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came less dogmatic and more tolerant. Adherence to religion declined. People no longer attended daily mass or sat through
~rotractedSabbath-day sermons. Eventually we seemed to be reaching the point where not only were the stores open on
Sunday morning, but people were just as likely to watch a football game or play golf as go to church. The church lost its power to prohibit people from doing such things and seemed to be losing its power to motivate other aspects of people's lives as well.
Similar trends could be found around the world. As traditional tribal and agricultural societies came into the modern orbit, their various religions also began to lose their power. One might have expected that religion would fade away entirely.
But this has not happened. Religion in the United States is far from dead. Even here, where science and technology has advanced to very high levels, and education is more widespread

panned out. Instead we see religious revivals of many sorts.

these two attitudes. Utilitarians and rational reformers in gen-

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a, few centuries ago. Witch-burning no longer took' place, and

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favoring or opposing religion. There is a third alternative. Durkheim created a nonobvious theory of religion, in which the key to religion is not its beliefs but the social rituals that its members perform. Religion is a key to social solidarity, and religious beliefs are important, not in their own right, but as symbols of social groups. Religion thus becomes sociologically important as a prime example of a nonrational phenomenon playing a major role in social life. The analysis of religion, moreover, leads us to a very important general theory that enables us to understand social rituals and the way in which they create both moral feelings and symbolic ideas. This theory has applications far removed from the realm of religion itself. It helps us to explain politics and political ideologies, and the dynamics of solidarity that make conflicts possible among social groups. It even tells us something about the private secular realms of modern life. You do not have to be either religious or politically active to experience the relevance of social rituals. They permeate modem life, just as they did any other time in history. It is only the forms and arrangements of rituals that has changed. Thus I will trace out the varieties of social ritual, from ~urkheim'ssociology of religion to Goffman's sociology of everyday life.
It is no accident that the same theory should tie together the

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the multiplicity of gods and goddesses, angels, devils, demons or spirits in which people of various religions have believed at one time or another. Nevertheless, how could people have been in error for such a long time, throughout most of history in fact? How can these sorts of beliefs continue to hold sway among large sectors of the populace even today? Something in which people have believed so strongly could hardly be based upon nothing but a mistake in reasoning. There must be something that corresponds to these religious beliefs, something real that people have symbolically seen in the guise of the gods.
Though the reality that the gods represent is not what its believers claim it to be, it does have the symbolic force of something very strong. People have always regarded the spirits or the gods as more powerful than ordinary humans. What religion represents, then, must be something much more powerful than the individual.
How would you go about proving what it is that religions represent? The first step is to compare. What is it, we ask, that all religions have in common? Not any particular doctrine of
God-not Jehovah and Jesus, Allah and Mohammed, Krishna,
Vishnu, Isis or Zeus. Not necessarily the concept that there is a single god, for there have been many religions with more than

dwelling upon Mount Olympus, the many. gods and of t h e ancient Hindus, and numerous others. Not even the mere concept of any god: Buddhism, for example, is obviously a religion, but its basic concept of Enlightenment is completely atheistic. And in many tribal religions, there are no gods, though there are totem animals, plants, rocks, and so forth that constitute the object of the cult.

only on a nonrational foundation, then even our self-consciously rational thought of today must rest upon some nonrational processes. This is precisely what the theory of social rituals helps explain. Unravelling the nature of the gods, sociologists have found an explanation of the rituals and symbols without which social groups of any kind would not be possible.

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certain beliefs held by all adherents and certain rituals that the believers collectively perform.
The basic religious belief is that the world is divided into two categories: the sacred and the profane, Things that are

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the initiated can speak or songs that only they can sing. The distinctive thing: about the sacred is that it is dangerous and u V supremely impodant: you must approach it seriously, respectfully, and with due preparation. Profane things, on the other hand, constitute the rest of the world: all the other things that you can deal with matter-of-factly, with whatever mood you wish, and for whatever purpose you find useful or desirable.
This is the basic religious belief: the dualism of sacred and profane. Along with it goes the basic religious action, namely, ritual. A ritualis very different from ordinary behavior. An ordinary practical action, such as walking down the street, doing your work, shopping for something at the store, or whatever, can be done in a variety of {ways.It makes no difference how you do it as long as you get the job done. Ritual, on the other hand, is very strictly determined behavior. In rituals, it is the fmrns that count. Saying prayers, singing a hymn, performing a primitive sacrifice or a dance, marching in a procession, kneeling before an idol or making the sign of the cross-in these, the action must be done the right way. Rituals are not a means to an ulterior end, the way practical actions are; you cannot say it makes no difference how you do it as long as the goal is attained, for the form of the ritual is its own end. It is meaningful if it is done right and worthless if done wrong.
Thus, religions are made up of beliefs and rituals, and the two are connected. Rituals are procedures by which people must conduct themselves in the presence of things that they believe to be sacred. The opposite of these two go together as well: ordinary, nonritual behavior is how you act in the presence of the profane. As we shall see, Durkheim gave priority to rituals over beliefs. In a certain sense, the correct performance of the ritual is what gave rise to the belief in the sacred.
The question now arises: how could people have ever invented this distinction? Why has there been this near-universal

THE SOCIOLOGY OF GOD

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forces that demand certain kinds of arbitrary respect and that are dangerous if disobeyed? There are real dangers in the world, to be sure, but people must have very quickly learned how to deal with them in practical ways. From a purely physical viewpoint, religion seems to have filled the world with hallucinations. But there is one reality that does have all the characteristics
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that people attribute to the divine. I t is not nature, nor is it metaphysical. It is society itseZf. For society is a force far greater than any individual. I t brought us to life, and it can kill us. It has tremendous power over us. Everyone depends upon it in innumerable ways. We use tools and skills we did not invent; we speak a language passed on to us from others. Virtually our whole material and symbolic world is given to us from societyThe institutions we inhabit-our form of family life, economy, politics, whatever they may be-came from the accumulated practices of others, in short, from society. This is the fundamental truth that religion expresses. God is a symbol of society.
Thus it is not an illusion to feel that something exists outside of ourselves, something very powerful, yet not part of the ordinary physical reality that we see with our eyes. Moreover, this mmething-the feelifig of our dependence upon society-exists simultaneously outside and inside ourselves. In religions there is always a connection between the sacred world beyond us
God is simultaneously and something sacred inside o~~rselves. without and within. In the advanced religions such as Christianity or Islam there is the concept of the individual's soul, which belongs to God. In the totemistic religion of primitive tribes there is a similar connection, for every member of the tribe is also identified with the totem. If the sacred animal of an Australian clan is the kangaroo: then every clan member feels
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that in some way they too are kangaroos. This belief, too, corresponds to something real. We are parts of society: it only exists in the aggregate because of us.
More than that, our inner selves are constructed out of parts that come to us from without. Our name, our self-identity, come from the ways we relate to other people, and from the way they relate to us. We usually think of ourselves by our own names, but we seldom created these names for ourselves. Even if you were to change the name given by your parents, you may find that you are known by a nickname given by people, And the deeper aspects of our self-image come even more powerfully from our experiences with other people. Do you think of yourself as good-looking, plain, or downright hideous? Do you feel
. confident, controlled, spontaneous, anxious, or harried? Successful or unsuccessful? These feelings about yourself are for the most part formed by the way in which other have treated you. This dependence of the self-image upon other people is well known in social psychology. We tend to see ourselves through the eyes of other people. To express this fact the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley coined the term "the lookingglass self ."
Most intimately of all, our very consciousness is social. We think in words, but we did not invent them. We could not think at all if we did not have ideas, and we guide our behavior by certain ideals. But neither ideas nor ideals could have been created by ourselves alone. Ideas and ideals must have something general in them; they are concepts that transcend the particular and that make out each particular thing to be an example of a larger class of things. But nature always presents itself to us as particulars, never as generalities. Observing nature could never have suggested general concepts to us. Each tree is actually unique; it is only because we have the general idea of
"tree" that we can see the resemblance among trees and thus treat them as members of the same class of things.
The only way we can transcend the here-and-now of this particular thing at this particular place is to put ourselves on

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THE SOCIOLOGY OF GOD another vantage point, one that cuts across time and space. But this is what society does. Hence whenever we think, we do so by means of concepts that originated in social communication.
Communication must always jump above any one person's particular viewpoint to a bridge of generality connecting one person's reality with another's. Social communication is what creates our basic repertoire of ideas, insofar as ideas are abstract concepts. Since we use these ideas to think with, our own minds are permeated by society. We cannot escape society, even when we are alone. As long as we are conscious, society is implicitly there. Thus society is both outside us and within the very core of our consciousness. This is what makes the symbolism of religion so very powerful: it expresses the essential facts of our human existence. That is why religious symbolism has incorporated ideas of human identity as well as of social obligation, why there is the idea of a soul as well as of some kind of god or spiritual force that rules the universe. And since religion symbolizes the major facts of society, it has always had to make room for social confIict in its system of symbols. Since societies are never totally unified, religion must always describe the existence of rival gods, heretics, evil spirits, or the devil. The symbolism of religion mirrors the social world.

W H Y DO PEOPLE HAVE MORAL FEELINGS?
But religion is more than an intellectual reality. Above all, it is a moral force. This, too, is preeminently social. Notions of right and wrong are intrinsically collective. Most of them regulate the relationships among people: prohibitions against killing, lying, and stealing, or positive injunctions to love or aid your neighbor. None of these rules make sense except in a social context. Even those moral rules that do not refer explicitly to social behavior have an underlying social component. Respect for a ritual is right, and a violation of it is wrong, because the
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spit on the Bible, for example, but only because the group has made the Bible into a sacred object.
The very idea of morality implies a force beyond any particular individual, a force that makes demands and punishes transgressions. These demands and punishments are not ordi- nary ones. You are expected to follow a moral duty, regardless of whether it is useful or injurious to yourself. Utilitarian rewards and punishments on the mundane plane, in the profane world, are irrelevant to whether something is right or wrong.
If you believe that stealing is wrong, then it is wrong even if you were to gain a great deal by stealing; it would continue to be wrong even if you were never caught. The punishment for a moral transgression, rather, is in ,another realm, just as the reward for moral behavior is in Heaven or in whatever the sacred realm is considered to be in that society.
What is the reality of Heaven and Hell and their equivalents in other religions? The only real force that can fill their part is , society itself. Moral righteousness is what makes you a member in good standing of the group; the secure sense of belonging constitutes its reward. This is what Heaven symbolizes. Moral evil is a transgression against the group, and its punishment on the strictly moral plane is automatic: it is the exclusion from membership. In the symbolism of Christian theology, Hell is the banishment of the sinner from God. Moral punishment is to be excluded from the feeling of belonging to society.
Why do people adhere to the precepts of morality? First of all, because the group demands it. But also because individuals want to belong. It is hard for people to avoid having some moral feelings or other because almost everyone is attached to some social group. Insofar as they want to belong to the group, they automatically attach themselves to its morality. I t is social ties that produce these spontaneous feelings of what are considered right and wrong.
%is does not necessarily mean that everyone shares the same morality, or that everyone has equally intense moral feelings. On the contrary. If morality comes from g o u p member-

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ship, then the fact that there are different sorts of groups in a society, that groups are in conflict with one another, and that individuals may join or leave groups means that there will be a number of different moralities. Which group one wishes to belong to will determine what kind of moral feelings they will have. If groups are in conflict, then their moralities will be in conflict too. This is true in the secular realm as well as in the sphere of religion. People who belong to opposing political parties regard their own position as right, and their opponents' policies as wrofig, in much the same fashion as members of rival religions feel themselves to be righteous and the others to be sinners. Whatever the group may be, though, if people want to belong to it they will end up feeling some kind of moral obligation. This sounds like the individual has to sacrifice something to become a member. The sacrifice is real enough, but there are compensations.
One of the main benefits of belonging to a group is so close to home that it tends to be overlooked. It is intangible, but completely real. This is the emotional energy that one receives from taking part in intense social gatherings. It is because of this emotional energy that people can do things in crowds that they cannot or would not do alone. The crowd makes them feel strong because they are part of some thing that is much stronger than they are as individuals. It also tends to make them feel righteous because by participating in a common activity they are doing something more than merely acting on their own individual self-interest. I t is for these reasons that people acting together in groups are capable of much stronger exertions than they usually would be alone.
We see this in a very common form at athletic events. The individual athlete is spurred on by a large and sympathetic crowd, and athletes performing as part of a close-knit team can sometkes perform beyond limits they would ordinarily find impossible. The'same kind of sentiments are played upon in very dangerous situations like military battles, Ordinarily people's

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The leader reaps the greatest rewards from participating in the group. The political leader, speaking for the group's ideals, becomes its most energetic member. The priest saying mass is the holiest person in the church because he is the center of the ceremony that everyone else watches. But ordinary rank-andfile group members can receive an emotional benefit too. They do not get quite the same energy surge, the same feeling of righteousness, as the leader, but they do gain personal force and confidence from participating in erouD eatherines, The more enthusiastically they throw them:
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just an ordinary person. He or she can become charismatic, a celebrity, a hero? even a holy figure. The energy that produces this transformation does not come from the leader. It is the energy of the group, revved UP by passing amund the assernbled crowd, and brought to a focus by the leader who Speaks them and for t f m - The leader is the channel for the collective
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tive energy is low, as people have only their own resources to draw upon. But alternating with these times of dispersion are times of assembly, These are the archetypal religious situations,
It may be the meeting of a church or the celebration of a tribal rite. In either case, the gathering of the societv chances the energy dynamics, The mood of the A~~
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level of courage is not very high, especially when they are by themselves. But in warfare troops have frequently stood together under very heavy fire and accepted almost certain death; the courage lasts as long as the group keeps together and feels that everyone is facing the same danger.
The energy and moral force of an assembled group is thus both Very powerful and potentially very dangerous. It is these group situations that bring individuals to the highest levels of altruism. They become capable of heroic actions and personal self-sacrifice. Individuals are capable of becoming martyrs, especially if it ban be done in public and with a strong supporting cast. At the same time, a crowd easily loses all sense of restraint. The moral energy can quickly become fanatical and can be turned in many different directions. From the excitement of mass gatherings, crusades are born and revolutions are made.
Smaller groups are usually less excitable, but they too have an effect of picking up the energy level of the people who throw themselves into them.
So One v e T powerful Way to gain confidence! and is to participate in intense group situations. Politics and religion have a common root. Religious leaders or political orators, in palticular, tend to gain a high degree of personal energy from their social role. The leader who can focus the attention of the crowd, who can express an idea that the audience holds in common, becomes filled with special energies. If the group is

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Group meetings, then, ar forming energies, B~ pluggi, uals can make themselves stronger and more purposeful. This is the hidden payoff that accounts for the continuous appeal of religion and its secular equivalents,
The duality of the sacred and the profane, that basic distinction that makes up the content of all religious beliefs, correspends to an between two modes of social organiza-

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give a feeling of permanence. The spirit of the group lives on in them, even when the group is not assembled. True enough, the feeling of exaltation and emotional strength that comes from the group could not survive if the group did not reassemble before too much time elapses. The emotion-producing machine has to be run intermittently since its charges run down in be; e en times. But concrete symbols can act as batteries, storing wwe up the social energy, and reminding the faithful members of that in which they believe and the feeling that it represents.
The symbols also can be used to reassemble the group, to crank up the machine again. Once charged with emotional signgcance, a sacred emblem can be used as a focal point around

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actions are regular and rhythmic, whether in the extreme form of singing, chanting, or dancing together, or in the more looseknit form of an audience applauding the words of a leader. I t is the common action that enables the group to feel itself as a group. It is no longer a static collection of individuals, but a dynamic, mutually coherent force. there is an emblem or symbolic object that focuses the group's idea of itself. The power of the group is its energy and its moral force, but this is hard for people to understand directly. Participating in it themselves, people cannot see it for what it is. They must represent its reality under a concrete form.
They reify it: they come to believe it is a real, almost physical,

A GENERAL MODEL OF SOCIAL RITUALS

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feeling, we arrive at a general model of social rituals. As indicated, this can be looked at as the formula for a machine for transforming social energies and also a machine for creating social ideals or symbols.
What are the components of this machine?
First of all, the group must be assembled. It is the physical presence of other people that starts the energies flowing, building up the contagious emotion.
But this by itself is not enough. The individuals in the group must all come to feel the same emotion and become conscious that the others are sharing it. Thus actions must be ritualized.
People must carry out a pattern, coordinating their gestures and voices. This may be done in unison or by means of a script

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intense and directed toward a different aim. By means of its symbols, the group no longer focuses upon the individual tasks of the mundape world but upon its collective self. It is out of this that people derive the sense of a higher realm, which they call the divine. It is a realm of 'the spirit, precisely because it is a spirit within which the group participates.

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thing. Thus they conceive of the spirit that moves and unites them as a sacred object. I t is the totem animal in whose name they assemble, or the God to whom they pray. In the modern political version, it is the nation, the party, or the political idea
(e.g., democracy, or socialism, or revolution), which they feel they are fighting for.
The underlying reality of : more particularly the mood it ble and carry out their rituals. -1his sense ot group identity becomes attached to an idea, which is simultaneously an ideal-a perfect or divine entity to which individuals must subordinate themselves, in return for which they receive security and emotional strength.
The emotion attached to this idea is diffuse and contagious.
It has the quality of transcending ordinary reality so that its essence cannot be completely grasped. It also has the quality of spreading out and adhering to specific, concrete objects. Not only is the mythical totem or the almighty God divine, but so also is the carved wooden emblem that represents the totem, or the altar or the cross by which God is worshipped. Thus there are not only sacred ideas, but sacred objects, which must be treated with respect.
The existence of sacred things gives religions yet another

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which another performance of the ritual can be carried out.
~h~~ concrete. emblems carry over at least a minimal feeling of solidarity from one ritual celebration to another. It is upon the ongoing existence of such emblems that the continuity of the group's identity depends.
The same principle applies to words as to physical objects*
1f a cross or a flag can be a concrete symbol of the goup, a partitular name or statement of belief can serve equally well. Thus

THE SOCIOLOGY OF GOD immediate emotional payoff. It also gives them a particular identit)', a way of defining themselves. In tribal Australia those who worship the same totem share a common name. AU those who call themselves after the kangaroo, for example, regard themselves as related, and feel bound to aid and not to hurt one another, just as they are bound not to kill the kangaroo, In
Christianity or Islam, CO-religionists themselves by the name call of their sect and feel they are brethren in the faith. They identify with each other's triumph and troubles, and feel obligated to come to one another's aid. The same bonds of common idenother strong religious or political doctrine,

SOCIOLOGICAL INSIGHT

far more emotion-laden than a piece of mundane property; hence the reaction is not just an effort at restitution but a feeling of righteous outrage. Notice the righteous aspect of this reaction: it is precisely because the group ritual creates feelings of morality that group punishments of ritual violations have this tone of moral anger. In terms of the metaphor used above, whoever tampers with the social-energy transforming machine runs the danger of receiving a high-intensity shock.
We find in a theory of religion, then, explanations of a wide range of phenomena. It shows us that life involves two quite different sorts of experiences, those in which individuals are reminded of their dependence upon the group and those in which they pursue their own practical interests. It is from the

THE SOCIOLOGY OF GOD rituals fit in with property and force. Another possibility would be to take up the theme of ritual violations and the righteous anger they provoke, which leads to a theory of crime and punishment. This, too, is reserved for a later chapter.
For now, let us stick close to the phenomenon of religion.
Examking it from the point of view of its variations and its historical changes, brings us even more evidence that religion is a social phenomenon. And by a strange evolution, it brings us to see our modem, secular society as full of rituals that carry on the older religious forces in a new guise. In some of the most common activities of everyday life, we find religion gone under-

THE TYPE OF GOD CORRESPONDS
T O T H E TYPE OF SOCIETY

the respect they feel is due to their symbols.

As it happens, this is precisely what we find when we comIn tribal societies, there is a close connection between the

THE SOCIOLOGY OF GOD

SOCIOLOGICAL INSIGHT

others, This horizontal multiplicity of sacred objects coflesponds to the horizontal organization of the tribe. found within Australian societies is
The only that by age and sex. The older men dominate the women and the younger men. This feature, too, shows up in the religion.
The women are excluded entirely from religious ceremonies and are not allowed even to see the sacred emblems. The young malesare eventually allowed into the religious cult, but only by passing through painful initiation rites.
When we move on to tribal societies that practice crude agic&ure (horticulture), we find that both the religion and the social structure have changed. Such societies are larger, more settled, and have some accumulated wealth- They are usually structured around elaborate kinship systems- There are complex as to who should marry whom; which marriages are prohibited; with whose family the bride, goom, and children should live; and what goods must be paid between the interrnarryjng families. In such societies, the role of women tends to

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tion of the Durkheimian theory that the type of societies in which women are most prominent should also be those in which the religions are the most female-oriented,
The more productive the economy becomes in agricultural societies7 the more scope there is for large-scale social organization. Quite a variety of social types and intermixtures becomes possible. Particular groups may specialize in animal herding, fishing, or trade; towns and cities appear; armies are organized.
If we look at all of these societies as a whole, we notice another religious pattern. We now can see a range of political organizations, from religiously independent, egalitarian groups up through local chiefdoms, military coalitions, and kingdoms united under a powerful throne. Parallel with this variety of

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duce most of the property.

likely the religion is to conceive of a high god presiding over all the rest, like the Greeks' Zeus presiding over ~ t Olympus,
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THE SOCIOLOGY OF GOD

SOCIOLOGICAL INSIGHT

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