Religion seminar activity_group_1_religion_oppression_and_transformation

Religion seminar activity_group_1_religion_oppression_and_transformation

• 1.
  Foundation Society andCulture Seminar Activities: Religion Group 1. Religion, oppression and transformation 1. Reread the sections in Sociology on Marx and Weber to remind yourself of the key points of their theories. 2. Marx’s position is often caricatured (portroyed in a comic or exagerated way) as suggesting that religions are always used by the dominant class to oppress the subordinate class; even working from a Marxist position, this view has to be seen as far too simplistic. Individuals as members of social groups actively seek to make sense of the social conditions in which they find themselves; ideologies can never be simply imposed from above. The Sunday school movement provides an example of this process: on the one hand it did promote values which were in line with the needs of industrial capitalism; on the other, it was part of the process which created a distinctive working‐class culture. 3. Read this extract from a famous sociology book: The repressive, middle‐class dominated Sunday School … was a rarity by the early nineteenth century. Within two decades of their founding Sunday Schools had become one strand of a uniquely working‐class cultural constellation. In their literature and teaching they stressed moral and ethical as against overt social or political values. Honesty, orderliness, punctuality, hard work and refinement of manner and morals may all have been congruent with the industrial system and thus in the interest of the bourgeoisie but they were not therefore middle‐class values. The great divisions in early nineteenth century society were not between the middle and the working classes but between the idle and the non‐idle classes, between the rough and the respectable, between the religious and the nonreligious. All of these divisions ran across class lines. The puritan ethic was therefore not the monopoly of the owners of capital; it was the ideology of those who worked as against those who did not. Sunday schools were effective in the transmission of certain values precisely because these values were those of the working‐class men and women who taught in and supported the schools. (T. W. Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture 1780–1850, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) 1. How can the values promoted by the Sunday schools be seen as acting in the interests of the bourgeoisie?
• 2.
  Foundation Society andCulture Seminar Activities: Religion 2. Why is it too simplistic to suggest that the bourgeoisie imposed their values upon the working class? 3. How could the Sunday School movement have both promoted acceptance of the existing social order and opposition to it?