At the center of Rand’s libertarian ethic is the individual ego. While traditionally egoism was considered the heart of original sin, Rand flippantly raised it as the standard of her new morality.  Humanity’s problem is that we do not love ourselves enough. Christians have nothing to learn from Ayn Rand that is not better said and more soundly concluded by any number of thinkers.  Between a social ethic that flows from Christian reflection and one that results from Rand’s premises, there is only accidental coincidence on a vanishingly few number of points.

Whittaker Chambers—one of the Cold War’s greatest anti-Communists—unmasked Rand in National Review after her mainstream debut. And so long as undeveloped intellectual palates swallow the cold gruel of Rand’s “philosophy,” Chambers’ 1957 critical article of Atlas Shrugged remains the go-to prescription:

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

Rand is as much a materialist as the communists she despised. Instead of a dictatorship of the proletariat, she proposed an oligarchy of the economic elite.  It is only because Rand and Marx are estranged philosophic twins that her ideology is so systematically individualist on every point in response to the collectivist ideas he spawned.

Once any political theory evacuates a holistic account of the human person and society, it becomes an ideology and provokes an ideological alter-ego. The ideologies of collectivism in the twentieth century reduced the human person to an economic cog and treated society as a machine—the state became absolute. The ideology of individualism reduced the human person to an economic island and treated community as a commoditized matrix—the individual became absolute. 

Rand simply replaced the hammer and cycle with the dollar sign.

Resistance to urban identity goes back to the very beginnings of American history. At the time of the Founding, and well into the early national years, the United States could well be described as a rural republic.  At the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, there were only six places featuring populations of more than 10,000, a number that is hardly a city by most present-day standards, and the combined population of these six was 183,000 in a nation of five million. Agriculture was not only the predominant mode of economic activity, but the one held to be most exemplary, a sentiment most vividly expressed in these famous words of Thomas Jefferson: “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” Nor was Jefferson shy about extending the implications of this analysis to urban life: “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” His fellow Virginian George Washington agreed: “the tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded.”

The very idea of conservatism itself, far from being intrinsically anti-urban, has in the West always been inextricably bound up in the history and experience of a particular succession of great cities. When Russell Kirk wrote his celebrated book on The Roots of American Order, he could have chosen to present that history strictly in terms of unfolding structures of ideas.  But instead, he built it around the central cities of the history of the West: Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. Each city was taken to exemplify a foundational stage in the development of American liberty and American order. This was not merely a literary conceit, like a metonym. The clear message was that such developments could only occur in cities. The very civilization that conservatives wish to conserve is rooted in such cities. It is no accident that the Book of Revelation aims at the creation of the New Jerusalem, not the New Tara Plantation or the New Mayberry. We should think about why this is so.

We have been taught to think of our American cities as hothouses of “creative destruction” and holding pens for atomized and anonymous “mass men.” But our actual experience of cities tells us something different. For one thing, every great city is really a collection of strong neighborhoods, in each of which there is far less anomie than may appear to be the case to an outside observer. But the conservative, civilization-sustaining aspect of the city goes far beyond that.

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

III

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jagged, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an aged shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs’s fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only.

IV

Who walked between the violet and the violet
Who walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary’s colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s colour,
Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

V

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

O my people.

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth This is the time of tension between dying and birth The place of solitude where three dreams cross Between blue rocks But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

To do this, Durkheim has to answer the age-old problem that Plato and Aristotle wrestled with, and to which Hume and Kant postulated their opposing schools of thought : where do mental categories come from? Because it is with mental categories that religion, science, and philosophy govern our thinking.

If they are a priori then particulars are intelligible because they somehow participate in the “forms” or “ideals” of which they are instantiations.  Huey, Dewey, and Louie are three ducks on a pond, but what makes us think that they share a “sameness” that allows us to transfer particular observations from one to the other (i.e., the inductive principle, on which science rests).  If there is an ideal “duckness” that is immaterial, then Huey, Dewey, and Louie, share in “duckness” and thus are in the right category together.  However, this implies that the material world of particulars is less real than the world of immaterial categories (Plato, Kant), because we can shoot Huey, Dewey, and Louie on the pond, but the idea of duckness remains.

Or, for example, if we destroyed every instance of a triangle, the reality of triangularity still exists.  Therefore, what truly exists are immaterial things, of which we are shadowy reflections.  But empiricists find a priori explanations absurd: how can the material world be less real than an invisible, immaterial world of ideal forms?  Mental categories are really derived from experience by our observation, say empiricists (Aristotle, Hume) because mental categories are only constructed in our minds, and we impose them on the world.  So we see Huey, Dewey, and Louie on the pond and observe three particular things, but only in our minds are they really classified as the same and we treat them the same, but we can never truly know for sure that they are the same, because we cannot observe the categories they fit into.  This leads to David Hume’s famous skepticism of science: the scientific method cannot prove the existence or reliability of induction, causation, or the uniformity of nature with the scientific method, and yet it presupposes these very things!

This is when Durkheim proposes his “third-way sociological theory of knowledge,” that theorizes how mental structures could develop through social interaction… and that social interaction being fundamentally religious-group behavior. And because socio-biological religion based on membership of a clan has given us mental categories of “in-and-out,” our religion, our reasoning, is based on a fundamental relationship with our fellow man…. and here is the kicker… which means that religion’s propositions about itself are a false consciousness!

If you buy this conclusion, then you simply cannot be a true believer in any religion. That is, you cannot have faith, even though you can become a nice liberal who sees the value of religion in providing “hope” to the masses or in giving us an emotional motivation to help others. So, here is my critique.

The power of Durkheim’s sociology is impossible to deny.  The depths he plumbs by his informed speculation and the sheer imagination of his argument are stunning.  Yet, it is possible to raise at least two substantive objections to his argument in Elementary Forms of Religious Life.  I am not convinced that he has found a middle path between empiricism and Kantian a priorism.  It is his most important methodological move in the book, but in the end he fails to provide a theoretically adequate explanation of the “social origins of thought.”  Durkheim believes that the choice between empiricism and a priorism is a false dilemma, but I think it is in fact a genuinely true choice, and I can prove that Durkheim himself has to admit as much.  Also, I think Durkheim’s framework accurately describes perhaps all religions, save two: he ironically mistakes Judaism, and consequently mistakes Christianity.

First, Durkheim mistakes key features of Judaism, and by inference Christianity.  (He also seems ignorant of many aspects of Christian doctrine: at one point he asks, “Even in Christianity, isn’t the devil a fallen god?” which is Manicheanism, not Christianity).  But several characteristics of Judaism’s formative experience seem to deny principles Durkheim suggests should persist with religion, even in the monotheism stage.  There is the Second Commandment prohibition on any kind of graven image, which contradicts Durkheim’s theory that believers seek out emblems by which to direct their primordial awe-feeling of society.  Also, the way Yahweh reveals himself to the Jewish prophets is not as Durkheim explains how primitive man experienced God.  Yahweh meets with men in lonely mountaintops, burning bushes, and in still, small voices.  Even into Christianity, the Desert Fathers sought solitude, not the frenzy of group life to find the God of the Jews and Christians.

Second, Durkheim wants to avoid the rigidity and skepticism of empiricism’s denial of the existence of universal categories, and therefore laws of logic and the reliability of reason itself, and he does so by suggesting that categories are formed through human social development as clans become tribes in totemic society.  On its face, given that human development universally progressed through the tribal phase, Durkheim seems justified in concluding that humans everywhere now think categorically, use reason, make moral judgments, etc.  However, the idea that humans developed categorical thinking and the laws of logic presupposes the possibility of the human mind thinking categorically and using standards of thought like logic.  One must ask Durkheim: how is it that you account for the possibility of using logic and reason, and that our minds are essentially receptive to making judgments of “like” and “unlike,” “in” and “out.”  Even Durkheim’s sociological theory of knowledge presupposes a common human nature that is equipped to trade in universal categories, once the opportunity of discovering them presents itself.  Children must be taught to reason, but even infant children know a violation of the principle of non-contradiction when they are on the receiving end of its violation: It is the case that this toy is mine and it is not the case that it is yours! My point is: Durkheim tried valiantly to avoid the a priori position of preexistent immaterial universal concepts accessible to the human mind by some immaterial connection, but he fails.

Durkheim wants to dismiss Kant’s transcendentalism as “unscientific.”  The problem is that misunderstands precisely what Kant was trying to show: there are some features of reality, evidently, that are so ordered that they govern even how we see the facts.  Facts are not neutral.  We all have interpretive grids—worldviews—that dictate what we consider convincing, important, and necessary.  Kant called such things “transcendental” because they are the preconditions of intelligible experience.  An example of this would be the law of non-contradiction.  How can you prove by scientific experimentation that “A is A and A is not non-A.”  Would your experiment assume the law of non-contradiction?  If so, then your assuming the very thing you want to prove—that’s not scientific, you know.  If your experiment does not assume the law of non-contradiction, then your result in principle proves and denies the law of logic, because after all if you don’t assume non-contradiction, then you have to treat any proposition as proof of its opposition.  This fundamental circularity is what Kant was getting at with a priorism.

To say that Kant cannot prove the preconditions of intelligible experience with experience means that Durkheim is lost in the conversation—he missed the point.  By denying the immaterial nature of transcendental, Duekheim is (whether he likes it or not) in Hume’s camp of empiricism, which must leave him a skeptic.  He cannot account for the truth of causation, induction, the uniformity of nature, or the laws of logic—and yet he wants to explain these things as developing socially.  The problem for Durkheim is, that logic and reason work. They work universally, categorically.  Saying that reason and logic developed socially means that there was something existent to develop at all: the universe already must work in their way, which is to say, they are objectively true.  And if reason and logic are true, are they material or immaterial?  If Durkheim says reason and logic are material and objectively true, he must show us by experiments their material existence: but as soon as they are material, they are not universal!

If Durkheim wants to preserve the universality of logic and reason, then he must deny his foundational methodological premise, and grant that immaterial things exist.  And so you see that Durkheim cannot prescind the debate between Hume and Kant.  Indeed, Durkheim is honest enough to know that he really cannot, try as he might to straddle the two sides: “Just because ideas of space, time, genus, cause, and personality are constructed from social elements, we must not, therefore, conclude that they have no objective value.  On the contrary, their social origin suggests that they have some basis in the nature of things.” With that admission, Durkheim’s position is really sunk from the outset.  It is a genuine dichotomy that must be answered.  Empiricism leads to skepticism of science itself (Durkheim calls classical empiricism “irrationality”).  A priorism requires a faith in a transcendental realm, but which faith then provides the preconditions of the intelligibility of experience.  So, here is the kicker: our material world depends upon an immaterial world.

As a Christian, this is precisely what I confess: in Hebrews chapter 11:1-3, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good testimony. By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.”

I think what Kant proves by a transcendental argument is exactly what the writer of Hebrews is saying. By faith we believe the unseen things of the universe generated the seen things, and the proof of this is that we can’t reason against that proposition without presupposing that as a truth… because reasoning itself is dependent on the existence of the reality of immaterial things.

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

“Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold

Watching the increasing revolutionary ferment rolling across the Arab autocracies and monarchies (now Bahrain in addition to the states of the Maghreb), I’m reminded of a book I read back in graduate school, Emile Durkeim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim sought to explain “the long, withdrawing roar” of the realm of faith on the one hand, and on the other, the rise of a peculiar set of unifying principles in modern society: egalitarianism, democracy, and The People. Ultimately, I think the book is about Durkheim’s realization that in modernity people transfer religious belief to ideological belief, and trade their faith in God for faith in the state, and in human organization… it’s the story of the Tower of Babel, really. I am convinced that his argument fundamentally applies today because what motivates people’s mass behaviors is still the same. Look at Egypt: masses of individuals still come together in a belief about their collective destiny and act on those beliefs, and hope for a tangible future they can build on their own by taking control of the state and harnessing the power of human organization. Isn’t that what revolution is, in the end? Isn’t that what democracy has given human beings, in the end? Collective belief and the power to act on collective belief.

I also think Durkheim makes a powerful case for why social conservatives identify religion and the social order, or identify religion as a pillar of their social order. But if you accept his (very persuasive) argument, you also accept a serious undermining of the truth value of religious claims. It’s a subtle but ultimately deadly theory of religion.

His book begins by recounting the Dreyfus Affair, a scandal of societal proportions that rocked Europe over one hundred years ago.

In November 1894, a young French captain of Jewish background, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of high treason and sentenced to life imprisonment by solitary confinement in exile on Devil’s Island, French Guiana.  The Third Republic had accused and found him guilty of transmitting military secrets to France’s arch-enemy, Germany.  When in 1896 new information revealed that a different Army officer was in fact the true traitor the government suppressed it and acquitted the officer; then, instead of freeing Dreyfus, the government charged him with additional offenses based on falsified documents. A loyal French citizen-soldier, the backbone of the strength of the French Republic since Bonaparte instituted the leveé en masse, had been framed and scape-goated by his own government: and he was a Jew.

It is an old story, an elite cabal freeing Barrabas to crucify an innocent.  And when word escaped about the Dreyfus Affair—the suppression of evidence, the jailed patriot, the freed traitor, the racism—socialists, republicans, and anti-clericals arose and marched in the streets in a unity that recalled revolutions past.  The air was thick with tricolored flags and white-hot speeches as the French people rededicated themselves to the sacred principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.  The government ultimately freed Dreyfus and confessed its sin against the creed of France.  Once again, the People had won, and freshly baptized in the ideals of 1789, France was redeemed.  And with a wash of catharsis, the streets emptied as people went home heady with energy.  Gazing down at the chanting masses high from within his university study, Emile Durkheim, another Jew, this one a professor of sociology, realized what had just happened: a religious revival.

If collective beliefs, authoritative dogma, common rites, and integral community are the hallmark of religion, and the years since Enlightenment were whittling down the province of religion in European civilization, surely one would conclude that modernity would be an age of collectivities breaking down, social ties disintegrating, and individualism reining.  And yet, what the Dreyfus Affair symbolized, and what nationalism, socialism, centralizing economies, and concentrating states exemplified, was unifying and consolidating forces, not disintegration.  It was collectivism and the totalitarian tendency, not individualist chaos that was the hallmark of modernity.  Late 19^th and early 20^th century ideologies were politicized religions, equipped with doctrines, zealots, inquisitions, eschatology, and theories of man and history.  In short, moral community had not been banished by the attacks of anti-clerical secularism, Enlightenment, and higher criticism of the Bible:  it had been re-forged.

Durkheim undertook to study the nature of religion for the sake of understanding the nature of man.  The Elementary Forms of Religious Life proceeds to create a methodology of examining religion that purportedly avoids the Scylla of reductionist Humean empiricism and the Charybdis of “unscientific” Kantian a priorism.  Durkheim proposes a third-way “sociological theory of knowledge” that theorizes how mental structures could develop through social interaction.  The argument proceeds to show the inadequacies of traditional Enlightenment “naturist” and “animist” theories of religion’s beginning.  Durkheim argues that in fact religion had no beginning as its most elementary form arises spontaneously in the nature of human group life as an expression of social cohesion: “the idea of society is the soul of religion.”  Elementary forms of religious life coexisted with elementary society, result being that mental matrices born in social evolution were co-birthed in religious matrices, so that the armature of our thinking is structured by elemental religion.

Philosophy and even science, therefore, have their seeds in religion because they borrow the mental categories furnished from a religious imagination.  Religious acts are therefore reaffirmations of these categories and representations of social life that express these collective realities.  The religious pulse is therefore the human pulse, and its beating heart is the evolutionary drive to survive through group life.  All religions are therefore true, in a sense.  All religions share the fundamental machinery producing the cement for social bonding, which is why all religions claim jurisdiction over the great societal events of birth, marriage, and death.  But all religions are therefore false, in a sense.  Any existential truth claims about a deity are wrong, as “deity” is in actuality the transference of the awe-feeling of communal activity (primordial worship is worship of the society itself) to an object conceived emblematically as the society, or as a presiding member of that society.  Durkheim’s argument is that therefore complex religions in complex society (the religions of monotheism for example) really do not know themselves even as they still provide the essential service of the more “honest” and primitive practices of totemic religion.  In sum, religion is in man’s nature because society is man’s nature, and the development and success of any particular religion is a function of its efficiency at regimenting group life and doing that better than rival forms.

In totemic (primitive) societies the world was divided among totemic principles according to their tribal territories, so in all societies these primitive moral feelings were bound up in moral collectivities.  These moral collectivities—universes unto themselves—impressed and shaped the identities and thought patterns of individuals, which constituted authority over the consciences of individuals: this is what creates the division in personal psyches between seeking to gratify the individual’s will and the impulse to live by group standards.  But the totems also figured emblems of the natural world, so nature is seen as the mediator of group standards.  This elementary religion, coextensive and coterminous with social life, encompassed the world of the individual and enclosed all reality within itself.  And thus all the world was normed.  Religion is therefore part of human reality and builds our reality—its origin is not hallucinated or born from fear.  And thinking in religious categories is therefore normal. Durkheim said, “We can say, in fact, that the worshipper is not deluding himself when he believes in the existence of a higher moral power from which he derives his best self: that power exists, and it is society.”

For Durkheim the fundamental observation that no primitive society had complex religion, and no complex society has primitive religion, clearly links the development of religion and society.  Religion needs society and society thinks, feels, and acts on the borrowed capital of the religious life:  “there is no gulf, then, between the logic of religious thought and the logic of scientific thought.  Both are made up of the same essential elements, although these elements are unequally and differently developed.”  Therein is the secret of religion’s durability: quite simply, it is true.  But, according to Durkheim, it is not true in the way the theologian thinks about it.  In reality, religion does not know itself, does not recognize of what it is made or what needs it satisfies.”

Religion is less about systems of thought, suggests Durkheim, than about habits and practice.  The Enlightenment thought religion was about doctrine and that liturgy was superfluous, but actually ceremonies and rites are the core of religion.  The religious person does not know more than the irreligious person, but he is capable of more—more feeling, more exaltation, more sorrow.  Through common action society is made aware of itself; in fact only in action is society manifest.  And thus out of the cult culture must arise: a man not acting on religious principles can be said to not have any. Durkheim finally concludes: “If religion generated everything that is essential in society, this is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.”  Therefore religion differs from philosophy, even though philosophy was birthed in religious speculation and wonder.  A philosophy can be elaborated from an ivory tower out of individual genius, but not faith: “for faith is above all warmth, life, enthusiasm, the exaltation of all mental activity, the transport of the individual beyond himself.  Now without leaving the self, how could the religious believer add to the energies he has?.”  Moral heat is formed by others grouping together, and thus the man of real faith has an irrepressible need to spread it.  Isolation cannot be the whole state of religious life—community is.

Religion is in fact a reality in the nature of man, so how can science replace it?  Religion is action and a human way of living; and so science cannot possibly supplant it for science expresses life, it does not create it.  Who could live “a scientific life”?  Thus, Durkheim believed that science does not deny religion on principle, but is rather a rival to its dogmatism on verifiable truth claims.  Scientific thought is perfected religious thought.  Monotheism freed men to study nature as natural, not as a sacred realm explicable by every push of a god: Christianity affirmed tradidit mundum hominum disputationi.

Yet, Durkheim believed that with modern science, religious speculation has no proper object.  Science does what religious speculation tried to do better—describe how the world works—and so religion has to play a new role in modernity.  In modern society, religion is a motivator for action; this is something science can never supply because science is always a step removed from action.  Science is descriptive, not prescriptive.  Religious motivation leads science by giving it “oughts,” else, why should we not do anything we can do?  But other theories of life compete with religion, to varying degrees: ideology, or humanitarian sympathy.  So, science cannot dispense with religious motivations as the light ahead of science, its intuition and sensitivity.  Even so, “while claiming the right to go ahead of science, religion must begin by knowing science and finding inspiration in it.”

In my humble opinion, this early twentieth century sociological critique of religion enters theology with the anti-supernaturalism of theological liberalism. Orthodox belief in the virgin birth, the propitiatory atonement of Christ, the physical resurrection… all of it is ejected from the modern theologian in favor of the social Gospel. What matters for liberal theologians is A) Theology keep up with “the times” (i.e., with society’s development) and B) That the most important thing about religion is that it maintains societal cohesion by providing motivation to help the poor, the dispossessed, the weak, etc. And thus social Gospelers easily allied with the state to improve society, to progress it to Christian “ideals” (which were then no different from democratic ideals) of equality, the elimination of poverty, etc. Doctrine is less relevant than helping people. Progressive Christians are about maintaining social justice, liberating groups of formerly “oppressed states,” and not falling behind the rest of society. Does any of this sound familiar?

Durkheim’s ghost is with us!

Lastly, the occasion for Durkheim’s analysis was an expression of nationalism– the Dreyfus Affair. He was trying to illustrate the rise of democratic nationalism, and explain why and how it can take such ideological control over men’s minds. The key pulse he put his finger on was that in an age of secularism, the religious impulse to aggregate into group life, perform ceremonies, rituals, and transmit meaning through stories and symbols still exists. But with the content of religious belief evacuated from the discourse of society, alternative content was filling it. Thus romantic nationalism with its music (and I love Romantic music), its art, its folk heroes, and symbols was appropriating that part of people’s affections that had solidly been owned by the church, hymns, saints, and the rest.

I find his analysis hard to resist. He at least explains on a societal level how ideology became so powerful in shaping the dreams and discourse of the modern educated who had lost their religion. Still, as a Christian, I want to oppose his fundamentally sociological and natural explanation of religion. I can grant that he explains maybe 95% of religion’s generating influence on culture. But the actual propositional truth of the doctrines of the faith are destroyed if one grant’s the connection between societal development and religion.

I’d love to hear if anyone has any insights into resolving this.

David Brooks has written similarly about the “Odyssey years.”

A classic.