Living in the most disturbed institution in a society which shows all the signs of acute cultural and social crisis is not very comfortable. It does, however, present great opportunities if we can take advantage of them. The present generation of students is not inclined to accept anything without question. We all have some experience of what that means in the realm of politics. In the field of religion, though, the consequences are somewhat curious.

The establishment view of religion in American universities today is what I have called “enlightenment fundamentalism.” This is the view that science and historical scholarship have effectively disposed of fallacious religious beliefs. If the study of religion has any place in the university at all, which is doubtful to enlightenment fundamentalists, it is to disclose the true reasons why religious believers have been so misguided. The present student generation is not at all prepared to accept these presuppositions. In fact many students feel that there is probably more of importance in primitive shamanism than in all the cut-and-dried rationality that college professors serve up to them. Indeed there are people on every major campus in America practicing magic at this very moment.

As with every other aspect of our present situation this one is full of danger and of possibility. Let me be a bit autobiographical in indicating how I have tried to cope with it.

I will begin with two caveats. I have decided to leave the bulk of this chapter as it was written in 2007, representing the atmosphere in the United States and the world at a time we considered “normal,” and then in conclusion append a brief discussion of how later events have forced a change in everyone's thinking. Second, I have cited Christianity in my title because it is the religion with whose impact on global culture I am most concerned here, but I do not mean to privilege Christianity. A genuine global cultural consensus will need the contribution of all the religions.

In my essay “Civil Religion in America,” first published in Daedalus in 1967, I discussed toward the end the possibility of what I called a “world civil religion.” Naive though it may sound today, the idea of a world civil religion as expressing “the attainment of some kind of viable and coherent world order,” was the imagined resolution of what I then called America's third time of trial (the first time was concerned with independence; the second with slavery), an idea later developed in my book The Broken Covenant. The third time of trial, as I then put it, was concerned with America's place in the world, and indeed what kind of world it would have a place in. That “viable and coherent world order” for which I hoped, would, I believed, require “a major new set of symbolic forms.

Although this chapter will begin with Émile Durkheim's ([1912] 1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Elementary Forms), I will focus on the place of ritual in the Durkheimian tradition, rather than add to the already enormous amount of explication of that book and the place of ritual in it. Even so, because of the vast influence of Durkheim on several disciplines, my treatment will be highly selective. I will focus on the ways in which ritual continues to be central for the understanding not only of religion, but of society.

There is probably no better place to begin a discussion of the place of ritual in the thought of Émile Durkheim than with a famous passage in his Elementary Forms:

There is probably no better place to begin a discussion of the place of ritual in the sociology of religion than with a famous passage in Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: