ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a new perspective that flows from Emile Durkheim's sociology: Religion is a cultural phenomenon that enables society to communicate its hidden state of being to itself and its members. It provides an analysis of Robert N. Bellah's famous notion of American civil religion, and the neoconservative trend it represents, contrasted with what Durkheim might have intended with his own implicit notion of civil religion, in the context of J. J. Bachofen's dramatic departure from the patriarchal view of history. It also provides an analysis of the most important division of labor and antagonism in culture, the role of masculinity and femininity in modern life, and presents Erich Fromm's call for a reconciliation of masculine with feminine elements in religion as a possible resolution of some of the contradictions that emerge in postmodern discourse. Feminine archetypes are emerging in the many guises documented by E. W. Gadon in her Goddess Within, as well as by other feminist writers.
