Breaking down the question

The command word is comment, which invites you to explain the statement, assess how far it holds, and register qualifications. The claim to be examined is that, for Durkheim, the essence of religion is identical across primitive and modern societies.

The word essence is the key. Durkheim was not interested in the particular beliefs or gods of any faith but in the underlying function and structure common to all religion — the division of the world into sacred and profane, and the way religious life expresses and renews social solidarity. Read this way the statement is broadly true: the outward forms change, but the essential social reality that religion embodies persists.

Threads to develop:

  • Durkheim's definition of religion and the sacred–profane dichotomy.
  • His study of totemism and the argument that religion is society worshipping itself.
  • Whether the essence truly survives unchanged into modern, differentiated society.

How to approach it

Begin with Durkheim's definition of religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, uniting adherents into a single moral community, a church. Explain that he sought the essence by studying the simplest form, totemism among Australian Aboriginal clans, drawing on the note on the sociological theories of religion and the profile of Emile Durkheim.

Then state his central thesis — that in worshipping the sacred, society worships itself — and show why the essence, defined functionally, is the same in primitive and modern life. Close with a measured qualification about how far this holds under conditions of modern individualism.

Model answer

For Emile Durkheim, religion was not defined by belief in gods or the supernatural but by a distinctive way of classifying the world. Every religion, he held, divides reality into two opposed domains: the sacred, set apart and forbidden, surrounded by prohibition and reverence, and the profane, the ordinary world of everyday utility. Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things that binds its followers into a single moral community. This structure, he argued, is universal.

To uncover the essence of religion, Durkheim examined what he took to be its simplest and most elementary form — totemism among the Australian Aboriginal clans, studied in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). The clan reveres its totem, an animal or plant treated as sacred, and Durkheim asked what the totem really represents. His answer was that the totem is the emblem of the clan itself: in worshipping it, members worship the collective. The sacred, in short, is society transfigured. Religion is the means by which a society represents itself to its members, expresses its shared sentiments, and renews the collective conscience.

On this reading the statement in the question is essentially correct. The forms of religion differ enormously — a totemic clan and a modern church share little in doctrine or ritual detail — but the essence is the same. In both, sacred symbols stand for the moral community; in both, collective rites generate the shared emotion Durkheim called collective effervescence, reaffirming solidarity and the authority of shared values. What is worshipped, at bottom, is the social bond. The function — integrating individuals into a moral order and sustaining social cohesion — persists whether the society is a simple clan or a complex modern nation.

Yet the claim needs qualification. Durkheim himself recognised that modern societies are marked by the division of labour and growing individualism, which weaken the old collective conscience and fragment shared belief. He suggested that a cult of the individual — the moral value placed on the human person and their rights — might become the sacred core of modern society, a functional successor to traditional religion. This shows the essence surviving in a transformed guise rather than in identical form. Critics add that Durkheim generalised too boldly from limited ethnographic evidence and underplayed religion's capacity to divide as well as unite.

The statement is therefore best judged broadly valid at the level of essence: the particular beliefs change, but the social function and the sacred–profane structure endure, even if their content is refashioned in modern conditions.

Examiner's perspective

Examiners look for the analytical distinction between form and essence — the point on which the whole statement turns. The strongest answers show that Durkheim defined religion functionally and structurally, so that the sacred–profane division and the solidarity-generating role remain constant while doctrines vary.

Precise use of Durkheim's apparatus — the sacred and profane, totemism, collective conscience and collective effervescence, and the thesis that society worships itself — is expected. A discerning comment also registers the qualification: modern individualism and the possible cult of the individual, plus the standard critique of over-generalisation from Aboriginal data. Balancing endorsement with this qualification, rather than flatly agreeing or disagreeing, marks out the top band.