have a central deity, do not appear to be religions at all. Weber classified these
forms of practice as “magic.” From Durkheim’s perspective this was a seri-
ous mistake. Because the essence of religion lies in its practices, Durkheim
argued that the distinction between religion and magic must be based on an
analysis of practices and not beliefs. According to Durkheim the popular view
that religions are superior is wrong. The mistake results from not recogniz-
ing the priority of practice over belief. Durkheim had argued earlier, in The
Division of Labor in Society(1895) that it was only through the development
of social relations in which practices had once again been set free to run ahead
of beliefs that modern western society showed the promise of progressing
toward justice and democracy.
When the distinction between beliefs and practices becomes a focus it is
apparent that practice and belief stand in a tension with one another that is
essentially dialectical. This was Durkheim’s position in The Elementary Forms
of The Religious Life(Durkheim 1912; Rawls 2005). He argued that while
accounts and beliefs can be achieved and sustained only through practice –
once they have been achieved, beliefs (and their adherents) tend to treat prac-
tices as unimportant. Practices are no longer allowed to “run ahead” of beliefs,
but become constrained by them. This is true not only in religion, but, as
Garfinkel points out, is a characteristic of theoretical thinking in general
(Garfinkel [1948]2006). For various reasons ideas have a strong tendency to
obscure their own origins. Marx ([1845]1956) Durkheim (1912) and Garfinkel
([1948]2005) each took scholars to task for uncritically allowing this tendency
to influence their thinking. They point out that social relationships in mate-
rial details are the actual causes of social phenomena, and the cause of ideas
- not the reverse.
Treating beliefs and narrative accounts as the causes of social orders, reifies
ideas that result from social relations of practices and treats ideas as the cause
of those social relations that create them. This inversion creates a false pic-
ture of practices that not only sustains the idea that religious beliefs are inde-
pendent of the collective practice of religion, but also that social processes in
general are in some profound way independent of the details of the local
order practices that produce them. Most social science is based on this premise:
the importance of generalizeability being just one indication. By contrast,
both Marx and Durkheim advocated an approach to the study of social rela-
tions that focused on underlying relations concretely. Garfinkel argued that
allowing any conceptual reification to directthe study of social order would
result in that order remaining obscured by an overlay of abstraction.
Speaking in Tongues: A Dialectic of Faith and Practice • 251