Crucifixes, Flags, and Idols: Emile Durkheim's Totems Today
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was the first professor of sociology, refining on the positivism of August Comte. He approached the mores and institutions of society as realities to be studied objectively (statistically if possible) in structural relation to each other. Earlier writers had condemned religion as bad science, false cosmology concocted by priests. Instead, Durkheim asserted that religions, like all living institutions, serve living purposes. Their truth resides in their power to produce social cohesion and cure the disease of anomie--the alienation and fragmentation that results from loss of shared meaning. Religions exist, not because priests invented them, but because they are stable and self-replicating social realities.
For skeptics in the 1700s, religion was simply bad science, destined to fall before the real thing. Auguste Comte (1788-1857), an early advocate of sociology, agreed with this but worried about it. For him, Christianity served vital functions, promoting morality and brotherhood, so he invented a scientific religion to replace it. The project failed, of course. Religion hasn't withered away as predicted, but Durkheim took up Comte's challenge to describe religion as sociology.
Durkheim's last book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), argues that religion is the most basic of all institutions, the basis of social organization and systematic thought. He asserts that the most fundamental form of religion is the totemism described in ethnographic studies of Australian aborigines. Their practices obviously aren't chronologically first but may reveal the common core of more elaborate religions. Totemism is, Durkheim argues, logically primary. His approach is, of course, reductive, like finding the "true" meaning of an English word in its Indo-European root. This approach may be informative, but its validity depends entirely on its ability to explain actual cross-cultural religious practices. As such, Durkheim's theory is powerful but incomplete, ignoring the private religions of individuals and all the specifics of theology and epistemology. Still, it explains otherwise irrational social practices, many of them not part of what we would normally call religion, but rather politics and art.
Totemism asserts two distinct domains, the sacred and the profane. Aboriginal tribes are organized into clans, each identified with a sacred totemic animal or plant. Each clan keeps a churinga, a piece of wood or stone at the center of clan gatherings, marked with the clan's symbol. Totemism isn't worship of the churinga itself (which can be replaced like a flag if it becomes worn), but, once consecrated, it embodies of a collective force that Durkheim called mana, felt as an "electricity" in gatherings of the clan, a "collective effervescence" that serves to unify a group of individuals. "This impersonal, extra-individual force, which is the core element of religion, transports the individuals into a new, ideal realm, lifts them up outside of themselves, and makes them feel as if they are in contact with an extraordinary energy" ("Emile Durkheim").
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| An Australian churinga |
It is a short step from this experience of mana, which Durkheim identified as the power of the group reflected back onto itself, to attributing mana to supernatural beings such as the patron gods of tribes, cities, and empires. Yahweh with his totemic Ark was the the patron of the Hebrews, Marduk of Babylon, Athena of Athens, and Jupiter of Rome. Their churingas, typically statues, were honored in temples. The king or emperor, claimed allegiance as a son or favorite of the god, creating religio-political solidarity in seasonal festivals of mana. It was the early Christian's refusal to participate in totemic festivals that drew Roman persecution, but Christianity soon adopted similar structures: the Pope, not the Emperor, became God's vicar, the cross a totemic object, and religious fathers, brothers, and sisters in one Christendom confirmed a calendar of festivals. Blessed by the Pope, kings claimed divine right and appointed bishops.
In Europe, the Reformation and the Enlightenment opened the floodgates of anomie, and the "collective effervescence" that Durkheim identified with totemic gatherings is muted today in mainstream Christianity, though still evident in Pentecostal and African-American churches. As anomie and social fragmentation increase, along political polarization and growing numbers of "nones," these mana-driven churches are growing, and nonreligious institutions also offer ritual solidarity.
Civic totemism can be lucrative. At first, I thought a new restaurant called Mission Barbecue might be Christian, but then I saw the antique army truck in front and understood a different kind of sacrifice. Last week, I went to eat there (by chance, exactly at noon) and stumbled on a totemic ritual. Everyone in the crowded restaurant was standing, baseball caps off, gazing up at a huge American flag hanging from the ceiling. A choral recording of the Star Spangled Banner swelled from speakers in the ceiling. I understood that I was in a sacred space, removed my own cap, and stood by the door. I dared not profane the moment by ordering lunch.
When the song ended, everyone suddenly donned caps and sat down to eat. We transitioned from sacred to profane time. The walls of the restaurant were shrines to non-clerical forms of government work: soldiers, sailors, airmen, police, firefighters, all the (mostly) men who protect the nation. Each half-wall panel honored a branch or occupation with heroic pictures and slogans, all about toughness. "The only easy day is yesterday." Most of the diners were older men, most in small groups, most (unlike me) seeming to be belong to of the clans honored. I felt like an intruder. Mission Barbecue was a temple, a tricolor totem in its center, to a sacred brotherhood, to the civic clans of American service, and it was doing brisk trade. I don't question the sincerity of the secular priests who founded it--perhaps they were the most devout--but they were making good money. Men attended regularly that noon ritual for the mana of patriotism.
Sacred totems are desecrated when they come into contact with the profane. We walk on the dirt freely, but a flag shouldn't touch it. Blue jeans may be ripped for stylish effect, but don't try that with the national flag. Blood is sacred, urine isn't. Early in a walk, my dog Rumi raises his leg over anything that protrudes from the ground--a mailbox post, a scrap of paper, a tuft of grass--marking territory. One of my neighbors had planted a little flag, the cheap kind waved at parades, at the base of his mail box. When Rumi pulled toward it, his intent clear, I jerked the poor dog back. This toy on a stick, five dollars a dozen on Amazon, was sacred unlike all the other protrusions nearby. Rumi moistened a profane tuft of grass, and ritual purity was inviolate.
This explains the visceral reaction to Colin Kaepernick's "taking the knee," especially among military veterans. Military service involves assemblies of the clan of national service, members standing in uniform, moving in unison, and saluting a flag as the anthem is played, infusions of collective mana directed toward battle, a sacred blood sacrifice for the nation. Figuratively but viscerally, they prepare to die for the flag, a totem more sacred than the Constitution. Nobody, I think, has proposed criminalizing the burning of a copy of that document. For the military, the flag represents--not the nation as it is--but a mana-nation to be revered and died for, and the national anthem creates sacred time, a time for veneration, not criticism, however valid. A veteran friend condemned Kaepernick's timing, not his message.
Veterans complain often about their government, but they understand flag-time to totemize an ideal body politic. Citizens of all parties are suppose to fight common enemies under a common flag and work out (or tolerate) differences beneath it. Donald Trump's defeat was formalized on January 6, 2021, in a flag-festooned Senate chamber after angry protestors brandished identical flags outside. There followed a sudden bloom of American flags on porches. My understanding is that both sides flew them, in triumph or defiance, both claiming the national mana. Everybody claimed the sacred totem. When one Facebook friend said he flew his against the policies of AOC, I posted a picture of her posing with the flag. One flag-flying neighbor on my block had a Trump bumper sticker, another a Biden sticker. I don't think this is a bad thing. It may save us.
It's easy to deconstruct flag rituals as arbitrary cloth-idolatry, noting that the rituals weren't codified until the 20th century, but this is like deconstructing the cash in my wallet as stained paper. Social structures and their symbols have real consequences.* As long as contending parties fight over the flag but still under it, respecting each other as citizens, we may be safe from the horrors of another civil war. Durkheim's totem theory of religion is reductive and incomplete, but it does explain bonding ceremonies that infuse individuals with collective spirit.
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| Emile Durkheim |
*I take complimentary, perhaps contradictory, positions in "National Flags and Secular Religion," https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/01/national-flags-and-secular-religion.html and "A Defense of Blasphemy," https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/05/blasphemy-and-freedom.html
Reference
"Emile Durkheim." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed April 10, 2022. https://iep.utm.edu/emile-durkheim/
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