Breaking down the question
The question turns on the phrase reality of religion. Durkheim's argument in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is that religion is not an illusion, a mistake or a childish error, as many Enlightenment critics held, but corresponds to something real. The task is to show how his study of totemism among the Australian Aborigines leads him to this conclusion.
The word show signals that you must reconstruct the argument step by step, not simply state the conclusion. The chain runs from why he chose totemism, through his analysis of the sacred and its source, to his famous claim that the reality behind religion is society itself. Religion is real because it expresses and sustains a real thing — the social bond.
Threads to develop:
- Why Durkheim treated totemism as the elementary form through which to study religion.
- The distinction between the sacred and the profane as the defining feature of all religion.
- The demonstration that the true object of religious worship is society, making religion real rather than illusory.
How to approach it
Begin with Durkheim's problem: he wanted to explain religion sociologically and to answer the sceptics who dismissed it as false belief. Explain his method — to isolate the simplest, most elementary religion, which he took to be Australian totemism, on the assumption that its essential elements would be easier to see there than in complex faiths. This links to the broader sociological theories of religion and to the wider thought of Emile Durkheim.
Then build the argument: the sacred–profane division, the totem as the sacred emblem of the clan, and the puzzle of what the totem really represents. Move to his answer — collective effervescence and the identification of the totemic principle with the clan itself. Conclude with the sense in which religion is "real": it worships society transfigured, and it performs indispensable social functions.
Model answer
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim set out to answer a question that the rationalist thought of his age had largely dismissed: is religion founded on a reality, or is it merely a tissue of illusions and errors? Thinkers of the Enlightenment tradition had treated religious belief as false — a primitive misunderstanding of nature that science would sweep away. Durkheim rejected this. A social institution as universal and enduring as religion, he argued, could not rest on pure illusion; it must correspond to something real in human experience. His study of totemism was the means by which he set out to identify that reality.
Durkheim's method was to seek out the elementary form of religion — its simplest and most primitive expression — on the reasoning that in the simplest case the essential elements would appear stripped of the later accretions that obscure them in the great world religions. He found this elementary form in the totemism of the Australian Aboriginal clans, which he took, on the ethnographic evidence available to him, to be the most rudimentary religion known. If he could show what religion essentially is in this simplest case, he believed the finding would hold for all religion.
His first step was to define religion not by belief in gods or spirits, since many religions lack a supreme deity, but by the division of the world into two mutually exclusive domains: the sacred and the profane. The profane is the sphere of everyday, ordinary life — work, routine, individual concerns. The sacred is a realm set apart and forbidden, surrounded by prohibitions and treated with awe and reverence. Every religion, Durkheim held, rests on this fundamental classification, and religion itself he defined as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, which unite their adherents into a single moral community he called a church. The sacred–profane distinction is thus the universal mark of the religious.
Turning to totemism, Durkheim observed that each clan takes as its emblem a totem — usually an animal or plant — which is regarded as sacred. The totem is not merely a name but the clan's collective symbol, carved on its churingas and bull-roarers, and it is these representations of the totem that are treated as most intensely sacred of all. Here Durkheim posed the decisive question: what is it that the members of the clan are really worshipping when they venerate the totem? The totemic animal itself is often an ordinary, unimpressive creature; the sacredness plainly does not derive from the animal's own qualities.
His answer is the heart of the argument. The totem, he reasoned, is at once the symbol of the totemic god or principle and the symbol of the clan itself. But if the sacred emblem stands for both, then the god and the clan must be one and the same thing. The force that the worshipper feels as sacred, external and superior to himself — a power that constrains him, that he depends upon, that outlives him — is real, but it is not a supernatural being. It is society. In venerating the totem, the clansman is unknowingly venerating the collective power of his own community.
Durkheim supported this through the phenomenon he called collective effervescence. In the daily dispersed life of the profane, the Aborigine feels no religious emotion. But when the clan gathers for its ceremonies, the very act of assembly generates a heightened, transported state — a collective excitement in which the individual feels lifted beyond himself and swept up in a force greater than his own. This experience is genuine and powerful, but the participant misattributes its source. He locates the moral energy that in fact arises from the assembled group in the totem that presides over the rite. Religion is thus born in these moments of gathering, when the reality of society is directly felt as a sacred force and fixed upon a symbol.
This is the precise sense in which Durkheim demonstrates the reality of religion. Religion is not false. Its beliefs, taken literally, may be mistaken — there is no totemic spirit inhabiting the animal — but the sentiment behind them corresponds to something entirely real. Behind the symbol of the god stands the reality of society, which is indeed a power external to and greater than the individual, which does command his obedience and inspire his reverence, and on which he genuinely depends. The believer feels this dependence truly; he merely misnames its cause. As Durkheim put it, the idea of society is the soul of religion. Far from being an illusion, religion is a symbolic representation of the most real thing in human life — the collective existence of the group.
From this follows the functional dimension that confirms religion's reality. Because it expresses society, religion also sustains it. Its rituals periodically reassemble the group and renew the shared sentiments and the collective conscience on which social solidarity depends. Religion strengthens the bonds between members, reaffirms common values and integrates the individual into the moral community. It is real not only in what it represents but in what it does: a functioning, indispensable institution that binds society together.
In demonstrating all this through totemism, Durkheim reframed the whole question of religion. The issue is not whether gods exist but what religious life reveals about the nature of society. Religion is real because society is real, and religion is society worshipping itself under a symbolic form. This is a sociological rather than a theological reality, but it is a reality nonetheless — and that is precisely what Durkheim's study of totemism was designed to establish.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner is testing whether you can reconstruct an argument, not just recall a theory. The pivot of the answer is the phrase "reality of religion," and the best scripts foreground it: Durkheim is answering the sceptics who called religion an illusion. Answers that merely summarise totemism without reaching the claim that society is the true object of worship miss the point of the question.
Reward-earning steps are the choice of the elementary form and the reason for it, the sacred–profane definition, the identification of totem-god-clan, and collective effervescence as the mechanism. The single most important sentence to land is that the believer feels a real force but misnames it: the reality is society. Concluding with the functional role — ritual renewing solidarity and the collective conscience — shows you grasp why, for Durkheim, religion is both true and necessary.
A frequent weakness is to lapse into general description of Durkheim's functionalism. Keep the answer tethered to totemism and to the specific demonstration of religion's reality that the question demands.