![]() ![]() ![]() In The Forms, his arguably greatest work, Durkheim explicates the elemental social basis of religion to uncover its ultimate foundation in the “real,” declaring from the outset that “there are no religions that are false” (EFRL:2).1 Religion for Durkheim emerges from the substratum of the social since what the collectivity values “is the source of all religious experience” (cf. This argument is grounded in ethnographic data on interfaith engagement in Rome, Italy. Rather than a change agent, interfaith dialogue is actually an emergent form of multi-religious moral community, an enactment of European cosmopolitanism which attracts mostly people who already agree with each other about the value of pluralism. The function of the interfaith society is to generate social solidarity through the invocation of their commonly held sacred values in a variety of modalities that can be considered the “denominations” of the interfaith “religion.” One consequence of understanding interfaith communities in this light is that it deprioritizes questions about the social impact or concrete results of interfaith engagement, as interfaith work becomes less about producing results and more about developing meaningful relationships that are not subject to proof or quantification. Interfaith groups can be fruitfully interpreted through a Durkheimian framework as moral communities gathered on the basis of shared values and ritualistic discourses. ![]()
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