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Book
Émile Durkheim · 1915
Durkheim went looking for the simplest religion he could find to ask what religion fundamentally is, and came back with an answer that unsettles believer and skeptic alike: the force a congregation feels as the sacred is real — it is the society itself, met in a register no single member could generate alone.
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Appears in
What this book knows
Religion is society worshipping itself: the sacred/profane divide and the collective effervescence of ritual are how a group makes and feels its own moral order.
Illuminates
Editor’s framing
This is the origin text for three of Vela's behavioral-science concepts — collective effervescence, the sacred/profane distinction, and (from his earlier work) anomie. Durkheim's claim is not that religion is an illusion but that it is a true experience of a real thing: the group's hold on the person. Vela leans on him across the religion axis to read scripture and ritual as records of social formation, without arguing with the theology. Read it for the move that founds a discipline — treating the sacred as a social fact you can study.
Read alongside · the magazine
Early-church formation read as the social process Durkheim names.
Read alongside · the emotions
The felt register of collective effervescence — the heat of the assembled group.
Scholars: Émile Durkheim
0 published passages · book excerpt · research analysis
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