This paper examines the critical functions that worldviews serve in human societies and cultures. Worldviews reveal core beliefs and values that shape sociology, politics, and religion, while serving as mechanisms for organizing society and controlling individual behavior through religious transmission of moral codes. The paper identifies three major functions: organizing society through religious socialization, justifying political and economic ambitions such as colonization and the Crusades, and providing theological answers to fundamental existential questions. By analyzing examples from Western Christianity and European imperialism, the paper demonstrates how worldviews simultaneously civilize populations and legitimize their collective actions.
Nearly every civilization and culture on this planet has a worldview that reveals a great deal about their beliefs. In fact, a group's worldview elucidates a substantial amount of its mores and some of the basic aspects of its society, including areas of sociology, politics, religion, and others. Viewed from this perspective, it becomes readily apparent that a population's worldview is a means of not only civilizing people but also of justifying collective actions and defending or indicting the actions of individuals within a civilization.
Worldviews serve multiple critical functions in human society. A worldview encompasses the fundamental perspective through which a culture interprets reality and guides behavior. Understanding these functions is essential to recognizing how societies organize themselves, justify their actions, and find meaning in existence.
Probably the most important function that worldviews provide for people is a means of organizing society and placing various control mechanisms in place. This sociological function is primarily administered through religion. Religion serves as a means of transmitting morals and values to people, who are expected to adhere to a certain type of behavior in accordance with those values. By doing so, they are effectively socialized and controlled by the religious worldview that is the initial transmitter of those values.
This fact is probably best demonstrated within Western society and various aspects of Christianity. Some of the basic principles that have become entrenched in law in Christian societies—the forbidding of murder and stealing, for example—were initially ordained as parts of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments have served as a foundational moral code in Western legal tradition. This example illustrates how the religious aspect of worldviews is used to organize and control individual behavior within a collective society.
Additionally, worldviews are utilized to justify certain actions that a group of people take. These actions are prominently manifested in political convictions, which have resulted in numerous wars and disputes over another important aspect of worldviews—land. Utilizing the aforementioned Western worldview in which Christianity is the dominant religion, there were numerous successful imperialist attempts made by Europeans throughout history, especially during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.
A major part of their justification for colonizing various parts of North, Central, and South America was their religious worldview in which they deemed it their duty to civilize people who practiced a different religion and were, in their view, ignorant of the "true" faith. European exploration and colonization during this period was significantly driven by religious conversion missions alongside economic and political ambitions. Similarly, the economic and political aspirations of the Crusades were based in no small part on the religious worldview of Christians who were seeking to glorify their God and gain economic profit in the process. In both of these instances, worldviews were utilized as justification for political ambitions, which is a critical function that worldviews provide.
"Worldviews answer life's fundamental questions"
In identifying the functions that worldviews provide for people, it is clear that they fulfill critical aspects of the process of civilizing them. They do so by creating means of social control through religious transmission of values, engendering and justifying political and some economic ambitions, and by providing theological answers to life's fundamental questions. Worldviews thus operate simultaneously as instruments of social organization, political legitimation, and existential meaning-making.
You’re 79% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 1 section.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.