Assess the view that religion is a conservative force

Religion is seen as a conservative force which means that some people believe that the role of religion is to maintain things the same or maintaining the status quo. Various groups believe that this is something positive and others believe that is something negative, Marxists regard this as being negative. Marxists believe that society is divided in the working class and the bourgeois class, where the bourgeois oppress the working class. They say that religion is one of the tools that the bourgeoisie uses to prevent a communist revolution of the proletariat, as religion provides compensation with the promise of an afterlife and obscures the authorship of human oppression which creates a false consciousness, this prevents the poor from reacting to change their situation and maintains the status quo, which benefits the upper class.

Marx himself believed that who controls the means of production is able to control everything, he has a famous quote which says that religion is `` the opium of the people´´, in other words it causes the proletariat to be separated or losing control of what they produce as they are like drugged with religion, and following the theory of Marx, it makes the working class to continue to be oppressed by the upper class and thus maintaining things the same over and over again. This theory is also considered too deterministic as it assumes that if you are working class you are going to be exploited, as well as being era dependant because nowadays in the modern contemporary society the theory that there is a clear factory owner bourgeois class and a factory worker proletariat is quite obsolete or out of time.

Marxists emphasizes the negative aspects of religion as a conservative force but in other hand functionalists highlights the positive functions of it. Malinowski argues