Revision summary
Durkheim: religion is society in sacred form, through ritual and the church as moral community. Civil religion, rallies, and festivals still fit. Weber, Marx, and gender critique limit the group-mirror model. Secularisation is unfinished; Census and NFHS show mixed practice. Use Durkheim for solidarity; do not use him as the whole of contemporary religion.
Model answer
Introduction
Emile Durkheim treated religion as society worshipping its own ideal in sacred symbols. The sacred–profane split, collective effervescence, and the church as a moral community remain usable. They do not exhaust politics, markets, or inner faith in the present.
Body
What still travels
- The Elementary Forms located the sacred in group assembly, not in a supernatural being as such. National days, stadiums, and disaster rituals still produce effervescence.
- Robert Bellah’s civil religion in the United States is a Durkheimian reading of flags and founding myths.
- Indian public festivals and, in another key, mass political rallies, organise belonging through sacred-like marking of space and time.
Critical limits
- Max Weber stressed meaning, theodicy, and this-worldly asceticism. Contemporary evangelical and reformist currents are poorly read as only the group hugging itself.
- Karl Marx treated religion as protest and as a veil of class. Durkheim underplayed domination inside the “church”.
- Bryan Wilson and later secularisation debates asked whether differentiation shrinks the sacred. Durkheim expected cults of the individual, not simple disappearance.
- Gendered priesthood and caste in temples show that the moral community is stratified. Ann Oakley-style questions about whose sacred order is at work are needed.
- Census religion tables and NFHS on practice show persistence, switching, and private belief that a clan totem model only partly fits.
Verdict
- Relevant as a theory of ritual solidarity and of the sacred as social.
- Incomplete as a theory of salvation, organisation, and religious conflict in a media-saturated world.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD D[Durkheim religion] --> S[Sacred profane] D --> E[Collective effervescence] D --> M[Moral community] S --> NOW[Rallies nations festivals] W[Weber Marx secularisation] --> LIM[Limits]
Conclusion
Durkheim remains relevant wherever groups make the sacred and bind themselves. Weber, Marx, and feminist and secularisation critiques show what his clan model misses: meaning, class, gender, and the unfinished death of the gods.
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