The video below on Durkheim is from our course "Journey Through Religion."

Much of Emile Durkheim’s work focuses on religion, and it is fair to say that he advanced our theoretical understandings of religion even beyond the sub-field of the sociology of religion.  

He argued that religion was the most fundamental social institution and that it gave rise to other institutions. Religion, according to Durkheim, gave humanity its most substantial form of collective consciousness.

While Durkheim's theories are used extensively today by scholars in the field of religion, it is still important to remember that he was a sociologist and not a religion scholar.