From Religious Practices to Religious Narratives as Sense-Making Models Supporting Solidarity in Society

Taking into account Durkheim’s declaration about religion as a base for human solidarity, this article aims to trace the dynamics of those mechanisms that allow religion to play this role in transient conditions. The paper demonstrates how E. Durkheim’s theoretical programme is interpreted by one of his followers, the founder of cultural sociology J. Alexander, and how it is used in cultural and sociological methodology. The paper also draws attention to the fact that J. Alexander remains within the paradigm proposed by E. Durkheim, in which cognitive and social structures correlate and interact; however, at the same time he develops the Weberian approach emphasising an important role of such symbolic systems as language, myth, narrative in the organisation of human experience, behaviour and consciousness. J. Alexander draws on both approaches to the understanding of religion, but redefines religion as a discourse or as a series of narratives that transmits, on the one hand, a certain tradition of describing social reality, and, on the other hand, makes possible for this reality to be rewritten and to acquire a different meaning. The paper demonstrates the relevance of E. Durkheim’s basic assumption about the solidifying role of religion and describes the way how the emphasis on the authorising role of religious practices is gradually moving to the sense-building function of religious narratives