Religion is one of those phenomena that is difficult to discuss because so many people (whether believers or not) have strong emotional investments in their opinions on the topic, and, its nature is quite consequential to everyone (whether believers or not). One of the most distinctive aspects of many religions is that names are important as signifiers or pointers to abstruse concepts. At least at the elite level and in “higher” religions. In antiquity, one can think of the homoousios versus homoiousios debate.
More contemporaneously I have long had arguments with people (including columnists at The New York Times) about the misunderstandings of history and religion entailed by the term “Judeo-Christian.” In the broadest sense, the term alludes to the shared common history of Judaism and Christianity, a valid construct. But more precisely it often misleads people into thinking that there is an affinity between Judaism and Christianity, as opposed to Islam, and that Judaism has been a partner with Christian civilization in the emergence of the West (post-Christian “Greater Europe”).
Christians often misunderstand the nature of Judaism due to the bracketing of “Judeo-Christian” from Islam. Judaism, like Islam as it has developed, is highly orthopraxic (everything kosher is halal, though everything halal is not kosher). It emphasizes theology far less than Christianity, just like Islam.* More importantly, due to the explicit and implicit aspects of supersessionism within Christianity modern Christians tend to view Judaism through the lens of their Old Testament. For them, Judaism is simply the prologue to their own religion. The reality is that modern Judaism is actually more accurately thought of as a sister religion to Christianity, not a parent. Both Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity emerged out of the synthesis of Greco-Roman civilization and Jewish religious traditions of the first few centuries of the Common Era. Theological currents in the broader Islamic and Christian civilizational matrix influenced the development of Rabbinical Judaism, the form we in the United States of America think as “Orthodox.”
The usage of the phrase “Judeo-Christian” after World War II, in particular in the USA, was a nod to religious and cultural pluralism. But, it misleads the historically ignorant about the role of Jews in Western civilization between Late Antiquity and early modernity. The fact is that Jews as a distinct people and culture had almost no influence on the societies in which they lived after the Talmud in its roughly current form came into being, but rather, existed as a parallel culture.** They were prominent as a middlemen minority or scapegoats, but they were not unique in both capacities. The emancipation and integration of Jews as Jew in the latter half the 19th-century has been highly transformative but it is historically atypical.
Ross Reat’s Buddhism: A History has brought home to me that similar phenomena apply to the relationship between Buddhism and Hinduism. To many Westerners and Indians, Buddhism can be thought of as an extension, deviation, or reaction to Hinduism. That is, Buddhism can be thought of as a “daughter religion” of Hinduism. But the reality that I have seen, and which Reat also argues for, is that Indian Buddhism and Indian Hinduism existed in dialectical tension for 1,500 years between 500 BCE and 1000 CE (when Indian Buddhism was intellectually and culturally exhausted, more or less). He suggests that the Advaita Vedanta philosophical tradition within Hinduism, arguably its most influential and prominent intellectual tradition in modern times, shares many more characteristics with classical Indian Buddhism than the variants of Mahayana Buddhism that flourished and evolved in East Asia.***
The standard narrative that you read in the history books, as passed down through Islamic tradition and historiography, is that in the first decades of the 7th-century the religion of Islam was promulgated by Muhammad and his followers from the cities of Medina and Mecca. Muhammad brought the tribes and peoples of the Arabian peninsula together under the umbrella of Islam. After his death leadership of the community passed to the Caliphs. Under Umar in the second half of the fourth decade of the 600s, the armies of the Islam defeated both the Byzantines and Persians and began the process whereby they would conquer much of the ancient lands of the Near East for the new religion (and beyond, from the Indus to the Atlantic!).
This is what you also read explicitly outlined in Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires. But, lurking in the shadows of the text are nods to the sort of revisionist narrative outlined in Tom Holland’s In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. There are many flavors and shades of revisionism, with some scholars changing their views over time. But the major insight and argument of all of the disparate views are that Islam, as we understand it today, was not the religion of the Arabs who conquered the Near East in the ten years after 636. Rather, Islam developed in the decadesafter the conquest, as an Arab response to the threat of assimilation into the conquered peoples.
In other words, Arabs became Muslim to maintain their Arab identity.
Mackintosh-Smith’s book is very expansive, and I suspect he didn’t want to get bogged down in discussions about the “origins of Islam.” I think he did an excellent job balancing the ethnic and cultural aspect of being Arab, with the centrality of Islam in Arab civilization being included but not overwhelming the narrative.
But the chapters on the Umayyads do nothing to dissuade you from the view that the early Arabs were actually on their way to being assimilated into the matrix of the Near East, in particular, the Greco-Aramaic culture ascendant in the Levant. The main seed for revision is the fact that in the early decades of Umayyad rule non-Muslim sources invariably fixate upon the ethnic element of the conquest, rather than the religious one. Byzantine Christian sources seem to indicate that the religion of the Arabs was a heresy of imperial Christianity, rather than a separate and distinct religion (this was a period when there were many heterodox Christian and quasi-Christian sects in the Near East).
My own view, weakly held, is that self-conscious Islamic identity as adherents to a separate and new religion is probably a feature of the decade around ~700 A.D. This is when we start to see archaeological references to Muhammad as the prophet of God, and, the Umayyads rapidly shift the apparatus of imperial control away from Byzantine precedents (e.g., the quick phasing out of Greek in the bureaucracy, and native Christians and Arabs stop worshipping in the same buildings in Damascus). More strongly held is my position that what we substantively associate with Islam qua Islam beyond identity is really developed and fleshed out during the Abbasid period, after 750 A.D.
Though I would grant the Muslim Arabs around 750 had had a clear self-conscious religious identity distinct from Christians, Jews, etc., for several generations, many of the aspects of Islam which we take for granted developed well after the group identity became crystallized. Only after the mawali reappropriation of the religion does Islam in full form emerge from Late Antiquity (e.g., the centrality of hadith, the institutional emergence of ulema, and the sharp sectarian lines separating Shia from Sunni). An analogy here might be the fact that Jewish Christians had a coherent sectarian identity in the decades after the death of Jesus, but once gentiles became numerically dominant within Christianity they transformed it in fundamental ways (e.g., Trinitarian theology seems far more elaborate and abstract than anything conceived of in the mind of St. Paul).
And yet it is unlikely that Islam was created as propagandistic fiction by the Umayyads. Rather, the expansive narrative presented by Mackintosh-Smith makes it clear that the early Muslims were appropriating and refashioning elements and currents of Arabian culture in the 6th and 7th centuries organically. For example, one of the alternative names for Allah turns out to derive from the name of God within an indigenous monotheistic religious movement in southern Arabia, which was an alternative to Christianity and Judaism in the 6th-century.
Which brings me to the historicity of Muhammad. There are tentative references to the prophet of Islam in very early non-Muslim sources, so I believe that the figure as depicted in orthodox Islam is drawn from a historic individual with broad biographical similarities to that described in the Koran and Islamic tradition. The world of Late Antiquity was filled with apocalyptic prophets and visionaries. We have extensive documentation of this from Muslims, who had to deal with revolts in Iran from syncretistic cults and movements that fused native Zoroastrian religion with Christian, Indian, and Muslim ideas, in the first few centuries of Islam.
The most likely scenario to me is that in the late 7th-century the heterodox monotheism of the Arabs fixated upon one of the most prominent early 7th-century prophetic warlord, and fashioned a distinct religion around this individual. The division between the Alids and the Umayyads very early on suggests to me that the centrality of Muhammad may have been motivated in part by this conflict, as it was a convenient way to reappropriate the prestige of the family of Muhammad, by universalizing his message and relevance outside of the context of lineage.
But for the purposes of this post, I want to focus on the fact that the descends of Muhammad are still alive around us. Broadly termed “Sayyids,” friends in the genetic genealogy community have confided to me that a branch of J1 is the modal haplotype among Arab Sayyids (interestingly, the haplotype in question is a “brother” lineage to that of the Cohens among Jews). If people who claim descent from Ali do seem to descend on the whole from a particular male who lived in the 6th and 7th centuries, then to me that definitely increases the veracity of the biographical elements of the prophet’s life in the Islamic story (in this case, it would be an ancestor of Muhammad and Ali, since they were paternal first cousins).
To my knowledge, the inference of a particular J1 as that of Muhammad has been assessed through surveying supposed descendants (in India 90% of supposed descendants of Muhammad are not even of the J1 haplogroup, but J1 is far more common among them than it is in India as a whole). But Muslims do not engage in cremation but bury their dead (and it is likely that most Arabs before Islam were already monotheists of some sort and buried their dead). This means that very early ancient DNA could be retrieved from individuals reputedly descended from Muhammad, or even of the broader Quraysh tribe.
Combined with the phylogeography of those who carry the very specific J1 haplotype of Muhammad and the Quraysh, one could probe the traditions of the emergence of the Muslim movement out of the Hejaz, or, revisionist contentions that it was North Arabian.
One of the similar responses from very different camps to my National Review piece on evolution was that I was wrong to assert evolutionary biology doesn’t have atheistic implications. This perspective came from both some religious evolution skeptics and from atheists who agree with Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins.
My own view on this isn’t exactly subtle, but, it’s kind of muddled and has a few moving parts.
First, I am an atheist and have been self-conscious as an atheist since I was eight. Before the age of eight, I didn’t identify as an atheist, but with hindsight, it is clear to me that my views on God were primitive to nonexistent. I may have averred to you that I was a believer in Allah, but compared to the vast majority of people who would say such a thing Allah was not real to me as a person who really operates in this universe. Allah was an abstraction. And one of little deep interest to me.
Therefore, I can say that my understanding of evolution has no implication for my atheism in its origin because I was an atheist long before I understood evolution. That’s just an empirical fact. It is also an empirical fact that there are a reasonable number of evolutionary biologists who hold various religious viewpoints. To my knowledge, there are no Protestant fundamentalist evolutionary biologists, as that’s a logical contradiction, but there are very diverse viewpoints excluding this.
These people are real, and I can’t deny their existence. Just as my atheism predated my understanding of evolution, their understanding of evolution did not necessarily result in a diminishment of their religion (though perhaps it modified it in some way).
Of course, these people could be logically wrong. And I think that’s what the religious evolution skeptics and fundamentalists of various sorts agree on. There are several issues with this. I think it misunderstands what religion as a phenomenon is: it’s not about a logical set of propositions. Even Aquinas’ effort is not airtight, and many are not convinced by Alvin Plantinga’s modern attempts utilizing modal logic. Religion is vague and amorphous enough as a phenomenon that I think it will always slip away from any formal refutation.
I am not here proposing ‘non-overlapping magisteria’. There are plenty of ways in which religion seems to intrude into domains of science or domains which can be scientifically informed. It’s just that religion is not a clear and distinct entity. And to be frank neither is science. Just as religion is often falsely reduced to a creed, so science is falsely reduced to a method. I do not believe there is an ‘out-of-the-box’ method that determines science. Rather, it is an outlook, sensibility, and culture, which iteratively attempts to explore patterns in the world around us and explain them.
Personally, I do think the scientific sensibility does lean one to a position of being skeptical of religious explanations. But this is more an intuition rather than a deduction. I don’t think science ‘disproves’ religion any more than religion ‘disproves’ science.
In the piece above I wanted to set aside my own personal views, which are tentative and inchoate, and simply observe that many scientists disagree with them in relation to their faith and their practice. The reality is that there are many great evolutionary biologists who are religious, and I have no issue with that. At this point in my life, I’m not too concerned that someone somewhere is wrong. I’d rather just learn things.
Note: I’ve been writing since 2002. I’ve probably held this sort of view since 2004 or so. I have probably written it before, but at this point, I guess I need to rewrite it. Also, I appreciate the “New Atheists” in their consistency, though I disagree with some of their assumptions about human psychology.
This is distinct from what you’d find in “Religious Studies”, a field with a more humanistic and historical perspective. Some of the early practitioners in this field, such as Mircea Eliade, were influenced by perennialism, so the epistemological stance tends to differ from the more positivist and scientific frameworks above.
As my post on intelligence was quite successful, I thought perhaps I would offer up something similar on religion, since that’s a topic where I have been giving opinions based on fragments of my own views for some time. The point in this post is to unpack the general set of ideas and frameworks that I take for granted and are tacitly operating with as background priors.
If you have been reading me back more than ten years ago, you know that there was a period between 2005 and 2008 when I wrote a fair amount about religion. This was the several years when Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion was at the center of the culture, and near enough after 9/11 that there remained a fresh interest in Islamic radicalism and religious fundamentalism (e.g., The End of Faith). I wrote enough about the topic that I even got invited to a conference about religion and evolution, and received books from publishers on religion and evolution.
But that period cooled off because at a certain point my views were changing only on the margin, and stabilized into a form which conditions my ideas in a stable state. The distance between me in 2018 and me in 2008 on this topic is one to two orders of magnitude smaller than the distance between me in 2008 and me in 2004.
Instead of defining religion a priori, I will describe my perception of the dynamics and phenomena in terms of scale and history (small to large, earlier to later).
That embarrassment may not last forever; perhaps a prophet of a new harmonized paganism is waiting in the wings. Until then, those of us who still believe in a divine that made the universe rather than just pervading it — and who have a certain fear of what more immanent spirits have to offer us — should be able to recognize the outlines of a possible successor to our world-picture, while taking comfort that it is not yet fully formed.
Thirteen years ago I also stumbled in such an inchoate direction in a post, A Prayer For The Emperor. Douthat in fact linked to this post from his perch at The American Scene, though he may not recall it.
I think Douthat is making a distinction implicitly in The New York Times column between a pagan psychology, which bubbles up out of human innate cognitive architecture, and a pagan religious society, which takes the cognitive froth and reshapes it into collective ritual and belief.
Human intuitions regarding the supernatural seem to be fundamentally animistic. We imbue places and animals with spirit. In general, I agree with the scholars who argue that this is an outcome of “overactive agency detection.” A world filled with the illusion of life and danger may induce more stress and anxiety, but in the Darwinian context, excessive vigilance is a virtue, not a vice.
“Religion nerds” like Douthat and Rod Dreher actually have a fair amount in common in their assumptions and cognitive style with hyper-rational atheists such as Armin Navabi (Navabi comes out of a “religion nerd” background). As Roman Catholic Christians Douthat and Dreher must give a nod to the mystical, and Dreher, in particular, has asserted the importance of the sensory in reawakening his religious faith. But both scaffold, channel and discipline their supernatural intuitions into very precise streams. Similarly, Navabi’s understanding of religion is as a system.
One of the elements of the religious systems developed over the past 3,000 years in complex societies characterized by specialization, and the emergence of a literate ruling class (or at least a ruling class which makes recourse to a literate caste), is that animistic and spirit-soaked component of religion has receded. Some intellectual historians have argued that the atheism of early modern Europe can be understood as the logical conclusion of a rationalist streak within Reformed Protestantism, which reduced the supernatural singularly to God and his host. Whereas other forms of Christianity perceived the world as filled with false gods who were faces of genuine demons, the rationalist form of Reformed Protestantism dismissed false gods as human inventions. This diminution of the supernatural then might lead one to the next logical step, banishing even God from the universe!
I do not think this was a special event in world history. We are all aware that the same tendency was pregnant within Hinduism, Buddhism, and in Chinese societies, with certain sects and factions pushing toward atheism and materialism. In the world of early Islam skeptics also existed, often drawing from the older traditions of the Classical World. Strangely, it is in the European Christian world that the supernatural-skeptical tradition was mostly absent. One might suppose this might have something to do with near monopoly of the religious class on intellectual activity in Western Europe for many centuries. Those who were personally skeptical likely kept that to themselves due to their vocation.
But these currents have always floated above the populace, whose practice and beliefs were much more demotic. The existence of religious reform and revival, and zealous cults, within most societies is due in large part to the deviationism that characterizes the religious sentiments of the populace at large. Though the mythos, ritual, and panoply of the great religions attract the people to them, the reality is that all these could exist without the formal and rationalist element which is necessitated by the systematizing tendencies of the intelligentsia.
What we see in the decline of the customary Christian sects and denominations in American society is in some ways a loss of the power of cultural elites. Arguably this period of the dominance of several forms of Christianity was itself a temporary period, with the early republic characterized by a large proportion of unchurched and free-thinkers, as well as a plethora of radical sects. The decades after World War II were an exception, which we took to be the new normal.
The broader decline in trust in institutions, the popularization of culture, and the disdain toward elites, has manifested now a turning away from organized religion. But the populace still wants to believe, and in their hearts they have deep and strong intuitions about the universe. Whether the universe has purpose, it feels like it has purpose. Individuals and subcultures develop ad hoc beliefs and practices to channel these feelings and sentiments, but there is no broad social system or identity to bind them together into a formal whole.
A “harmonized paganism”, as Douthat may say, may not manifest because a it needs a harmonious society, and that is not something we have. State paganism needs a powerful state with a self-confident elite culture. State paganism needs an Emperor, to be the axis mundi between Heaven and Earth. Elite Western Christianity is collapsing, but it being replaced popular paganism, and that is because elite high culture no longer has the prestige it once did, and all is demotic. The ancient world was not a mass society, it was a culture defined by rules, and bound by ritual. The consumer society is driven bottom-up decision making, the impulse of the mob.
What we are seeing is the reemergence of hunter-gatherer animism writ large.
Recently I became a patron of the Secular Jihadists podcast. Ten years ago this wouldn’t be a big deal, but as a “grown-up” with three kids I’m much more careful to where I expend my discretionary income. So take that as a stronger endorsement than usual. I think Secular Jihadists is offering a nonsubstitutable good today. By which I mean a robust, but not cliched or hackneyed, critique of the religion of Islam. For various reasons the modern-day cultural Left has become operationally Islamophilic in public, while the political Right isn’t really too concerned with details of fact and nuance when they level critiques against Islam.
On this week’s episode, the hosts talked about the life of Muhammad, focusing some of the rather unpalatable aspects of his biographies as they’ve been passed down in tradition (in the Hadiths), or as can be found in the Koran. Armin Navabi points out that the prophet of Islam married Safiyya bint Huyeiy Ibn Akhtab on the day her father and husband were killed by his forces. Therefore Navabi’s interpretation, which is entirely in keeping with our modern values, is that Muhammad raped a woman on the day her father and husband were killed.
Of course, this behavior is not shocking in the pre-modern world. In the Illiad Hector’s widow, Andromache, eventually becomes the concubine of Neoptolemus. He is the son of Achilles, who killed Hector. And, in many traditions, Neoptolemus is the one who kills Andromache’s infant son by Hector, Astyanax. Eventually, the son of Neoptolemus by Andromache inherits his kingdom.
Obviously, the Illiad plays things up for drama, but I think it correctly reflects the values of a pre-modern tribal society. One of my favorite books is Jonathan Kirsch’s The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible. Like the Illiad, the Hebrew Bible has within it stories that reflect values of pre-modern societies very different from ours. Moses, like Muhammad, was a military and political leader as well as a religious prophet, and so it is entirely unsurprising that he was a participant in and director of what we would today term war crimes.
The question from the perspective of the hosts of the Secular Jihadists podcast is how Muslims will react to the fact that in the Koran itself, which most Muslims take to be the literal recitation of the words of God through Muhammad, documents the founder of the religion engaging in sex and war crimes. I think the truth though is that most Muslims won’t be very impacted by these revelations, because for most Muslims Islam is not reducible to the revelation within the Koran.
“Higher religions” tend to have scriptures and texts which serve as the scaffold for their intellectual superstructure. But most people who believe in these religions never read these texts. That’s because most people don’t read much, period. The organized institutional and multi-ethnic religions which have emerged over the last 3,000 years have a complex division of labor among the producers of religious “goods and services”, as well as among the consumers and identifiers. A minority are highly intellectualized, and these are the types who will record the history of the religion.
As I’m reading this book, I’ve been giving thought how I would respond to this comment:
…not only were priests an independent power source from kings, but no matter how deeply interrelated each was in principle independent of the other, with their own independent spheres: the secular sphere and the religious sphere. This fact too was important in shaping the modern world, in that modernity assumes that government is fundamentally secular in a way that would have been unfamiliar to pre-moderns outside of Latin Christendom.
This is a common view. Fareed Zakaria, for example, expresses something similar in The Future of Freedom, whereby the emergence of an independent Western Church after the Fall of Rome created space for secularization and the development of liberal democratic institutions through decentralization of power.
And yet after having just read History of Japan, and reading again about the Battle of Anegawa, where Oda Nobunaga completed a chapter of his crushing of institutional Buddhism as an independent power in Japan, I wonder what the above even means. A standard model would argue that in East Asia religion suffused life, philosophy tended toward monism, and there was no separation between this world and that. The Emperor of Japan descended from the Sun Goddess. The Emperor of China was the Son of Heaven, though Heaven was not conceived of in an anthropomorphic sense. And yet the kingship of nations such as France and England have exhibited a sacral nature, and to this day the monarch of England is also the head of its established religion.
About when I abandoned my plan to read Imperial China I read Jay Winik’s The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800. One of the many things that stuck with me from that book was just how radical in regards to religion the federal government established by the American Founders was at the time. While the American states had all had an established religion, due to the pluralism of the new nation, and the personal secularism of many of the Founders, no consideration was given to privileging religion on the national level. This concerned many leading thinkers, some of whom suggested that simply declaring Christianity in the general sense the national religion would have been sufficient (and for all practical purposes Protestant Christianity was the national religion, even though church-state separationists such as Andrew Jackson were punctilious in making this not a de jure matter).
With hindsight, it seems clear that having a “national religion” only makes sense in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, and the collapse of the religious system of Western Christendom during the medieval period. The medieval Western Church was characterized by a great deal of diversity and variation. But something happened during early modernity, whereby that variation produced too many tensions and factionalized. Eventually, this shattered the tacit understandings and compromises which allowed for external unity. In nations where monarchs supported Protestant Reformers, national churches emerged, and become official arms of the state for all practical purposes. In Catholic Europe, a reaction produced a newly muscular and standardized church, which stood opposed to the new official Protestantism on very similar terms. The Roman Catholic church remained international, but it also became the national churches of nations as diverse as Poland, Ireland, and Spain.
Though many people assert that the Roman Empire became “officially” Christian with the conversion of Constantine, or perhaps during the reign of Theodosius the Great at the end of the 4th century, the reality is that the Roman Empire was not a totalitarian state. The dissolution of paganism occurred more through slow decay and death, as the cessation of subsidies from the state starved elite paganism, and persistent missionary efforts blanketed the population with nominal Christianity.
The assertion above that “government is fundamentally secular in a way that would have been unfamiliar to pre-moderns outside of Latin Christendom” always strikes me as strange because of my familiarity with Chinese history and philosophy, and the interpretation of how the Chinese seem to have viewed “church”-state relations. It is often said that the Chinese are superstitious, but not religious. In other words, what China lacked in the vigor of organized religion, it made up for in widespread belief in supernaturalism. This is broadly correct, but the same could be said for the West for most of its history. That is, many pre-modern peasants were not religious as much as they were superstitious, and their Christianity was a thin skein upon folk beliefs.
The issue rather is with the cultural elite, and what their beliefs were. There is a line of argument that philosophical dualism, and a particular sort of disenchantment with the world and a rationalism, was pregnant within Western Christianity, and came to fruition with Calvinism and modern forms of Catholicism. In the ancient world, Christians believed that magic was real, and that the pagans worshipped true supernatural forces, but that these were rooted in the devil. The argument proceeds that in early modernity this belief gave way to more rationalist views, whereby God remained true, but non-Christian beliefs were rooted in falsehood, rather than demons. Magic was now simply trickery.
And yet History of Japan notes that even before Oda Nobunaga’s crushing of the Buddhist clerical powers of the 16th century the society was going through broad secularization, as popular and elite enthusiasm for religion abated. Though the Tokugawa regime enforced Buddhist registration by families across Japan, this was a measure that enabled control and regulation, not one which promoted religion as such. Japanese intellectuals during this period were influenced by currents skeptical of supernaturalism that had its roots in Chinese Confucianism, and this in its turn can be found to have prefigured by anti-supernaturalist threads as far back as Xunzi.
Curiously, the Japanese system after the decline of the Fujiwara and the rise of the Shogun dynasties recollects the mythologies of dual kingship, with a sacred and a secular king, in other societies. To me,this reinforces my own current position that all the semantical distinction between secular and sacred power and how they differ between societies elides more than it illuminates. My own materialist bent leads me to suggest that in fact, secularization in early modernity at the two antipodes of Eurasia were natural and likely inevitable developments with mass societies and more powerful states. A coercive state did not need to rely on supernatural power to persuade a populace, and the workaday nature of bureaucratic governance, in any case, would not reflect positively upon a religious order that was fused with that state.
Naturally, others will have different views. But one of the reasons I am such a fan of Peter Turchin’s project is that I tire of semantic definitions as the axis around which arguments hinge. I am usually unconvinced by the erudition of my interlocutors because in most cases I don’t get a sense that they know more than I do, even though perhaps they may, in fact, be in the right. Rather than calculating, argumentation is often a way for two individuals to assess each other’s knowledge base and sophistication. If there is parity, there will never be a resolution, because personal qualities are more relevant than reality.
It’s been about 10 years since I addressed this topic. Largely because I have no new thoughts. But probably after 10 years, it’s useful to revisit/clarify on this topic to clarify confusions, since people have a lot of opinions on this topic.
People mean different things when they mean “religion,” and the different meanings are not contradictory, nor in conflict.
At the lowest level in terms of individual cognition religion emerges from deep intuitions about the nature of the universe. Colloquially one might say that religion bubbles out of our unconscious.
In relation to social units, say the clan or tribe, religion consists of these intuitions about the nature of the universe and the world around us, bound together with rituals and verbal descriptions and narratives. These rituals and communal narratives help forge some sort of group Weltanschauung that has a functional utility in terms of inter-group competition and relations. Here religion steps out of the individual and becomes an expression of collective consensus.
As human societies became more complex the role of religious professionals became more elaborated. The common role of a shaman can be thought of as a magician, one who manipulates and operates in the domain of the supernatural. Shamans are common and ubiquitous in pre-state societies (even if a tribe does not have a “professional” shaman, someone takes on the role when needed). The priest adds on top of this institutional authority, often supra-clan or tribal. No king, no priest. Eventually, though the shaman-priest took on the role of the metaphysician. The metaphysician generates abstract principles and rationales, which can transcend the tribe or ethnicity, and allows religion to generate meta-ethnic civilizational identities in the service of priestly functions.
So in the post-Axial Age, the religious professional is often shaman, priest, and philosopher.
In relation to my post about why I am not a New Atheist, New Atheists, and the hyper-verbal expositors of modern organized religion, often tend to reduce religion to a branch of philosophy with some textual revelatory buttress. By refuting the philosophy of religion, they think that they refute religion in toto. But what they refute is only the latest and most elaborated structural expression of the religious phenomenon.
What about the priest? Though I am wary of the term “political religion,” due to semantic confusion, it seems clear that the function of the priest can be stripped of its supernatural valence. Many of the most objectionable characteristics of religion for people of liberal orientations derives from the institutionalized priestly functions. Unfortunately, the persistence of the priest in the absence of gods, shamanic powers and metaphysical justification opens the doors to secular totalitarianism.
Finally, it seems almost impossible to stamp out the shaman. Shamanism is like music. You can banish it through institutional sanctions, but once those sanctions disappear, shamanism reappears.
These different aspects of religiosity exist and persist simultaneously in most contexts, but sometimes in tension. Philosophers and priests often take a dim view of shamanic religiosity. In organized religion of the modern sort shamanism is marginalized, or highly constrained and regulated in sacraments. But the recession of state-sponsored Christianity across much of the West has arguably resulted in a resurgence of shamanism, and the proliferation of diverse supernatural beliefs which had previously been suppressed (much of East Asia is characterized by relative weakness of philosophical religion but the strength of shamanism).
Jade Eggs anyone?
The relevance of all this in relation to New Atheism is that New Atheism seems to posit a religious “Blank Slate.” That is, children are indoctrinated in religion at a small age, previous to which they had been atheists. Part of this is due to the fact that the philosophical-metaphysical aspect of religion is quite clearly indoctrination, and often of a superficial sort at that (judging by how weak most believer’s grasp of theology is). But the communal and psychological aspects are not indoctrination, as much as specific instantiations of general human sentiments, dispositions, and intuitions. The erasure of a Christian, Buddhist or Islamic religious orientation will not necessarily leave in its wake a mind primed for scientific naturalism. Rather, it will simply be one shorn of Axial-Age accretions, reverted back to the shamanic age…
As someone who is an atheist, I have never had strong intuitions that lead me to find shamanism plausible. Additionally, the philosophical arguments are wanting for me in relation to God, though they are interesting (thanks to reader Thursday I’m reading Edward Feser’s work). Finally, obviously, I take a dim view of the conformity and structure which the priests attempt to impose upon us. But I do not presume I am not typical.
Here is how I learned it. Once upon a time in the West, the Church aimed to save all of society by bringing everyone under the umbrella of the Truth. The shattering of Western Christendom with the Reformation caused a problem. If the Catholics were right, then the Protestants were damned, and if the Protestants were right, the Catholics were damned. You know all about the “Wars of Religion,” which occupied Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Ultimately this led to the Westphalian system and a gradual acceptance that there would no longer be One True Religion in the West. Monarchs who even took a skeptical view on religion, such as Frederick the Great, arose in the 18th century. In this case, you had a Calvinist Hohenzollern dynasty which could not bring its Lutheran populace on board. In Saxony, you eventually had Catholic dukes ruling over a Protestant populace.
But another aspect of the collapse of universal Christianity in the West was the emergence of radical Protestant groups which understood most of society to be damned and beyond redemption. The separatism of the Amish is an extreme case of this. They don’t even attempt to convert anyone to their religion, which has turned into an ethnicity. This withdrawal of radical Protestants from attempting to force the temporal world to their will has expressed itself most fully in the United States of America, which never had a state-supported religion on the federal level, a radical innovation in its day.
This strain of Christianity is suspicious of the state and society in part because of the suppression their beliefs and practices by both the state and society in which they first emerged. But their relegation of the majority to the ranks of the damned also allows for a modus vivendi in this life. As a contrast, see this apologia for the Pope Pius IX behavior in the Mortara case in First Things, Non Possumus.
The basic argument seems to be that the Pope was motivated by the salvation which was being offered to the soul of the child baptized by the family’s maid. The curious thing is that the whole time I was reading the piece I was thinking about Islamists who would argue that coercive conversion of children of other religions to Islam is still good on the balance because they are now Muslims. The general way this wors is somehow a child is tricked into saying the shahada, and Islam enjoins that once converted one can not apostatize (the Kafir Kalash of Pakistan are suspicious of their children being around their Muslim neighbors because this has happened many times in the past to them).
Some of the same extreme “compassion” seems to be cropping up in American politics, as a deviation from the Truth is no longer tolerated. Pius IX was out of step with his time, as secular liberalism was on the rise. Today I wonder if that liberal in its own turn may have to give ground to a new totalitarianism.
Religion is one of those phenomena that is difficult to discuss because so many people (whether believers or not) have strong emotional investments in their opinions on the topic, and, its nature is quite consequential to everyone (whether believers or not). One of the most distinctive aspects of many religions is that names are important as signifiers or pointers to abstruse concepts. At least at the elite level and in “higher” religions. In antiquity, one can think of the homoousios versus homoiousios debate.
Christians often misunderstand the nature of Judaism due to the bracketing of “Judeo-Christian” from Islam. Judaism, like Islam as it has developed, is highly orthopraxic (everything kosher is halal, though everything halal is not kosher). It emphasizes theology far less than Christianity, just like Islam.* More importantly, due to the explicit and implicit aspects of supersessionism within Christianity modern Christians tend to view Judaism through the lens of their Old Testament. For them, Judaism is simply the prologue to their own religion. The reality is that modern Judaism is actually more accurately thought of as a sister religion to Christianity, not a parent. Both Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity emerged out of the synthesis of Greco-Roman civilization and Jewish religious traditions of the first few centuries of the Common Era. Theological currents in the broader Islamic and Christian civilizational matrix influenced the development of Rabbinical Judaism, the form we in the United States of America think as “Orthodox.”
The usage of the phrase “Judeo-Christian” after World War II, in particular in the USA, was a nod to religious and cultural pluralism. But, it misleads the historically ignorant about the role of Jews in Western civilization between Late Antiquity and early modernity. The fact is that Jews as a distinct people and culture had almost no influence on the societies in which they lived after the Talmud in its roughly current form came into being, but rather, existed as a parallel culture.** They were prominent as a middlemen minority or scapegoats, but they were not unique in both capacities. The emancipation and integration of Jews as Jew in the latter half the 19th-century has been highly transformative but it is historically atypical.
