Religion in the Structures of Human Societies

To study the role and place of religion in human societies, we must first describe the latter. In Sociology Mind, “Structures of Human Societies” (van Meter, 2014), we have previously described Agoramétrie’s results on how human societies are distributed over a two dimensional structure around a first axis of “openness”/“closure” and a second axis of “emotional”/“non-emotional”. In the same article, we have also shown how early villages and cities were also distributed along the “openness”/“closure” axis ranging from cooperative “Type 1” villages without defensive walls, all the way to “Type 2” walled hierarchically organized closed cities. In the earliest examples of the cooperative villages, there is no archeological evidence of organized religion or its concomitant clergy, or any distinctive evidence of a community. In the earliest examples of hierarchically organized cities, there is such evidence. Here in this article, we examine the place of religion in this two dimensional structure and its close proximity and association with other institutions of society such as doctors, teachers, police, politicians and clergy, and their roles in managing conflict within society. In the specific case of clergy and religion, this implies a fundamental role of “closure” in the management of conflict both at the individual and the societal level. Other methods of analysis or scientific approaches have arrived at similar results and these methods and approaches are closely and fundamentally related.