son who
committed the breach, and then, when the matter was taken up by the
members of both tribes, and finally by the witenagemot as a judicial
court, the question was, what the law was. That was the working of the
old Anglo-Saxon law, and it was a great many centuries before the notion
of law changed from that in their minds. And this "unwritten law"
perdures in the minds of many of the people today.

3. Religion and Social Control[275]

As a social fact religion is, indeed, not something apart from mores or
social standards; it is these as regarded as "sacred." Strictly speaking
there is no such thing as an unethical religion. We judge some religions
as unethical because the mores of which they approve are not our mores,
that is, the standards of higher civilization. All religions are
ethical, however, in the sense that without exception they support
customary morality, and they do this necessarily because the values
which the religious attitude of mind universalizes and makes absolute
are social values. Social obligations thus early become religious
obligations. In this way religion becomes the chief means of conserving
customs and habits which have been found to be safe by society or which
are believed to conduce to social welfare.

As the guardian of the mores, religion develops prohibitions and
"taboos" of actions of which the group, or its dominant class,
disapproves. It may lend itself, therefore, to maintaining a given
social order longer than that order is necessary, or even after it has
become a stumbling-block to social progress. For the same reason it may
be exploited by a dominant class in their own interest. It is in this
way that religion has often become an impediment to progress and an
instrument of class oppression. This socially conservative side of
religion is so well known and so much emphasized by certain writers that
it scarcely needs even to be mentioned. It is the chief source of the
abuses of religion, and in the modern world is probably the chief cause
of the deep enmity which religion has raised up for itself in a certain
class of thinkers who see nothing but its negative and conservative
side.

There is no necessity, however, for the social control which religion
exerts being of a non-progressive kind. The values which religion
universalizes and makes absolute may as easily be values which are
progressive as those which are static. In a static society which
emphasizes prohibitions a