The moral force of the sacred-profane distinction Durkheim tends to equivocate
between religion and sacred in his texts. The religious is defined in terms of the
sacred, but he will often refer to the religious, rather than the sacred, as the
source of moral rules.
The sacred may be defined as those things set apart, and identified by taboos,
which set it apart from the profane. The profane, the opposite of the sacred, is
not a clear concept. Durkheim never defines it although commentators have
listed its characteristics as ‘ordinariness’, ‘work’, ‘individual’, or the ‘body’.
According to Durkheim, in both modern and pre-modern life, morality can be
defined by the interdictions of taboos around the sacred. ‘It is impossible to
imagine on the evidence,’ Durkheim states, ‘that morality should entirely sever
its unbroken historic association with religion without ceasing to be itself’.25
In Professional Ethics and Civic Morals he argues, ‘Man is a moral being only
because he lives within established societies. There are no morals without
discipline and authority…Morals do not seem like obligations to us, that is, they
do not seem like morals to us—and therefore we can have no sense of
duty—unless there exists about us and above us a power which gives them
sanction’.26 What is clear in this comment is that the moral injunctions are those
that preserve the sacred—and are based on a rules/duty model of morality. These
rules are the sanctions or taboos around the sacred. In a sense, the taboos maintain
and preserve the sacred. Durkheim goes on to acknowledge that individuals
develop their own image of God and spirituality, but this cannot be a source of
ethics for Durkheim. He argues that it is the authoritarian, and not the individual,
conception of the sacred that is the source of ethics on the grounds that if the
authority of the state is weakened, the sense of duty and therefore of ethics is
also weakened, and this leads to a general anarchy and immorality