Marx and Durkheim on Religion Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim, two of the most important social critics of the modern world, agree on very little about the functions and goals of religion and its place in modern societies. The one clear overlap in their assessments of religion is that it is immensely important and that no important critique of society can be complete without an examination of religion. This paper explores the approach that each of these theoreticians took in regards to an understanding of how religion functions.

Durkheim and Marx were historical contemporaries, and so it is in no way surprising that they should be interested in many of the same social issues. However, their personal circumstances and personal philosophies were sufficiently different that there is no possible way in which one could ever confuse the two. Durkheim (1858-1917) was in many ways the scion of the Encyclopedists and other French philosophers of the Enlightenment. Although he clearly had certain ideas about how society should work (that is, he was to some extent a prescriptive scholar), he was mostly concerned with how society does work. This latter approach is a descriptive one.

One of Durkheim's major concerns was that sociology be recognized as a legitimate science, something that could be applied with the same rigor as chemistry or biology. This is still a concern in the discipline, although there are differences of opinion today on whether this should remain a serious question. This emphasis on sociology as science pushed Durkheim toward the practice of sociology as descriptive.

Durkheim wanted sociologists to observe society accurately and carefully in the same way that a biologist did (Poggi, 2000, p. 3). Because...

One of Durkheim's fundamental concerns was how societies stick together. That is, given the number of forces pull and push society apart (everything from class conflict to high levels of immigration to the urbanization and industrialization of society), how is it that societies do not simply fall apart?
For him, one of the chief forces for cohesion was established religion. Religion helped people feel that they belonged to a community, and this sense of community helped them act in a range of ways that encouraged them to protect and support each other and to act in altruistic ways (Poggi, 2000, p. 5). This emphasis on aspects of society that pulls people together rather than pushing them apart is reflected in the following passage from 1893, from The Division of Labour in Society.

Man is only a moral being because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity. Cause all social life to vanish, and moral life would vanish at the same time, having no object to cling to.

Although he is explicitly referring to morality here rather than religion he is describing the same social force. His identification of religion and morality as fulfilling the same function can be seen in his definition of religion (from The Elementary Forms of Religious Life):

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden -- " beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those…