“Critically analyse Durkheim’s views on elementary forms of religious life and role of religion. Also discuss the consequences of religious revivalism in contemporary society.” (2020)
Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), argued that religion is neither illusion nor error but the symbolic worship of society itself. The thesis also illuminates today’s religious resurgence.
Durkheim’s argument
- Definition: religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things that unites its adherents into a single moral community (a “church”).
- Sacred and profane: the core of religion is not gods or the supernatural but the absolute separation of things set apart and forbidden from the ordinary.
- Totemism of the Arunta (Central Australia) was, for him, the simplest religion. The totem is at once the emblem of the clan and of its god, so god and society are one. The impersonal force behind it (comparable to mana) is the moral power of the group felt by individuals.
- Role of religion: rituals periodically assemble the group and revitalise the collective conscience; religion disciplines, consoles and ties the individual to shared ideals. Declining faiths give way to new sacred objects, such as a cult of the individual.
Critical appraisal
- Ethnographic base: E. E. Evans-Pritchard showed that the Arunta were neither the simplest society nor was totemism typical; a single case cannot yield a universal law.
- Circularity and reductionism: religion is explained by society, and society is known through religion. Believers’ own meanings, stressed by Max Weber, are bypassed.
- Integration bias: Karl Marx saw religion as the opium of the people, legitimating domination. Durkheim scarcely explains religious conflict, sects, or plural societies where religion marks group boundaries.
- Enduring insight: Robert N. Bellah‘s “civil religion” (1967) and M. N. Srinivas‘s Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952) confirm ritual’s binding power.
Consequences of religious revivalism today
Durkheim expected modern religion to become diffuse; instead religious identity has become a vehicle of mobilisation. The Pew Research Center (2025) found about 75.8% of the world’s population religiously affiliated in 2020.
Integrative consequences
- Renewed community cohesion amid migration and urban anonymity, e.g. gurdwara langars feeding stranded migrants in 2020.
- Welfare: faith-based schools, hospitals and relief.
- Assertion of marginalised groups, such as Navayana Buddhism.
Disintegrative consequences
- Communalism and identity politics: the Ramjanmabhoomi mobilisation, culminating in the 2019 Supreme Court verdict and the January 2024 consecration of the Ayodhya temple, shows religion fusing with nationalism. In December 2024 the Supreme Court barred courts from registering fresh suits under the Places of Worship Act, 1991, while challenges to the Act are heard.
- Violence and polarisation: the north-east Delhi riots (2020). Ashutosh Varshney (Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life, 2002) showed that inter-community civic associations restrain such violence.
- Pressure on secularism: T. N. Madan and Rajeev Bhargava debate how far a secular state can stand at a principled distance from resurgent faith.
- Globally, political Islam and American evangelicalism show what José Casanova called the “deprivatisation” of religion.
Conclusion
Durkheim was right that groups sacralise their own unity. What he underestimated is that in plural societies each group may sacralise itself against others. Revivalism therefore produces both solidarity within the group and conflict between groups, and whether cohesion outweighs division depends on civic institutions and constitutional secularism.