“Elaborate Emile Durkheim’s analysis of the Elementary Forms of Religious Life and role of religion in society. How does he explain existence of religion in modern industrial societies?” (2007)
Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) asked two questions. The first was what religion essentially is, answered through Australian totemism. The second was what can hold modern society together once traditional faith declines. If religion is society worshipping itself, it cannot simply disappear.
The analysis
- Definition: religion is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things… which unite into one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them”. The sacred–profane division, not belief in gods, is its mark.
- Method: the simplest society reveals the essential elements. Durkheim drew on the clan totemism of the Arunta, rejecting animism and naturism as reducing religion to illusion.
- Totem as symbol of society: the totemic emblem stands for both the clan and its impersonal sacred force (akin to mana). Worshippers venerate society, transfigured.
- Beliefs and rites: negative rites (taboos) separate the domains; positive rites (communion, intichiuma), mimetic and piacular (mourning) rites periodically reassemble the group.
Role of religion in society
- Cohesion and revitalisation: collective ritual renews the collective conscience, and believers leave strengthened.
- Discipline and moral regulation: interdicts train self-restraint and respect for rules.
- Cognition: categories of time, space, class and causality have religious-social origins, so religion is the matrix of science.
Religion in modern industrial society
Durkheim did not predict religion’s end. He predicted its transformation.
- Crisis of transition: “The old gods are growing old or already dead, and others are not yet born.” The division of labour dissolves the uniform collective conscience on which traditional churches rested.
- Something eternal survives: every society needs to reaffirm its collective sentiments at regular intervals. The function persists even as the symbols change.
- The cult of the individual: in “Individualism and the Intellectuals” (1898), written during the Dreyfus Affair, Durkheim argued that in a differentiated society the one sacred thing all share is the human person. Its dignity and rights form a religion “in which man is at once the worshipper and the god”. This moral individualism, unlike egoistic utilitarianism, is the collective conscience of organic solidarity.
- Secular sacralisation: the early French Revolution made Fatherland, Liberty and Reason sacred, with the Cult of Reason (1793) and the Festival of the Supreme Being (1794). Durkheim expected new “hours of creative effervescence” to produce fresh rites.
Later confirmation: Robert N. Bellah (“Civil Religion in America”, 1967) found an American civil religion of sacred texts, martyrs and holidays. In India, Constitution Day (observed since 2015), Republic Day parades and the Har Ghar Tiranga campaign sacralise the Constitution and the flag. A Pew Research Center survey (2019–20) found 84% of Indians saying that respecting all religions is very important to being truly Indian, a civic creed resting on shared sacred values.
Limits
- Modern religion is plural and often divisive, as communal mobilisation shows.
- Bryan Wilson’s secularisation thesis and Thomas Luckmann’s privatised “invisible religion” dispute the integrative claim.
- Civil religion can be captured by nationalism, sacralising the majority, not the person.
Conclusion
Durkheim’s explanation is functional: modern societies retain religion because they still need sacred, shared ideals. The sacred has moved from the totem to the rights-bearing individual and the constitutional nation.