The Social Influence of Each Religion
Weber compared how religions influenced people’s labor, economic activity, attitudes toward authority, and the discipline of everyday life. What follows is a summary of his view. It does not describe each religion as a whole or its believers today, but indicates the historical features he emphasized.
1. Protestantism: Vocational Labor and the Discipline of Life
What Weber especially emphasized was the ascetic Protestantism of the Calvinists and others.
It gave worldly occupations the meaning of a “calling,” a mission given by God.
Working diligently became not only a means of earning a living but also a religious duty.
Under the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, those to be saved are determined in advance by God.
Humans cannot change that decision through good works, and they grow anxious about their own salvation.
In actual religious life, disciplined labor became a means of supporting confidence in salvation.
This, however, was not a simple doctrine that becoming rich brings salvation.
An attitude developed of avoiding wasted time, idleness, and luxury and managing the whole of life in a planned way.
Because pleasure-seeking consumption is restrained even when work yields profit, saving and reinvestment advance more readily.
He argued that this attitude toward life contributed to forming the spirit that supports modern capitalism.
He did not attribute the same effect to all Protestants, including Lutherans.
Once capitalism is established, competition forces people into disciplined labor even as religious motives fade.
2. Catholicism: Salvation Through the Church and Monastic Asceticism
Weber emphasized the system in Catholicism by which the Church and clergy mediate salvation.
Believers can face sin and salvation through the sacraments, confession, and absolution.
Compared with ascetic Protestants, individuals bear the anxiety of salvation alone to a lesser degree.
In monasteries, on the other hand, a life strictly regulating time, labor, and prayer developed.
Weber found there an important precedent for the rationalization that systematically disciplines life.
Yet high asceticism was demanded mainly of religious specialists such as monks.
This differs from a system organizing the occupational life of all ordinary believers with the same strictness.
The Church embraced both a religiously thoroughgoing minority and the majority leading everyday lives.
As a trans-regional organization, it also influenced education, law, and political power.
The Church and secular authorities sometimes cooperated and sometimes clashed over the legitimacy of rule.
He did not argue that commerce or capitalism was absent from the Catholic world.
The focus of the comparison is the difference in where asceticism is located in society and how it reaches the lives of ordinary believers.
3. Confucianism: Cultivated Officials and Adaptation to the Existing Order
Weber understood Confucianism as an ethic carried by China’s bureaucratic intellectual stratum.
The ideal is a person who has acquired learning and propriety and handles human relationships appropriately.
The civil service examinations and classical education opened the way to officialdom and spread common values.
Political rule required the virtue of the ruler and the ability to maintain order.
Filial piety and ancestor worship strengthened the bonds of family and kin.
Economic activity, too, was influenced by such personal relationships and obligations.
Confucianism does not reject wealth or worldly success in themselves.
However, a person of broad cultivation is esteemed above a specialist merchant pursuing profit alone.
Rather than transforming the world for the sake of religious salvation, it seeks to adapt harmoniously to the order of this world.
Weber contrasted this attitude with Protestant inner-worldly asceticism.
This is not an explanation that China lacked diligence or commercial ability.
He considered that the combination of Confucian ethics, bureaucracy, kinship institutions, and so on led to a development different from that of Western Europe.
4. Hinduism: Status Order and Religious Duty
Weber emphasized the link between Hinduism and the caste order.
Social position, occupation, marriage, diet, and more are regulated by a religious status order.
The ritual distinction between purity and impurity serves to maintain boundaries between groups.
The ideas of karma and rebirth explain one’s present circumstances by linking them to past deeds.
People hold hope for a future life by fulfilling the duties appropriate to their status.
He therefore argued that this had the effect of giving religious meaning to worldly inequality.
This does not mean, however, that all believers shared the same ideas.
Even when the economic activity of merchants and artisans is vigorous, the norms of each status direct their behavior.
Duties differing by group tend to be valued over a work ethic common to society as a whole.
Those who pursue religious salvation thoroughly, on the other hand, may withdraw from worldly life.
World-renouncing asceticism coexists with everyday life carried on within the status order.
Weber considered that this structure produced a direction different from Western-style economic rationalization.
5. Buddhism: Liberation from Suffering and Distance from the World
What Weber mainly discussed was early Buddhism and the path of salvation through monastic renunciation.
The aim is to overcome the suffering of life and the desires and attachments that cause it.
Wealth, power, and social success do not guarantee ultimate salvation.
Practitioners seek liberation from the cycle of rebirth through meditation and self-control.
Inner transformation of the self is valued over actively mastering others or the world.
Its direction therefore differs from an ethic that treats vocational labor thoroughly as a sacred mission.
The practice of monastics requires the support of lay believers, such as through almsgiving.
Here a relationship forms between those who pursue salvation as specialists and those who carry on everyday life.
For lay believers, almsgiving and the observance of precepts become an important part of religious life.
From this structure, Weber considered how Buddhism positions economic activity.
His argument, however, cannot be applied to all of Mahayana Buddhism or Japanese Buddhism.
Buddhism has historically had diverse developments deeply involved in politics, commerce, and local society.
6. Ancient Judaism: Prophetic Ethics and Responsibility to History
Weber regarded ancient Judaism as an important element leading to Western religious rationalization.
God is held to be not one with the cycles of nature but a transcendent being who gives commands to the world.
Humans have the responsibility to follow the covenant with God and to act righteously.
Prophets interpreted calamity and defeat not as mere bad luck but in relation to faith and conduct.
History thus came to be understood as having ethical meaning and direction.
Not only the correct performance of ritual but also justice and care for the weak are called into question.
Even rulers and the wealthy become subject to criticism by God’s demands.
This prophetic ethic differs from an attitude that unconditionally affirms existing power.
Law and religious education also supported the continuity of the community and the discipline of life.
Weber also discussed the economic activity of later Jews in relation to exclusion and legal restrictions.
He did not, however, identify it with the spirit of modern capitalism.
His account also includes terms and historical understandings that should be reexamined today.
7. Islam: The Union of Religion and Political Community
Regarding Islam, Weber focused on the union of religious mission with a political and military community.
Faith does not remain within the individual’s inner life but concerns law, government, and the order of the community.
For its early development, he emphasized the attitudes toward life and sense of honor of the warrior stratum.
He also examined the influence on social life of religious law and of the scholars who interpret it.
As for the system of government, he discussed its relation to patrimonial rule.
He took up how such forms of rule and law affect the predictability of economic activity.
On the other hand, he did not think that commercial activity was uniformly rejected by religion.
His interest lay in the difference from the work ethic of ascetic Protestantism.
However, he did not complete an independent comparative study of Islam.
His discussion is fragmentary and generalizes more strongly than for other religions.
It does not adequately address mysticism, urban merchant culture, or the diversity of regional institutions.
It must therefore be read as Weber’s hypothesis and distinguished from an explanation of Islamic society as a whole.
The question running through all of this is that the way people work, use wealth, and relate to power changes according to what they regard as sacred duty. Religion alone does not determine society, however; it is important to see it as an interaction with the economy, political institutions, and social strata. (Continued in Part 3, on the influence of Catholicism on Philippine society)
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