Emile Durkheim Theory Of Religion Essay

Tylor and Frazer were not alone in their use of sociology to understand religion. A sociologist perhaps more influential than Tylor and Frazer was Emile Durkheim. Durkheim was a frontrunner in the introduction of the field of sociology. He used this scientific sociology to comprehend religion and discover the basis of it. Emile Durkheim explored the scientific realm of sociology and how it related to religion. He viewed the defining feature of religion as the concept of the sacred. This conclusion was gathered after he had engaged in fieldwork with the Australian aboriginal people as he contrasted their worship of totems with religion in the West. No matter the cause of religion, it stemmed from a social area. Religion stood on the base of society and when the religion went through a change, consequently so did that society. Like Durkheim, Marx knew religion to be a product of society, something that united individuals. Yet this also gave power to the controlling, and in the case of Christianity, the church. Religion could be used to control the masses, and the powerful gained an advantage by manipulating the religion at will. However unlike Durkheim, Marx stood for an elimination of religion to preserve goodness in the
As Durkheim was an atheist, he did not believe in god but he knew that religion was inevitable with the way that society was structured. The enlightenment did not think they needed religion, and that it was a hinder to our advancement as a species. Durkheim knew that we needed religion, that it could never be destroyed as it gave us structure and unity in our world. The enlightenment found areas to criticize to reveal religion as a fake, and to find a way to prove that God did not exist. Durkheim disagreed, and said that religion was objective. There was no way around it and could not be willed