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Religion and social change - Coggle Diagram
Religion and social change
Marxists
Religion stops people having revolutions by giving them a sense of 'false consciousness'
Marx and Lenin - workers are told they'll be rewarded after they die; workers pray for a better life, pointlessly, instead of having a revolution; workers are told that being poor and oppressed is actually good; bosses will be punished in hell after they die
Neo-Marxists
Religion mostly stops people from having revolutions, but sometimes, it can help them too - religion is a cultural battleground between the working classes and the economic elites
Althusser - Ideological State Apparatus - people are conditioned to follow elite ideologies taught to them in the ISAs, as opposed the the RSAs, which kill them if they try to take power; the workers can fight against the elites in religion, to try to take it over, and sometimes succeed
Gramsci - cultural hegemony - the elites have most of the power over culture, but not all - the workers can try to take some of it and sometimes they are able to
Bloch - religion can inspire people to try to make heaven on earth for the workers - e.g. to create welfare states (in the 1950s)
Weber
Protestant Work Ethic - early forms of protestantism (specifically Calvinism) created the conditions needed for capitalism in Western Europe
Calvinism, a type of religion that grew in the Netherlands, had two specific features that created capitalism: predestination (you have already had your fate decided before you were born - you need to look for signs of God's favour, including business success) and asceticism (don't spend money on luxuries and live a simple life - re-invested the money so that their businesses got even bigger)
Evaluation
Ditmarr - cities with printing presses grew faster than those without them - Calvinists had more printing presses, because they focused on religious scripture instead of religious ceremonies
However, the slave trade - enormous economic effect, but this was a trade that strict Calvinists couldn't follow and played a role getting banned
Most early trade was in luxuries - so someone was buying it, if not the Calvinists
Calvinist areas with no economic growth - Switzerland had no economic growth, but the capital of Calvinism was Geneva in Switzerland
Functionalists
Religion creates social solidarity and integration, which stops social change - because they think that it is good to prevent revolution
Examples
Liberation theology - Marxism and Catholicism mixed to fight the military dictatorships in Latin/South America - 'if Jesus were alive today, he would be a Marxist Revolutionary' - priests fighting the regimes in Latin America and then joining governments afterwards - but the central Catholic church in Rome didn't like this (although at the same time, the Catholic Church was supporting the Solidarity Movement in Poland against the Communist government)
Iranian revolution - religious groups united with liberals and socialists/communists against the Shah (the old King, who was corrupt and incompetent) - when he was gone, the religious people took power under Ayatollah Khomenei - however, as soon as they took power, they became very conservative
New Religious Right - force of social conservatism in America, that tries to change politics back to how it was in the 1950s - strongly nationalist and Christian, and not liberal - religion trying to stop social change