I have to answer the following question:
"On the basis of theories about the origins and functions of religion (mentioned below), what are the functions that organized religion serves in the US society? Can religion in the United States be said to be inbedded in other sociocultural institutions, such as politics? "
What would you say are the functions that organized religion serves in the US? Besides politics, what other sociocultural institutions would you say it's involved in? education somewhat?
"1. Religion, a cultural universal, consists of beliefs and behavior concerned with supernatural beings, powers and forces. Religion also encompasses the feelings, meanings and congregations associated with such beliefs and behavior.
2. Tylor considered animism--the belief in spirits or souls-- to be religion's earliest and most basic form. He focused on religion's explanatory rule, arguing that religion would eventually disappear as as science provided better explanations. Besides animism, yet another view of supernatural also occurs in nonindustrial societies. This sees the supernatural as a domain of raw, impersonal power or force (called 'mana' in Polynesia and Melanesia). People can manipulate and control mana under certain conditions.
3. When ordinary and rational means of doing things fail, people may turn to magic. Often they use magic when they lack control over outcomes. Religion offers comfort and psychological security during times of crisis. However, rites can also create anxiety. Rituals are formal, invariant, stylized, earnest acts in which people subordinate their particular beliefs to a social collectivity. Rites of passage have three stages: separation, liminality, and incorporation. Such rites can mark any change in social status, age, place, or social condition.
Collective rites often are cemented by communities, a feeling of intense solidarity.
4. Besides their psychological and social functions, religious beliefs and practices play a role in the adaptation of human populations to their environment. The Hindu doctrine of ahimsa, for example, which prohibits harm to living things, makes cattle sacred and beef a tabooed food. The taboo's force stops peasants from killing their draft cattle even in timt
5. Religion establishes and maintains social control through a series of moral and ethical beliefs, and real and imagined rewards and punishments, internalized in individuals. Religion also achieves social control by mobilizing its members for collective action.
6. Religion can also promote change. Revitalization movements blend old and new beliefs and have helped people to adapt to changing conditions. "
7. Protestant values have been important, as they were in the rise and spread of capitalism in Europe. The world's major religions vary in their growth rates. There is growing religious diversity in the US and Canada. Fundamentalists are anti-modernists who claim an identity separate from the larger religious group from which they arose; they advocate strict fidelity to the "true" religious principles on which the larger religion was founded. Religious trends in contemporary North America include rising secularism and new religions, some inspired by science and technology, some by spiritism. There are secular as well as religious rituals.
Topic: Religion in the US (Read 3774 times)