Crime/Deviance

Abstract

The relationship between religion and deviance has been explored for many years. In fact, some of the seminal works in the sociology of religion addressed deviant behavior such as crime and suicide. The most famous of these works were written by Emile Durkheim, but several other founders of the modern social sciences, such as Branislow Malinowski, André Michel Guerry, and Adolph Quetelet, also considered whether crime, suicide, or other forms of deviance were associated with religious affiliation, participation, or other aspects of society’s spiritual life. It should come as no surprise that these early scholars studied religion and deviance. After all, they were highly concerned with factors that made society, or more precisely social cohesion, possible, and religion has long been seen as a key integrative institution for good, as many early functionalists contended, or for ill, as implied by Marx and Freud (Bainbridge, 1989). Deviance, in its many forms, is seen as disruptive to the social fabric, and thus as something that religion should, in some way, attenuate.