CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Religion and Society in
Classical Greece
Charles W. Hedrick Jr.
Introduction
According to Aristotle, ‘‘man is a political animal’’ (Politics1253a3): it is the nature of
people to live in groups such as the polis. Religion, like all other human activity, is a
social activity. From the time of Durkheim, sociologists have emphasized the coherence
of religion and society. Students of religion, including Greek religion, have generally
accepted the point without demur. In religion contingent social values and practices are
hypostasized. Religious beliefs, as manifested in myth and ritual, are then re-presented
to society as transcendental, authoritative. By ‘‘justifying God’s ways to man’’ religion
reconciles society to its own ways and hierarchies: religion is society’s worship of itself.
Because it is thought to represent the absolute, religion has always been closely
identified with acculturation, the inculcation of fundamental social values.
This position has proved to have great explanatory power; nevertheless, many will
regard it as overstated. Is religion simply society’s stooge, the apotheosis of ‘‘hege-
monic social values’’? To what extent does religious morality cohere with prevailing
social values? For that matter, how coherent is society itself? Such doubts reflect a
tradition of religious thought going back in the Christian world at least to the fourth
century AD and Augustine’s influential divorce of the political ‘‘city of the earth’’
from the religiousCity of God. Christian society, for Augustine, is an ideal society, and
its contrasting presence demeans those who must live in the corrupt secular world
and inspires them to hope for better. Christians have ever since tended to see
themselves not as avatars of prevailing social values, but as ‘‘conscientious objectors,’’
or even (in extreme cases) as guerrillas for godliness. Their faith they see as ‘‘un-
timely,’’ out of step with secular society. As a consequence they experience and teach
religion as a mandate to be a force for change in the world.
It would be a mistake to regard this attitude as mere self-delusion, an appetite for
fragrant but inedible ‘‘pie in the sky by and by.’’ Christian social activism has a long