both men believe religion to be a force for delusion, for ignoring the harshness of reality in favor of an illusion which gives the individual comfort. However, unlike Marx, Freud (as a psychologist rather than a sociologist) does not adequately deal with the larger social impact of religion.
With respect to the views of these theorists on the role religion plays in both social stability and social change, again, Marx and Freud generally agree that religion is a tool which stabilizes society, but also that the stability it provides masks a deeper instability, both psychologically and socially.
Weber has the most unique of the four theorists in terms of his view of religion's role in the stability of society. He places in religion the power to not only stabilize society but to develop society economically and technologically and to bring it in those contexts into the modern age. Modernization, then, is, in effect, in Weber's view, the result of religion, in the special way he uses that term.
Durkheim, again, seems to be the most detached of the four theorists in his study of religion and its impact on social stability and change. Taking an historical view of religion, like Marx, he also differs with Marx in that he does not place much emphasis on its role as a force for illusion. Durkheim simply says that we do not know as much as we might about religion, but two things are clear: religion once, and for a long time, had a major role in creating and maintaining social stability, but increasingly religion is losing that power:
We do not possess any scientific conception of what religion is. . . . Often it regulates legal, moral and economic relationships. . . . The sole characteristic that is apparently shared equally by all religious ideas and sentiments is that they are common to a certain number of individuals living together. . . . Yet if there is one truth that history has incontrovertibly settled, it is that religion ...