Religion as Control: A Durkheimian Lens on a Daily Ritual

Religion as Control: A Durkheimian Lens on a Daily Ritual

En route to my workplace, I often come across an unusual scene: people park their big cars and offer food to cows on the highway. It is a common sight to see men dressed in business suits stepping out of their cars for this practice. To a modern educated mind, this may appear as superstition.

Interestingly, I have been reading Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In it, he offers a fascinating explanation. He writes:

“Religion itself helps to give him that security, for it is believed to arm him with broad powers over nature. In part, the rites are meant to enable him to impose his wishes on the world. Thus, far from being inspired by a sense man has of his smallness before the universe, religions have the opposite inspiration. The effect of even the most elevated and idealistic is one of reassuring man in his struggle with things. It professes that faith, by itself, is able ‘to move mountains’—that is, to dominate the forces of nature.”

They wanted to invent something bigger than themselves—something that could hold meaning, order, and power over the forces shaping their lives. I was surprised by his assertion that religion emerged as a way to make sense of such forces, and to feel less powerless in the face of them. Similarly, Max Müller saw all religion as “an effort to conceive the inconceivable and to express the inexpressible, an aspiration toward the infinite.”

These ideas felt phenomenal to me because they connect directly to what I see every day. It’s all about control.

Looking back at 10,000 years of human civilization, it would seem that through scientific inventions, we have demystified the world. We know so much more than our ancestors did. But when it comes to having actual control over our lives—the situations and institutions that shape us—I don’t think we are much different from early humans. In fact, if we look closely, control is shifting away from us and toward institutions and people we don’t even know.

The medicine we take, the food we eat, the water we drink, or the air we breathe—we have very little say in any of it. Control is concentrating in the hands of a few unknown entities. Democratic institutions promised transparency and accountability—but those mechanisms now seem to be failing. As a result, modern humans are left with a deeper lack of control over what shapes their future and trajectory.

If religion was originally a tool to regain a sense of stability and control in a confusing world, then it stands to reason that religiosity will only increase as control slips further away from the average person. If I infer from Durkheim’s analysis, the majority of people—those who are losing their grip on their own lives—will become more religious as a way to seek that lost control. Meanwhile, for the few who actually control these institutions, religion will remain a convenient instrument to rule over the rest.