Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, which posits the distinction between sacred and profane as the keystone of human understanding, grounds not only his approach to religion and epistemology but also his theory of modernity. This distinction between traditional and modern social forms is essential to Durkheim’s position. In traditional society, social facts are produced through consensus. Durkheim’s theory of modernity, however, focuses on the role of constitutive practices in the creation of modern social facts in situations lacking consensus. A tendency to consider the sacred only in traditional consensus-oriented (religious and symbolic) terms leads to the impression that modern society has entered a crisis period in which the sacred and the social facts the sacred/profane distinction make possible are in short supply. While Durkheim acknowledged a crisis in the transition to modernity, he maintained that new forms of constitutive practice would develop to replace the religious and cultural commonalities of the past, making it possible for modern society to produce strong collective solidarity, mutual intelligibility, and a new moral grounding in freedom and justice. The sacred essentially relocates, shedding its “institutional” character and becoming situated, “ordinary,” and self-organizing. In this article, we take three modern social facts and the constitutive practices they depend on, examining the moral and contractual relationships they enact, the reciprocities they require, and the distribution of participation they facilitate.
