Durkheim’s analysis of religion
Durkheim analyses religion and gives various interpretations of the same. While other scholars believed that religion encompassed a belief in supernatural deities like gods and God, he differs from them. He says that primitive individuals usually fail to believe in two worlds, one natural and the other supernatural, in a similar way as religious people in developed cultures do77. Natural science laws easily influence modern people, but primitives are unmoved by the same. They view all happenings as the same, whether they are ordinary or miraculous. More so, gods’ idea becomes a challenge because not all religious individuals are believers of divine beings inasmuch as they believe in supernaturals. For example, some Buddhists disapprove of gods, and other individuals have a routine of performing rituals that are not deity or spirit related. Hence, to him, religion has nothing to do with superior beings.
He relates religion to the concept of sacredness and not supernatural. According to him, “religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.” 78. These sacred things come together and make a church, a single moral community, encompassing people who adhere to all these practices. Hence, he views the sacred as a communal thing.
Durkheim’s analysis of religion has human beings incorporated in it, which is similar to Max and Feuerbach’s critique.
When Max began rejecting religion, he said that he hated all gods because they failed to recognize man’s self-consciousness as the greatest divinity132. This was similar to Durkheim, whose analysis and belief of religion was far from associating it with gods. He believed in the ordinary, no divinities, and primitive beings.
According to Feuerbach, the oppressed acquire escape from religion.
In Durkheim’s analysis, he emphasizes that primitive beings do not believe in the existence of a deity or a god. Feuerbach and Max’s analysis centers on God as the supernatural being of the religion. Max says that God’s will is the rich who own wealth and the poor who struggle to remain in their present situations because that where they belong. He says that religion justifies the status quo in life135. They insinuate that religion divides people according to their richness or poorness. However, Durkheim’s analysis stresses sociology and unity among people of a community, which keeps them together rather than separating them into groups.
Durkheim’s analysis of religion is continuous with the enlightenment. He says that “this social idea of the soul is quite enlightening…when we think of the age-old religious (and philosophical) problem of its relation to the body”101. The soul being implanted and idealized within oneself is mandated to represent society’s ideals and demands to the individual. An individual’s self-consciousness is their soul, while their body asserts its desires’ self-centredness. Thus may clash with the restraints and desires of the social life, which is why religion always suspects one’s flesh desiresCITE. The soul is immortal, meaning it will succumb, but the clan lives. Spirits of the ancestors show up as remnants of the clan’s past, and they often ‘associate themselves with living members of the clan in a way that gives each person a kind of double soul’101. This places the individual in question in an enlightened position where they are in spiritual enlightenment because they believe in the human power of reason and by educational, religious, and political innovations.