The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (57 page)

That story is told by a tribal people in northern New Guinea. The story exemplifies a widespread class of myths called origin myths, familiar to us through accounts of the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel in the Bible’s book of Genesis. Despite those parallels with Judeo-Christian religions, traditional New Guinea societies, like other small-scale societies, lacked churches, priests, and sacred books. Why is that tribal belief system so reminiscent of Judeo-Christian religions in its origin myth, yet so different in other respects?

Virtually all known human societies have had “religion,” or something like it. That suggests that religion fulfills some universal human need, or at least springs from some part of human nature common to all of us. If so, what is that need, or that part of human nature? And what really defines “religion”? Scholars have been debating these and related questions for centuries. For a belief system to constitute a religion, must it include belief in a god or gods or some supernatural forces, and does it necessarily include anything else? When, in human evolutionary history, did religion appear? Human ancestors diverged from the ancestors of chimpanzees around 6,000,000 years ago. Whatever religion is, we can agree that chimps don’t have it, but was there already religion among our Cro-Magnon ancestors and our Neanderthal relatives of 40,000 years ago? Were there different historical stages in the development of religions, with creeds like Christianity and Buddhism representing a more recent stage than tribal belief systems? We tend to associate religion with humanity’s noble side, not with its evil side: why, then, does religion sometimes preach murder and suicide?

These questions posed by religion are especially interesting in the context of this book, devoted to exploring the whole spectrum of human societies, from small-scale or ancient to populous or modern. Religion is an area where traditional institutions still thrive within otherwise modern societies: the world’s major religions today arose between 1,400 and over 3,000 years ago, in societies much smaller and more traditional than the ones that still espouse those religions today. Religions nevertheless vary with the scale of society, and that variation cries out for explanation. In
addition, most readers of this book, and I, question our personal religious beliefs (or lack thereof) at some point in our lives. When we do, understanding of the different things that religion has meant to different people may help us find answers that fit us as individuals.

For individuals and for societies, religion often involves a huge investment of time and resources. To mention just a few examples, Mormons are expected to contribute 10% of their income to their church. It’s estimated that traditional Hopi Indians devote an average of one out of three days to religious ceremonies, and that one-quarter of the population of traditional Tibet consisted of monks. The fraction of resources in medieval Christian Europe devoted to building and staffing churches and cathedrals, supporting the many orders of monasteries and nunneries, and underwriting crusades must have been large. To borrow a phrase from economists, religion thus incurs “opportunity costs”: those investments of time and resources in religion that could have been devoted instead to obviously profitable activities, such as planting more crops, building dams, and feeding larger armies of conquest. If religion didn’t bring some big real benefits to offset those opportunity costs, any atheistic society that by chance arose would be likely to outcompete religious societies and take over the world. So why hasn’t the world become atheistic, and what are those benefits that religion evidently brings? What are the “functions” of religion?

To a believer, such questions about religion’s functions may seem nonsensical or even offensive. A believer might respond that religion is nearly universal among human societies simply because there really is a God, and that the ubiquity of religion no more requires discovering its supposed functions and benefits than does the ubiquity of rocks. If you are such a believer, let me invite you to imagine, just for a moment, an advanced living creature from the Andromeda galaxy, who races around the universe at a velocity far exceeding the speed of light (considered impossible by us humans), visits the universe’s trillions of stars and planets, and studies the diversity of life in the universe, with metabolisms variously powered by light, other forms of electromagnetic radiation, heat, wind, nuclear reactions, and inorganic or organic chemical reactions. Periodically, our Andromedan visits Planet Earth, where life evolved to utilize energy only from light and from inorganic and organic chemical reactions. For a brief period between about 11,000 BC and September 11, AD 2051,
Earth was dominated by a life form that called itself humans and that clung to some curious ideas. Among those ideas: that there is an all-powerful being, called God, which has a special interest in the human species rather than in the millions of trillions of other species in the universe, and which created the universe, and which humans often picture as similar to a human except for being omnipotent. Of course the Andromedan recognized those beliefs to be delusions worthy of study rather than of credence, because the Andromedan and many other living creatures had already figured out how the universe really had been created, and it was absurd to imagine that any all-powerful being would be especially interested in or similar to the human species, which was much less interesting and advanced than billions of other life forms existing elsewhere in the universe. The Andromedan also observed that there were thousands of different human religions, most of whose adherents believed their own religion to be true and all the other religions to be false, and that suggested to the Andromedan that all were false.

But this belief in such a god was widespread among human societies. The Andromedan understood the principles of universal sociology, which had to provide an explanation for why human societies persisted despite the huge drain of time and resources that religion imposed on individuals and societies, and despite religion’s motivating individuals to inflict on themselves painful or suicidal behaviors. Obviously, the Andromedan reasoned, religion must bring some compensating benefits; otherwise, atheistic societies not burdened by those time and resource drains and those suicidal impulses would have replaced religious societies. Hence if you, my readers, find it offensive to inquire about the functions of your own religion, perhaps you would be willing for a moment to step back and inquire about the functions of New Guinea tribal religions, or to place yourself in the frame of mind of the Andromedan visitor and inquire about human religions in general.

Let’s begin by defining religion, so that we can at least agree about what phenomenon we are discussing. Which features are shared by all religions,
including Christianity and tribal religions along with the polytheism of classical Greece and Rome, and are necessary and sufficient to identify a phenomenon as a religion rather than as some related but different phenomenon (such as magic, patriotism, or a philosophy of life)?

1. “Human recognition of superhuman controlling power and especially of a personal God entitled to obedience.” (
   Concise Oxford Dictionary
   )
   
2. “Any specific system of belief and worship, often involving a code of ethics and a philosophy.” (
   Webster’s New World Dictionary
   )
   
3. “A system of social coherence based on a common group of beliefs or attitudes concerning an object, person, unseen being, or system of thought considered to be supernatural, sacred, divine or highest truth, and the moral codes, practices, values, institutions, traditions, and rituals associated with such belief or system of thought.” (
   Wikipedia
   )
   
4. “Religion, in the broadest and most general terms possible, … consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” (William James)
   
5. “Social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” (Daniel Dennett)
   
6. “A propitiation or conciliation of superhuman powers which are believed to control nature and man.” (Sir James Frazer)
   
7. “A set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence.” (Robert Bellah)
   
8. “A system of beliefs and practices directed toward the ‘ultimate concern’ of a society.” (William Lessa and Evon Vogt)
   
9. “The belief in superhuman beings and in their power to assist or to harm man approaches universal distribution, and this belief—I would insist—is the core variable which ought to be designated by any definition of religion…. I shall define ‘religion’ as ‘an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings.’” (Melford Spiro)
   
10. “The common element of religion cross-culturally is a belief that the highest good is defined by an unseen order combined with an array of symbols that assist individuals and groups in ordering their lives in harmony with this order and an emotional commitment to achieving that harmony.” (William Irons)
    
11. “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” (Émile Durkheim)
    
12. “Roughly, religion is (1) a community’s costly and hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents (3) who master people’s existential anxieties, such as death and deception.” (Scott Atran)
    
13. “A religion is: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivation seem uniquely realistic.” (Clifford Geertz)
    
14. “Religion is a social institution that evolved as an integral mechanism of human culture to create and promote myths, to encourage altruism and reciprocal altruism, and to reveal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of the community.” (Michael Shermer)
    
15. “A religion we will define as a set of beliefs, practices and institutions which men have evolved in various societies, so far as they can be understood, as responses to those aspects of their life and situation which are believed not in the empirical-instrumental sense to be rationally understandable and/or controllable, and to which they attach a significance which includes some kind of reference to the relevant actions and events to man’s conception of the existence of a ‘supernatural’ order which is conceived and felt to have a fundamental bearing on man’s position in the universe and the values which give meaning to his fate as an individual and his relations to his fellows.” (Talcott Parsons)
    
16. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” (Karl Marx)
    

Table 9.1
lists 16 different definitions proposed by scholars of religion. Definitions numbers 11 and 13, by Émile Durkheim and Clifford Geertz respectively, are the ones most frequently quoted by other scholars. It will be obvious that we are not even close to agreement on a definition. Many of these definitions are written in a convoluted style similar to the language used by lawyers in drafting a contract, and that warns us that we are treading on hotly contested ground.

As a fallback position, could we skirt the problem of defining religion in the same way that we often skirt the problem of defining pornography, by saying, “I can’t define pornography, but I nevertheless know it when I see it!”? No, unfortunately even that fallback position won’t work; scholars don’t agree about whether to recognize some widespread and well-known movements as religions. For instance, there have been long-standing debates among scholars of religion about whether Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism should be counted as religions; the current trend is to count Buddhism but not Confucianism, although Confucianism was usually counted a decade or two ago; Confucianism is now instead usually termed a way of life or a secular philosophy.

These difficulties in defining religion are instructive. They warn us that
the phenomena that we lump together as religions contain several different components, which are variously strong, weak, or virtually absent in different religions, different societies, and different stages of the evolution of religions. Religion shades into other phenomena, which possess some but not all of the attributes usually associated with religion. That’s why there is disagreement over whether Buddhism, usually counted as one of the world’s four biggest religions, really is a religion at all or is “just” a philosophy of life. The components commonly attributed to religions fall into five sets: belief in the supernatural, shared membership in a social movement, costly and visible proofs of commitment, practical rules for one’s behavior (i.e., “morality”), and belief that supernatural beings and forces can be induced (e.g., by prayer) to intervene in worldly life. As we shall see, though, it would not make sense to define religion by the combination of all five of those attributes, nor to label as non-religion a phenomenon lacking one or more of them, because one would thereby exclude some branches of movements widely recognized as religions.

The first of these five attributes is the basis of the definition of religion that I offered to my University of California undergraduate students when I first taught a course in cultural geography. I proposed, “Religion is the belief in a postulated supernatural agent for whose existence our senses can’t give us evidence, but which is invoked to explain things of which our senses do give us evidence.” This definition has two virtues: belief in supernatural agents is indeed one of the most widespread characteristics of religion; and explanation, as we shall discuss later, was among the main origins and early functions of religions. Most religions do postulate the existence of gods, spirits, and other agents that we term “supernatural” because they or their provable consequences can’t be perceived directly in the natural world. (Throughout this chapter, I shall repeatedly use the word “supernatural” in that neutral sense, without any of the pejorative connotations sometimes associated with the word.) Many religions go further and postulate the existence of an entire parallel supernatural world—often, a heaven, a hell, or another afterlife to which we ourselves shall be transferred after our death in this natural world. Some believers are so convinced of the existence of supernatural agents that they insist that they have seen, heard, or felt spirits or ghosts.