliefs they hold and the rituals in which they participate, yet the very diversity of religions and their obvious connections to different types of society, the three thinkers held, make these claims inherently implausible† (Giddens, 1987). In Marx's view, religion is famously the â€Å"opiate of the masses† (Crabtree, 2008). Its fundamental purpose is as a power structure: Using mystery, the propagation of false consciousness (whether this process is a conscious propagandistic effort on the part of a priestly autocracy or an unconscious relaying of social norms and values), offerings of a life to come, and other techniques, it serves to channel what would be systemic resentment elsewhere. â€Å"The problem is that the life that is led by most men and women in present-day society is so hard, so intolerable, or at least so meaningless, that the idea of a life after death seems the only way to invest it with any meaning† (Woods, 2001). It also serves other ancillary functions for social elites, in the case of industrial societies the interests of capital, such as rallying troops to war. In the Marxist view, religion operates in a way Foucault might term panoptical: It becomes internalized repression, psychological chains that employ the oppressed in their own oppr ession by making them afraid of divine punishment or feel guilty for transgressive thought. Marxist theorists since then have extended the role of religion Many have focused on Marx's critique of religion, but it is important to note that Marx was actually not particularly hostile to it: Religion was the least of his concerns. Read carefully the â€Å"opiate of the masses† quote. Religion is a low-level drug pusher, a way to keep people from fighting against a powerful structure rather than a powerful structure in and of itself. Marx had said, â€Å"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation†. This is actually almost ennobling: Marx is arguing that religion acts as a conscience and a release; his quarrel is with the source of the pain, not the release from it. Similarly, in his critique of Bauer, that â€Å"political emancipation is perfectly compatible with the continued existence of religion, as the contemporary example of the United States demonstrates. However, pushing matters deeper, in an argument reinvented by innumerable critics of liberalism, Marx argues that not only is political emancipation insufficient to bring about human emancipation, it is in some sense also a barrier. Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings. Therefore liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view,