Evolutionary Development, Religious Coding and Religious Modernity Updating Three Main Aspects of Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion

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Abstract

Even if more than a century separates our time from the time when The elementary forms of religious life was published, the ideas that Durkheim developed in that book still resonate all over contemporary sociology.
However, not all of Durkheim’s ideas have aged equally well. In that sense, the main goal of the following paper is to update three of the main aspects of Durkheim’s sociology of religion, namely: the social origins of religion, the main distinction that is used to observe the world from a religious point of view and the role of religion in modern society. In order to do this I will draw upon contemporary empirical and theoretical sources such as the sociology of religion of Robert Bellah, the theory of interaction ritual chains of Randall Collins and the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. This updating will set the foundations of a contemporary sociological theory of religion.

Author

• Jorge Galindo, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana