How do theories of Marx, Weber and Durkheim differ in understanding religion? Explain. (Answer in 350 words)

- How do theories of Marx, Weber and Durkheim differ in understanding religion? Explain. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
The three explain religion differently because each is explaining a different thing with it.

Body

1. What each takes religion to be and to do: For Marx, religion is a reflex of material conditions — in the 1844 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the sigh of the oppressed creature and the opium of the people: real suffering expressed and consoled, and therefore an ideology reconciling the exploited to exploitation. For Weber, religion is a source of meaning and a cause in its own right: in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Calvinist this-worldly asceticism has an elective affinity with capitalist accumulation, and his comparative studies of India and China explain why the same development did not occur there. For Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, religion is society worshipping itself — the division of the world into sacred and profane, totemic rites renewing the collective conscience, and a church, meaning a moral community.

2. The axes on which they differ: Origin: material relations, the problem of meaning, and the structure of the group. Function: mystification and control against motivation and meaning against integration and moral regulation. Direction of causation: Marx makes religion an effect of the base, Durkheim an effect of social morphology, Weber allows religious ideas to move the economy. Attitude to truth: Marx treats belief as an illusion that dissolves when conditions change, Durkheim holds the believer is never wrong about the force he feels but mistaken about its name, Weber brackets the question and asks what believers do. Expected future: disappearance with class society, disenchantment and the routinisation of charisma, and the reappearance of the sacred in new forms such as nation and constitution. Method: dialectical critique, interpretive comparative history, and functional analysis of an elementary case.

3. What the differences follow from: Each account applies the writer's wider position. Marx's is base and superstructure applied to belief; Durkheim's follows from social facts and the priority of the group over the individual; Weber's follows from multiple causation and a method of understanding that forbids reducing belief to interest. Their objects differ too — the ideology of class society, the elementary form of religious life, and the origins of rational capitalism.

Conclusion
They are not three answers to one question but three questions, which is why the field still uses all of them.