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Conceptions of Religion: On Distinguishing Scientific, Theological, and "Official" Meanings

Relatively recent efforts in the past decade by a variety of scholars to situate the conceptualization and study of religion more solidly in social and historical contexts have once again raised the question of whether the notion of religion is not fundamentally misleading as a scientific concept and should therefore be abandoned or at least severely circumscribed. The foundation of these critiques in, roughly speaking, sociology of knowledge approaches to religion suggests that they might well have significant implications for the basic orientations of the sociology of religion to its primary object of study. The aim of this article is to examine these more recent critiques of the concept of religion and then to outline a reorientation of the conceptualization of religion to take them into account. To this end, it suggests that the familiar distinctions between functional/substantive definitions and restrictive/expansive approaches be supplemented with a three-part typology of theological, scientific, and official conceptualizations of religion. These are derived from an analysis of the basic social-systemic structures of modern and global society.

Social Compass, Vol. 50, No. 2, 141-160 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0037768603050002002


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