Religion and moral discipline

Abstract

In his earliest writings Durkheim comments upon the importance of religion in society, recognising it to be the original source of all subsequently evolved moral, philosophical, scientific and juridical ideas. In The Division of Labour , he outlines the thesis that any belief which forms part of the conscience collective tends to assume a religious character, although in that work this is advanced only as a ‘highly probable conjecture’ which needs further study. But Durkheim's recognition of the probable significance of religion in relation to the influence of the conscience collective in society is counterbalanced by an awareness of the fact that very profound changes have occurred with the emergence of the modern societal type. Durkheim consistently supports the conclusion, reached at an early point in his intellectual career, that both the ‘defenders of the old economic theories are mistaken in thinking that regulation is not necessary today’ and ‘the apologists of the institution of religion are wrong in believing that yesterday's regulation can be useful today’. The declining importance of religion in contemporary societies is a necessary consequence of the diminishing significance of mechanical solidarity: the importance we thus attribute to the sociology of religion does not in the least imply that religion must play the same role in present-day societies that it has played at other times. In a sense, the contrary conclusion would be more sound. Precisely because religion is a primordial phenomenon, it must yield more and more to the new social forms which it has engendered.