Durkheim: The Theory of Religion

In one line

Durkheim argued that what religion worships, underneath every particular belief, is society itself.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Emile Durkheim, 1858 to 1917, set out his theory of religion in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912. He defined religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is things set apart and forbidden, which unite into one single moral community all who adhere to them. Studying the totemism of Australian Aboriginal societies as, in his view, the simplest available religion, he concluded that the totem is sacred because it is the emblem of the clan, and that the force experienced in religious life as divine is the society itself, so that in worshipping the totem the clan worships itself in a form it can perceive.

The position it rests on

Two ideas from his earlier work are needed first.

The social fact, from The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895: a way of acting, thinking and feeling which is external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion by which it controls them. Religion is a social fact in exactly that sense: it exists before any believer, outlives them, and constrains them.

The collective conscience: the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the members of a society, which forms a system with a life of its own. Religion is its most concentrated expression.

Durkheim's method throughout is to explain a social fact by another social fact, never by individual psychology, which is why his account of religion looks for a social rather than a mental origin.

The definition, and why each part is there

A unified system of beliefs and practices. Both halves are necessary: religion is done as well as believed, and Durkheim thought the doing the more important half.

Relative to sacred things, that is to say things set apart and forbidden. The sacred and profane division is his central move. Religion does not consist in belief in gods or in the supernatural, because some religions have neither in the ordinary sense; it consists in dividing the world into the sacred, treated with awe and hedged by prohibitions, and the profane, the ordinary and everyday. Anything can be sacred and nothing is sacred by its nature, which is what makes the definition work across societies whose contents differ entirely.

Which unite into one single moral community all those who adhere to them. The community is not an effect of religion but part of what religion is, and this is what distinguishes religion from magic: magic has clients, religion has a church.

The argument, in five steps

Setting it out as steps is the best way to reproduce it.