Durkheim's Sociology: Social Facts and the Religious Origin of Society

Durkheim's Theory of Social Facts and Religious Foundations

Firstly, Durkheim established that sociology is the science of social facts. These social facts have the following characteristics:

Characteristics of Social Facts

• Social facts are ways of thinking and acting.
• Social facts are normative: they rule and they are coercive.
• Social facts are external to the individual; they have an independent existence.
• Social facts are general because they encompass the whole society.

Religion as the Fundamental Social Fact

Durkheim also stated that religion is the social fact that makes society exist. To understand what religion is, his starting points for his investigation were:

• There are no true or false religions; they are all true in their own way.
• All religions respond to the same needs and fulfill the same social function.
• Therefore, all the elementary forms of religious life can be tracked back to the religion of primitive societies.
• For sociologists, the challenge is to find what is common to all religions and what is its normative function—in other words, to understand religion as a universal social fact.

The Absence of God in Elementary Religious Forms

After his investigation, Durkheim realized that what is not an elementary religious form is God. This is because there are religions without God and rituals in which God has no appearance. Thus, although there are religions without God, there are no religious forms without rites. In short, there are religions without God and religious rituals that do not depend on divinity.

The Five Elementary Forms of Religious Life

So, which are the elementary forms?

1. The Spirit: Not necessarily a god, but a belief in something greater than the individual.
2. Beliefs: The distinction between good and evil, between what is forbidden and what is allowed.
3. Cults: Collective rituals for sharing and reproducing beliefs.
4. An Institution: With its 'priest' responsible for watching over the content and for reproducing it.
5. Society: Religion is nothing more than a normative representation of society that brings together individuals through ritual acts and explains what society is.

Key Conclusions on Religion and Society

Durkheim obtained the following conclusions:

• There are religions without gods, but there is no society without religion.
• Religion is the representation society gives of itself, and that representation makes society possible.
• All elementary forms of religion are already found in primitive groups.
• All complex social institutions originate from primitive religious forms.
• Rituals become more important the more complex the society is, but they are fundamentally a primitive form of a religious social fact.
• As beliefs become increasingly detached from the collective, anomie grows.