The apparent role of religion in everyday life is something that is frequently discounted in the contemporary world. Most individuals now consider themselves to be living in a mode in which direct engagement with conceptions of the sacred are no longer necessary. This paper will question this assumption by drawing on the world of Peter Berger and Emile Durkheim. By doing this, it will demonstrate that religion can continue to play a serious and nuanced role in the life-worlds of many people and that it continues to maintain a necessary relationship to both the worlds of the social and of the so-called “sacred.”
An understanding of the “sacred” is essential to an understanding of the social role of religion. The first mode of understanding it can be to take it as the direct empirical reference points for religious claims. A sacred object is one that contains a kind of literal religious significance, in the sense of a semiotics that would maintain that religious speech can be made about a sacred object, or that it can refer to a sacred object. This sacred object therefore forms a specific point of reference for the lived experience of a religious world.
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"The Role of Religion in Everyday Life".
In this sense, they can be become reference points for what Peter Berger terms the ‘nomos’ of a society This nomos, deriving the New Testament word for ‘law’ is understood as a specific mode of behaviour and series of beliefs that any possible society requires that is members internalize and live according to. Berger notes that several institutions exist which act to legitimise the nomos in the eyes of those who take part in social structures. This legitimisation may come about through legal institutions, through ideological institutions such as schools and education systems and through religions that are commensurable with a social nomos, such as most aspects of Christianity. Berger notes that this legitimising of the nomos was the primary role that religion played in pre-modern societies in which religious belief was wide-spread. Indeed this active legitimation of a life-world can still be taken as the primary role that religion plays in the construction of human worlds. This is to say that religion, from this perspective, can be understood to place itself alongside the demands and conventions of society and to mediate and influence how they are received by individuals at the same time as legitimating them in the vast majority of circumstances.
This sense of community and the construction of a life-world is equally present in Durkheim’s understanding of religion, especially with relation to the distinction between the sacred and the profane. Durkheim notes that the sacred realm and the profane are traditionally understood the be permanently separated, however individuals and objects can nonetheless be considered to be sacred. As such, according to Durkheim, religion is something that concerns itself with both the worldly and the spiritual by definition. In this sense, religion constructs a world by constructing an earthly community in and around objects that refer to something which occupies a fundamentally different space to the profane. In this sense, both Berger and Durkheim can be seen to have similar views of how religion constructs human worlds in the sense that they both understand it to be something that generates a community of people around objects that exist in a context that is simultaneously social and sacred.
In conclusion, I would argue that the role of religion in the construction of human worlds can be seen to be two fold. Firstly, it involves the construction of a shared context for individuals in which their action may take place. Secondly, this construction is related both to the sacred objects of the religion and also to the society in which the religion takes place. Ultimately, it is by mediating the relationship between people, the sacred and the society within which a religion takes place that religion is most active in the construction of human worlds.
