Durkheim on Religion

Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912/1995) is the foundational work of the sociology of religion, and arguably of sociology tout court. Its central claim — startling when first encountered and still generative a century later — is that religion is not fundamentally a set of beliefs about supernatural entities, but a social fact: the collective representation of society itself, reinforced through ritual, and reflected back to the society that produced it under the disguise of the sacred (Durkheim 1912/1995, pp. 207-214).

Durkheim built this argument through an extended analysis of totemic religion among Aboriginal Australian societies, drawing on the ethnographic material available to him from Spencer and Gillen and from Strehlow. The choice was deliberate: Durkheim sought what he took to be the most elementary form of religious life, on the methodological assumption that the essential features of religion would appear most clearly in its simplest instantiation. The substantive choice is now heavily contested by anthropologists — the Aboriginal material was less 'elementary' than Durkheim supposed and was in any case filtered through colonial observers — but the analytical framework has survived the criticism of its empirical base (Evans-Pritchard 1965, pp. 64-72).

The framework has several components. First, the sacred and the profane: Durkheim argued that all known religions partition the world into two mutually exclusive categories, with the sacred consisting of objects, places, times, or persons set apart and surrounded by prohibitions, and the profane consisting of the ordinary remainder (Durkheim 1912/1995, pp. 34-39). The sacred is not the same as the supernatural — Buddhism, famously, has sacred elements without a supernatural cosmology — and Durkheim's definition survives the inclusion of such cases. The sacred/profane distinction is the minimum common structure of religious life.

Second, ritual as the mechanism through which the sacred is created, renewed, and transmitted. Durkheim's analysis of corroboree ceremonies emphasized the collective effervescence — the heightened emotional and cognitive state — that participants experience when gathered together for ritual, and he argued that this state is the experiential basis for belief in the sacred. The group, gathered and chanting and moving together, experiences an energy that exceeds any individual, and this energy is attributed to the sacred objects that focus the ritual (Durkheim 1912/1995, pp. 220-228). Ritual, in this account, is not the expression of pre-existing belief; it is the generative mechanism that produces belief.

Third, the church — Durkheim's technical term for any community of believers who share moral commitments and ritual practices — as the social locus of religion. Religion for Durkheim is never purely private; the solitary mystic is a secondary phenomenon derivative of a prior communal religious life (Durkheim 1912/1995, pp. 41-44). Religion binds: the Latin root religare (to bind) is apt, whether or not it is philologically correct.

Fourth, and most provocatively, the claim that society is the true object of religious worship. When a society represents to itself the sacred forces that govern its life, it is representing — in disguised form — the moral authority of the collective over its members. The god is the group; the commandments are the group's rules; the rituals that honor the god are the rituals that reinforce membership. This is not a reductionist debunking in the manner of Marx's 'opium of the people' but a substantive sociological claim: religion is one of the primary means by which societies maintain themselves as moral communities, and its disappearance — if it occurred — would therefore raise questions about the basis of social solidarity more broadly (Durkheim 1912/1995, pp. 429-433).

Durkheim's closing observation in Elementary Forms is that religion, so understood, cannot disappear, because the collective experiences that generate the sacred continue to occur in any society — political rallies, national holidays, commemorations, funerals — even where traditional religious forms recede. The sacred is reallocated, not abolished. This observation has been enormously generative for later work on civil religion (Bellah 1967), nationalism, and the ritual aspects of contemporary political and cultural life.