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Comparing_Religions_Coming_to_Terms_----_11_Rational_Re-readings_Masters_of_Suspicion_Classical_and_Contemporar....pdf

rational re-readings masters of suspicion, Classical and Contemporary

If we take in hand any volume of divinity, or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask: Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

David Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

The Madman in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885)

Chapter Outline

When Religion Doesn’t Work 336 On the Heart of Reductionism: “There Is No Gap” 337

Reductionism Defined 338 The Intellectual and Moral Integrity of Reductionism 338 Religion and the Social Sciences 339 Strong and Moderate Forms of Reductive Inquiry 339

Sigmund Freud: Religion Is a Childish Illusion 340 Censorship and the Unconscious 341 The Oedipus Complex 342 Libido, Repression, and Sublimation 343

Émile Durkheim: Religion Is Society Worshipping Itself 344 The Totem 345 The Sociology of Knowledge 346 Peter Berger and the Sacred Canopy of Religion 346

Kripal, Jeffrey J., et al. Comparing Religions : Coming to Terms, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucok-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1597992. Created from ucok-ebooks on 2021-04-28 19:10:54.

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Rational Re-readings336

There are other ways of re-reading religious experience than those of faith. It is quite possible, after all, that there is another way of resolving the historical fact that there are countless religions and hundreds of revealed scriptures. That resolution goes something like this: it is not the case that one religion or revelation is true and the rest are false, or that one is more true than the rest, or that they are all partially true; rather, it is simply the case that they are all false.

When religion Doesn’t Work

There are many reasons for thinking as much. No doubt one of the biggest is something that Christian theology calls theodicy: literally the “justice of God,” but here better rendered as the problem of suffering, injustice, and evil in the context of belief in a loving and all-powerful God. Consider the immeasurable sufferings of countless human beings ravaged by war, dislocation, hunger, natural disasters, and gross economic injustice. Or the unthinkable historical massacres, wars, and genocides of the twentieth century, the murderous campaigns of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, which together slew us in

the hundreds of millions. Or the daily countless racial, gender, and sexual bigotries often carried on in the name of God or religion. Or those centuries- long historical sufferings of slavery and, today, human trafficking. Or all of those natural diseases too gruesome to describe, which invisibly feed on us every day before the worms do. And this is before we even get to the untold sufferings of animals, who show every sign of sharing sentience with us and whom we slaughter, often quite cruelly, by the millions each day, for our own pleasure and sustenance.

Clearly, if the religions are meant to “explain” all of this, they have failed, and spectacularly so.

There are other problems still. There are all those countless daily, quiet, and largely invisible failures of ritual, prayer, and religious hope. Religious systems routinely fail to do what they claim they can do. We might frame this last problem under the banner of “when religion doesn’t work.” This is a major theme, if often submerged, in the study of religion. At least part of the issue boils down to the double fact that (1) religious traditions are often based on singular revelations, anomalous events, or states of enlighten- ment that happened “in the beginning,” or once, often to a single individual, within a very specific and

Postcolonial Theory: The Gaze of Empire 348 Orientalism 349 Conversion and Empire 350

On Spirit and Spandrels: Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, and Cultural Evolution 350

Theistic Models 351 Mystical Vitalist Models 351 Cognitive Evolutionary Models 352 Ann Taves and the Building Blocks Approach 355

The Study of Religion and Violence before and after 9/11 357 The Question of Cults and Brainwashing 357 “In the Name of God” 359 Faith as Prevention, Protection, and Problem 360 Liberalism and Comparison 360

The Tough Questions 361

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probably unique state of consciousness, and that (2) these revelations, events, and states are not repeat- able in any other human being in exactly the same way. The religious traditions will often claim that the original revelation, salvation event, or enlightened state is accessible if one does a, b, and c or believes x, y, and z. But the truth is that doing or believing anything seldom (ever?) results in exactly the same original event, and that for the most part these practices and beliefs result in little.

Or in nothing at all. Religions are aware of this problem, of course,

and so they have developed elaborate explanatory models for why this is the case. The models of karma and reincarnation in many of the Asian traditions, the presence of a trickster figure in so much indigenous folklore, and the doctrines of grace and God’s inscrutable will (or that trickster, Satan) in the monotheisms: each can be re-read as a reflection not on some mysterious cosmic moral principle or human failure, but on why that particular system usually does not work. Phrases like “the achievement of nirvana or enlightenment is the fruit of many births and the burning of all karmic bonds,” “if God wills it,” or “by the grace of God” can all be translated in the same way: “This is why it didn’t work for you.” All too often, moreover, what they really mean is this: “It’s your fault.”

That is just a bit cruel. The fact that the anomalous states of revelation,

salvation, and enlightenment cannot be reliably reproduced has also had a significant impact on how the professional study of religion is practiced. This is one major reason why the field has focused generally on things that can be reproduced and observed, things like texts, rituals, the formation of social identities and institutions, artistic representa- tions, material objects, buildings, doctrines and beliefs, and temporal linear histories, preferably with numbers attached to them. At least these things stay put. At least these things behave. The field is wise to focus on them. But it must also hold in balance the fact that all of these things and selves only make sense as “religious” to the extent that

they point back to and express states of extra- ordinary experience that are not things at all, to which we have no direct access, and that we cer- tainly cannot reliably reproduce in a book, a class- room, a laboratory, a number, or anywhere else for that matter.

Finally, this common failure of the religions is also, no doubt, one reason why there are so many different religions and subsystems in the first place. The bottom line? People are different. And that is a fantastically gross understatement, as the variables here are basically infinite, as we now know from brain science and all those gazillion connections in our heads—which, of course, are different connec- tions, a gazillion times over, in each and every head.

Perhaps the most common result, however, is that many people experience nothing special at all. Hence also the common phenomenon of unbelief, agnosticism, or simple religious indifference. These negative responses are not an indication of sinister, insincere, or bad people, as the religious systems too often want to claim. Usually they are rather perfectly honest and heartfelt responses to that difficult fact of the history of religions: religious practices and beliefs often accomplish nothing at all.

Zilch. Nada. Zip.

on the Heart of reductionism: “There is no gap”

Not only are such questions honest. They often have also taken great moral courage to formulate and have come with heavy costs to the person asking them (asking them out loud, anyway). But questions are questions, and they do not go away just because people in power want to squash them. And the power of these particular questions is simply immense.

Take western culture. Once faith seeking under- standing began to question its own foundations, it was only a matter of time before reason separated

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itself entirely from its religious engagement and sought its own integrity entirely outside the special institutions of revelation. Accordingly, the last two centuries have witnessed a whole series of radical thinkers whose thought defines, inspires, and guides the study of religion to this day. Among the greatest of these were three men whom the French philoso- pher Paul Ricoeur called our “masters of suspicion”: Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. These three men are so influential in western thought today that we do not need their first names.

As the poet W. H. Auden observed in 1939 in his eulogy for Freud, such a thinker leaves behind a legacy that does not so much contribute a piece or a part to a culture but comes to define an entire world- view. And so Auden wrote of the fallen psychologist, who changed so dramatically how we think of human sexuality, childhood, mothers, and fathers, and who brought expressions like “Freudian slip,” “oedipal complex,” and “phallic” into our everyday vocabulary (and humor):

if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives.1

In the present chapter we have chosen to concentrate on a duo of thinkers: Sigmund Freud and Émile Durkheim. We have chosen these two men because, together, they succinctly represent the psychological and sociological modes of rational re-readings that dominated the twentieth-century study of religion. We will also, toward the end of the chapter, treat some rational re-readings of religion that have arisen more recently around three further complexes: empire and colonialism, evolution and the brain, and religious violence.

But all five of these rational re-readings are expressions of the same basic conclusion, namely that there is no gap between revelation and reason. That is, the literal claims of revelation are finally false ones and must be rejected as illusory from the side of reason. This is why we are calling these re-readings

rational: not because the other re-readings are not rational (as we have just seen, faithful or theological re-readings are all about relating reason and revelation and are thus rational forms of thinking as well), but because the present ones recognize as valid only rational forms of thinking. In short, rational re-readings solve the disjunction or gap between revelation and reason by removing one side of the apparent disjunction: the side of revelation.

reductionism Defined

These are much more than simply rejections of revelation, though. They are also thoughtful, often elegant explanations. They do not simply say “No” to religion. They explain exactly how religion is about something else, which is not religious at all. They “reduce” religious experiences, expres- sions, and institutions to more basic mechanisms. They identify deep underlying structures that give rise to religious phenomena but that are not themselves religious. Enter another skill set, which is vital for putting the plural pieces of religion back together again:

Reductionism: the explanation of reli- gious phenomena as the effects of some deeper, more basic non-religious causes, processes, or mechanisms.

The intellectual and moral integrity of reductionism

We will leave it at that for now. As we proceed through this chapter, what reductionism is and how it works will become more than apparent. Just now we want to issue a preliminary caution, which is really a kind of moral plea: please do not mis- read robust forms of reductionism as some kind of simple, uncaring, or angry rejection of religion. Sometimes reductionist thinkers are indeed “angry” (often for very good reasons). Sometimes they are superficial and simplistic (often for not very

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good reasons). And sometimes reductionism is employed as a blunt tool with which to ridicule religion. But, historically speaking now, this is not how reductionist re-readings arose, nor is it how they generally function in the professional study of religion today.

As we have already had many an occasion to note, the critical study of religion originally arose in the hearts and minds of well-meaning individuals who came, often at some risk to their professional lives (or just to their lives), to the painful conclusion that what they formally believed is simply not true. More pre- cisely, they came to the conclusion that their former beliefs could no longer be reconciled with what they now knew to be true about history, the biblical texts, the natural world, and the advances of science. They did not “choose” these thoughts. Such thoughts were forced on them as inevitable conclusions of years, sometimes decades of intense research. In short, such conclusions were finally not acts of anger or apathy at all. They were acts of courage, profound concern, and moral outrage. There is much reason, it turns out, to be suspicious of religion.

Before we get into some of the specifics of our own two masters of suspicion, it will serve us well to dis- cuss the two fields with which they are mostly identi- fied: the psychology and sociology of religion. These are, if you will, two different drawers in your toolkit, which is perhaps getting rather full about now.

religion and the social sciences

Some scholars are interested in the psychological dimensions of individual religious experience, while others choose to focus on the demographics and social structures of religion. The study of religion has branched out into different specialties roughly along these same lines. The internal or experiential dimen- sions are the primary concern of the psychology of religion. The external or institutional dimensions are the primary concern of the sociology of religion. We write “primary,” because these two approaches are not truly separate. It is a matter of accent, as psychol- ogists of religion are perfectly aware that religious

experience is deeply shaped by social institutions (hence all their intimate focus on the family unit), and the sociologists are hardly denying the impor- tance of personal experience. Still, that accent, wherever it lands, makes a big difference to how one sees and understands “religion.”

strong and moderate Forms of reductive inquiry

There is a further important distinction to draw here. There are strong and moderate forms of reductive inquiry. The strong forms of reductive inquiry reduce religious events and experience entirely to natural mechanisms and unequivocally deny the transcendent or ultimate truth claims of the religions as false. The moderate forms of reductive inquiry are not so sure. They either leave the door open to the possibility of some transcendent force or truth at work in religion or avoid the truth questions altogether and focus instead on the psychological or sociological functions of religion.

As with the faithful re-readings, there is a fairly easy litmus test to apply in order to distinguish between moderate and strong forms of reductive inquiry and then to distinguish between strong forms of reductionism and both faithful and reflexive re-readings. Let us call it “the ‘nothing but’ test.” Again, this test can be applied in the form of a question: “Are religious experiences and institutions nothing but the transformations of perfectly natural states of emotion, cognition, and social process?” Strong forms of reductive inquiry can easily be identified by their clear answer to this question: “Yes.” Faithful and reflexive re-readings answer the same question with a “No.” Moderate forms of reductive inquiry answer it with a “Maybe,” or, more commonly, they avoid the question altogether.

We will get to the strong forms of reductionism in due time. As an example of moderate forms of reductionism and of avoidance of the truth question, consider the way in which religion is normally handled in the media. The media are most interested in demographic patterns, in who believes what—and not for the sake of that “what,” but for the sake of

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how effectively or broadly that “what” forms a particular voting bloc or social group. The journalist never asks: “Well, is it really true what so-and-so believes?” Rather the journalist asks: “How many such believers are there? And in what ways will their numbers affect the next election or the next social issue?” Truth is actually irrelevant here, since false- hood is never seriously entertained as an option and all we really have at the end of the day is a kind of counting. All that really matters is how people act in the public square on their beliefs, not whether those beliefs are profound or absurd.

Psychologists and sociologists of religion prac- ticing strong forms of reductionism and some radical theologians stand for a very different set of concerns. They want to know what is true and what is false, and they are willing to consider that it may all be false. They want to know what the deeper mechanisms of religion are. They couldn’t generally care less about how full the parking lots are, or what the impact of a particular belief on a religious institution or particular election might be. Indeed, they might even suspect that the fuller the parking lot or more successful the election campaign belief, the less likely a claim is to be true. They are after truth, not after votes. Perhaps most importantly of all, they come from a long line of thinkers who knew the truth but did not have the votes. They remember the towers, the fires, and the censors.

sigmund Freud: religion is a Childish illusion

Sigmund Freud is the most significant founder of what would later become the psychology of religion. There are certainly other major figures, including William James and C. G. Jung. But Freud’s thought has had an especially formative influence on the field, particularly in the ways it has so fruitfully taught us that cultural and religious phenomena are deeply inscribed by psychological dynamics that can be traced back to childhood and, more particularly, to the manner in which fathers, mothers, and children

interact within what Freud called the family romance—that complex of sexual and aggressive feelings between mother, child, and father that defines how a child develops and becomes a person.

It is good to admit up front and immediately that Freud’s thought is very controversial to this day and that, whereas it is widely used and celebrated in the humanities—especially in the study of literature, film, popular culture, and religion—it is generally rejected in academic psychology as grossly dated, particularly in light of the advances of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology—which, rather ironically, have more than a little in common with Freud’s strong biological reductionism, his insistence that most of human behavior is con- trolled “offline,” and his infamous insistence on the centrality of sexuality (re-figured as reproduction or “fitness” in evolutionary psychology).

Freud himself had a quick and too easy answer for his critics. He psychoanalyzed them. He pointed out that their “resistance” was a defense mechanism encountered often in therapy, where it expressed the psyche’s attempt to protect itself from difficult material that would expose its own illusions. We are here in the realm of Shakespeare’s oft-quoted line from Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” In other words, people vehemently reject Freud’s thoughts because, to take these ideas seri- ously, they would have to examine whole regions of their mental, emotional, social, and sexual lives that they would rather leave alone.

Freud’s point about defense mechanisms may have been too easy, but it contains more than a grain of truth. Who would deny that human beings often reject plausible ideas for emotional rather than rational reasons? In other words, if Freud gets people worked up, this is itself likely significant: “a button has been pushed,” as we say. It is also worth remem- bering that Freud’s ideas have been the object of active censorship and moral condemnation among various types of offended communities—academic, political, and religious. Freud ended his life not in professional comfort, but in terrible physical pain (his death was an assisted suicide, a requested overdose

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while suffering the end stages of mouth cancer) and in the emotional turmoil of a political exile from Hitler’s Germany. He had to flee his beloved Vienna for a distant London shortly after the Nazis temporarily kidnapped his daughter and staged public burnings of his books. To the latter he responded along these lines: “At least we have advanced a little. In a previous age, they would have burned me.”

Alas, Freud was terribly wrong, for this, of course, is exactly what the Nazis would do—burn books and people, by the millions—including his own sister, it turned out. From the very beginning, Freud stood bravely against all of this. He knew what it meant to be despised, to be censored, and to be exiled from his home for both his ideas and his very person. Another version of the tower.

Censorship and the Unconscious

Nor was (or is) this only a political issue for fascists and hate-mongers. Freud was clear that censorship is internal to the psyche itself and its conscious/ unconscious structure. What Freud had learned from his suffering patients is that the human psyche censors its own thoughts and wishes and so encodes them in more safe or distant forms within the narra- tives of dreams and the symptoms of mental illness. What Freud called the unconscious contains every- thing that the psyche has censored and pushed “under.” The unconscious is that realm of the human mind of which the conscious individual is unaware but which nevertheless influences, if not determines, much of the individual’s thinking, emotional life, and social behavior. If there were no internal censorship, there would likely be little or no unconscious, not at least in the Freudian sense of the term.

There is one corollary here that Freud did not pick up on, but that numerous later anthropologists and cross-cultural psychoanalytic thinkers did. It goes like this: if the unconscious is a product of what is censored, and if different cultures censor different things, then the unconscious will be different in different cultures. Freud was very much a universalist

when it came to such things. He did not generally recognize the profound influence of different cultural practices on the human psyche.

The most basic method of psychoanalysis, then, boils down to this one rule: Look for the defense mechanism, the resistance, the denial, the attempted censorship, and go there. That is where the truth lies. That is where the secret abides. And psychoanalysis is all about secrets: identifying them, decoding them, and finally speaking them in the open. Because the unspoken secret, as the repressed, is what makes individuals and whole societies sick, the revealing of the same secret is what heals and makes whole. At the end of the day, then, psychoanalysis is all about speaking secrets in order to heal.

Consider, as a most simple and mundane example, the whisper. Imagine having a long conversation with a friend about anything. At some point in the conversation, the friend bends closer, looks around, and begins to whisper something to you. What do you immediately assume? You assume that whatever this friend is about to say is far more important than anything that came before it and anything that will likely come after it. What you assume is exactly what Freud concluded with his patients—that the secret is the key.

This twin notion of secrecy and censorship goes to the very heart of what Freud was trying to show us. In his later writings he would extend this dethroning of the “I” and write of how our conscious sense of self, or what he called the ego (simply the Latin for “I”), is in fact a rather superficial social construction floating precariously between a sea of submerged, largely unconscious desires and aggressions (the id, the “it”) and a threatening sky of moral judgments, themselves derived from social interactions with the parents and, later, with other social actors and institutions (the superego, the “over-I”). This was Freud’s version of how we are a double product of both nature and nurture, biology (the id) and society (the superego).

Religion, for Freud, was an illusion. And not just any illusion, but a childish one at that. All human beings are born from a woman and most grow up in

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some sort of family arrangement in which they are radically dependent on parents for their sustenance and security. Most people never really grow up, however. People remain in need of the securities of infancy and childhood. They remain in need of a nur- turing mother and a protecting father. And so they project these emotional needs, these infantile wishes, into the sky: “Our Father, who art in heaven …” God, for Freud, is essentially an illusion that people create in order to feel safe and secure. In reality, of course, there is no father in the sky, nor is there any real secu- rity. We all die. It all ends badly for each of us. Better to accept this than to live in the illusion that religion represents, Freud argued. Better to grow up.

The oedipus Complex

At the heart of Freud’s developed system is one of his most fruitful and most controversial ideas: that of the Oedipus complex. Freud himself clearly saw this as the master key to all sorts of cultural forms, especially art, literature, and religion. Put very simply, Freud argued that the child’s early relationships with his parents (Freud focused on the son) set the psychic patterns that will be worked out—or not worked out—in later adult life. More specifically, Freud argued that a male child’s first love object is his mother (and, more specifically, her breasts), and that the infant son experiences fear, aggression, and anger towards his father as he competes with him for possession of the mother-lover. Eventually, if all goes well, the young boy accepts defeat, surrenders the mother, and identifies with the victor, that is, with the father. In this way he learns to be a man like his father and will some day go in search of another woman, one who most likely reminds him of his first love, that is, of his mother. Freud named this drama the Oedipus complex, after King Oedipus in Sophocles’ ancient Greek play Oedipus Rex. In this play, Oedipus falls in love with a woman who, unbeknownst to him, is in fact his mother and kills a man who, unbeknownst to him, is actually his father.

Freud argued that how a small child resolves these early family conflicts determines in large part his

later emotional and sexual make-up, and that child-rearing practices determine a culture’s mythology and religion. As we have already noted, Freud himself was a universalist here. He did not recognize just how different child-rearing practices and family struc- tures are in different cultures. Later psychoanalytic thinkers would correct and develop Freud’s thought here. They adjusted it to different cultures and in this way showed how different family structures pro- duce different sorts of mythologies and religions. Of particular note here is South Asia, where gifted analysts and anthropologists like the Indian analyst and novelist Sudhir Kakar and the Sinhalese anthro- pologist Gananath Obeyesekere have been particu- larly eloquent and prolific in correcting Freud’s thought and extending it into the study of various Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

The basic comparative conclusion goes some- thing like this. If the father is supreme in the family household, he will also be supreme in the culture’s mythology and public ritual. Similarly, if the mother or a small community of mothers raise the children in the relative absence of the father (who may, after all, be literally unknown in many traditional cul- tures), then the mother or these mother figures will dominate the mythology. Moreover, the degree to which the son is bonded to the mother (and this var- ies widely from culture to culture) will determine the emotional lengths to which the culture must go to separate him from this female world and to insert him into the world of men and fathers. The secret of religion and mythology, in other words, lies in that exceedingly strange and mysterious drama in which a man emerges from the vagina of a woman, shares intimate contact with her breasts and nur- turing body for years, and then must be banished from this same physical and emotional union for the sake of becoming an individual and starting the whole drama all over again, as an adult, with another woman.

And you wonder why men are so confused? Entire religions and cultures based on childhood

and sex and childhood sexual impulses? Sounds outrageous, doesn’t it? Think again. Think about how

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commonly religious people employ family terms to speak of their deepest beliefs about the divine. In religion after religion, the divine is a “father” or a “mother” (or both), or a “son” (but almost never a “daughter,” for all the reasons we explored in Chapter 6). Similarly, religious titles of honor and respect are routinely taken directly from family life. From the Catholic practice of referring to priests as “father” to the Hindu practice of honoring religious leaders with the title of “Swami” (“lord” or “husband”) and to the innumerable religious communities in which individuals address one another as “brother” or “sister,” the practice is so common that we tend to forget the this-worldly origin of such titles and all they imply.

As for the “bizarre” idea of aggression between fathers and sons, all we have to do is open our comparative eyes to see that this is a salient feature of all three western monotheisms, in which the model and exemplary act of faith is the willingness of a father to kill his own son. In Judaism we have the story of Abraham and Isaac, in Islam the story of Abraham and Ishmael, and in Christianity we have a Father who wills an order of salvation that demands the gruesome murder of his own beloved Son.2 This strong comparative pattern of son sacrifice made little rational sense before Freud and his oedipal theory. It makes sense after him.

Such oedipal patterns are not restricted to the West, as is often falsely claimed. They are evident, if not always so obvious, in Hindu India and Buddhist Asia as well. As a most striking example, consider the following Buddhist scripture, translated into the Chinese from the Sanskrit around 542 ce, in which the author advances a theory of gender and sexual orientation that is virtually identical to the Freudian one:

Finally, as the time of his death approaches he sees a bright light, and being unaccustomed to it at the time of his death he is perplexed and confused. He sees all sorts of things such as are seen in dreams, because his mind is confused. He sees his (future) father and mother making love, and seeing them a thought crosses

his mind, a perversity (viparyasa) arises in him. If he is going to be reborn as a man he sees himself making love with his mother and being hindered by his father; or if he is going to be reborn as a woman, he sees him- self making love with his father and being hindered by his mother. It is at that moment that the Intermediate Existence is destroyed and life and consciousness arise and causality begins once more to work. It is like the imprint made by a die; the die is then destroyed but the pattern has been imprinted.3

Freud, of course, would locate these processes in infancy and childhood, whereas the Buddhist text locates them in the intermediate state between lives. But the classical oedipal structure of this process (the child loving one parent and feeling aggression toward the other) is nevertheless obvious. Note also that the soul’s witnessing of the parents having sex (Freud called this the primal scene) is not some minor accident without consequence. On the con- trary, its primordial “die” or “imprint” is permanent, even if its source is no longer obvious or conscious. Moreover, it is precisely this same witnessing and these same sexual and aggressive drives that set the wheels of causality and existence into motion again. They actually create reality. Basically the Buddhists out-Freud Freud here.

libido, repression, and sublimation

Freud not only had an eye for the aggressive and sexual sides of life. He was also an admirer of art and literature, which he considered successful transfor- mations of libidinal energies. Freud used the word libido to refer to energies in the body that are closely aligned with sexuality but can be employed for all sorts of nonsexual ends. What the reigning public morality cannot accept, the psyche of the artist, writer, or religious seer has to disguise somehow or, better, to transform into art, text, or vision. Thus Christ may be denied an erect and useable phallus in the Christian imagination, but when one of his female saints (Teresa of Avila) unites with him in a mystical marriage, she sees a gorgeous male angel

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with a flame-tipped arrow, which he thrusts again and again into the middle of her body as she moans in intense pain and ecstatic pleasure. This visionary sublimation worked: Bernini’s marble version of this erotic vision now hangs suspended over the altar of a chapel in Rome (see Figure 11.1).

Freud called this process, from sex to spirit, “subli- mation.” The term was probably originally derived from alchemical literature, where the concept thus named was used to describe the mysterious transfor- mation of base metals into gold. Modern chemistry redefined the same term to describe the chemical process by which a solid is translated directly into a gas, as when, for example, ice evaporates into the air without first becoming a liquid. In the same way we too, for Freud, have a process that goes from a solid (the sexual body) to a gas (the cultural) while skipping the liquid phase (sexual emission). Freud, in other words, used sublimation to describe how

libidinal energies are diverted from their original sexual aims and converted into cultural accomplish- ments, such as art or literature.4

If we were to update Freud’s notion here, we might recall our discussions of super sexualities in Chapter 6 and say this. By “sex” we do not mean sex. We mean everything in a truly vast range—from the DNA sex texts wrapped tight around one another in the inner depths of the trillions of cells of our bodies to the lust and passions of sexual intercourse that these same DNA coils require for their transmission from one body to another; to the love a mother and infant or husband and wife feel for each other; to the compassion of the social worker, the minister, the rabbi, the mullah, and the priest; to the creative urges of the artist and writer who helps to draw the lineaments of human culture; to the spiritual flights of religious ecstasy and divine love. All of this is of and from the same energy. And all of it is erotic.

How exactly this occurs Freud did not claim to understand (nor do we). In the end, this sublimation or “making sublime” went unexplained. It is the point at which Freud’s thought ends, and the master falls silent and simply admires.

Émile Durkheim: religion is society Worshipping itself

Sociology, like psychology, is an immensely diverse and complex form of thinking practiced by tens of thousands of professionals. But perhaps its most basic argument boils down to this: a society is not made up of individuals; individuals are made up by society. Put metaphorically, we might say that indi- viduals are best thought of not as hard billiard balls bouncing around on a flat green, two-dimensional carpet, but as moving, morphing nodes in a con- stantly shifting, multidimensional web of meaning, social practice, economic exchange, relationship, and language. “You,” as an ego, as a social self, do not “have” relationships and transactions. You are those relationships and transactions. It may be true that

Figure 11.1 Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1647–1652). Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. © Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis.

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“you are what you eat,” but it is also true that “you are who you know and love (and hate).”

Perhaps the easiest way to get a handle on this is to consider the role of language in forming a social identity. At the end of the day even one’s name is a word, and all of our thoughts are basically silent sentences in our heads. So too with most all of our social interactions, business transactions, social identities, professional practices, and so on—they are all carried on in and through language (as is this textbook). But language is not a personal invention. It is a social process into which one is born—again, like a spider in a web. We cannot even have a conversation with ourselves in our own heads without this web. We rely on what is fundamentally a social practice of communication to create and maintain what we think of, probably incorrectly, as a stable personal identity.

The Totem

Religion is one major tool through which the social web forms, constitutes, and controls its individual nodes. In the sociological view, religion is a set of beliefs and practices that hold a society together around a common authority. We have already had occasion to “think with” this approach in our brief study of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch and their respective analyses of charisma and religious institu- tions. Another major thinker in this line of thought was the French sociologist Émile Durkheim.

Durkheim is a classic reductivist thinker who resolved the problem of religious plurality and the apparent absurdity of religious beliefs by tracing them all back to a single, deeper, and finally natural and rational source. Here is how he announces his project through the trope of “surface” and “depth”:

When only the letter of the formulae is considered, these religious beliefs and practices undoubtedly seem disconcerting at times, and one is tempted to attribute them to some sort of a deep-rooted error. But one must know how to go underneath the symbol to the reality which it represents and which gives it its meaning. The

most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social. The reasons with which the faithful justify them may be, and gener- ally are, erroneous; but the true reasons do not cease to exist, and it is the duty of science to discover them.5

What are these “true reasons” beneath the surface of erroneous beliefs, fantastic rites, and strange myths that science must discover?

Society. Durkheim thought that this thesis about the

social basis of religion could be most effectively demonstrated by going back to the most archaic and simplest of religious forms: the totem. This is what he did in his classic work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915). A totem is an animal or object that is made to represent a particular group of people, for example a family, a tribe, or a clan. Totems are commonly found in indigenous religions around the world, in places like Australia, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Totemism, Durkheim argued, is the most archaic and “elementary” religious phenomenon on the planet. Indeed it is so simple that it scarcely involves any notion of divinity at all.6 Studying the totem, then, should logically lead to a general theory of religion, or so Durkheim assumed.

For Durkheim, when a community worships or honors a clan totem, what they are really worshipping and honoring is their own social structure. Religion, in other words, is not about private pious feelings, and it is much less about hopes for some individual or personal salvation. These are all erroneous surface notions or later developments. Deep down, religion is “an eminently collective thing.”7 Religious myths, symbols, and rites are, first and foremost, “collective representations that express collective realities.”8 When human beings bow down to a god, they are in effect bowing down and submitting to their own collective social systems. Hence two of Durkheim’s memorable sound bites: “religion is society worship- ping itself ” and “God is society writ large.”

Such “divine” collective representations, it should be noted, are always the product of immense stretches

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of time, numerous generations, and countless individuals, because a very special kind of wisdom or intelligence results when all these factors come together. Religion is not simply rational, then. It is also super-rational. “A special intellectual activity is therefore concentrated in them [the collective representations] which is infinitely richer and complexer than that of the individual.” This is Durkheim’s version of what I have called “the human as two,” through which he explains the remarkable powers of any single human reason “to go beyond the limits of empirical knowledge”:

It does not owe this to any vague mysterious virtue but simply to the fact that according to the well-known formula, man is double. There are two beings in him: an individual being which has its foundation in the organism and the circle of whose activities is therefore strictly limited, and a social being which represents the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we know by observation—I mean society … In so far as he belongs to society, the individual transcends himself, both when he thinks and when he acts.9

Basically, we are way smarter as a group than we are as individuals, and we worship that which is greater than us. But the sacred, the “other” of the human as two, is the social, not the soul.

The sociology of Knowledge

In this same line of thought, intellectuals will sometimes speak and write of the social construction of knowledge. This in turn is the basic idea of the sociology of knowledge, a field that explores how “truth” is not discovered in some objective and clear way, say, like a mineral in the ground or a distant planet, but “constructed” through elaborate social processes and institutions—like churches, empires, laboratories, nation-states, and universities.

As in other forms of reductive inquiry, there are strong and moderate forms of this thesis. The strong forms assert that all forms of human knowledge (including science) are socially con- structed and can best be understood as pragmatic

truths that are good at doing particular things for particular people, but by no means can any such truth be claimed as absolute or entirely objective. The moderate forms suggest that all human know- ing is indeed shaped, and even severely restrained, by social processes and contexts, but that human beings nevertheless can arrive at, or at least approximate, real truths, truths that are not entirely dependent on or relative to this or that social practice and institution.

peter Berger and the sacred Canopy of religion

The sociological theories of Troeltsch, Weber, and Durkheim, like the psychological theories of Freud, James, and Jung, spawned a rich and diverse legacy. But perhaps no sociologist has had a deeper and more lasting influence on the contemporary study of religion than the American sociologist Peter Berger. Berger co-wrote, with Thomas Luckman, one of the classics in the sociology of knowledge: The Social Construction of Reality (1966). The following year he published The Sacred Canopy (1967), a potent and especially clear little book that has become a kind of classic of the modern study of religion.

Berger begins The Sacred Canopy with an oft-noted observation about the human species: in contrast to all other higher mammals, which are born with a more or less fully wired instinctual apparatus, humans are born “unfinished.” They are born with an underspecialized instinctual apparatus, which is not hard-wired toward a species-specific environment. As a result, “man must make a world for himself.” This world-building activity is not to be understood as a “biologically extraneous phenomenon, but the direct consequence of man’s biological constitution.”10 If bees build hives and birds build nests, we build worlds. These constructed worlds we call “culture”— probably with insufficient awe.

But how exactly do we build worlds? Berger portrays a dialectical or two-way process, in which society is a product of individual human beings and individual human beings are products of society. In fact we have already seen versions of this

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back-and-forth, inside–outside process numerous times in our journey. We have also implied it all along, through our central tropes of the mirror and the skill of reflexivity. Berger’s elegant version is separated into three steps or reflections: (1) external- ization; (2) objectification; and (3) internalization.

Externalization is the human activity of building a cultural world through sign, symbol, myth, ritual, and institution, as discussed above: in effect the human species “externalizes” itself in culture; it builds a world. Objectification is a further extension of this process: an independent world of “objects” comes to confront the human being—the subject—as facts outside that subject. The world externalized by humans now takes on material, physical form. It becomes a literal set of objects “out there.”11 Finally, internalization is the reabsorption back into consciousness of this objectified world, in such a way that the structure of the world “out there” comes to determine the subjective structure of consciousness “in here.” At this level society functions as the forma- tive agency of individual consciousness, in a process that is normally referred to as “socialization.”12

It is very important to understand this tripartite process as thoroughly dialectical—as in a circle or mirror, again. Hence internalization does not mean that the individual is some inert subject, passively receiving the world as it is. Rather the individual “is formed in the course of a protracted conversation in which he [or she] is a participant.”13 The individual is actually a co-creator of the social world, which, of course, has been co-created before that individual by countless others. This, we might add, is precisely what the general history of religions is: the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of countless worlds.

Such “realities” are highly precarious, given their profound dependence on human beings, and hence they are in need of constant maintenance and confirmation. So why construct them in the first place? What are these cultural worlds finally about? For Berger, they are fundamentally about meaning, order, and reliability. Social worlds are grand schemes that provide a meaningful order, a nomos (“law” or

“order” in ancient Greek) for the discreet experiences of the individual, with the aim of shielding this person from the terror of chaos and constant disrup- tion. This nomos is the “sacred canopy” of the book title. Religion is the seemingly safe and reassuring canopy that we create in the very dark and foreboding forest of the real.

The more transcendent, pervasive, and seemingly independent of human agency such constructed canopies appear to be, the more successful they are in creating order and assurance. This is where religion appears in Berger’s analysis. Through religion, human beings make sense—or claim to make sense— of the entire realm of existence. They do this by creating fantastic narratives (that is, myths) that pit a “sacred” cosmic order against a “profane” realm of chaos or evil. In this way the human desire and need for order is projected onto the totality of being, in “an audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant.”14 Social structures and institutions like kinship, kingship, and religious priesthood serve the same purposes. All ultimately validate our safe status in the cosmos.

Religion requires a social “base” that can continue to project and maintain its validity independently of the attentions (or inattentions) of this or that subject. Berger calls this social base a “plausibility structure.” Without such a base, no mythical world can survive. For example, the religious world of pre-Columbian Peru was objectively and subjectively real as long as its plausibility structure, namely pre-Columbian Inca society, remained intact.15 Once Incan society collapsed, so did the mythical world of the Incas.

In more general terms, we might say not only that such worlds are collectively produced, but also that they remain real by virtue of collective recognition.16 Their subjective reality “hangs on the thin thread of conversations,” as Berger puts it.17 Disrupt that conversation and the world falls apart. Many a reader might have already experienced such a falling apart through long travel or, much more radically, through immigration. You might have felt that some of the things you were utterly certain about do not make much sense any longer, simply because you have

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been physically removed from the social “base” that supported them and made them plausible. Previously powerful and utterly controlling ideologies tremble easily, it turns out.

There is a further “catch” here. For Berger, religion is an essentially “alienating” force. That is to say, its proper function is guaranteed only as long as the producer remains alienated from, or ignorant of, this production/projection process. Following a long line of previous thinkers, Berger calls this basic ignorance that makes it all work false conscious- ness.18 Astonishingly, religion only works as long as we do not realize that we are behind it. This sociolog- ical shocker, of course, is not a new idea. We also find hints of it in various world mythologies, particularly in the very widespread notion—as apparent in ancient European religion as it is in contemporary Confucianism and Hinduism—that God, the gods, or the ancestors demand, need, or require humans’ attention, manifested through ritual and sacrifice.

Turns out they do. Without such a ritual base, without such constant attention, the gods die and the ancestors disappear. A stronger sociological re-reader might go further still and suggest that the gods die and disappear when we cease to give them our attention for one simple reason: they were us all along. Our attentions give them life, and so our inattentions take that life away. Or back. What really happens, of course, is that life and attention are “ reabsorbed” back into human consciousness for future new worlds and future new gods.

We are god-makers. And god-killers. Such extreme expressions, it should be pointed

out, are more faithful to Nietzsche than to Berger. Whereas Nietzsche advocates a strong version of reductionism, Berger opts for a more moderate version. We will return to him and see why—in our last chapter.

For now, there is another way of putting all of this sociological wisdom. We might observe that human beings classify and compare because they live in social groups; they do not live in social groups because they classify and compare. In other words, it is society that

forms our thoughts and shapes our cognitive pro- cesses, and especially the cognitive processes of classification and comparison. Comparison, like Durkheim’s totem and Berger’s canopy, is finally an expression of society.

•••

These, then, are our two masters of suspicion. Such reductivist readings have hardly ceased, of course. Numerous new theoretical directions have been mapped out since Freud and Durkheim helped pioneer these two ways of re-reading religion. We can outline only three here: postcolonial theory, evo- lutionary and cognitive psychology, and the present question, so pressing, of religion and violence.

postcolonial Theory: The gaze of empire

A rational re-reading of religion that is very much related to the sociology of knowledge but strongly develops in its own directions is postcolonial theory. This discipline is so named because of how the kind of thinking that generated it tracks, describes, and critically analyzes the countless ways in which colonial assumptions and institutions still determine the political practices, cultural productions, economic flows, and interior emotions, anxieties, and desires of people around the planet, even after the colonial period ended—which happened roughly around 1950. The postcolonial, then, as my colleague Elias Bongmba has pointed out, is not simply a matter of European colonialism. It is also a feature of present-day societies, for example in Africa, that were once European colonies and have since internalized and adopted these colonial structures and institutions as their own.

As in all major theories, there are many streams of influence here. One of the most important was Michel Foucault, who advanced a model of knowledge that insists that all forms of knowledge are also forms of power: every form of knowing serves particular political agendas and interests, which is to say particular people.

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orientalism

Taking up this line of thought, the literary critic Edward Said advanced his deeply influential notion of orientalism. Historically speaking, before Said an orientalist was a scholar who studied “the orient” (the East), which usually meant some part of the Muslim world or of Asia. This broad notion of “the orient” is still carried in our contemporary expression “the Middle East.” In his classic work Orientalism (1978), Said observed that western culture’s scholarly and artistic interaction with “the orient” took place in the historical context of European colonialism, and that much of this early engagement was defined by underlying assumptions about “the West” and “the East” that consistently rendered the latter inferior to the former, regardless of the positive or negative inten- tions of any author or thinker.19 So, whereas the West was commonly coded as masculine, active, and mate- rialist, the East was commonly coded as feminine, passive, and spiritual. The “spiritual East” may sound positive, but, once it is placed along the larger histor- ical and literary spectrum, we can see that it is the flip- side of the “materialist West,” which was consistently framed as the positive, scientific, active, rational pole.

Most of Said’s examples were drawn from European representations of Arab cultures (he himself was an American citizen of Palestinian-Lebanese descent)— representations that, he argued, were grossly mis- leading, false, and self-serving of European and now US imperialistic ambitions. But the basic model has been widely applied to western representations of other non-western contexts. Hence, when a culture, say, like India was being praised or lifted up by both European and Indian authors as a model or as more “spiritual” than “the West” (for instance in expressions like the “mystic East”), Said’s rational re- reading would argue that these “orientalist” tropes functioned in ways that advanced the colonial project and privileged the economic and political interests of the European nation-states, even when they appeared to be positive or admiring—or especially then.20

Said’s work is central to the comparative study of religion because, as we saw in Chapter 2, it is an

indubitable fact that the latter arose most recently, through European colonial interactions with these “oriental” cultures and religions and precisely during the colonial period. Many of the field’s early and later depictions of Islamic and Asian cultures are very much open to this orientalist critique. And this is before we get to the field’s early framing of numerous African, American, and Australian indigenous traditions as “primitive” or “savage”—an unmistak- able legacy of colonialism.

Such a bracing critique needs to be answered by the comparativist because, whatever Said’s own intentions, his work has been consistently used by others to call into question any comparativist practice and to regard it as implicitly colonialist or imperialist. Whereas the psychological and sociological methods discussed above have encouraged and furthered comparativism, Said’s orientalist critique has been invoked as part of a broad-based attempt to squash comparativism.

This latter use of Said’s critique as a wholesale rejection of comparison needs to be named for what it is: a gross over-simplification. As we have already had multiple occasions to see, all sorts of comparative practices have been performed around the globe for millennia. Moreover, the location of ancient wisdom “in the East” is hardly a European colonial invention. It goes back a full two millennia, and then some—to some of our earliest intellectual and religious sources. There is thus no necessary relationship between European colonialism and the location of special religious knowledge “in the East.” Nor is there any necessary connection between comparativism and colonialism, although there do seem to be some very deep structural links between radical forms of comparison and mystical forms of thinking.

Moreover, even early scholarship on the orient in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was incredibly diverse; key segments of it were advanced in cultures that had no colonies in the East (like Germany) or in former colonies (like the USA); and, perhaps above all, its intense religious interests in the global diversity of humankind and in the ultimate question of human identity or “soul” clearly worked against European ethnocentrism and Christian chauvinism.

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Equally problematic and simplistic readings of Said too easily ignore the fact that non-western cultures like those of the Arabic-speaking Muslim societies, India, and China have practiced their own forms of “occidentalism,” portraying and represent- ing “the West” in equally distorting and self-serving ways. The other oft-overlooked historical fact here is that in an earlier period Islam itself spread through empire—one that subjected Western Europe and much of the civilized world. In short, Said’s bracing criticism cuts both ways.

Or all ways. We might say, then, that Said was more right than

he imagined, as long as we are willing to extend his orientalist critiques into critiques of occidentalism and of every other historical form of empire and projection. That would be most of human history. The history of colonialism and empire, after all, goes far beyond the last few centuries, and much of the histories of both Christianity and Islam are located squarely in the context of imperial and colonial projects. And this is all well after the other empires of history, including China’s empires, the Egyptian Empire, the Israelite campaigns in Canaan, the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the Aztec and Mayan Empires, and so on.

The simple truth is that much of recorded human history has been largely determined by imperial his- tory, and that these empires produced any number of positive things alongside all the violence, terror, and military aggression. One thinks here, for example, of ancient Persian, Greek, and Roman cosmopolitanism, or of Roman roads and law, or of ancient Meso- american architecture and city building, or, most recently, of western science and technology (think railroads and electricity). This is not to idealize, much less to defend colonial and imperial practices. It is simply to underline the complexity of the issues.

Conversion and empire

With respect to the comparative study of religion, probably the most significant imperial practice has

been that of conversion, by which we mean a radical realignment of life and self-understanding around a new religious narrative and set of beliefs. The word itself, derived from the Latin, invokes a certain “turning around,” or more literally “turning with,” a new set of values and convictions.

Conversion, of course, need not be influenced by or reduced to an imperial project. People also convert to other religions to escape gross economic or social injustice, to assimilate into a new culture, or because of some overwhelming religious experience. Nevertheless, it the case that, in the Christian, Islamic, and European imperial projects, we find numerous examples of manipulated, coerced, or forced conversions, and that much of the world is now Christian or Muslim (and “modern”) because of these empires and their colo- nial conversion campaigns. If you are a Christian or a Muslim or you consider yourself “modern,” you likely owe this identity and self- understanding to past colonial and imperial projects.

on spirit and spandrels: Cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and Cultural evolution

As we have seen already, the main ground on which some of the earliest European intellectuals and anthropologists of religion thought and compared was nourished by the ferment of early evolutionary biology. Such individuals were con- vinced that Darwin’s vision of natural selection would ultimately provide the key to understanding the nature of religion. Given their historical con- text, it should not surprise us that their early attempts usually ended in some form of colonial ethno centrism, with the worldview of the European comparativist on top. This is the primary reason why, in the professional study of religion, evolu- tionary models of religion were more or less abandoned for most of the twentieth century as inescapably problematic, if not actually racist.

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Things have changed. A lot. Evolutionary models are now widely celebrated again. Although still young and in their early stages, such models are clearly here to stay, and no responsible mapping of the field can afford to overlook them.

If we look from a wide historical angle, what we can see now is in fact not one, not two, but at least three different types of evolutionary models that have spiked at different points over the last century and a half, up to the present day. For the sake of conversation, let us name them theistic models, mystical vitalist models, and cognitive evolutionary psychology models. The first two are not rationalist re-readings in the strict sense, since they take revelation very seriously and incorporate it into the heart of their theorizing. They will not take our attention here, as they are not, strictly speaking, rationalist re-readings. We will only describe them briefly.

Theistic models

Theistic models are models that posit a personal deity or a god at work behind the natural laws of the universe, especially where evolutionary processes are concerned. These models vary widely and should not be conflated with one another. The nineteenth- century models were theistic in a devel- opmental sense, to the extent that they argued that religion has developed historically from its most “primitive” modes in animism and polytheism up to its fullest flowering in monotheism. So too are the “creationist” arguments of contemporary funda- mentalist groups, which themselves vary widely but often end up force-fitting the scientific evidence into some literal reading of the first three chapters of Genesis.

Neither of these comparative practices is accept- able to the vast majority of modern scholars of reli- gion today, as both are clearly based on ethnocentric arrogance (the colonial models) or on a gross denial of the scientific evidence and/or a naïve precritical reading of scriptural texts (the creationist models). Other, more nuanced theistic models are, however, seriously entertained, particularly under that broad

banner of “science and religion.” These models are generally advanced by believing scientists or theologians and by philosophers trained in the natural sciences. Such authors turn to evidence like the uncanny “fine-tuning” of the four fundamental forces of matter, or the fantastically complicated structure of the cell and its ability to replicate DNA; and they do so in order to posit an intelligence (really a super-intelligence) at work within cosmic history.

mystical Vitalist models

Mystical vitalist models move beyond theorizing and claim to intuit, know, or even experience some living force or intelligence within evolutionary processes. Generally this force is experienced as some cosmic spirit or mind gradually coming into fuller and fuller manifestation through cosmolog- ical, biological, sociocultural, and now spiritual evolution. Hence the term vitalism—vita means “life” in Latin—which refers to any philosophical position that posits, at work in the universe, some life force or living energy that is not finally reducible to matter and its mechanisms.

These mystical vitalist models are historically related to the theistic models, but they are also quite different. In the Christian West they go back to ancient convictions about a “soul of the world” (anima mundi) and a “spirit of the universe” (spiritus universi), or about the natural world being a second book of Revelation. We have seen a few contempo- rary examples of mystical vitalist models in the mystical experiences of the NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell and of the comic book writer Grant Morrison. One of the most remarkable examples, however, occurs in the history of Islam. In some of the schools of Sufism in the Ottoman Empire, hundreds of years before Darwin, we find a genre of poetry called devriyyes that features the theme of particles of soul “reincarnating” through the mineral world, the vegetable world, the animal world, and the human world until they can all come together in the body of a true saint, realize their own innate

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divinity, and come to know that everything is one, that everything is God.

Cognitive evolutionary models

Cognitive evolutionary models draw on contempo- rary cognitive science and evolutionary psychology in order to develop a rationalist re-reading of religion that analyzes religious ideation, rituals, beliefs, and institutions as surface functions of deeper neurolog- ical systems, which have evolved over millions of years for non-religious, adaptive, and survival pur- poses. Unlike theistic and mystical vitalist models, cognitive evolutionary ones refrain, in principle, from invoking non-natural or non-material forces. They are truly rationalist re-readings.

Cognitive science is a branch of academic psychology concerned with mapping the internal systems that determine how we all think, feel, and perceive the world. It is interested, we might say, in identifying and testing the deep “operating system” of the brain, which is running all the surface cultural software. It is interested both in the specific shape and structure of religious ideation and in why these beliefs look so remarkably similar across cultures and times. The short answer is this: the human brain produces this deep religious sameness, and local physical and social environments produce the surface differences. Evolutionary psychology takes this comparative analysis one step further by arguing that these universal cognitive systems are products of our deep evolutionary past and of the species’ adaptive responses to environmental pressures.

Scott Atran explains the comparative robustness of the cognitive evolutionary models through a well-known but often resisted phenomenon: the anthropologist’s (or, we would add, the comparativ- ist’s) otherwise inexplicable powers to enter any human society and grasp its basic social structures and meanings within a few years. If local difference ruled over global sameness, this would not be possible, or at least it would be extremely difficult and lengthy. But it is possible and it happens all the time—and not just to anthropologists and comparativists, but to

travelers, immigrants, business professionals, even readers. And why not? Both the anthropologist and the “foreign” culture are manifestations of the same evolved neural and biological machinery. Atran emphasizes the latter point: “Even the apparently incommensurable aspects of different cultural groups are only conceivable against a rich background of universally commensurable beliefs. If this weren’t true, anthropology would be impossible.”21

Such an evolutionary sameness also implies radical difference, however, since one of the key features of any evolutionary process is diversity. In this case, local social and ecological niches are understood to produce different religious expressions. Hence there are numerous jaguar totems in indigenous South American religions and an elephant-headed god in Hindu India, but there are no jaguar spirits in India or elephant deities in indigenous South America.

That’s the simple surface part. The deeper evolutionary argument is more complex. After all, religion demands exorbitant investments of time, energy, and material resources in “counterintuitive beliefs” or “absurd commitments” to “factually impossible worlds.” Atran puts the problem this way:

To take what is materially false to be true (e.g., people think and laugh and cry and hurt and have sex after they die and their bodies disintegrate) and to take what is materially true to be false (e.g., people just die and disintegrate and that’s that) does not appear to be a reasonable evolutionary strategy. Imagine another animal that took injury for health, or big for small, or fast for slow, or dead for alive.22

Such a species would not survive long. So what is going on here? Part of the answer is cognitive. Moderately

counterintuitive or factually impossible features of a religious story (as long as they are not too counterin- tuitive) render the myth fantastic, striking, and above all memorable, hence it can easily be remembered and transmitted from generation to generation. Moderate strangeness, if you will, is a cognitive feature that selects for survival (read: cultural transmission).

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A successful religious representation, then, has to violate particular cognitive expectations and preserve others at the same time.23 So we get many monsters in world folklore that display all sorts of human features but are not quite human, whereas we seldom find monsters, or deities for that matter, that are entirely non-human, that, say, look like an amoeba or a jelly fish or an abstract trapezoid.

More of the answer is social. Religions demand public demonstrations of expensive commitments to absurd beliefs from individuals not in order to glorify absurdity but so as to assure these individuals’ commitment to the same group. It is, after all, difficult to fake an expensive animal sacrifice or the regular attendance at a weekly or daily religious ritual. By performing such public rituals, individuals perform their own commitments to the social group, whether or not they happen to believe the mythical world they are re-enacting. Moreover, these are extremely important commitments to demand, because every social system contains “representa- tions of false belief and deception.”24 In short, religious worlds are fragile, patently dubious, and so easily questioned. Accordingly they are always under the threat of defection from individuals. The repeated rituals and public acts of commitment prop all of this up and keep it going.

Most of the answer, however, is evolutionary. Thus behind the cognitive and social answers lies a third, even more basic answer as to why religious expressions look the way they do. That evolutionary answer boils down to the primordial pressure to avoid predators and acquire prey and protection. So, for example, the universal tendency to think about the sacred as both positive and negative, as protective and destructive, is rationally re-read as a distant expression of a more basic predator– protector detection system. In consequence, “the evolutionary imperative to detect rapacious agents favors [the] emergence of malevolent deities in every culture.”25 In this way the religious is reduced to the biological.

Not quite. The argument is more sophisticated and more interesting. It is not that religion = biology, full

stop. It is that religion appears within, and well after, a biological system that has evolved under other pressures and for other needs. Religious ideation, practices, and institutions are not biology per se. They are unnecessary “add-ons” of human evolution, which work with the help of and within the well-worn “mental modules” or “templates” that the human brain has developed in order to cope with earlier adaptive, survival, and social challenges.

To employ Atran’s metaphor, we might say that religion is like water on an ancient mountain landscape. It flows naturally and goes where the rivulets, canyons, and slopes of the mountainous land take it. Religion follows the “evolutionary landscape” of the evolved brain and the adaptive challenges that the human species has faced over millions of years. Its river can certainly flow or collect elsewhere, and it occasionally does, but it will always tend to “dry up” and wither away if it flows in directions or collects in places that have not been carved out by these millions of years of hominid and now human time.

These cognitive evolutionary models are reductive in both tone and conclusion. They are naturalistic models that accept only material realities and causes. Here, then, even a category like “culture” ceases to be a world to live in—let alone an enchanted set of symbols that might potentially mediate a transcen- dent reality—and becomes instead “the distributed structure of cognition, that is, the causal networking of ideas and behaviors within and between minds.”26 No particular religious system is understood to point to any ultimate or transcendent truth. Indeed, although religion may well serve reproductive and various socially useful ends (like encouraging people to reproduce, form stable family networks, and cooperate in groups), asking whether a particular revelation is “true” or “false” is a meaningless question. Beliefs, scriptures, and deities are side effects of evolutionary adaptations; but they are not adaptations themselves, and they certainly have nothing to do with any objective or transcendent truth.

As a secular analogue, take the example of American football. Human bipedality evolved so as to increase vision over an African savannah (to detect

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predators and prey), the human arm evolved its throwing abilities for the hunt, and tribal groups used animals as totems around which to organize their social behavior and competitive inter-tribal warfare. Modern American football uses those same legs, that same ability to throw spears and rocks, and even that same totemic group behavior (hence all those local totemic mascots: the Dallas Cowboys, the Miami Dolphins, the Seattle Seahawks, and so on) for entirely different reasons, but for reasons neverthe- less built into the evolutionary architecture of the human body. It would be nonsensical to suggest that evolution “intended” the National Football League, or that American football can tell us something about the cosmos, but it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that American football is a by-product or side effect of anatomy, skill sets, and sensibilities that originally evolved around survival, competition, cooperation, predators, and prey.

Evolutionary thinkers sometimes use another metaphor or analogy to transmit the same under- standing of religion as an evolutionary add-on or by-product—an analogy drawn this time from architecture. In this analogy, first advanced by evolutionary biologists Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin in 1979, most products of human cognitive faculties, including language, art, and religious phenomena, are said to be like the spandrels of architecture, those empty places in the right angle of an arch that are filled up with things like sculpted or painted gargoyles, angels, saints, and deities, that is, with objects of religion and art. Religion here is not about spirit, for there is no such thing. Religion is about these spandrels.27 Religion is decorative, but it is decoration that fits into a specific evolved human architecture and meets particular design needs (see Figure 11.2).

Two common focal points of cognitive evolu- tionary theories of religion can serve to illustrate how these methods are presently forging new explanatory models for our rational understanding of “religion.”

Invisible Presences Religion is famous for positing invisible presences in the environment, from ghosts

to God. Indeed, “belief in invisible beings” was one of the earliest proposed definitions of religion. From a conventional scientific perspective, such beings are not really there, of course. So how to explain the universal human tendency to believe that they are? Evolutionary psychologists point out that, if we read such beliefs in the light of survival and adaptation needs, we can see quite quickly why these sensibil- ities would have evolved. The argument goes that it would have been much more costly not to detect presences in the environment, some of which (like lions and tigers) would have really been there, than to detect others which (like ghosts and God) were not really there. Nor would this have been simply a defensive posture. It would have been useful, too, for

Figure 11.2 A spandrel. Saint Pancras Public Baths, London, England. © Philippa Lewis/Edifice/Corbis.

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offensive postures—for example in the act of hunting for prey.

In short, we evolved to be super-sensitive to powerful presences in our environment for both pro- tection and our own predatory needs. The religious sensibility to detect invisible presences piggy-backs on this evolved “predator–protector-prey detection schema.”28 Human experiences that involve the detec- tion of things like ghosts and God are, then, “mis- guided intuitions” built on a real, evolved capacity.29

Altruism If the point of adaptation is to ensure survival in order for individuals to reproduce (evolu- tionary biologists call this fitness), how does one explain the common phenomenon of individuals sac- rificing their own welfare, or even life, for others? Clearly such behavior is common and is by no means restricted to human beings. It even occurs across species. Ever watch a mother bird lure a cat away from its young by faking an injury? Or watch a dog effort- lessly risk its life for its human owner? Evolutionary psychologists have an answer about the ubiquity of this phenomenon. They draw a simple distinction between classical or “Darwinian fitness” and “inclusive fitness.” Darwinian fitness concerns the survival of the individual. Inclusive fitness, on the other hand, is concerned with the survival of the group. When an individual sacrifices himself or herself for the community, what he or she is really doing, in this view, is protecting the gene pool, including many of his or her own genes, by assuring the stability and security of the social group. Put a bit differently, evolutionary processes do not work toward the survival of individ- uals, but toward the survival and reproduction of com- munities and species.

Obviously, these cognitive evolutionary psycho- logical models of religion could not be more different from the theistic or mystical vitalist models. They do not leave any room for the guiding presence or intelligence of deity, not to mention any actual communion with or direct knowledge of the evolutionary impulse itself. They advance a model that is highly abstract, impersonal, computer-like, and, above all, non-teleological (“teleology” is a

compound the Greek noun telos, “end” or “purpose”). In the classic Darwinian model, evolu- tionary processes possess no meaning and no future goal, end, or purpose. Hence the quip of the theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg: “The more comprehensible the universe becomes, the more it also seems pointless.”30

ann Taves and the Building Blocks approach

One of the most striking features of cognitive and evolutionary models of religion is their almost total lack of attention to actual religious experiences, whose reported details would inevitably reintro- duce claims of transcendence and meaning into the discussion. This is partly a natural function of the method’s commitment to abstract models such as cognitive templates and cognitive structures, which operate well outside the awareness of the individual. But it is also a reflection of the ways in which rational re-readings of religion have moved further and further away from the category of experience.

One important exception here is the work of Ann Taves, which is designed “to support research on singular experiences across cultures and historical time periods” with the tools of cognitive psychology.31 This she does through an approach that reframes reli- gious experiences as “experiences deemed religious” or “special.” What Taves is most interested in here is how genuinely anomalous experiences become the “building blocks” of religion over time, through peo- ple ascribing, either consciously or unconsciously, specialness or sacrality to them, much as Durkheim and the sociology of religion have long argued. She is interested in a “bottom-up” approach to modeling religion instead of a “top-down” approach.

The latter has traditionally worked through complex cultural concepts like “religion” or “God,” which are generally not cross-culturally applicable. In contrast, Taves prefers to focus on more basic building blocks, like “play,” “nonordinary powers,” or “path,” which are globally distributed. Indeed, play displays “deep evolutionary roots” and can be observed in the animal kingdom through tail

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wagging, mock bows, and even, believe it or not, what looks remarkably like laughter, even in rats.32

Taves is drawn to the themes of nonordinary powers and nonordinary worlds as particularly use- ful “building blocks.” “Rather than shy away from the idea of an underlying magicoreligious matrix,” she writes, “I think we should embrace it.”33 Here she is aligned with scholars like the sociologist of religion Martin Riesbrodt, who, as we saw in Chapter 3, similarly defined religion as a means of dealing with “superhuman powers.” She can thus suggest, in the spirit of the toolbox or toolkit again, that what the scholar of religion needs is a “Powers Kit” and an “Alternate Worlds Kit,” which “could be used separately or combined to create different effects,” that is, different religious worlds.34

Her handling of the “Powers Kit” is especially close to my own proposals. She can thus write:

While theories of the first type [evolutionary psychology models that focus on the detection of threats and resources] argue that religion is a “ spandrel” or by-product of evolved capacities with no particular survival benefits, research on the placebo effect suggests that the attribution of nonordinary powers to things may trigger capacities that are otherwise unavailable to people, thus providing an evolutionary advantage.35

This, of course, is exactly what we suggested in Chapter 8 under the theme of the truth of the trick.

Taves’s handling of William Barnard’s self-reported mystical experience (which we treated briefly in Chapter 9) and of his subsequent interpretation of it as evidence for the existence of an immortal self is a good example of her comparative practice. Taves wants to insist both on the felt anomalous, unique, or apparent transcendent nature of such experiences and on the attribution processes through which these events are “deemed special” and, in some cases, shaped into religious ideas and (in rare cases) into stable teachings and institutions.

We do not have to accept Barnard’s own explanation of his experience, she notes, but we do have to take

seriously his description of it as special or unique. It is not enough, then, to show how an experience is “constructed.” We have to take seriously its genuinely felt or intuited special qualities. In her own words,

we need a deeper understanding of the ways in which seemingly novel experiences not only inspire individuals to search for alternative meaning systems, as in Barnard’s case, but also lead to the generation of new meaning systems that appeal to multitudes of followers, as in the case of Siddhartha Gautama or Joseph Smith [the founders of Buddhism and Mormonism, respectively].36

It is both this sensitivity to the nuances of real and extreme religious experiences and this balanced embrace of the special and the natural that make the work of Ann Taves a model rational re-reading of religion.

Before we move on, it is worth noting Taves’s indebtedness to another important scholar of religion, the philosopher Wayne Proudfoot. It was Proudfoot who initially made the helpful distinction between what he called “descriptive reductionism” and “explan- atory reductionism” in his classic study Religious Experience (1987).37 Descriptive reductionism is never appropriate for the student or scholar of religion. It involves describing an individual’s religious experi- ences in terms that are foreign to the subject’s own self-understanding and experience. The scholar’s first task is to describe a religious experience accurately, as the experiencer knew and reported it. After this accurate description, however, the scholar has every right and every need to proceed with an explanation of the religious experience in question, and this explanation in no way needs to correspond to the self- understandings of the subject or to the terms of his or her tradition. There are two different stages in responsible scholarship, then: (1) description; and (2) explanation. The latter can and likely will be reduc- tive. The former, however, should preserve the self- understanding and “feel” of the experience in question. Hence Ann Taves’s nuanced treatment of the mystical, immortal experience of William Barnard.

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The study of religion and Violence before and after 9/11

The events of 9/11 taught the world what scholars of religion already knew all too well: that religion is a complex phenomenon, which can in no way be framed as a simple moral force of good and peace in the world. Much has been written in the last century or so on the subject of religion and violence, largely in response to the historical circumstances and pressing social needs of the authors in question. Debates about “just war” and pacifism were especially common around the two world wars, in the first half of the twentieth century. After the counterculture of the second half, much of the scholarship on religion and violence shifted to the subject of “cults” and “brainwashing.” More recently, of course, it has

shifted to global terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and the possible links between monotheism and vio- lence. Because of space, we can only touch on the last two subjects here.

The Question of Cults and Brainwashing

In 1978, 918 people committed religious suicide by drinking a cyanide-laced fruit drink in Jonestown, Guyana, under the inspiration of the Christian preacher Jim Jones and his People’s Temple movement (see Figure 11.3). In 1993, 76 members of the Branch Davidians (a splinter group of the Seventh-day Adventists), under the leadership of David Koresh in Waco, Texas, died in a fiery holo- caust at the end of a 51-day siege by the US government. The details of this event remain highly controversial, including who started the fire and

Figure 11.3 Jonestown, Guyana, November 18, 1978. Bodies belonging to members of the Jonestown community, who committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced fruit punch. © David Hume Kennerly / Getty Images.

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who fired the first shots in the government raid that led to the siege. In 1995, followers of the eclectic Japanese Buddhist–Hindu movement known as Aum Shinrikyo employed a biological weapon, sarin gas, killing 12 and injuring thousands in a Tokyo subway. In 1997, 39 members of a UFO religion called Heaven’s Gate committed suicide in the hope of joining a spacecraft that they believed was follow- ing the Hale-Bopp comet, which was then approach- ing the earth’s view. They were led to this act by their two charismatic founders, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, who taught that they were, both of them, extraterrestrial “ walk-ins,” that is, aliens in human form.

One easy explanation commonly offered for these horrific events is that such groups are “cults” and that their members have been “brainwashed.” The reality is much more complex. For one thing, the word “cult” (as well as “sect,” used more commonly in European countries) has become a loaded prejudicial term, which can too easily justify violence against small religious groups and their members. It is also worth noting that, historically speaking, a “cult” (which comes from the Latin cultus) is related to the terms “cultivate” and “culture” and was originally used to describe any established religious activity, as in the Catholic “cult of the saints.” It carried no negative connotations. Closer to home, “cult” was the term that twentieth-century sociologists used to replace Troeltsch’s earlier “mysticism” type. What we have here, then, is yet another “abused” word. Many scholars today use the more neutral phrase “new religious movement.”

The term “brainwashing” is similarly unhelpful. The basic problem is that this word assumes that it is psychologically possible for individuals to be forced into actions against their own will and best interests, for long periods of time, in the absence of any physical means of control. Initial public views on brainwashing were based on the anti-American statements made by some American POWs ( prisoners of war) during the Korean War (1950–1953). The professional psychological community has since eval- uated the evidence and concluded that brainwashing,

as commonly understood, is not psychologically possible, at least not in the absence of physical restraint or coercion. This appears to be the key. In some of the cases listed above, such as the Jonestown and the Aum Shinrikyo events, force or restraint was indeed used on some individuals, but in most other cases both affiliation to the group and participation in the violence were voluntary.

As with all other comparative terms, there is a history here. During the 1960s and 1970s, a number of individuals began to use the phrase “coercive persuasion” to explain behavioral changes that took place in the various new religious movements that sprang up in the counterculture. Coercive persuasion came to mean brainwashing without physical restraint. It was said to be achieved through emo- tional manipulation, hard work, and isolation, supported by chanting, fasting and ascetic practices, all of which were part of a sophisticated system designed to break down the personality of the recruit and assist the leader in remolding it to his or her will. It was alleged that cults used deception, fraud, and even blackmail to retain their members.

Although a few groups did use illegal or unethical tactics, most were simply offering an immersive and high-demand experience that satisfied their members. Furthermore, most of the alleged charac- teristics of a cult (strange clothes or costumes, strong discipline, specific dietary practices, and distinctive hair cuts) can also be found in more established religions, not to mention the military organizations of almost any nation-state. The com- parativist cannot help but notice that the cult label was often applied by Christians to groups with beliefs rooted in Asian religious traditions (more bad comparisons).

Ironically, the emerging “anti-cult” movement justified its own use of coercive or even violent techniques designed to “break” cult indoctrination. These techniques included kidnapping and forced “deprogramming,” which basically amounted to holding group members against their will until they agreed to give up their newfound beliefs. One form of coercion had replaced another.

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As it turns out, deprogrammings are not very successful, and most recruits to new religious movements leave voluntarily. Individual agency is generally much stronger and more resilient than the language of “brainwashing” suggests (as if we were towels or shirts?). Sociologist Lorne Dawson summa- rizes the scholarly consensus: “The evidence is weak for assuming that the full and involuntary transfor- mation of identity signified by ‘brainwashing’ can occur in the absence of physical restraint and abuse.”38 Most scholars today see conversion as a complex process that meets a variety of social, psychological and spiritual needs.

In the end, two conclusions can be drawn from the study of new religious movements and violence. First, violence is rare. As pointed out by Dawson, “even though there have been many world-rejecting apocalyptic groups, few of them have been impli- cated in any acts of violence, towards themselves or others.”39 Second, violence is usually an interactive process, as it was in the Branch Davidian case. The Branch Davidians were certainly operating with a set of dangerous eschatological beliefs (based on Revelation) and were partly responsible for what happened, but, as Catherine Wessinger observes, “the fire would not have started if tanks had not been inserting a flammable tear gas and demolishing the building.”40

Most new religious movements do not end violently, even those that experience millennial episodes. As a case in point, consider the several thousand members of Church Universal and Triumphant, a New Age religious movement led by Elizabeth Clare Prophet (mother of Erin). This group constructed a network of underground bomb shelters in Montana and purchased weapons for self-defense in response to Prophet’s eschatological predictions of an impending nuclear war. A series of drills were held, but little else transpired. The group members emerged from the shelters peacefully and eventually returned to their homes and jobs. The core group at the church headquarters dwindled over time, and the group renewed its emphasis on peaceful worship. A study of these events reveals the ebb and

flow of eschatological themes in response to both a perception of persecution and the fragility of charismatic leadership. It also demonstrates that groups can continue after such near-apocalyptic incidents, weakened for sure, but with a return to non-eschatological teachings and behavior.41

In the end we might conclude that beliefs do not and cannot kill people alone; they need people too. Still, if a particular set of beliefs relies on violence for its logic and for the dramatic ending of its story, we have good reason to be concerned.

As we saw on 9/11. The Islamist radicals who hi-jacked those four planes and killed thousands of innocent people murdered and died for religious reasons, “for God.” We can argue that these were misguided reasons or reasons not faithful to the real or full teachings of Islam, but we cannot deny the Islamists their own self-understandings and mean- ings. They were what they were.

“in the name of god”

Again, it bears repeating: religious terrorism is by no means unique in the historical record. Quite the contrary. People have been killing people for millen- nia for conscious, well thought out religious reasons, which are always also political, economic, and personal reasons. As the stories go, the tenth and last plague in Exodus involved the god of the Hebrews slaying the (completely innocent) male children of Egyptian mothers and fathers in order to convince the Egyptian leaders to free the Hebrews. How do you think those Egyptian parents felt about the terrorist acts of this foreign murderous god? For centuries, colonizing and missionizing Christians wiped out, sometimes intentionally, through military force, sometimes accidentally, through disease and alcohol, entire indigenous cultures and populations in Africa, Australia, and the Americas. Zen Buddhist priests preached virulent forms of Japanese nation- alism and supported the war effort in World War II. Nationalist Hindus carefully planned and organized a nation-wide political movement that led to the destruction of the Muslim Babri mosque in Ayodhya

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in 1992, which in turn initiated waves of religious violence between Muslims and Hindus that took the lives of thousands of people and opened up an era of politicized Hindu fundamentalism.

How should one respond intellectually, that is, with the tools of clear rational thought, to all of this?

Faith as prevention, protection, and problem

The first thing to say is that we must recognize that religion also, and probably much more often, pre- vents violence to the extent that it suppresses and controls human aggression and instills basic ethical norms in human beings and societies on a daily basis in countless invisible ways. Faith does not just occa- sionally kill. It also protects and prevents. Numerous writers have commented on the mass massacre that was the twentieth century, and that much of the immeasurable violence was carried out not by religious groups, but by aggressively atheist or secular regimes: Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot. In short, it is certainly the case that too much religion can produce real violence, but it is also more than apparent that not enough religion can produce even more. And on an unbelievable scale.

The second thing we can observe is that most of the recent Islamist violence has been directed at the fellow faithful, not at people outside the Islamic world. Although there are no definitive statistics available, it is clearly an understatement to observe that, for every Indian, European, or American who has become a target of violent Islamist attacks, hundreds of Muslims have suffered similar fates at the hands of their fellow Muslims. Islamist radicals, after all, do not simply position them- selves against the assumed “godlessness” of modern secular humanism and “the West.” They also fero- ciously oppose the more syncretic understandings of Islam, which often draw upon the mystical elements of the tradition. For an Islamist funda- mentalist, all such developments fall into the blank category of “human corruptions,” as opposed to the “pure faith” of the founding fathers. This is why radical Islamist groups have been so actively

engaged in the destruction of Sufi shrines across the Muslim world.

The third thing we can say is that acts of religious violence make good sense to those who inhabit many traditional forms of religion, which seek to impose their singular vision of humanity, their sameness, on all human beings. These are worldviews that have little sympathy for the modern values of religious liberty, respect for persons, human rights, and cultural and religious pluralism. Indeed, these same values are precisely those that are commonly and openly mocked by fundamentalist leaders and their institutions around the world.

liberalism and Comparison

These mocked values are all key components of a philosophical orientation and political philosophy called liberalism. By “liberalism” we do not mean to refer to any contemporary political campaign or candidate (and we recognize that this term carries very different meanings in different political and national contexts). We mean to refer to a carefully argued philosophical position that has now been developed for centuries by countless political theo- rists and philosophers, originally and primarily in Europe and in the broader West. Richard Miller, in a cogent study of religion and violence after 9/11,42 has identified two core principles of liberalism and its specific forms of social criticism, of which the comparative study of religion is clearly one.

The first core principle is that human beings live their lives “from the inside.” They are autonomous moral agents. They seek to revise their worlds constantly in the light of new information and of their own decision- making processes. They resist all attempts to have a system of values or norms imposed on them “from the outside.” Religious fundamentalists, of course, might say the same, but they would deny that their religious con- victions come from the outside, that is, from the accident of birth and the intimate processes of socialization.

The second core principle of liberalism boils down to a set of values that constitute modern liberal democracies, that is, political arrangements built on

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these same liberal values, namely “the presumption of individual liberty; respect for persons and, with that, the tolerance of different loyalties, communities, and convictions; a commitment to equality; an account of the limited authority of the state; and the organization of political life premised on popular sovereignty,” that is, on democratic processes like free elections.

If you value these principles and wish to live in a society that respects them, you are a liberal political thinker and, potentially at least, a liberal social critic who cannot accept the opposite logic of religious con- servatism upon which religiously motivated terrorist acts rely for their own logic and support.

Miller’s incisive liberal analysis of religious vio- lence is helpful here, since he writes directly against what he calls, quoting another author, the “culture of excuse and apology.” This is important to explain, as this culture of excuse and apology is a common one in academic circles. Miller explains:

This is not a culture in which terrorism is openly defended, but one in which the rationales come from oblique and indirect angles. Typically such rationales assume the form of excusing terrorism, including religious terrorism, by assimilating it into a broader critique of political inequality, Western imperialism, or American foreign policy—as if violent zealots were themselves advocating liberal and egalitarian causes.43

At the end of the day, what we really have here is two dia- metrically opposed worldviews of what a human being is and how human societies should organize themselves: one liberal and open-ended; the other conservative and closed. Also two diametrically opposed ways of being religious: one insisting on complete sameness; the other insisting on both sameness (as in human equality and equal rights) and radical difference (as in religious liberty and autonomous moral agency). Put most provocatively, we have here one example of comparison done badly and one example of comparison done well.

notes

1 For the full poem, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1 September 1939), see W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 273–276.

2 See Carol Delaney, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

3 Saddharma-smrityupasthana Sutra XXXIV, translated by Arthur Waley. In Buddhist Texts through the Ages, edited by Edward Conze, I. B. Horner, D. Snellgrove, and A. Waley (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), 283.

4 Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey in

1 One apparent attraction of functionalism is that such a method appears to avoid or sidestep the tough truth questions: “Is what so-and-so believes true or not?” But does functionalism really avoid these questions? Or does it already have an answer? Examine some functionalist treatments of religion in the media and decide for yourself.

2 Where do you stand on the relationship bet- ween human evolution and religion? Is it really possible, in the long run, to keep our science and our religion apart?

3 Is there any way to address the problem of religious violence in the modern world without also addressing the problem of religion? Can we really separate the violence from the religious contexts in which it takes place and through which it is expressed?

4 What do you do with the observation that two of the most common professional occu- pations of fundamentalist leaders around the world have been engineering and computer programming?

The Tough Questions

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Rational Re-readings362

collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, vol. 7 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1975), 178.

5 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, translated by Joseph Ward Swain (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 14.

6 Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 19. 7 Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 63. 8 Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 22. 9 Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 29.

10 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), 5.

11 Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 9. 12 Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 15. 13 Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 18. 14 Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 28. 15 Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 45. 16 Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 10. 17 Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 17. 18 Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 85–87. 19 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage,

1978). 20 Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial

Theory, India, and the “Mystic” East (New York: Routledge, 1999).

21 Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 113.

22 Atran, In Gods We Trust, 5. 23 Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary

Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 62.

24 Atran, In Gods We Trust, 114. 25 Atran, In Gods We Trust, 79. 26 Atran, In Gods We Trust, 10. 27 Atran, In Gods We Trust, 43.

28 Atran, In Gods We Trust, 51. 29 Boyer, Religion Explained, 145. 30 See Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The

Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 255 (where he also discusses it).

31 Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 11.

32 Ann Taves, “Building Blocks of Sacralities: A New Basis for Comparison across Cultures and Religions.” In Handbook of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, edited by Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal Park, 2nd edn. (New York: Guilford Press, 2013), 151. For the notion of animal laughter, I am relying on NPR’s Radio Lab episode on laughter, available at http://www.radio lab.org/2008/feb/25/ (last accessed August 30, 2013).

33 Taves, “Building Blocks,” 146. 34 Taves, “Building Blocks,” 156. 35 Taves, “Building Blocks,” 152. 36 Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered, 99. 37 Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1987). 38 Lorne L. Dawson, Comprehending Cults: The Sociology

of New Religious Movements, 2nd edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 108.

39 Dawson, Comprehending Cults, 152. 40 Catherine Wessinger, How the Millennium Comes

Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2000), 20–21.

41 For the details of this particular case, see Erin Prophet, Prophet’s Daughter: My Life with Elizabeth Clare Prophet inside Church Universal and Triumphant (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2009).

42 Richard B. Miller, Terror, Religion, and Liberal Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

43 Miller, Terror, Religion, and Liberal Thought, 3–4.

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http://www.radiolab.org/2008/feb/25/

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The Mage (2001), by Lynn Randolph, 56″ × 51″.

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