Introduction

In Sub-Saharan Africa the high rate of HIV/AIDS infection, unemployment, economic instability and dynamic religious changes from the rise of African independent churches to the current popularity of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity and Catholicism are startling, concerning and intriguing. In order to understand these, little consideration is normally given to the religious world-view of the people in this area and the place of religion within the sociopolitical shifts that have taken place. In this chapter I would like to explore the idea of taking religion seriously as a social variable, as something to help us understand why and how people collectively act. To unpack this idea more fully I will pick up on some salient issues featured in the early sociological study of religion and show how these have impacted on the way that religion has been studied in Africa. With this as the base of my argument I will examine some examples of the way in which contemporary Christianity and African religions have been studied and finally propose the first steps of an inclusion of religious variables into the broader study of societies in postcolonial Africa.

Religion, culture and systems of knowledge

Durkheim was fascinated by the power and energy of what he called the sacred and the profane. For him the function of religion within society was of key importance and he proposed that religious systems offer people conceptual frameworks – the categories of which are used to organise human experiences. He proposed that religions could give the individual person a sense of empowerment and that rites and rituals gave one a sense of belonging (Durkheim, 1947, p 416). Societies ‘owe to it [religion] not only a good part of the substance of their knowledge, but also the form in which this knowledge has been elaborated’ (Durkheim, 1947, p 9). His theory did not negate religious systems but suggested that they were society worshipping/representing itself; in doing so he recognised the inherently symbolic nature of religion (Lambek, 2002, p 35).

Working with and expanding Durkheim's ideas, studies of African religions and African independent churches were largely carried out within a structural–functionalist paradigm (Evan-Pritchard, 1956; Wilson, 1961; Sundkler, 1961 [1936]; Peel, 1968; Fabian, 1971). Influenced by Durkheim and early 20th-century ideas about race, no religion was regarded as false but there was an undeniable hierarchy of religions from the most primitive to the most sophisticated/civilised.