Religion, Discourse, and Society by Marcus Moberg

Author:Marcus Moberg [Moberg, Marcus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology of Religion, Religion, Comparative Religion, Media Studies, Institutions & Organizations
ISBN: 9781000530469
Google: WRhREAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 58839445
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-12-30T03:12:05+00:00

Although contemporary liberal democratic political discourse continues to include elements of both political and economic individualism, during roughly the past century or so, social individualism has without doubt developed into the dominant form of individualism in the West.

The onset of social individualism was noted by Durkheim already at the end of the nineteenth century. In what remains a quite original take on the matter, Durkheim approached the issue of individualism in direct connection to his broader, and more fundamental, idea that all societies “create systems of symbolic classification to make sense of the world” in the form of a general distinction between the “sacred” and the “profane.”29 In this framework, as principally laid out in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), the “sacred” refers to those things, ideas, practices, phenomena, persons, etc. that members of a particular community endow with a non-contingent and non-negotiable value or character. The sacred is therefore typically circumscribed by (sometimes very elaborate) rules that stipulate how people are to engage with and treat the sacred. As Gordon Lynch phrases it, by underpinning the basic categories and values that structure communities and societies on the whole, sacred phenomena “exert a profound moral claim” over people’s lives.30 This is why, in Durkheim’s view, the community itself becomes the epitome of the sacred.31 Communal constructions of the sacred are further formed in dialectical contradistinction to communal constructions of the profane, or those classes of things, ideas, phenomena, etc. that are perceived to belong to the sphere of mundane, everyday life and that therefore lack particular “specialness.” The profane thereby also accrues a transgressive charge relative to the strength of the sacred: the stronger the sense of the sacred, the greater the revulsion evoked by that which threatens to profane or violate it. As outlined by Durkheim, the sacred is thus not be understood in terms of an ontologically fixed category. Nor does the sacred–profane distinction refer to any type of distinction between “good” and “evil.” Rather, depending from one communal context or another, virtually anything can be constructed as sacred. And so, while the sacred has indeed traditionally been closely tied to religious frameworks and typically been imbricated with religious discourses, it extends well beyond these. “Religion” should therefore not be regarded as the “source” of the sacred, while the “profane” should not be confused or conflated with the category of the “secular.”32

At different points throughout key works such as The Division of Labor in Society33 (1893) and Elementary Forms, as well as the essay “Individualism and the Intellectuals” (1898), Durkheim argues that, whereas “traditional” society is underpinned by “the idea it has of itself” as a collective,34 modern society instead becomes morally consolidated through what he refers to as the “cult of the individual” (culte de la personne). The precise meaning of this concept, however, remains somewhat unclear. At one point, he refers to it as “individualist faith,” at another point as the “religion of humanity,” and at yet another point as the “religion of the individual.

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