Social Construction of Religion

Your Name Subject and Section Professor’s Name March 28, 2019 Social Construction of Religion During the past decade, mass media has never failed to portray images of violence and terrorism around the globe. For the most part, this has led to a setback to the Islam religion as news, movies, and other mediums of communication have emphasized the relationship between media and the said religion. This becomes detrimental to our Muslim friends since, despite their desire to being a contributive member of our society, plenty of people have developed some prejudice against them. In this paper, I would discuss how the media played an essential role in the development of religion through the works of Durkheim and Weber. All in all, I believe that the growing fear towards our Muslim friends have been perpetuated by mass media, as it equates terrorism with Islam almost all of the time. Islamophobia Durkheim has always believed that the construction of our social reality has been rooted in our history. That is, it is a collective accumulation of the signs, symbols, and facts which could be studied (also called as ‘social facts’). Accordingly, one example of a social fact is the persisting belief that violence is inherent in the religion of Islam. Such belief has been the product of different activities and exposures to external factors that influence the parts and totality of how we perceive the world CITATION Carnd \l 1033 (Carls, n.d.). However, it must be noted that social facts are ‘internal’ to every person, only manifesting itself as a greater number of people starts to internalize meanings that are consolidated from our history. In line with our topic, two important realizations could be seen. On the one hand, Durkheim’s concept of the internaliz...