It went through an atheistic phase when many sociologists implied that religion performed no useful function. Temples could be replaced by community centres, psychologists must be the prophets, psychiatrists would hear confessions, and man's salvation needed only town planning and welfare economics to usher in the millennium. Now Sociology has gone religious. The integrating effects of religion are preached as the panacea for slums, and suburbs, and jungle tribes. The problem is that few of the newer sociologists have ever learned to distinguish among the many forms of religion.
Religion is no more homogeneous than liquid.
To say that liquid is good is no doubt true, but until we learn to distinguish between water and gin, and castor oil and weed killer, we have dangerously little knowledge. We all agree that some expressions of religion are socially valuable, but Marx's indictment was not without foundation. Kings, courtiers and commercial magnates have always prescribed traditional religion as a sedative for unruly people. There have been very few really great social crimes without religion to confer the needed respectability. To grow up into an adult science Sociology therefore needs to learn to label, test and discriminate, and it cannot escape value judgments between one form of religion and another.