Theoretical Reflections from Halbwachs' Perspective: The Religious Collective Memory and Its Political Uses

The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs was in the 1920s the founder of the Sociology of Memory and was responsible to introduce a subject that has not been considered yet. Their formulations, roughly ,try to demonstrate how the memory  does not refer to  static set of past events , but rather to systematic reconstructions shaped from the present condition . Assuming such formulations and inspired by the reflections from the chapter La mémoire collective des groupes religieux  contained in inaugural book Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire , this paper aims to develop an explanatory theory about the  required relationship that religions (which are intended to be universal) have with their own religious memory in order to prevail their own interests and judgments over other collective memories related to others social groups -  understanding social group as the halbwachsian concept that  represents an intermediate category between the individual and society. The central idea is that although the religious memory wishes to be timelessly valid -due to its construction of moral truth about human life - it is constructed from the  pressures  from the social and political interests of the present. Namely, the religious memory, in order to satisfy their political interests to maintain its position within a society, would be concerned with demands arising from others social and political groups. By assimilating, occasionally, these external interests and values, religion reconstructs its own past, incorporating them to their own religious system of values. Nevertheless, religion assumes that this new set of values is linked to the religion historical origin, thus omitting part of its historical past. To exemplify the idea that religious memory is a product of constant total reconstructions that are presented as non historical, we use some historical cases concerning to the Catholic Church.