Overview

Pierre Bourdieu conceives of the religious field as one of numerous distinct yet interrelated fields that together constitute human society. Fields are characterized and structured principally by the struggle or competition that takes place within them, as explained in Chapter 2. For Bourdieu (1987a, 126), the religious field is characterized by a ‘[c]ompetition for religious power [that] owes its specificity … to the fact that what is at stake is the monopoly of the legitimate exercise of the power to modify, in a deep and lasting fashion, the practice and worldview of lay people, by imposing on and inculcating in them a particular religious habitus’. Struggle in the religious field, furthermore, unfolds principally between the Church (Eglise) and its priests versus the prophet (or ‘heresiarch’) and his believers, or orthodoxy versus heterodoxy, over the production, administration and consumption of religious capital and the adherence of the laity to whom it is marketed. Bourdieu (1971a, 305) stresses that the Church's primary interest (an interest concealed by the Church's trademark use of euphemisms) is ‘the monopoly over the legitimate production of religious capital’ and the ‘institutionalization of their dominance in the religious field’.