Apocalyptic Party: Religion as the Social Response to Crisis
During World War II, the islanders of Melanesia witnessed foreign soldiers unloading vast quantities of food, machinery and technology they had never seen before. When the soldiers departed, the islanders built bamboo replicas of aeroplanes and runways, even mimicking military practices using abandoned equipment. All in hope of summoning back the cargo they believed was rightfully theirs. What's fascinating is that they continued these rituals even after being taken to Australia and shown how these goods were manufactured. Why? Because their ritual wasn't really about the cargo. It was about maintaining a sense of order in a world that had been turned upside down.
These days, things feel unstable on multiple levels. It seems like every time we open our phones, there's a fire hydrant of outrage, emergencies, political divides and tragedies blasting us in the face. It can feel like the systems we relied on are failing and the old ways of thinking no longer make sense. At the same time, many people coming forward to solve these crises seem more rigid, exclusive and religious than in recent times. A strong messiah rising like a phoenix from the ashes. Because in moments like these, people often don't turn to solidarity. They turn to religion.
Religion in crisis is like that one friend who you call when your life is falling apart. You don't speak to them for years when things are going well, but the minute your relationship breaks down or you lose your job, suddenly you're at their kitchen table at 3am, completely hammered, asking for the meaning of life. Because when the floor falls out from under us, we reach for something solid, even if it's just an empty promise and someone to tell us we're not completely screwed.
But religion has always been there. Hovering in the background like some vigilante superhero. Just not religion as we often think of it. Not just a set of doctrines or arguments for a supreme being's existence. Religion, at its core, is something far more primal. It is society's way of responding to crisis, of holding itself together when the ground beneath it starts to shake. Because religion is not just about ideas. It is about survival. The most basic religious commandments—don't kill, don't steal, honour the gods—are not arbitrary rules. They are the bare minimum required for a society to function.
This is not to say that religion is about gods. In fact, that misses the point entirely. What we call God is an abstraction for the coherence of society itself. The universality of a deity tends to match the complexity of the society it governs. Simple tribal societies have tribal gods. Complex trade networks develop more universal deities like capital, liberal values, borders, nationalism. Religion becomes a social technology, evolving to meet social needs.
The French sociologist Émile Durkheim saw religion not primarily as a set of supernatural beliefs, but as social glue. A collective consciousness that binds individuals together into a moral community. For Durkheim, religious rituals weren't about appeasing gods; they were about reaffirming social bonds. When we worship together, we're really worshipping society itself and strengthening the collective values that make communal life possible.
Durkheim called these "social facts"—phenomena that exist outside of individual consciousness but constrain and shape our behaviour. Any group that didn't enforce these norms would collapse. Religion, then, is the abstraction of these social necessities. It is the story a society tells itself to justify why things must be done a certain way. He writes “The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system of collective representations which may be termed the collective consciousness.” Meaning that the common beliefs and feelings people in a society share create a collective way of thinking that helps hold the community together.
However, when material conditions decline, when the old order starts to fray, people don't abandon belief. They reshape it. They look for saviours, for purifying forces, for someone or something to sweep away corruption and restore balance.
We see this pattern repeat throughout history. In first-century Palestine, Christianity emerged as a millenarian movement, which is the belief that the world is coming to an end and that a new kingdom is coming. The christians believed that the corrupt powers of Rome would be overthrown and that a saviour would return. Two thousand years later, we see similar impulses in movements like QAnon, where a hidden saviour is expected to cleanse the world of evil elites. The details change, but the structure remains the same: crisis, then salvation.
This explains why, in times of prosperity, religion often fades into the background. When the good times are raging and the future is so bright it's burning our eyeballs, we don't need strict rules to keep us in line. We cooperate because cooperation benefits us. But when scarcity sets in, when trust erodes, religion reasserts itself—not as a gentle moral guide, but as a buffer against chaos.
Durkheim would recognise this pattern in what he called "anomie"—a state of normlessness where social bonds weaken and individuals feel disconnected from shared values. Religion steps in to combat anomie, to restore the sacred boundaries that keep society intact. It provides what Durkheim termed "mechanical solidarity"—a sense of sameness and shared purpose that binds people together.
When someone says "honour the gods," what they’re really saying is "conserve the coherence of society." Honour the way society has been until now because, speaking evolutionarily, it did get us this far. This is why all religious fervor is, paradoxically, a conservative force. It resists change while appearing revolutionary. It places the burden of action on a saviour, requiring followers merely to support rather than to act. Religion functions, as it always has, as the justification to do as little as possible.
In Part 2, we'll explore why this makes religion both insufficient for solving genuine crises and potentially dangerous when wielded by political messiahs. We'll examine how religious impulses manifest in our current social landscape and consider what Durkheim might say about building a more robust form of solidarity for our troubled times.