Functional theories

The social philosopher Karl Marx 1818–1883 held the materialist worldview. According to Marx, the dynamics of society were determined by the relations of production, that is, the relations that its members needed to enter into to work their means of survival.

Developing on the ideas of alienation that was functional to relieving people's instant suffering, and as an ideology that masked the real race of social relations. He deemed it a contingent element of human culture, that would construct disappeared after the abolition of a collection of matters sharing a common attaches society.

These claims were limited, however, to his analysis of the historical relationship between European cultures, political institutions, and their Christian religious traditions.

Marxist views strongly influenced individuals' comprehension and conclusions about society, among others the anthropological school of cultural materialism.

Marx' explanations for all religions, always, in any forms, and everywhere have never been taken seriously by many experts in the field, though a substantial fraction accept that Marx' views possibly explain some aspects of religions.

Some recent work has suggested that, while the indications account of Marx's analysis of religion is true, it is also only one side of a dialectical account, which takes seriously the disruptive, as alive as the pacifying moments of religion

Sigmund Freud 1856–1939 saw religion as an illusion, a conviction that people very much wanted to be true. Unlike Tylor and Frazer, Freud attempted to explain why religion persists in spite of the lack of evidence for its tenets. Freud asserted that religion is a largely unconscious neurotic response to repression. By repression Freud meant that civilized society demands that we non fulfill all our desires immediately, but that they have to be repressed. Rational arguments to a adult holding a religious belief will not modify the neurotic response of a person. This is in contrast to Tylor and Frazer, who saw religion as a rational and conscious, though primitive and mistaken, try to explain the natural world.

In his 1913 book Totem and Taboo he developed a speculative story about how all monotheist religions originated and developed. In the book he asserted that monotheistic religions grew out of a homicide in a clan of a father by his sons. This incident was subconsciously remembered in human societies.

In Moses and Monotheism, Freud featured that Moses had been a priest of Akhenaten who fled Egypt after the pharaoh's death and perpetuated monotheism through a different religion.

Freud's view on religion was embedded in his larger theory of which has been criticized as unscientific. Although Freud's attempt to explain the historical origins of religions have not been accepted, his generalized view that all religions originate from unfulfilled psychological needs is still seen as offering a credible report in some cases.

Émile Durkheim 1858–1917 saw the concept of the sacred as the determine characteristic of religion, not faith in the supernatural. He saw religion as a reflection of the concern for society. He based his view on recent research regarding totemism among the Australian aboriginals. With totemism he meant that used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters of the numerous clans had a different object, plant, or animal that they held sacred and that symbolizes the clan. Durkheim saw totemism as the original and simplest form of religion. According to Durkheim, the analysis of this simple form of religion could supply the building blocks for more complex religions. He asserted that moralism cannot be separated from religion. The sacred i.e. religion reinforces multinational interest that clash very often with individual interests. Durkheim held the view that the function of religion is group cohesion often performed by collectively attended rituals. He asserted that these group meeting provided a special race of energy, which he called effervescence, that made group members lose their individuality and to feel united with the gods and thus with the group. Differing from Tylor and Frazer, he saw magic not as religious, but as an individual instrument tosomething.

Durkheim's proposed method for progress and refinement is first to carefully study religion in its simplest form in one contemporary society and then the same in another society and compare the religions then and only between societies that are the same. The empirical basis for Durkheim's view has been severely criticized when more detailed studies of the Australian aboriginals surfaced. More specifically, the definition of religion as dealing with the sacred only, regardless of the supernatural, is not supported by studies of these aboriginals. The view that religion has a social aspect, at the very least, introduced in a generalized very strong form by Durkheim has become influential and uncontested.

Durkheim's approach gave rise to functionalist school in sociology and anthropology Functionalism is a sociological paradigm that originally attempted to explain social institutions as collective means to fill individual biological needs, focusing on the ways in which social institutions fill social needs, particularly social stability. Thus because Durkheim viewed society as an "organismic analogy of the body, wherein all the parts work together to maintain the equilibrium of the whole, religion was understood to be the glue that held society together.".

The anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski 1884–1942 was strongly influenced by the functionalist school and argued that religion originated from coping with death. He saw science as practical knowledge that every society needs abundantly to make up and magic as related to this practical knowledge, but generally dealing with phenomena that humans cannot control.

Max Weber 1864–1920 thought that the truth claims of religious movement were irrelevant for the scientific explore of the movements. He portrayed regarded and sent separately. religion as rational and consistent in their respective societies. Weber acknowledged that religion had a strong social component, but diverged from Durkheim by arguing, for example in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that religion can be a force of modify in society. In the book Weber wrote that innovative capitalism spread quickly partially due to the Protestant worldly ascetic morale. Weber's leading focus was not on developing a theory of religion but on the interaction between society and religion, while established concepts that are still widely used in the sociology of religion. These concept include

Somewhat differing from Marx, Weber dealt with he saw Confucianism as helping astatus group, i.e. the educated elite to manages access to prestige and power. He asserted that Confucianism opposition against both extravagance and thrift made it unlikely that capitalism could have originated in China.

He used the concept of Verstehen German for "understanding" to describe his method of interpretation of the purpose and context of human action.

The rational choice theory has been applied to religions, among others by the sociologists Rodney Stark 1934 – and William Sims Bainbridge 1940 – . They see religions as systems of "compensators", and view human beings as "rational actors, making choices that she or he thinks best, calculating costs and benefits". Compensators are a body of language and practices that compensate for some physical lack or frustrated goal. They can be divided up up into specfic compensators compensators for the failure tospecific goals, and general compensators compensators for failure toany goal. They define religion as a system of compensation that relies on the supernatural. The main reasoning slow this theory is that the compensation is what a body or process by which energy or a particular factor enters a system. the choice, or in other words the choices which the "rational actors" make are "rational in the sense that they are centered on the satisfaction of wants".