The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“In reality, then, there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence.”

Durkheim, in contrast to some of his contemporaries in the religiously skeptical world of European academia of the early 20th century, strives to portray religion in a positive light. Rather than claiming it to be false or based in delusion, he turns the tables on many readers’ expectations by declaring that, in a certain sense, all religions are true. Because religions reflect social structures and respond to human needs, they are based on the real phenomena of human existence.

“Now when primitive religious beliefs are systematically analyzed, the principal categories [of understanding] are naturally found. They are born in religion and of religion; they are a product of religious thought.”

Durkheim suggests that religion enabled human thought to reach the level of conceptualizing abstractions like time, space, number, class, and division—all considered fundamental categories of understanding in classical philosophy. Religion accomplished this by reflecting human social structures back onto human experience in a way that enables people to observe and classify everything around them, and thus to consider new categories of thought inherent in those classifications.

“This division of the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought; the beliefs, myths, dogmas and legends are either representations or systems of representations which express the nature of sacred things, the virtues and powers which are attributed to them, or their relations with each other and with profane things.”

In Durkheim’s brief survey of all human religions, the only common factor is a belief in the sacred and the associated idea of the sacred’s separation from the profane. In Durkheim’s view, all other beliefs in