Bluesky

The presidential call for “unity” is a bipartisan tradition. After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Barack Obama urged Americans to cultivate “a sense of unity.” Joe Biden made a “plea for national unity” the centerpiece of his 2021 inauguration, and Trump referred to unity as the theme of both his inaugural addresses. Trump was criticized for his hypocrisy in being so divisive himself, but I take him at his word: The Trumpist fantasy is premised on the creation of a particularly cruel united front in which his foes are liquidated, leaving behind only his ardent supporters. (Indeed, his proud declaration of hate for his enemies at the memorial for Charlie Kirk might as well amount to a call for togetherness in the conservative ranks.)

When discussing unity, presidents will often couch it in religious terms, as if longing to dissolve into some great national oneness. Trump, hardly the most devout figure, presented unity as a Christian ideal at his first inauguration: “The Bible tells us how good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.” Biden, a practicing Catholic who liked to talk about healing the “soul of the nation,” told the crowd at the National Mall, “Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this. Bringing America together, uniting our people.”

Unity may seem on its face to be socially and spiritually beneficial, and, of course, nobody should want violence, division, or chaos. It’s entirely plausible, though, that we shouldn’t pursue national unity right now; perhaps we should want class conflict, upheavals to an unjust social order, dramatic outpourings of productive disunity. In the wrong hands, ideals like unity—especially when infused with religious sentiment—can distract from a focus on justice and the material struggle needed to improve our societies.

Sociologists have long studied how religious ideals and sentiments permeate social and political norms. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the discipline was founded by intellectuals who argued that religious impulses had shaped how we organized our communities, the capitalist economy, and much else. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science, which examines the spiritual kernel present in secular society, focuses on four pioneering social scientists who helped invent the field of sociology: the French intellectual Émile Durkheim, the German philosopher Georg Simmel, the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, and the German social theorist Max Weber. These thinkers proposed that “the social and religious…were inextricable categories,” Appiah writes, interwoven in such a way that hidden spiritual impulses could be found in all aspects of society.

In their personal lives, these theorists came themselves to exemplify the uneasy marriage of the social and the religious. When World War I broke out, for example, Simmel and other social scientists saw the conflict as an engine of “spiritual renewal,” becoming rabid champions of the transcendent unity that the war brought to German society. Nationalist politics met their spiritual hunger for collective ecstasy, as the MAGA movement does for Trump supporters, who see him as a messiah. “When we think about society, we still use their lenses,” Appiah writes of his book’s subjects. What can we learn from the mistakes these men made in responding to their times?

Appiah begins from the premise that sociology emerged in the late 19th century in response to the decline of Christianity throughout Europe. As industrialization, urbanization, and the attendant dissolution of traditional communities advanced, some scholars were tempted to see the emergence of an entirely secular realm, divorced from religious influence. But to Durkheim—the son, grandson, and great-grandson of rabbis—every aspect of social life could be understood as religious. Durkheim critiqued scholars who suggested that religion mainly played an “explanatory role” on the nature of the cosmos that was being filled in modern times by science; he argued instead that religion was essentially a social force, binding communities around shared symbols and rituals. As the power of traditional religions over European societies eroded, those societies were still behaving in ways that Durkheim saw as fundamentally religious, even when they didn’t realize it.

To Durkheim, the heart of religion is a division between the sacred and the profane, a division he saw running through all of society. In his view, an object, symbol, or person becomes sacred by representing a people or community. For example, a flag acquires its status as a sacred object—ringed around with prohibitions against its being burned or even touching the ground—by signifying a shared land, history, and identity. Organizing themselves around these symbols, groups gather for shared rituals—the singing of the national anthem at a baseball game, the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of a school day—and experience what Durkheim famously termed “collective effervescence,” an experience of mutual bodily attunement that leaves participants feeling charged with energy, caught up in one another’s emotions. A congregation singing a hymn and that patriotic crowd at the baseball game are, in Durkheim’s telling, both engaging in the same—and fundamentally religious—activity because, as he saw it, religion isn’t about the supernatural; it’s about the experience of being lifted out of one’s isolated self and dissolving into a larger social whole. The very function of religion is to produce experiences of social unity.

In a sense, Durkheim’s sociological project can be understood as making the case that a culture facing the decline of traditional religiosity was still, at its core, knit together by experiences that mimicked faith. Like Durkheim, the other thinkers that Appiah profiles lived during a time—the late 19th and early 20th centuries—when institutional religious influence was waning in Europe. For Simmel, the erosion of religious structures of spiritual nourishment and meaning led to a “feeling of life’s emptiness and worthlessness,” which he contrasts with a religious person’s “fullness of being.” In a famous lecture, the stern, impassioned Weber bemoaned the “disenchantment of the world,” the loss of the “prophetic pneuma that once swept through congregations like a firestorm, welding them together.” In Germany and France, Simmel, Weber, and Durkheim all observed the weakening of traditional religious authority, but also the stubborn persistence of religious longings for meaning, moral clarity, and transcendence.

While religious communities were in decline, industrialization was tearing at Europe’s social fabric. Factories drew people from villages into cities, weakening rural kinship networks and communities. Simmel was profoundly influenced by a theorist, Gustav Schmoller, who anticipated that “the division of labor” in industrialized, capitalist societies would threaten social “cohesion” via “the creation of social classes,” Appiah writes, which proved prescient as urban poverty and unrest grew. Anarchist violence—bombings in public places, high-profile assassinations—soon sowed fears of wholesale social upheaval. European elites became terrified of fracture and public violence.

Nationalism represented a countervailing force of cohesion. France had lost Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), and politicians, newspaper editors, and social reformers pushed the need for national pride in the pursuit of revanchisme, or revenge. With Germany unified under Prussian leadership, German elites also promoted nationalism to bind the country’s various states. Primed for nationalist enthusiasm, the French and German people welcomed the eruption of World War I in 1914.