THE AMERICAN
JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
Volume XV
MARCH, igio numbers
RELIGION AND THE MORES^
WILLIAM G. SUMNER Yale University
Mohammedanism, Romanism, and Protestantism contain systems of world-philosophy which have been deduced from religious dogmas. The world-philosophy is in each case re- moved by several steps of deduction from the religious postu- lates. In each case customs have grown up from the unavoid- able compromise between metaphysical dogmas and interests, and these customs, so far as they inhere in essential traits of human nature, or in fundamental conditions of human life, or as far as they have taken on the sanctity of wide and ancient authority so that they seem to be above discussion, are the mores. Does a Roman Catholic, or a Mohammedan, or a Protestant child begin by learning the dogmas of his religion and then build a life-code on them? Not at all. He begins by living in, and according to, the mores of his family and societal environment. The vast mass of men in each case never do anything else but thus imbibe a character from the environ- ment. H they learn the religious dogmas at all, it is super- ficially, negligently, erroneously. They are trained in the ritual, habituated to the usages, imbued with the notions, of the societal environment. They hear and repeat the proverbs, say- ings, and maxims which are current in it. They perceive what
^Address of the President of the American Sociological Society at its fourth annual meeting in New York, December, 1909.
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