This book examines the sociology of contemporary religion, drawing not only upon recent debates but also from the classical resources of the founding scholars of the discipline. The writings of Durkheim and Weber continue to offer enduring insights into the evolving condition of religion in the West. The title of this book is drawn from Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930). For Freud (1856–1939), the unresting enemy of rational civilization was the seething appetites of the Id, the untamed impulses of sexual conquest and aggressive self-interest in the depths of the human psyche. Religion had served civilization well, in providing mechanisms to control the Id’s destructive impulses. Although it therefore had an ethical utility, Freud only allowed for two origins for religion (1927). On the one hand, it was a natural human response to the irresistible forces of the natural world: the farmer prayed for a bountiful harvest and a mild winter, knowing that the mild weather needed to secure a good crop was beyond human control or guarantee. On the other, religion was a projection of the collective oedipal complex that had framed early human life. Freud’s account of human psycho-religious origins was dismissed by the Oxford anthropologist Evans-Pritchard (1965) as a ‘just so story’and a ‘fairy tale’. For Freud, the urge of young men to kill the father of the tribe required the performance of rituals to atone for their common and generational guilt (1913), and this was combined with a longing for a fatherfigure that was projected as a god–‘the primal father was the original image of God, the model on which later generations have shaped the image of God’(1927; 1995, 712).

Given his account of the beneficial contribution of religion, Freud might have been expected to welcome its continuance, if only as a useful fiction, strengthening common morality and assuaging the inevitable oedipal guilt (1913). However, Freud was deeply and instinctively anti-religious, considering it to be no more than an illusion (1927). There was, for Freud, no place for concepts of revelation in religion, nor did he find credible or appealing accounts