Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.
Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India
Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.
Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India
From the Latin religio (respect for what is sacred) and religare (to bind, in the sense of an obligation), the term religion describes various systems of belief and practice concerning what people determine to be sacred or spiritual .Throughout history, and in societies across the world, leaders have used religious narratives, symbols, and traditions in an attempt to give more meaning to life and understand the universe. Some form of religion is found in every known culture, and it is usually practiced in a public way by a group. The practice of religion can include feasts and festivals, God or gods, marriage and funeral services, music and art, meditation or initiation, sacrifice or service, and other aspects of culture.
In studying religion from a sociological perspective, it is not important what one believes about religion. What is important is the ability to examine religion objectively in its social and cultural context.
Durkheim is generally considered the first sociologist who analyzed religion in terms of its societal impact. Above all, Durkheim believed that religion is about community: It binds people together (social cohesion), promotes behavior consistency (social control), and offers strength for people during life’s transitions and tragedies (meaning and purpose. Source of religion and morality is the collective mind-set of society and that the cohesive bonds of social order result from common values in a society.
It is important to look at the starting point of Durkheim’s analysis, his definition of religion: “A religion is 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 in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” There are, thus, three fundamental elements to every religion: sacred objects, a set of beliefs and practices, and the existence of a moral community. Of the three, perhaps the most important would be the notion of the sacred, which is the point around which any religious system revolves. It is that which inspires great respect and admiration on the part of society and what is set apart and keeps us at a distance.
According to Durkheim, religion is the product of human activity, not divine intervention. He thus treats religion as a sui generis social fact and analyzes it sociologically.
With this definition Durkheim also puts an emphasis on the social element of religion.
In order to describe and explain the most primitive religion known to man, Durkheim observed, we must first define the term “religion” itself: otherwise we risk drawing inferences from beliefs and practices which have nothing “religious” about them, or of leaving many religious facts to one side without understanding their true nature. In fact, Durkheim argued that religion consists of obligatory beliefs united with definite practices which relate to the objects given in the beliefs.”
Durkheim proposed to examine the various religious systems we know in their concrete reality, in order to determine those elements which they have in common; for “religion cannot be defined except by the characteristics which are found wherever religion itself is found.”
So all the prejudicial definitions of religion must be eliminated which govern our ideas of those things which surpass the limits of our knowledge — the “mysterious,” the “unknowable,” the “supernatural” — whereby religion would be “a sort of speculation upon all that which evades science or distinct thought in general.
Religion as a Social Fact
Durkheim theory of the origin of religion, postulate that religion is at the basis of all human thought (both sacred and profane), even of all the categories of human thought (e.g. space, time, causality).All of this, it will be shown, is essentially social: religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities. The categories of knowledge, because they are of religious origin, are therefore social too. Within that civilization, therefore, these values must be universal, i.e. they originated within that society .Since society is a reality sui generis, it representations which express it, must be supra-individual, it imposes itself upon the individual mind. Consequently, since these representations are so constraining, have such power over the individual, society is responsible for the necessity of the categories of thought as a reflection of the moral necessity of society. It will be shown that all representations come from religious representations as a social reality sui generis.
Functions of Religion
The structural-functional approach to religion has its roots in Emile Durkheim’s work on religion. Durkheim argued that religion is, in a sense, the celebration and even (self-) worship of human society. Given this approach, Durkheim proposed that religion has three major functions in society: it provides social cohesion to help maintain social solidarity through shared rituals and beliefs, social control to enforce religious-based morals and norms to help maintain conformity and control in society, and it offers meaning and purpose to answer any existential questions.
Stability and cohesion
Religion forms a balanced and cohesive moral community. It is a means of protecting individuals from anomie, alienation and the threats of disruptive mass movements and so maximises the individual’s potential for happiness. Religion binds people together, closely Shared religious experiences provide the social cement for group unity .
Social identity
Religion gives people an identity and social membership. For Durkheim, group solidarity is affirmed and heightened during collective ceremony and ritual. They represent the necessary power of the social group over the otherwise isolated, anomic individual. Religion serves to integrate the person into the society. It is functionally useful for people to grow up identifying with a particular place or nation, to strengthen person’s sense of commitment.
Collective conscience
The group affirms its belief in the central values through its commitment to thereligious system. These sentiments produce ‘value consensus’. Religion thereby generates and maintains the collective conscience and unites people in moral ways. Durkheim saw society as a moral community, whose members were socialised into accepting appropriate patterns of behaviour over time. This is an unending process since people are always being integrated into new groups, adopting new norms, absorbing new values and adapting new patterns of behaviour.
Religion is a conservative force which contributes to moral and wider social order and stability. Many cultural norms are given sacred legitimacy by religious beliefs. By promoting such values through family, school and church, the process of socialisation occurs. Appropriate modes of thinking and behaving are controlled in ways which will promote the good, orderly society .Religion gives meaning and purpose to people. Religious beliefs offer people comfort in times of crisis lives and disasters beyond their control.
The Origins of Religion as Social Science
Sociologists typically regarded religion as a system of ideas or beliefs, of which the rituals are an external, material expression; this has naturally led to a concern for whether these ideas and beliefs may or may not be reconciled with those of modern science. The problem in this approach, is that it does not correspond to the religious believer’s own account of the nature of his experience, which is less one of thought than of action: “The believer who has communicated with his god,” Durkheim observed, “is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger. He feels within him more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them.” Durkheim thus believe that it is the repeated acts of the cult which give rise to “impressions of joy, of interior peace, of serenity, of enthusiasm which are, for the believer, an experimental proof of his beliefs.”
Like science, ,religion too reflects on nature, man, and society, attempts to classify things, relates them to one another, and explains them; and as we have seen, even the most essential categories of scientific thought are religious in origin. Scientific thought, in short, is but a more perfect form of religious thought; and Durkheim thus felt that the latter would gradually give way before the inexorable advances of the former, including those advances in the social sciences extending to the scientific study of religion itself.
Accordingly science is religious in its origins; but if religion is itself only the apotheosis of society, then all logical, scientific thought originates in society. All logical thought, Durkheim explained, is made up of concepts — generalized ideas which are distinguished from sensations by two important characteristics. First, they are relatively stable — unlike our sensations, which succeed one another in a never-ending flux and cannot repeat themselves, our concepts remain the same for long periods of time. Second, they are impersonal — again unlike our sensations, which are held privately and cannot be communicated, our concepts are not only communicable but provide the necessary means by which all communication becomes possible. These two characteristics in turn reveal the origin of conceptual thought. Since concepts are held in common and bear the mark of no individual mind, they are clearly the products of the collective mind; and if they have greater permanence and stability than our individual sensations, it is because they are collective representations, which respond much more slowly to environmental conditions.
It is only through society, therefore, that men become capable of logical thought — indeed, of stable, impersonal “truth” altogether .In one sense, the “categories of the understanding” are simply concepts so stable and impersonal that they have come to be seen as immutable and universal. How is it that these categories, the pre-eminent concepts by which all of our knowledge is constructed, have been modelled upon and express social things? Durkheim’s answer was that, precisely because the categories must perform this permanent, pre-eminent function, they must be based upon a reality of equally permanent, pre-eminent status — a function for which our shifting, private sensations are clearly inadequate.
Durkheim denied any conflict between science, on the one hand, and morality and religion, on the other; for, , he felt that both were directed toward universal principles, and that both thus implied that, in thought as in action, man can lift himself above the limitations of his private, individual nature to live a rational, impersonal life.
Elementary Forms of Religious Life
This is perhaps Durkheim’s most complex work, as he attempts to provide both a sociology of religion and a theory of knowledge. In this work, Durkheim studies primitive society to demonstrate that an enduring quality of all religions, even the most modern, is the differentiation between the sacred and the profane. The sacred is created through rituals, and what is deemed sacred is what morally binds individuals to society. This moral bond then becomes, according to Durkheim, a cognitive bond that shapes the categories we use to understand the social world
As per his “preliminary definition” of religion, Durkheim set out in search of its most primitive, elementary form. With the help of this definition Durkheim sets about the search for the elementary religion he desires to study
Animism
The theory of animism, finds in dreams the first beginning of the evolution of religion According to this theory, the idea of the human soul was first suggested by the contrast between the mental representations experienced while asleep (dreams) and those of normal experience. The primitive man grants equal status to both, and is thus led to postulate a “second self” within himself, one resembling the first, but made of an ethereal matter. The transformation of this soul into a spirit is achieved with death, which, to the primitive mind, is not unlike a prolonged sleep; and with the destruction of the body comes the idea of spirits detached from any organism and wandering about freely in space. Henceforth, spirits are assumed to involve themselves, for good or ill, in the affairs of men, and all human events varying slightly from the ordinary are attributed to their influence. As their power grows, men increasingly consider it wise to conciliate their favor or appease them when they are irritated, whence come prayers, offerings, sacrifices — in short, the entire apparatus of religious worship. Reasoning wholly by analogy, the primitive mind also attributes “second selves” to all non-human objects — plants, animals, rivers, trees, stars, etc. — which thus account for the phenomena of the physical world; and in this way, the ancestor cult gives rise to the cult of nature. In the end, Durkheim concluded, “men find themselves the prisoners of this imaginary world of which they are, however, the authors and models.”
The “very heart of the animist doctrine,” however, was its explanation of how souls become spirits and objects of a cult; but here again Durkheim had serious doubts. Even if the analogy between sleep and death were sufficient to suggest that the soul survives the body, for example, this still fails to explain why the soul would thus become a “sacred” spirit, particularly in light of the tremendous gap which separates the sacred from the profane, and the fact that the approach of death is ordinarily assumed to weaken rather than strengthen the vital energies of the soul. Most important, however, if the first sacred spirits were souls of the dead, then the lower the society under investigation, the greater should be the place given to the ancestor cult; but, on the contrary, the ancestor cult is clearly developed only in relatively advanced societies.
But even if ancestor worship were primitive, Durkheim continued, the third part of the animist theory — the transformation of the ancestor cult into the cult of nature — is indefensible in itself. Not only is there little evidence among primitives of the complicated analogical reasoning upon which the animist hypothesis depends; neither is there evidence among those practicing any form of nature worship of those characteristics — anthropomorphic spirits, or spirits exhibiting at least some of the attributes of a human soul — which their derivation from the ancestor cult would logically suggest.
Naturism
Theory of naturism, finds certain natural forces, serves the purpose, since the germ of the opposition that separates the profane from the sacred cannot be found in the nature either of man or of the universe.. In sharp contrast to animism, the naturistic theory insisted that religion ultimately rests upon a real experience — that of the principal phenomena of nature (the infinity of time, space, force, etc.) — which is sufficient to directly arouse religious ideas in the mind. But religion itself begins only when these natural forces cease being represented in the mind in an abstract form, and are transformed into personal, conscious spirits or gods, to whom the cult of nature may be addressed; and this transformation is achieved by language. The roots of their language consisted of very general types of human action (pushing, walking, climbing, running, etc.). When men turned from the naming and classifying of actions to that of natural objects, the very generality and elasticity of these concepts permitted their application to forces for which they were not originally designed. The earliest classes of natural phenomena were thus metaphors for human action — a river was “something that moves steadily,” the wind was “something that sighs or whistles,” etc. — and as these metaphors came to be taken literally, natural forces were quite naturally conceived as the product of powerful, personal agents. Once these agents had received names, the names themselves raised questions of interpretation for succeeding generations, producing the efflorescence of fables, genealogies, and myths characteristic of ancient religions.
Nature is characterized not by phenomena so extraordinary as to produce a religious awe, but by a regularity which borders on monotony. Moreover, even if natural phenomena were sufficient to produce a certain degree of admiration, this still would not be equivalent to those features which characterize the “sacred”, and least of all to that “absolute duality” which typifies its relations with the “profane.” The primitive, does not regard such forces as superior to his own; on the contrary, he thinks he can manipulate them to his own advantage by the exercise of certain religious rites.
Durkheim believes that the naturistic theory, would reduce religion to little more than a system of hallucinations. he admitted, that primitive peoples reflect upon the forces of nature from an early period, for they depend on these forces for their very survival.
Totemism.
The totem, denotes a common object such as an animal, or a plant, and a symbol representing that it is sacred. Durkheim found that people tend to separate religious symbols, objects, and rituals, which are sacred, from the daily symbols, objects, and routines of existence referred to as the profane. Sacred objects are often believed to have divine properties that separate them from profane objects. Even in more‐advanced cultures, people still view sacred objects with a sense of reverence and awe, even if they do not believe that the objects have some special power.
Then Durkheim proceeds to show that the totemic classifications form the basis for the idea of social class. Men were first organized as men, in clans , and therefore they were able to organize things. The fundamental notions of the intellect are the product of social factors. The notion of class is not an ideal but a defined group of interrelated things. Human classification is based on social hierarchy.
Durkheim asserts that totems have an underlying idea of force. The force of the totem, its symbolic qualities of sacredness, must indeed have a referent (symbols refer to something). There must be something unifying in all that is worshipped in these totemic religions, and this unity lies in what is symbolized and not in the symbol. Durkheim argues that totems are forceful over and against the individual because they are an instance of the idea of force in general. This force derives from the strength of the clan, so that the totemic principle of force is in fact the clan under an empirically concrete form: if the totem’s symbol is god and society, then god and society are identical.This more fundamental and primitive cult is totemism. The totem has a religious character. It is the type of sacred things.
Totemic Beliefs
Totemism is a religion in which three classes of things — the totemic emblem, the animal or plant, and the members of the clan — are recognized as sacred; The most fundamental of these beliefs is that the members of each clan consider themselves bound together by a special kind of kinship, based not on blood, but on the mere fact that they share the same name. This name, moreover, is taken from a determined species of material objects with which the clan members are assumed to enjoy the same relations of kinship. But this “totem” is not simply a name; it is also an emblem, which, like the heraldic coats-of-arms, is carved, engraved, or designed upon the other objects belonging to the clan, and even upon the bodies of the clan members themselves
The same religious sentiments aroused by these designs, of course, are aroused by the members of the totemic species themselves. Clan members are thus forbidden to kill or eat the totemic animal or plant except at certain mystical feasts ,and the violation of this interdiction is assumed to produce death instantaneously. Moreover the clan members themselves are “sacred” in so far as they belong to the totemic species, a belief which gives rise to genealogical myths explaining how men could have had animal and even vegetable ancestors.
Durkheim suggested believes that, while all the things discussed above (emblems, animals, clan members, and all other objects) arc sacred in different degrees, they are all sacred in the same way; thus, their religious character could hardly be due to the special properties of one or the other, but rather is derived from some common principle shared by all. Totemism, in short, is not a religion of emblems or animals or men at all, but rather of an anonymous, impersonal “force,” immanent in the world and diffused among its various material objects.
The individual who is transported from his profane to a sacred existence in a gathering of the clan seeks some explanation for his altered, elevated state. The gathering of the clan itself is the real cause, though one too complex for the primitive mind to comprehend; but all around him, the clan member sees symbols of precisely that cause — the carved engraved images of the totem — and fixes his confused social sentiments on these clear, concrete objects, from which the physical power and moral authority of society thus seem to emanate.
Durkheim insisted that the primitive man does not regard his gods as hostile, malevolent, or fearful in any way whatsoever; on the contrary, his gods are friends and relatives, who inspire a sense of confidence and well-being. The sense thus inspired, moreover, is not an hallucination, but is based on reality; for however misunderstood, there actually is a real moral power, and from which the worshipper derives his strength.
The subsequent evolution of totemic beliefs is one from souls to spirits, spirits to “civilizing heroes,” and heroes to “high gods,” in which the focus of religious worship becomes increasingly powerful, personal, and international. Since the idea of souls is inexplicable without postulating original, “archetypal” souls from which the others are derived, for example, the primitive imagines mythical ancestors or “spirits” at the beginning of time, who are the source of all subsequent religious efficacy. When the clans come together for the tribal initiation ceremonies, the primitive similarly seeks an explanation for the homogeneity and generality of the rites thus performed; and the natural conclusion is that each group of identical ceremonies was founded by one great ancestor, the “civilizing hero” of the clan, who is now venerated by the larger tribe as well. And where the tribe as a whole, gathered at such initiation ceremonies, acquires a particularly powerful sentiment of itself, some symbol of this sentiment is sought; as a result, one of the heroes is elevated into a “high god,” whose authority is recognized not only by the tribe thus inspired, but by many of its neighbours. The result is a truly “international” deity, whose attributes bear a marked similarity to those of the higher religions of more advanced civilizations. But this “great tribal god,” Durkheim emphasized, retracing his evolutionary steps, “is only an ancestral spirit who finally won a pre-eminent place. The ancestral spirits are only entities forged in the image of the individual souls whose origin they are destined to explain. The souls, in their turn, are only the form taken by the impersonal forces which we found at the basis of totemism, as they individualize themselves in the human body. The unity of the system,” Durkheim concluded, “is as great as its complexity.”
Actually Durkheim’s work on religion was purely speculative. His account of the origins of religion could not be accepted by most of the modern sociologists. Goldenweiser, for example, criticized Durkheim’s theory as one-sided and psychologically untenable. He argued that a “society possessing the religious sentiment is capable of accomplishing unusual things, but it can hardly produce that sentiment out of itself.” Some others have stated that “by making the social mind or collective representations the sole source of religion, Durkheim resorted to something quite mysterious in it and, hence failed to give a satisfactory explanation.” But the real merit of his analysis is his recognition of the vital social functions that religion plays in society.
For a long time it has been known that the first systems of representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and themselves were of religious origin. There is no religion that is not a cosmology at the same time that it is a speculation upon divine things. If philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy.
— Émile Durkheim