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And acts of nomination, from the most trivial acts of bureaucracy, like the issuing of an identity card, or a sickness or disablement certificate, to the most solemn consecrations of nobility, lead in a kind of infinite regression to the realization of God on earth, the State, which guarantees, in the last resort, the infinite series of acts of authority certifying by delegation the validity of the certificates of legitimate existence… And sociology thus leads to a kind of theology of the last instance… Durkheim was, it can be seen, not so naïve as it is claimed when he said… that ‘society is God’
(Bourdieu 2000a, 245).Introduction
Pierre Bourdieu's essays on religion are quite influenced by two seemingly very firm convictions: that religion in the modern world is in decline; and that religion's ultimate social function is to help people make sense of their respective positions in the social order. Consistent with the general raison d'être of his entire sociological project, Bourdieu's commentaries on religion, taken together, thus aim to demonstrate how institutional religions seek to monopolize the religious field by imposing on the laity an ‘orthodox’ worldview and by denouncing as ‘heretical’ any alternative worldviews that competitors seek to propagate among the same laity. Another theme that emerges across several of Bourdieu's essays on religion is how the Church (which can be taken as a blanket term for all institutional religious hierarchies) tries to cling to power that is, as a function of modernity, inevitably slipping out of its grasp.
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