Chapter 13: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

What is religion? Durkheim addresses this question explaining that this is the most important question when talking about religion. Most people tend to ask about certain religions, how religions came to be, or what makes a religion a religion. But what needs explanation is not what is A religion but what IS religion.
At first this question didn’t confuse me however trying to put it into words is the hard part. We know what religious activities look like on the outside. Or do we?
“Since all religions can be compared to each other, and since all are species of the same class, there are necessarily many elements which are common to all”
These are the rest of the points I want to make.
I think what Durkheim is saying here is that, yes religion encompasses ceremonies, and yes there is some sort of leader, congregation, rules, a book. But Durkheim prods further than that.
“Neither the thought nor the activity of the religion is evenly distributed among believers; according to the men, the environment and the circumstances, the beliefs as well as the rites are thought of in different ways.”
To me this was sort of an explanation on why we have more than one type of religion (using religion here to represent an idea not the definition of what a religion is). Religion has been a main source of many different movements in history. People start to question what they are being taught and start to make their own rules therefore creating their own religious beliefs and new denominations. Also believers of one religion have different beliefs. Let’s look at Christianity because that is what I am most familiar with, how many versions of the Bible are there? Does anyone know? What one do you read? Does the person sitting in the pew next to you read the same version? Are you both getting the exact same definitions from the words? I assume not. Translating the Bible can result in many different views.
Durkheim goes on to explain that the smaller a society the closer the beliefs they hold.
“Things are quite different in lower societies. The slighter development of individuality, the small extension of the group, the homogeneity of external circumstances all contribute to reducing the differences and variations to a minimum…..Everything is common to all.”
A perfect example of this, the town where I grew up. I don’t know if anyone is familiar with Pinconning MI but if you are you know that it is predominantly Catholic and everyone knows the norm. I’m not Catholic however I have been to Catholic services at the local church. The ritualistic way of it all is disturbing. No one questions, everyone kneels when they’re suppose to kneel, sing when they should sing, and by God don’t forget to do the curtsey before you enter the pew. Now I’m not attacking Catholicism it’s the same with all religions. There is a status quo to follow that’s part of what makes it a defined religion. Religion starts off as a set of rules or maybe a better way to put it is a set of beliefs that someone thinks are better than what they already know. Strict or otherwise members follow these rules but over time and with population growth and dispersion people take their own spin on the rules that dictated their beliefs.
Durkheim goes on to explain that religion is the basis of our knowledge or could be a major base of our knowledge. I didn’t really understand what he meant by this. I can see how religion can dominate how you feel and think about things and definitely if you have a religious background it might be the basis for all of your knowledge but this part confused me a little bit.
The next point I want to address is this
“At the roots of all our judgments there are a certain number of essential ideas which dominate all our intellectual life, they are what philosophers since Aristotle have called the categories of the understanding: ideas of time, space, class, number, cause, substance, personality, etc. They correspond to the most universal properties of things. They are like the solid frame which encloses all thought; this does not seem to be able to liberate itself from them without destroying itself, for it seems that we cannot think of objects that are not in time and space, which have no number, etc. other ideas are contingent and unsteady; we can conceive of their being unknown to a man, a society, or an epoch;…….Now when primitive religious beliefs are systematically analyzed, the principle categories are naturally found. They are born in religion and of religion; they are a product of religious thought.”
Now this is a lot to take in but here’s the main point that I got from this and I thought it made quite a bit of sense. First off let me ask why do a lot of people have problems believing in religion (again let’s take Christianity because I am familiar)? It’s because there is nothing solid. The biggest criticisms I get when I tell people about God is how do you know he exist have you ever seen him and of course the answer is no not physically. I think that what Durkheim is saying here is that religion is something we can’t place in our physical thought and so most people can’t grasp the idea of it. It all lies in faith and believing and yes it’s true this might be something that most people can’t do but that doesn’t take away the fact that some people can and that’s religion. Believing there is something better out there.
Durkheim also explains religion as the thought of something better when he writes about
“..real society…In it, evil goes beside the good, injustice often reigns supreme, and truth is often obscured by error. How could anything so crudely organized inspire the sentiments of love, the ardent enthusiasm and the spirit of abnegation which all religions claim of their followers? These perfect beings which are gods could not have taken their traits from so mediocre, and sometimes even so base as reality. But, on the other hand, does someone think of a perfect society, where justice and truth would be sovereign, and from which evil in all its forms would be banished forever?”
So I think this is a great explanation of what religion is and what Durkheim was trying to explain causes a religion. Religion is the means in which to obtain the idea of a perfect society. It’s the idea that people could be without fault and that they could live together without fighting and competition for the better goods. I know that I’ve dreamt of a perfect world. Who hasn’t wanted to live where there is, cliché as it may be, “world peace”? To me this sounds a lot like Heaven and what is a lot of religions final place if you obey the religion then a place of peace. Religion is a thought on the way to reach this place of peace.
“A society can neither create itself nor recreate itself without at the same time creating an ideal.”
This might be a small passage but I thought this was kind of the essence to what I think Durkheim was saying. Being a functioning “real” society only leads you to thoughts about what is wrong with your society and how you would change it if you could. Religion I think is the thought of these imperfections being perfected. It’s the world you place above your real world as Durkheim kind of said.
“Thus the collective ideal which religion expresses is far from being due to a vague innate power of the individual, but it is rather at the school of collective life that the individual has learned to idealize.”
So what religion is, is a way to express the ideal? I think so. I think we turn to religion because we need something to hope for, we need something to believe in or we would want to kill ourselves on the spot once in a while.
I don’t think religion should ever be thought of only as church, ministers, a book, traditions. Religion is anything you turn to for comfort, for support, for the hope of a better tomorrow. Religion in its essence is an escape from the real world. It’s an out for whoever wants to believe that there is a perfect future somewhere and sometime for them. I think this is a much more fluffed up explanation than Durkheim would care to give yet I think that’s the basis of what he was trying to explain religion as being.
“Thus there is something eternal in religion which is destined to survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought has successfully enveloped itself. There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except vy the means of reunions, assemblies, and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments; hence come ceremonies which do not differ from regular religious ceremonies, either in their object, the results which they produce, or the processes employed to attain these results. What essential difference is there between an assembly of Christians celebrating the principle dates of the life of Christ, or Jews remembering the exodus from Egypt or the promulgation of the Decalogue, and a reunion of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a new moral or legal system or some great even in the national life?”
Hence religion as we know it. Religion as in books, churches, preachers, all of these are tools of religion not religion itself. These are the tools that keep us believing and reinforcing the idea that there is an ideal society. These are the tools that keep our religion (beliefs) alive. I think Durkheim was on the right track, if I understood this correctly, in determining that religion was a belief, what kind of belief, the belief of a better society then what we have made. This is what I got out of this article but as we have seen everyone has their own take on things.