Building Religions 3: Émile Durkheim

Building Religions, part 3: Émile Durkheim

I'm not going to deal with all of Durkheim here -- just the parts that I consider fun, which can be found in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim was basically the founder of the field of the sociology of religion, so it should be no surprise that he examines religions as purely social phenomena. He makes the point early on in The Elementary Forms that there are no false religions, but gradually, it becomes clear that what he means by that is that they can all perform their social function properly, not that there's any underlying Truth to them.



The argument of The Elementary Forms can be reduced to one sentence: society is God. That is to say, societies search for symbols by which to represent themselves (e.g., totems, emblems, flags) and then lend those symbols a sacred quality as a way of acknowledging their united identity. He spends a great deal of his time on the subject of society's power over the individual, a power that can cause people to behave in ways they otherwise wouldn't, restrain their own desires, or be swept along in the frenzy of a revolution. Unable to give a name to that power, people externalize it in the form of a deity.

This is, I admit, the idea of Durkheim's that I like the most, because he's describing an experience that most of us have felt: the difference between an ordinary party and a great party; the thrill you get when you're speaking in front of an attentive crowd; the rush of enthusiasm that sports fans feel when they're cheering their team alongside thousands of others. Those are the moments of effervescence (to use his word), the moments when we shift from our daily lives into an ecstatic oneness with others. They're the moments that religious rituals try to recapture.

That's the core of religion, but there are some other concepts from his work to bear in mind. First off, the separation of the sacred and profane. He has a very simple definition of the sacred, which is that it's anything set apart from the profane. What's the profane? Anything that isn't sacred. It's an arbitrary separation, but an absolute one; the only way that sacred and profane things can interact is through a series of rituals created to allow the two to meet. (To add to that, he suggests that we get uncomfortable when that division breaks down, or when we encounter phenomena that don't fit neatly into one or the other. That, too, I'll get back to, because both establishing and preserving categories has a long history in religious traditions.)

Second, he divides religion from magic in terms of their social roles: religion is public, magic is private. Priests have communities, magicians have clients. Otherwise, they work with the same set of symbols and, often, toward the same ends. I'll return to this in a more general religion & magic post.

What can you do with this? Durkheim is handy if you're devising religions in a world where the divine doesn't take any sort of active, verifiable role. All you have to do is work out a system of symbols that represent different social groups, think about the morality that they'd ascribe to those symbols, and patch in the rest. If you're working with clan- or tribe-based societies, he has much more to say, since he sees their religious practices as the "elementary forms" of his title, but ultimately, his ideas can be applied anywhere so long as you decide to make each religion some extension of a social group's original identity.