A Sociology of Religious Emotion

This monograph examines the complex relationship between religious emotion and social context, offering a sociological framework for understanding how feelings and faith intersect within communal settings. Riis develops a comprehensive theoretical model that bridges individual emotional experiences and collective religious practices, challenging both purely psychological and exclusively social explanations of religious phenomena.

The work systematically analyzes how emotions function within religious communities, exploring the social construction, regulation, and expression of religious feelings. Riis argues that religious emotions cannot be understood solely as private psychological states but must be examined as socially embedded phenomena shaped by cultural norms, institutional structures, and collective rituals. The author demonstrates how religious communities develop specific "feeling rules" that govern appropriate emotional expression, creating distinct emotional cultures that vary across traditions and contexts.

Drawing on extensive empirical research across multiple religious traditions, Riis illustrates how emotions serve as both personal experiences and social resources within religious life. The analysis reveals how religious institutions actively cultivate particular emotional states through liturgy, architecture, music, and communal practices, while simultaneously providing frameworks for interpreting and validating these experiences. This dual process of emotional socialization and legitimation emerges as central to understanding religious commitment and community cohesion.

The monograph's contribution to debates about religion lies in its refusal to reduce religious emotion to either mere social conditioning or authentic spiritual experience. Instead, Riis presents a nuanced account that recognizes the genuine phenomenological reality of religious emotions while analyzing their social dimensions. This approach offers valuable insights for understanding contemporary religious movements, conversion experiences, and the persistence of religious belief in secular contexts.

By focusing on emotion as a critical but often overlooked dimension of religious life, the work provides tools for analyzing how religious communities maintain vitality and attract adherents in modern societies. The sociological framework developed here helps explain variations in religious expression across cultures while acknowledging the universal human capacity for religious emotion. This balanced perspective enriches academic discussions of religion by highlighting the embodied, affective dimensions of belief that purely cognitive or institutional analyses often neglect, ultimately demonstrating that understanding religious emotion requires attention to both its social construction and experiential authenticity.