Introduction

According to Aristotle, ‘‘man is a political animal’’ {Politics 1253a3): it is the nature of people to live in groups such as the polis. Religion, like all other human activity, is a social activity. From the time of Durkheim, sociologists have emphasized the coherence of religion and society. Students of religion, including Greek religion, have generally accepted the point without demur. In religion contingent social values and practices are hypostasized. Religious beliefs, as manifested in myth and ritual, are then re-presented to society as transcendental, authoritative. By ‘‘justifying God’s ways to man’’ religion reconciles society to its own ways and hierarchies: religion is society’s worship of itself. Because it is thought to represent the absolute, religion has always been closely identified with acculturation, the inculcation of fundamental social values.

This position has proved to have great explanatory power; nevertheless, many will regard it as overstated. Is religion simply society’s stooge, the apotheosis of‘‘hegemonic social values’’? To what extent does religious morality cohere with prevailing social values? For that matter, how coherent is society itself? Such doubts reflect a tradition of religious thought going back in the Christian world at least to the fourth century AD and Augustine’s influential divorce of the political ‘‘city of the earth’’ from the religious City of God. Christian society, for Augustine, is an ideal society, and its contrasting presence demeans those who must live in the corrupt secular world and inspires them to hope for better. Christians have ever since tended to see themselves not as avatars of prevailing social values, but as ‘‘conscientious objectors,’’ or even {in extreme cases) as guerrillas for godliness. Their faith they see as ‘‘untimely,’’ out of step with secular society. As a consequence they experience and teach religion as a mandate to be a force for change in the world.

It would be a mistake to regard this attitude as mere self-delusion, an appetite for fragrant but inedible ‘‘pie in the sky by and by.’’ Christian social activism has a long and well-documented history of effectiveness, and it can be credited with many notable successes. In America, for example, it is a founding principle of the state that ‘‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’’ (the First Amendment): the Founding Fathers, schooled by the Reformation and Enlightenment experiences of violent sectarianism, believed that religion had the potential to destabilize the political order; so they established the doctrine of ‘‘the separation of church and state.’’ History has repeatedly proved their fears. The American colonies themselves were founded as a result of religious conflict. During the American Civil War the abolitionist movement was promoted to a large degree through religious organizations; the same phenomenon can be observed in the 1960s civil rights movement. In worship the poor have traditionally found and continue to find an outlet for hostility toward the wealthy; religion and class warfare go hand in hand. The ‘‘Liberation Theology’’ professed by some Catholic priests expedited class conflict in Central America and elsewhere. Religious activism played an important part in the demise of east European communist regimes and in the bloody conflicts in the Near East and central Europe over the past twenty years.

The theory of religious and social coherence further presumes that society itself is coherent. The structural integrity of society is not self-evident; indeed, at first glance such a monolithic perspective appears to be a grotesque over-simplification. Given the patent complexity of even individual social status might we not better imagine individuals as members of many conflicting groups, including religious groups, rather than as smoothly meshing cogs in some well-lubricated social machine? For sociologists, society is by definition coherent; if it is not, it is not a (single) society. Individuals are circumscribed by society, in the singular; apparent contradictions in their status need to be reconciled. Incoherence is unintelligible, and its recognition in a society would be tantamount to an admission of disciplinary inadequacy.

The objection is obvious, and sociologists have traditionally countered that social incoherence is only apparent; conflicts embody dynamic oppositions that are intrinsic to the social order, and even work to maintain its stability. So, for example, racial tensions in America today might work to channel the energy of the poor along (relatively) harmless ethnic lines: poor Anglos may hate poor Hispanics and Blacks and vice versa, rather than uniting to direct their hostilities more dangerously, against the wealthy. Or again, allowing a person of low economic status (say a janitor) to hold a position of importance (say the deaconship of a church) provides an outlet for thwarted aspirations and helps reconcile the poor to their subordination.

Religion, however, provides only one kind of access to knowledge of the transcendent; it has competitors. By the third quarter of the fifth century BC Greek philosophy clearly offered itself as an alternative to religious knowledge; since the time of Galileo, philosophy’s descendant, empirical science, has offered another. The competition of religion with philosophy, and later with science, illustrates that not only the content of knowledge matters, but also the character of the knowing. The ‘‘scientific method’’ has proved corrosive of religious faith and arguably even of the moral values traditionally promoted by religion. However that may be, it seems reasonable that an order of knowledge based on tradition and authority will be compatible with comparable social orders, while an order of knowledge based on debate and consensus will be compatible with those in which power is managed through group discussions and resolutions. For those who believe in the ultimate authority of god and a divinely ordained human order, what room is left for political self-determination and individual freedom?

I concentrate here on the relationship between religion and society in classical Athens. Greek society and religion are attested in most detail from Athens; it is not possible to approach the problem except in a very abstract way with regard to any other Greek state. Athens is in many respects an exceptional case: for much of the classical period it is the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful of the Greek city-states. But then, it is not clear that any other Greek state would be more ‘‘representative’’ than Athens. Which Greek polis is ‘‘typical’’? Doubtless the Greek city-states shared many cultural traits, but is there such a thing as a general ‘‘Greek society’’? Or were there as many different societies as political entities?

It might reasonably be objected that the examples I have cited so far have been taken from the modern world of vast multi-ethnic nation-states in which monotheistic religion is the rule. The ancient Greek city-states were more intimate and socially homogeneous, and a relatively tolerant, assimilative polytheism was the rule. It is a truism that ancient religion is civic religion, a more or less overt extension of the social and political order. In this context the basic dichotomies that we find in the modern world, including even the opposition of religion and society, were not recognized. There is certainly some truth in this position; critical evaluation of it requires consideration of an ancient case. As a preliminary, however, it is also necessary to consider the history of the concepts of religion and society and their relationship.