Little Skeleton and the Rubber Duckie. Durkheim and the Invisible Religion

Durkheim often writes about a “religion of the future” as “moral individualism”, “the cult of man” or “the cult of human personality”. He refers to an advanced stage of secularization, in which religion would not disappear (since it operates as a universal force of cohesion for collectivity), but its representations would move from a transcendent to a wholly human plane. In short, it will be a civil, fully secularised religion, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as its sacred text, whose believers would be radical Kantians. Yet, the reader of The Elementary Forms learns that these ingredients alone do not make religion, which would otherwise be mere moral sense, at least to the extent that human beings are not spiritual entities. Rather, religion must materialise in bodies, in their practices and interactions, and in the material qualities of everyday life. How does then the religion of man, or individual, come into being in secularised, opulent and consumerist societies? How does the “sacred matter” pervade mass culture and consumerist practices – the main basis for the articulation of social relations in the contemporary world? This essay offers some answers using Thomas Luckman’s concept of “invisibile religion”, and discussing ethnographic sources concerning ordinary material culture in domestic contexts.