Breaking down the question
This is a two-part question, and both parts carry weight. The first part asks you to critically analyse Durkheim's theory of religion as set out in "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life", together with his account of the role religion plays in society. "Critically analyse" means you must expound the theory accurately and then evaluate it — strengths and weaknesses both. The second part asks you to discuss the consequences of religious revivalism in the contemporary world.
The link between the two parts is not accidental. Durkheim treated religion as a source of social solidarity and integration; religious revivalism raises the question of whether, in the modern world, religion integrates or divides. A thoughtful answer uses the second part to test and extend the first, showing that revivalism both confirms Durkheim's insight into religion's binding power and exposes the limits of his emphasis on consensus.
Durkheim's framework — the sacred and profane, totemism, collective effervescence and the identification of the religious with the social — should be presented with precision. His theory of religion sits within the wider field of the sociological theories of religion, and his broader corpus is set out in the account of Emile Durkheim.
How to approach it
Devote the first and larger portion to Durkheim. Present the sacred–profane dichotomy as the defining feature of religion, explain his study of Australian totemism as the elementary form, introduce collective effervescence as the mechanism, and state his central thesis that the object of worship is society itself. Then set out the functions he assigned to religion — integration, regulation, and the provision of meaning.
Move immediately to critique. Note the empirical objections to his reading of totemism, the reductionism of equating religion with society, the neglect of religion's individual and divisive dimensions, and the difficulty of applying a theory of small tribal societies to complex modern ones. This critical turn is what "critically analyse" demands.
Then discuss revivalism. Set out its consequences even-handedly — the integrative and identity-affirming effects that vindicate Durkheim, alongside the conflict, polarisation and politicisation that his consensus model underplays. Weber and Marx can be recruited to supply the dimensions Durkheim missed. Conclude by drawing the two parts together.
Model answer
Emile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life", published in 1912, remains the most influential sociological theory of religion. Durkheim set out to discover the essence of religion by studying its simplest form, reasoning that its fundamental nature would be clearest where it was least elaborated. He took as his case the totemism of the Australian Aboriginal clans, which he regarded as the most elementary religion known.
At the heart of his theory lies the distinction between the sacred and the profane. All known religious beliefs, he argued, classify things into two opposed categories: the sacred, set apart, forbidden and treated with awe, and the profane, the ordinary matter of everyday life. Religion is precisely the unified system of beliefs and practices relating to sacred things, beliefs and practices that bind their adherents into a single moral community he called a church. What is worshipped in totemism is the totem — an animal or plant held sacred by the clan and represented on its emblem. Durkheim's decisive insight was that the totem is at once the symbol of the god and the symbol of the clan, and that these coincide because the god and the clan are one and the same: in worshipping the totem, the clan worships itself. The sacred is society, transfigured and set apart.
The mechanism by which this occurs is collective effervescence. When the dispersed clan assembles for its rituals, the intense, shared emotion generated by the gathering lifts individuals out of themselves and creates a sense of a power greater than any of them. This experienced force, real but misrecognised, is projected onto the totem and named the sacred. Religion, for Durkheim, is thus society becoming conscious of itself through symbols.
From this follows his account of the role of religion. Its primary function is social integration: shared beliefs and collective rituals reaffirm the conscience collective, renew the moral bonds of the community and reassert its unity. Religion also regulates conduct, endowing social rules with sacred authority and disciplining the individual to the demands of the group. And it provides meaning, offering explanations and consolations that help people bear suffering and confront death. Religion, in short, is the celebration and maintenance of the social order itself.
Critically assessed, Durkheim's theory is a landmark. It shifted the study of religion from theology and individual belief to social function, established the sociological method of explaining religion by its social consequences, and offered a compelling account of ritual, solidarity and the sacred that remains generative. His insight that the sacred symbolises the social captures something real about how communities constitute and renew themselves.
Yet the theory has serious limitations. Empirically, his choice of Australian totemism as the elementary form has been questioned; anthropologists have doubted whether totemism is the most primitive religion or even a religion in his sense, and his ethnographic sources were secondary and contested. Analytically, the theory is reductionist: by dissolving religion into society, it denies religion any autonomous reality and cannot easily accommodate belief in transcendent beings that believers experience as more than a disguised society. It neglects the individual and cognitive dimensions of faith, treating religion as collective and ritual while saying little of personal spirituality. It exaggerates religion's integrative role and is largely blind to its divisive and conflictual face — religions divide as much as they unite, sanctify domination as Marx insisted, and drive persecution and war. Its functionalist logic struggles to explain religious change and cannot readily be transferred from small, homogeneous tribal societies to large, differentiated, secular and multi-religious modern ones, where a single conscience collective no longer exists.
These limitations become vivid when we turn to religious revivalism in the contemporary world — the resurgence of religion as a public and political force, from various fundamentalisms to assertive religious nationalisms, against the earlier expectation that modernity would bring secularisation. Its consequences are double-edged, and reading them through and against Durkheim is illuminating.
On one side, revivalism confirms Durkheim's core insight. It demonstrates the enduring power of religion to integrate, to confer identity and belonging, and to generate collective effervescence. For communities dislocated by rapid modernisation, migration and cultural uncertainty, revived religion supplies solidarity, moral order and a sense of meaning that secular institutions have failed to provide. In this respect the revival vindicates Durkheim against the secularisation thesis: the sacred has not withered, and the need for collective moral community persists.
On the other side, revivalism exposes precisely what Durkheim underplayed. Where his tribe was a single moral community, the modern world is plural, and a religion that integrates its own adherents can sharpen its boundaries against others. The consequences here are conflict and polarisation: communal violence, the persecution of minorities, and the hardening of religious identities into political fault lines. Revivalism frequently allies with politics, producing religious nationalism and the mobilisation of faith for state power, which Weber's attention to religion, meaning and legitimation helps illuminate and Marx's view of religion as ideology helps unmask. It can also breed intolerance and the suppression of dissent, reversal of reforms concerning gender and personal freedom, and resistance to the pluralism on which democratic societies depend. Revival thus reveals the dual capacity of religion — to bind and to divide — that Durkheim's consensus model captures only in half.
Drawing the two parts together, Durkheim gave sociology its most powerful account of how religion creates and sustains the social bond, and religious revivalism confirms that this binding power is far from exhausted. But revivalism also demonstrates the incompleteness of a theory built on integration and consensus alone. A complete sociology of religion must hold together Durkheim's insight into solidarity, Marx's into ideology and domination, and Weber's into meaning and social change. Read in this way, the contemporary revival is at once a vindication and a critique of Durkheim.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners look first for an accurate and well-sequenced exposition of Durkheim: the sacred and profane, totemism as the elementary form, the identity of god and clan, collective effervescence, and the functions of integration, regulation and meaning. Candidates who muddle these or reduce the theory to the single phrase "religion unites society" cannot reach the higher bands.
The word "critically" must then be earned. The strongest scripts move deliberately into evaluation — the contested ethnography of totemism, the reductionism of equating religion with society, the neglect of the individual and of conflict, and the problem of generalising from tribal to modern societies. Listing these limitations with a line of explanation each converts a descriptive answer into an analytical one.
The revivalism section separates good answers from excellent ones. The examiner wants both faces of the phenomenon — the integrative, identity-affirming consequences that vindicate Durkheim, and the divisive, conflictual, politicised consequences that his framework misses. The best candidates use revivalism to test the theory, recruit Weber and Marx to supply the missing dimensions, and close by synthesising the two halves of the question rather than treating them as separate essays.