Does faith lead to the social virtue of solidarity? Yes, because “obedience follows faith”, as said by Thomas Aquinas. Emile Durkheim, on the other hand, points to the value of faith for developing social solidarity by taking us in a completely different direction from that of Aquinas: “The beneficent influence of religion is not due to the special nature of religious conceptions.” He continues, “If religion protects man against the desire for self-destruction, it is not that it preaches the respect for his own person to him with arguments sui generis; but because it is a society.”
The key point from Durkheim is that “religion preserves men from suicide because and in so far as it is a society.” Accordingly, suicide is not merely a personal tragedy, but a sociologically predictable consequence of the degree to which one is integrated into society, in this case, religious society. “The more numerous and strong these collective states of mind are, the stronger the integration of the religious community, and also the greater its preservative value”, as said by Emile Durkheim.
Religion clearly has the ability to develop societies of “shared aims, shared goals”, as suggested by Heather Battaly in the traits of solidarity (trust, Battaly’s final component of solidarity, is discussed later in this blog post), otherwise the practice of faith would not produce societal “preservative value”, as put by Durkheim. Therefore, we can safely say that, yes, faith does lead to the social virtue of solidarity.
As said by Dr. Phillip McGraw in ‘We’ve Got Issues’: “In a divided society, a communal worshiping experience helps create unity and social cohesion. This has major implications, because the absence of social cohesion is one of the key preconditions for conflict and violence.”
Solidarity based on relationality, connectedness, and the importance of the future flows from faith. A study in Britain, in fact, showed that religious community participation in general does present a positive association with majority-minority connectedness. See below a slightly modified version of the study’s Figure 2.
Yes, faith does lead to solidarity.
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