What does religion actually do for a society? This question sat at the heart of Émile Durkheim’s landmark 1912 work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Rather than asking whether religion was true or false – a theological question – Durkheim asked a sociological one: what social purpose does religion serve? His answer was both radical and enduring. For Durkheim, religion is fundamentally a social institution – one that binds communities together, reinforces shared values, and regulates moral life. To make his case, he turned to one of the most ancient and seemingly simple forms of religious practice he could find: the totemism of Aboriginal Australians.
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Why Durkheim studied “elementary” religion
Durkheim’s strategy was methodological. He believed that to understand religion in its most essential form, you need to strip away centuries of theological complexity. He investigated what he considered the simplest form of documented religion – totemism among the Aborigines of Australia – as a way to reveal an essential and permanent aspect of humanity. The logic was straightforward: if certain features appear in the most rudimentary religious systems, they are likely the core features of all religion.
Durkheim never visited Australia himself. His account depended entirely on ethnographic materials available at the time, most notably The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) by Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen, a detailed fieldwork study that described the beliefs and ceremonies of the Arunta (also called Arrernte) people of central Australia. From these reports, Durkheim built one of the most influential theories in the history of sociology.
The Arunta and their totemic religion
The Arunta organized their social world around clans, and each clan was defined by its totem – typically an animal or plant that the group claimed a sacred connection with. Aboriginal society was divided into a number of clans, and members of each clan had specific obligations – such as mourning the death of other clan members or helping seek justice if a member was wronged by an outsider. Each clan was also exogamous, meaning people had to marry outside the clan.
Durkheim chose to study totemism among Aboriginal tribes because it appeared to be the simplest and most rudimentary form of religion, and he believed it would reveal the underlying social mechanisms at play in all religious phenomena. By understanding the Arunta, he hoped to understand religion everywhere.
The totem as a social symbol
The most important insight Durkheim drew from totemism was this: the totem is not just a religious symbol – it is a symbol of the group itself. Totemic symbols are representations of the clan itself. The totem is not merely an animal; it is a symbol of the social group, embodying its identity and solidarity. When clan members revered their totem, they were expressing reverence for their community.
This is why Durkheim famously concluded that the god and the clan are, in effect, one and the same. His study of totemic societies led him to the conclusion that the animal or plant each clan worshipped as a sacred power was, in fact, that society itself. Worshipping the totem was worshipping the collective – its values, its authority, its power over individuals.
The sacred and the profane
Central to Durkheim’s theory is a division he saw as universal across all religions: the distinction between the sacred and the profane. The sacred consists of things that are “set apart and forbidden,” imbued with special significance that elevates them above ordinary, everyday objects or experiences. The profane, by contrast, is the realm of the routine – work, daily tasks, ordinary life.
Among the Arunta, this was concretely expressed. The totem animal or object was sacred and surrounded by strict taboos. Clan members typically could not kill or eat their totem except during special ceremonies. Meanwhile, ordinary activities like hunting other animals, gathering food, or making tools belonged to the profane world of everyday survival. The line between these two worlds was not about good versus evil – it was about what was ordinary versus what carried collective significance.
For Durkheim, religion is the collective practice of marking off and maintaining distance between the sacred and the profane. Prayer, ritual, ceremony – all of these are ways societies draw and reinforce that boundary. And crucially, anything can become sacred. A tree, a flag, a carved stone – sacredness is not an intrinsic property of objects but is assigned to them by collective agreement.
Collective effervescence and social solidarity
One of Durkheim’s most original contributions is his concept of collective effervescence. During the rare occasions when the entire tribe came together, a sense of heightened energy and unity emerged. This intense communal experience transformed certain physical objects or individuals into sacred symbols, as the energy of the gathering was projected onto them.
The Arunta Intichiuma ceremony, described in Spencer and Gillen’s fieldwork, was a key example. Durkheim argued that it was during extremely rare gatherings of the entire Australian clan that the religious idea itself seemed to have been born – which explained why the most important religious ceremonies continue to be observed only periodically, when the clan as a whole is assembled.
These gatherings did something powerful. When people came together in ritual, they generated a shared emotional intensity that strengthened social bonds. If these moments of collective effervescence are the origin of religious feelings, religious rituals must be repeated in order to reaffirm the collective unity of a society – otherwise its existence is at risk. Without periodic renewal through ritual, the ties that hold a community together begin to weaken.
Religion as moral regulation
Beyond social solidarity, Durkheim saw religion as a powerful mechanism of moral regulation. Religion is a key source of moral regulation, social integration, and solidarity. Religious beliefs and practices do not just connect people emotionally – they also define what is right and wrong, what is expected and forbidden.
Through worshipping religion, people recognize their duties to the social group and their dependence on society. Rituals remind individuals that they belong to something larger than themselves, and that this belonging comes with obligations. In this sense, religion is not just about the divine – it is about sustaining the social fabric.
Participation in religious worship builds respect for society’s values and norms, thereby acting as an agency of social control. Collective participation in common rituals and the holding of common beliefs creates a sense of “we-ness” among members of society and strengthens solidarity. The moral community Durkheim describes is not maintained by force but by shared belief – and religion, at its core, is the institution that generates and sustains that belief.
The collective conscience
All of this connects to what Durkheim called the collective conscience – the shared beliefs, values, and moral attitudes that operate as a unifying force within any society. The collective conscience is society’s shared values and beliefs. One of religion’s most important functions is to reinforce the collective conscience. Society cannot exist without it, according to Durkheim.
The reason people need a totem – or any religious symbol – rather than simply revering the group directly is that the group is too abstract and complex to worship. Religious symbols are simpler entities to worship than so complex a thing as a clan. The totem, the cross, the crescent – these are concrete representations of something much larger and harder to grasp: the power and moral authority of the community itself.
Criticisms and lasting relevance
Durkheim’s theory has attracted significant criticism over the decades. His conclusions are often critiqued as speculative, since his insights were based on limited ethnographic sources rather than direct observation. Feminist scholars point out that his account ignores the patriarchal structures often reinforced by religious ritual. Marxist critics argue that religion can entrench class inequality just as readily as it promotes solidarity. And some sociologists question whether findings from small-scale Aboriginal clans can be generalized to large, complex, pluralistic modern societies.
Yet Durkheim’s framework has proven remarkably durable. His insights into the social function of religion and the ways in which it contributes to social cohesion remain highly relevant in understanding both religious and secular societies today. National ceremonies, sports events, political rallies – these secular gatherings exhibit many of the same dynamics Durkheim identified in Aboriginal ritual. They produce collective effervescence, reinforce shared values, and create a sense of collective identity. The mechanisms he described in the Arunta ceremonies of central Australia appear, in different forms, across the full range of human social life.
Durkheim’s general conclusion was that religion is something eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of assembled groups and which are destined to excite, maintain, or recreate certain mental states in these groups. Whether in a desert corroboree or a modern stadium, the social function of the sacred endures.
What do you think? Does Durkheim’s argument – that when people worship a god they are ultimately worshipping their own society – change the way you think about religious belief? And in an increasingly secular world, do you think collective rituals like sports events or national holidays are filling the role that religion once played in creating social solidarity?
References
- https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/elementary-forms-religious-life-emile-durkheim
- https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-elementary-forms-of-religious-life-9780199540129
- https://revisesociology.com/2018/06/18/functionalist-perspective-religion-durkheim/
- https://www.dalvoy.com/en/upsc/mains/previous-years/2012/sociology-paper-i/durkheim-totemism-religion
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elementary_Forms_of_the_Religious_Life
- https://puresociology.com/durkheim-theory-of-religion-sacred-profane/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_effervescence
- https://durkheim.uchicago.edu/Summaries/forms.html
- https://iep.utm.edu/emile-durkheim/
- https://people.uncw.edu/ricej/theory/durkheim3.htm
- https://sociologyoptional.wordpress.com/2016/12/25/durkheim-religion-and-society/
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