Systems reboot
Russell Sandberg · Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2024
Having identified the problem with Law and Religion and surveyed alternative trajectories taken by different academic fields, this stage of the book explores how Law and Religion can be transformed. After repentance and reappraisal comes regeneration. It highlights how Law and Religion is currently based upon the premise of social functional differentiation, an idea that is understood as being a keystone of modern societies. While in previous eras religious authorities and social structures previously performed a variety of social functions, in a modern society a variety of social institutions now perform distinct social functions with the State playing a central role. As a result, the very idea of religions performing functions that they previously carried out but which now ‘belong’ to other social institutions, such as educating children or determining legal disputes, now seems archaic. Social functional differentiation can be understood further by means of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory.