Durkheim’s Positive Definition of Religion: Bridging the Sacred and Profane

When Émile Durkheim set out to define religion in his landmark 1912 work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he wasn’t interested in theology or the question of whether God exists. He was asking something far more sociological: what does religion actually do in society, and how does it work? His answer produced one of the most influential definitions in all of social science – one built on a single, fundamental divide: the sacred and the profane.

Durkheim’s definition of religion 🔗

Durkheim’s definition is precise and worth quoting directly. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Durkheim defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”

This definition is what sociologists call a positive definition – meaning it focuses on what religion does rather than what it is about doctrinally. It doesn’t require a god, an afterlife, or a supernatural being. As the open-access Introduction to Sociology textbook from BCcampus explains, Durkheim was the first sociologist to analyze religion primarily in terms of its societal impact, arguing above all that religion is about community – it binds people together, promotes behavioral consistency, and gives meaning during life’s transitions.

Three core elements are packed into this definition: sacred things, a set of beliefs and practices centered on those things, and a moral community of adherents. Each of these deserves careful unpacking.

The sacred and the profane: a fundamental divide 🔗

The cornerstone of Durkheim’s entire theory of religion is the distinction between the sacred and the profane. According to the University of Chicago’s summary of The Elementary Forms, Durkheim observed that all known religious beliefs share one common characteristic – they presuppose a classification of things into two fundamentally opposed groups: the sacred and the profane. This opposition, he insisted, is absolute; no other distinction in the history of human thought is so “profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed.”

What counts as sacred? 🔗

PureSociology’s analysis of Durkheim’s theory notes that the sacred consists of things that are “set apart and forbidden,” imbued with a special significance that elevates them above ordinary objects and experiences. Crucially, the sacred is not defined by any intrinsic quality of the object itself. As ReviseSociology points out, anything can be sacred – not only churches, mosques, and holy texts, but in some cultures, trees or rocks – because it is the community’s collective designation, not the object’s physical nature, that makes it sacred.

Sacred things are also surrounded by taboos and rituals that set them apart. Durkheim’s own text, preserved by Portland State University, clarifies that sacred things are those “isolated and protected by powerful interdictions,” while religious rites are rules of conduct prescribing how one must behave in the presence of such things.

What counts as profane? 🔗

The profane, by contrast, is simply the world of ordinary daily life – commuting, working, cooking, and every other routine activity that carries no special religious significance. As Unacademy’s study material on Durkheim explains, the profane includes the everyday mundane things such as jobs, professions, and daily routines. The sacred must be kept separate from the profane, because the sacred is considered extraordinarily powerful and can be “contaminated” by contact with the ordinary.

This doesn’t mean the profane is negative or immoral. It simply means it is ordinary – the baseline of human life against which the sacred stands in sharp relief. The two categories are mutually exclusive within any given religious system, but together they constitute the full social world of its adherents.

Why the division is social, not supernatural 🔗

Here is where Durkheim’s insight becomes genuinely original. He is not making a theological claim – he is making a sociological one. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that for Durkheim, all religions are true at least symbolically, because the social forces animating religious life are real and really felt. The power attributed to sacred objects is not an illusion – it is the power of society itself, projected onto a tangible symbol. When people worship their sacred objects, they are in effect worshipping the collective values that hold their community together.

The University of Regina’s Sociology 250 course notes capture this well: for Durkheim, religion becomes “society personified” and the “worship of society.” The sacred object – whether a totem, a cross, or a national flag – receives the collective force of the community and becomes infused with that power. The meaning comes not from the object itself but from the believers who collectively endow it with significance.

Religion and the moral community 🔗

The second major element of Durkheim’s definition is the concept of the moral community, which he called a “Church” – not in the narrow Christian sense, but as a shorthand for any group bound together by shared sacred beliefs and practices. The Girardian Lectionary’s excerpt from Durkheim makes the distinction sharply: a magician has a clientele, not a Church. Clients may be unknown to each other, their relationship with the magician accidental and transient. Religion, by contrast, creates durable moral bonds – members of the same faith feel united by a common faith, not just a common service provider.

This is why Durkheim considered the communal dimension just as essential as the sacred-profane distinction. ReviseSociology explains that when people come together in religious rituals, they reinforce social bonds and express their commitment to shared values – recognizing their duties to the social group and their dependence on society. Religion, in this view, is the mechanism by which a society regularly reaffirms itself.

Collective effervescence: where the sacred comes alive 🔗

Durkheim identified a specific social experience that generates the feeling of the sacred: collective effervescence. Wikipedia’s overview of the concept describes how, during communal religious gatherings, a heightened sense of energy and unity emerges that transforms ordinary objects into sacred symbols. The electricity of the crowd, the shared emotion, the sense of being part of something larger – these generate the very feelings that people then attribute to divine or supernatural forces.

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Durkheim argued that if these moments of collective effervescence are the origin of religious feelings, then religious rituals must be periodically repeated – otherwise the social forces that bind a community together will be forgotten, leaving individuals with no sense of their ties to one another. Religion is not optional for social life; it is the mechanism through which social solidarity gets regularly renewed.

Totemism: religion in its most elementary form 🔗

To ground his theory, Durkheim turned to what he considered the simplest observable form of religion: totemism among Aboriginal Australians. Each clan identified with a totem – typically an animal or plant – which was regarded as sacred and served as both the group’s emblem and its god. The University of Chicago’s summary explains that Durkheim concluded the totemic principle “can be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or plant which serves as totem.” Worshipping the totem was, at a deeper level, the clan worshipping its own collective identity and social order.

This example illustrated everything in Durkheim’s definition at once: a unified system of beliefs and practices (totemism), relative to sacred things (the totem), which united adherents into a single moral community (the clan). The sacred-profane divide was maintained rigorously – profane individuals had to undergo purification rituals to approach sacred totemic objects – and collective rituals regularly re-energized the group’s social bonds.

Bridging the sacred and profane: the two-way relationship 🔗

A subtle but important point in Durkheim’s framework is that the sacred and the profane, while absolutely distinct, are not permanently sealed off from each other. ReviseSociology notes that religion is defined precisely as the collective practice of marking off and maintaining the distance between them – and this is done through rituals. Rituals are the bridge. They are what allow people to move, temporarily and with proper preparation, from the profane world into the sacred one.

In initiation ceremonies, for example, as Durkheim’s text describes, the individual is submitted to a series of negative rites whose effect is to strip away the profane self, sanctifying the person and admitting them to the sacred life of the community. The very strictness of the sacred-profane boundary makes crossing it meaningful – and that moment of crossing is where individual transformation and communal reaffirmation both occur.

The sacred, in turn, shapes how adherents behave in the profane world. Moral values derived from religious practice govern everyday life – how a community treats its members, resolves conflicts, and relates to outsiders all reflect the teachings embedded in its sacred order. The two domains are distinct but deeply interdependent.

Relevance beyond traditional religion 🔗

Durkheim’s framework extends well beyond churches and temples. ReviseSociology cites a 2023 British Social Attitudes Survey finding that only 38% of British adults identify with any religion, yet 80% still take part in shared moral or cultural rituals – Remembrance Sunday, charity events, football fandom – supporting Durkheim’s view that collective rituals maintain social cohesion even when formal religion declines. National flags, war memorials, and major sporting events can all take on the properties of the sacred: they are set apart, treated with reverence, and bring people together into shared emotional experiences that reinforce collective identity.

This is arguably Durkheim’s deepest insight. The sacred-profane distinction is not just a feature of religion – it is a feature of social life itself. Any society, religious or secular, needs objects, symbols, and rituals that it treats as beyond the ordinary, around which it gathers and through which it reaffirms its shared values. What changes across societies and historical periods is not whether the sacred exists, but what form it takes.

What do you think? If the sacred is defined by a community’s collective beliefs rather than by any inherent quality of the object itself, what does that reveal about how societies create shared meaning? And can you identify anything in your own social world – a symbol, a place, a ritual – that functions as “sacred” in Durkheim’s sense, even outside of formal religion?

References

1. https://iep.utm.edu/emile-durkheim/
2. https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontosociology/chapter/chapter-15-religion/
3. https://durkheim.uchicago.edu/Summaries/forms.html
4. https://puresociology.com/durkheim-theory-of-religion-sacred-profane/
5. https://revisesociology.com/2018/06/18/functionalist-perspective-religion-durkheim/
6. https://web.pdx.edu/~tothm/religion/Durkheim's%20Definition%20of%20Religion.pdf
7. https://unacademy.com/content/upsc/study-material/biology/durkheims-sacred-and-profane/
8. https://uregina.ca/~gingrich/250j2203.htm
9. https://girardianlectionary.net/learn/durkheim-definition-religion/
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_effervescence