An explanation of the puzzle that is religion has been one of the more notable challenges, and perhaps achievements, of sociological knowledge. The collective representations of religion, Durkheim told us, provided a systematic and comforting explanation of the universe, rendering it simultaneously cognizable to the mind and somewhat compliant to the will (see: Durkheim, 1995 [1912]). Religion not only helped to represent and understand the world, but also to get a measure of control through personifying it and instituting rituals, incantations, and sacrifices to influence fate. The divine representations at once helped explain, console, and regulate human life. Sigmund Freud further noted in this personification of divine as God the adult version of the child's need as much as fear of the power of the father. Making a phylogenetic comparison, Freud equated religious ideas to childhood neuroses – ideas motivated by wish-fulfillment that help to repress dangerous thoughts. Important though these ideas that met “our wishes and illusions half-way” were in making civilization possible, Freud believed that the blind faith, sectarian identity, and dogmatic practice that religion encouraged made it a burden on cultural progress (Freud, 1939: p. 204; Freud, 1961).

For both these doyens of sociological thought, religion was the bedrock, the possibility of meaning (intellectual, moral) to human existence and society. But while Durkheim attempted to be morally agnostic, Freud was unequivocal that religion eventually be replaced by civic morality. The trajectory would be tortuous, no less than a neurotic working through his repressed content, but it was a moral necessity (Freud, 1961: p. 55). Freedom from the mythical clouds that had shadowed humans in all their diverse histories looked imminent – whether conceptualized as the sanguine outcome of the unrelenting progress of the world spirit to absolute knowledge in Hegelian speculative philosophy (Hegel, 1998 [1807]), or the dismal colonization of the world by the forces of rationalization (Weber, 1948). Berger (1967) went even further and located humanity's secular destiny in the birth of the Jewish religion itself. Thus, these eminent voices heralded the death of religion and of God with resounding conviction.