Sociology of Religion is a 1920 book by Max Weber, a German economist and sociologist.
By viewing religion strictly in the scientific sense, Weber was striving for objectivity, attempting to ignore value judgments, and to understand religion as those human responses that give meaning to the inescapable problems of existence, such as birth, death, illness, aging, injustice, tragedy, and suffering.
[1] He shows how early religious beliefs stem from the work of skillful, charismatic individuals, and how their actions are eventually transformed into a systematic, church-based religion - in other words, how religion begins with charismatic authority and is transformed into traditional authority.
This writing illustrated the way in which religious beliefs steered the direction of the economic and technological forces that were already in motion.
Max Weber takes an objective, distant view of the sociological traditions of the institution of religion.