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2009 Paul Hanly Furfey LectureThe Return of the Sacred: What African Chiefs Teach Us about Secularization

The modern sociology of religion is founded on the fundamental tension between Weber’s and Durkheim’s approaches to religion. In this article, I want to use the tension between Weber and Durkheim to address fundamental problems in understanding religious modernity, both in the modern West and in contemporary Africa. Weber sought to explain differences in the social effects of the world religions—in Bellah’s (1964, forthcoming) or Eisenstadt’s (1986) terms (going back to Karl Jaspers 1953), the “axial” or “historic” religions: Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Hinduism, and their successors. He focused on the ideas that shape individuals’ understandings of the paths to salvation as the key to explaining those differences: