Breaking down the question

The command word is assess, which asks for more than exposition: the candidate must lay out the Durkheimian distinction between the sacred and the profane, explain the work it does in his sociology of religion, and then weigh its strengths against the criticisms it has attracted.

The analytical core is Durkheim's claim that the dichotomy between sacred and profane is the defining feature of all religion — the one universal that survives across faiths — and that the sacred is ultimately society representing itself to its members. Assessing the notion means testing that claim.

Threads to develop:

  • The meaning of the sacred and the profane, and their radical separation.
  • Their place in Durkheim's argument that religion is a social, not a supernatural, phenomenon.
  • The merits and the limits of the distinction.

How to approach it

Open by defining the two categories precisely and stressing that Durkheim locates the essence of religion not in belief in gods but in the division of the world into sacred and profane realms. Explain how he derives this from his study of totemism among Australian Aboriginal clans in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Then draw out the sociological payoff: the sacred is the collective, society experienced as a moral force, generated in moments of collective effervescence. The note on sociological theories of religion and the profile of Emile Durkheim support this exposition.

Close the assessment by acknowledging the reductionism and the fuzziness of the boundary that critics identify, while affirming the enduring value of treating religion as a social fact.

Model answer

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) Emile Durkheim argued that the essence of religion lies not in belief in gods or spirits — many religions have none — but in a universal classification of the world into two mutually exclusive domains: the sacred and the profane. The profane is the realm of the ordinary, the everyday, the instrumental — work, routine, individual need. The sacred is the realm of the set-apart and the forbidden, things surrounded by prohibition and treated with reverence. What makes a thing sacred is not any quality intrinsic to it — a stone, an emblem, an animal may serve — but the collective attitude a society adopts towards it. The two domains are kept rigorously separate, and rites, taboos and rituals police the boundary between them.

Durkheim derived this from the study of totemism among Australian Aboriginal clans, which he took to be the simplest known religion. The totem — an animal or plant — is sacred to the clan, and Durkheim observed that it is also the emblem of the clan itself. From this he drew his celebrated conclusion: in worshipping the totem, the clan is unknowingly worshipping society. The sacred is society experienced as an external, compelling moral force. Religion is therefore a social fact, and the "god" it venerates is the collectivity in symbolic disguise.

The sacred is generated, Durkheim held, in moments of collective effervescence — the heightened emotional intensity of assembled ritual, when individuals, drawn together, feel a power greater than themselves. This experience regenerates the collective conscience, reaffirms shared values, and binds the group. Religion thus performs the essential function of social integration, and the sacred–profane dichotomy is the conceptual key to that function.

The notion has real strengths. It offers a genuinely universal definition of religion, applicable where belief in the supernatural is absent, and it decisively relocates religion from the individual psyche to social life. It illuminates why sacred objects command such reverence and why the boundary is defended so fiercely. It also anticipates the study of secular sacreds — the flag, the nation, the constitution — that ritual can consecrate.

Yet the notion attracts serious criticism. It rests on reductionism: to say the sacred is "only" society explains religion away rather than on its own terms, and slights the believer's own experience of transcendence. The evidence base is thin — a contested reading of Australian ethnography generalised to all religion. Critics note that the sacred–profane boundary is not everywhere so sharp; in many traditions the two interpenetrate, and Mircea Eliade, while retaining the dichotomy, treated the sacred as an irreducible reality rather than a social projection. Finally, the framework fits integrative, communal religion better than the individualised, privatised faith of modern societies.

On balance, the sacred–profane distinction remains one of the most fertile ideas in the sociology of religion. Even those who reject Durkheim's reduction of the divine to the social concede that he established religion as a proper object of sociological study and gave the discipline a durable analytical tool.

Examiner's perspective

Examiners look first for a precise grasp of the two categories and, crucially, for the point that sacredness is conferred by society, not inherent in the object. A script that merely glosses sacred as "holy" and profane as "worldly" misses the sociological argument entirely.

The assessment must be genuine. Strong answers do not stop at exposition but weigh the notion — crediting its universality and its relocation of religion to the social, while noting the reductionism, the slim evidence and the porous boundary. Naming Eliade as a contrasting voice signals wider reading.

The examples that lift a ten-marker are the totem–clan identity that anchors Durkheim's inference, and the modern secular sacreds — flag, nation — that show the concept's reach. Kept concise and balanced, such an answer secures the top band.