Test Analysis Of Religion, The Social Capital Theory

As one of the most influential theoretical concepts since 1970s, 'social capital' theory, developed from new economic sociology, have been concerned widespread and adopted and applied to their own research areas by sociologist, economist and political scientist. Social capital is a potential and valuable approach for research. Since there are many ways to connect religious studies with social capital theory, this article attempts to start from systemic definition of social capital theory, premising religion's social-capital position, then further illustrate religion's connotation, property and function as social capital.This article applied social capital theory to analyse religion mainly on four aspects.First of all, before applying social capital theory to religious analysis, this article have stated the fact there are various and complicated concepts about social capital and no final conclusion. In addition, this article have arranged these researchers who had discoursed the social capital theory and their classical theories, then adopted the systemic definition of social capital (Thomas Ford Brown) as the theoretical starting point. On this basis, the author proposed the theoretical premise of this article, which is religion, could be located as social capital itself. The development and connotative change of capital theory, let region, a kind of social phenomena unrelated to capital, could become the research object of capital perspective and be defined as a sort of social capital itself; besides, the sociality of religion itself is the precondition to make it be the social capital.Secondly, the discussion about religion's social-capital connotation started from systematic analysis and revealed the connotation of religion as social capital in macro, mid-scale and micro levels. In order to make theory more figurative and specific, the article selected the Christianity in ethnic groups' society of Yunnan Province as the analytic case, using the minority social situation of multiculturalism and multi-religions as background, to discuss the specific operation and connotation of ethnic groups' Christianity as the social capital in macro, mid-scale and micro these three levels.Thirdly, referring to analysing the property of religion as social capital, the article discussed its social property, capital property and religious property respectively, mainly from deconstruction view. Religion plays the role of social capital based on certain social relations and social networks, so religion is a kind of 'public goods' and also easily-reaching social resources. Proliferative is the essential character of religion as social capital; and the subject's purpose-oriented action and the self-reinforcing nature of religion as social capital implement the 'proliferation' by the way of 'motion'. The religious is the core of the value for religion as the social capital, so its supernatural property determines the religion would have certain 'transcendence' as the social capital.At last, there are both coincidence and difference between the function of religion as the social capital and the social function of religion itself, and the article concentrate on the former. The function of religion as the social capital has been provided with dual characters—there are both positive aspects and negative aspects, both the advantages that are other kinds of social capital can not be compared with and the limitations and disadvantages attributed to its religious property.