It was Durkheim’s argument, in The Elementary Forms of The Religious Life,
that most of the serious misperceptions about religion have come from treat-
ing it as a system of ideas, when it is in fact a system of practices. He argued
that, as practices, religions have many things in common that in terms of
their beliefs appear to be completely different. He set out in The Elementary
Forms (Durkheim 1912, Rawls 2005) to show how – if religion was treated as
a system of practices – instead of as a system of ideas – it could be shown
that all religions have a common purpose in their practices, and that even
so-called primitive religions that appeared to western scholars to have mag-
ical aspects – and consequently were not considered to be really religions –
turn out to be religions in just the same ways as modern religions when
approached in terms of practices. This reduces ethnocentricism and discov-
ers a common moral center in human social practices.
To treat the result of material activity as real – while treating the activity
itself as inconsequential – is to let ideology replace the concrete social rela-
tions that comprise social and economic life. This is a dialectical contradic-
tion resulting from and consistent with the tendency of modern society to
replace all concrete social relations with reified conceptual “things” that are
treated as independent when they are not. Durkheim argued (1895) that this
view of social order belongs to the past and locks us into an emphasis on
belief and value that threatens our ability to maintain solidarity in a modern
context (Rawls 2003). Social solidarity is a matter of practice not consensus
of belief and value. Trust is required by the necessity to cooperatively enact
practices – it is not a belief state. Marx also argued that instead of focusing
on ideas, we must focus on social relationships themselves – concretely as
material relations and in details – in order to avoid the absurd reifications of
the economists, philosophers and religious thinkers of his day.
With regard to religion and the study of religion, however, this dialectical
contradiction is even more deeply ironic than with other social facts, as reli-
gion has come, rather uniquely, to be treated as primarily about beliefs – and
not about the practices that constitute it. In subjecting religion to an exami-
nation of practices in their witnessable details, we hope to illuminate the
dialectical contradiction involved in all relationships between ideology and
practice. It is through a focus on practice that Marx and Durkheim hoped
that Sociology could resolve these issues. Contemporary sociologies of prac-
tice inspired by Garfinkel and Goffman carry on this tradition.
284 • Bonnie Wright and Anne Warfield Rawls