The mystical body of society: religion and association in nineteenth-century French political thought.

‘‘It is not the case,’’ Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote, ‘‘that men first stopped believing in God and in the authority of the Church, and then subsequently started behaving differently. It seems clear that men first of all lost any overall social agreement as to the right ways to live together, and so ceased to be able to make sense of any claims to moral authority.’’1 Religious faith and moral order thrive, MacIntyre tells us, on robust social bonds. This insight rests upon an implicit premise: to believe in religion—‘‘in God and in the authority of the Church’’—is to believe in society—that is, an ‘‘overall social agreement as to the right ways to live together.’’ Though MacIntyre states this claim with particular succinctness, he is far from alone in making it. His fellow communitarians, who value religion for fostering social cohesion, frequently endorse normative versions of this argument, while sociologists of religion have employed it to explain, for instance, the