Hans Mol

Johannis Jacob Mol (14 February 1922 – 26 November 2017) was a Dutch-born sociologist and Professor Emeritus in Religious Studies at McMaster University.

[1] In 1978, Mol gave the Paine Lecture at the University of Missouri and was opening speaker at the International Conference for the Sociology of Religion in Tokyo, Japan.

Mol refused to sign allegiance to the Nazi party, as all university students were expected to do, and was sent to work in Kleinwanzleben at a sugar factory.

[8] Thus, his theory of religion begins with identity as a sense of stability, order, and place in a potentially chaotic environment.

He adopts a dialectical model then, pitting the ideal stability of identity against the differentiating and destabilising forces of social life.

"[8] By "sacralisation", Mol means that religion is able to fit myths, rituals, and emotion-based commitments into a transcendent worldview that buttresses whatever is providing a sense of stable identity.

[13] It also led Mol to question the mid-20th-century secularization thesis because, for him, religion was not relegated to traditional institutions but to an existential drive to protect one's identity by making it sacred and untouchable.