Religion, Mind, and Society Critical Commentary

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CHAPTER 14

Religions as Complex Adaptive Systems Richard Sosis James Barnett Professor of Humanistic Anthropology, Department of Anthropology University of Connecticut, Storrs

I regularly teach an introductory course on the anthropology of religion. At the beginning of each semester, following some brief introductory comments, I ask the students how they would define the term religion. Although this is a seemingly innocuous question, and an obvious place to commence any course on religion, I know from years of teaching that in fact I have opened Pandora’s box. My query invariably leads to a heated discussion about what constitutes religion.

Typically, some students suggest that belief in God characterizes religion, whereas other students correctly remind these students that some people believe in many gods, and they are in turn informed by others that followers of some religions, such as adherents of the Hindu school of Samkhya as well as religious naturalists and humanists within all the Abrahamic traditions, ostensibly do not believe in any gods. The discussion is then likely to move toward a characterization of religion as a set of beliefs, but this ultimately proves to be a dead end because the students are unable to agree upon the precise beliefs that distinguish religion from other social movements in which belief seems important, such as civil rights or believing that aliens have landed in Roswell, New Mexico. The students then explore topics like meaning, salvation, afterlife, and ritual to see whether these concepts hold the key to defining religion.

The discussion within my classroom is a microcosm of the conversation that scholars of religion have been engaging in for at least a century about how to define religion. The historical view of religion has generated considerable discussion within the academic study of religion and often is framed as a debate about whether religion is a natural or artifactual kind. Of the difference, Paul Griffiths notes:

A natural kind is generated by the order of things, independently of human effort or intelligence.… The set of prime numbers is a natural kind in this sense … whereas the set of trousers is not. It is an artifactual kind because we have created it out of whole cloth: without us and our interests (especially our legs), no trousers. (2006, 67)

Whether religion is a natural or artifactual kind has significant implications for how scholars study religion. Although my goal is not to resolve this debate, I present these issues so that

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the following framework can be understood within the context of the academic study of religion. Although I recognize religion as a Western category created for analytical purposes that is absent in many languages, I do not agree with Jonathan Z. Smith’s artifactualist conclusion that “religion has no independent existence apart from the academy” (1982, xi). Nor do I agree that religion is sui generis, although the approach I outline suggests that religions do exist and might be a natural kind, depending on one’s definition of natural kind. Specifically, religions are complex adaptive systems that spontaneously emerge in human communities without conscious deliberation or organization.

The complex adaptive system approach to the study of religion does not necessarily solve the natural kind debate, but it does clarify much confusion in the scientific study of religion, including what religions are. This chapter begins by detailing the workings of the religious system. Next, it explains what complex adaptive systems are—how you can know them when you see them—and how religions exhibit the features of complex adaptive systems. It concludes with brief comments on the implications and merits of viewing religion as a complex adaptive system.

DEFINING RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS

My class proceeds by recognizing that descriptive definitions of religion will always fail because religion is a fuzzy concept that cannot be captured easily within a few sentences. When religion is characterized in a sentence or two, the definition is invariably either too general to exclude cultural institutions that we do not want to define as religions (e.g., nationalism, fandom, and science), or too narrow so that some phenomena that we do want to define as religions are left out (e.g., Buddhism and Confucianism). I assure my concerned students that fuzzy concepts such as religion will not derail study and apprehension. Watch any episode of Star Trek and it is quickly obvious that our definition of life is ambiguous and contested, yet the science of life, that is, biology, marches on, rather effectively I might add, irrespective of definitional ambiguity.

For the study of religion, recognizing religions as systems offers a lifeline out of our definitional quagmire. Specifically, rather than trying to capture the concept of religion in a sentence or two, it is more productive to define religion as constituting the dynamic interaction of core interdependent elements that constitute the building blocks of a system. Breaking the social category of religion down into its more easily definable core elements has several advantages.

First, this approach avoids endless disputes—often on display in my classroom— concerning whether Marxism, science, patriotism, sports, and so on are religions. It is clear that religions share some core elements with all of these cultural institutions, and this approach clarifies that most of religion’s core elements are not unique to religion. Second, defining religion according to its core elements highlights an important goal of comparative research: namely, explaining why some groups emphasize particular core features, whereas other groups emphasize different features. Third, and most important, by breaking down religion into its core elements, it becomes obvious that these elements did not evolve together. Ritual, for example, has antecedents in many other species and presumably has a much deeper evolutionary history in our lineage than many other core elements, such as myth. Asking “When did religion evolve?” is a poor question because it assumes that at some point in our evolutionary history, religion simply appeared. Religion did not appear; it

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consisted of uniting cognitive processes and behaviors that for the most part already existed. Although these elements evolved separately, they coalesce in similar ways across all cultures, and at some point in our history, they began to regularly coalesce.

I have proposed with my colleagues Candace Alcorta (e.g., Alcorta and Sosis 2005), Benjamin Purzycki (e.g., Purzycki, Haque, and Sosis 2014; Purzycki and Sosis 2009, 2013), and Jordan Kiper (e.g., Kiper and Sosis 2014; Sosis and Kiper 2014) that religion may best be understood as an adaptive complex of traits incorporating cognitive, neurological, affective, behavioral, and developmental elements. We argue that these traits derive from prehuman ritual systems and were selected for in early hominin populations because they contributed to the ability of individuals to overcome ever-present ecological challenges. By fostering cooperation and extending the communication and coordination of social relations across time and space, these traits served to maximize the potential resource base for early human populations, thereby increasing individual fitness. The religious system is an exquisite, complex adaptation that supports extensive human cooperation and coordination, and social life as we know it.

CORE ELEMENTS OF RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS

Religious systems typically maintain eight core elements: authority, meaning, moral obligation, myth, ritual, sacred, supernatural agents, and taboo. Each of these elements is most usefully conceived of as a unique category that may have an independent phylogenetic history, but within religious systems, they are inherently interconnected to the other elements within the system. Other features of religion are common, such as music, spirit possession, afterlife beliefs, prophecy, superstition, and pilgrimage, but they are not essential to the working of the religious system; rather, they are better understood as secondary forms of one of the core elements identified above.

The core structure of religious systems consists of interactions among the eight core elements we have identified. Our understanding of how these elements coalesce and interact is rudimentary, but in the past few years, a clearer picture has begun to emerge. Ritual is at the center of religious systems, and although all elements may not interact with each other directly, they do all interact with and through ritual. Particular theories in the evolutionary and cognitive sciences of religion have advanced our understanding of how elements within religious systems are interrelated. For example, Harvey Whitehouse’s Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (2004) provides a useful framework for understanding the mechanisms that enable rituals to create meaning, and significantly, how variation in the frequency of ritual performance is related to variation in the formation of meaning. Likewise, Lee Cronk’s (1994) theory of signal manipulation provides a powerful explanation of how religious authorities employ ritual for means of exploitation.

Sacred values research, outlined by Philip Tetlock (1954–) in “Thinking the Unthinkable: Sacred Values and Taboo Cognitions” (2003), offers another example and highlights the relationship between the sacred-profane distinction and taboo. Other theories offer further insights about how the core elements within religious systems interrelate, such as supernatural punishment theory, see Dominic D. P. Johnson’s God Is Watching You (2016) and Jeffrey P. Schloss and Michael J. Murray’s “Evolutionary Accounts of Belief in Supernatural Punishment” (2011); signaling theory, see William Irons’s “Religion as a Hard-to-Fake Sign of Commitment” (2001) and Joseph Bulbulia and Richard Sosis’s “Signaling Theory and the Evolution of Religions” (2011); MCI theory, see Benjamin Purzycki and Alyana K. Willard’s “MCI Theory: A Critical Discussion” (2016); hazard

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precaution system theory, see Pierre Liénard and Pascal Boyer’s “Whence Collective Rituals?” (2006); and ritual form theory, see Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson’s Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms (2002). These core elements are the building blocks of religious systems (cf. Ann Taves’s Religious Experience Reconsidered, 2009), and as some have argued, such as Bulbulia in “Spreading Order: Religion, Cooperative Niche Construction, and Risky Coordination Problems” (2012), the patterns by which the core elements of religion interact likely constitute a grammar. It is the ongoing task of evolutionary and cognitive researchers studying religion to uncover these grammatical rules.

STRUCTURE OF RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS

Figure 14.1 depicts a general illustration of the structure of religious systems. Religious systems begin with a group of socially engaged individuals. Individuals can enter as well as depart from the group. Like all communities, the group is influenced by external factors including the social, political, economic, ecological, and religious environment in which the group is situated. Notably, as Bulbulia in “Spreading Order” (2012) and Purzycki and Sosis in “The Extended Religious Phenotype and the Adaptive Coupling of Ritual and Belief” (2013) have noted, religious groups are not simply influenced by their external conditions, they actively shape them. These external factors, as well as the internal social dynamics of the group, motivate human action in the form of ritual behavior. Like all systems, religious systems require power to drive the system to function. That power, or energy, is introduced into the religious system through human action in the form of ritual. Ritual behavior contains energy and social information that enters the religious system. All systems transform energy; likewise, the religious system transforms the energy and information of human ritual behaviors into human cooperative and coordinated behaviors.

How does human action in the form of ritual behaviors emerge from social groups? The proximate motivations are likely to be diverse and socioecologically varied. Fortunately, to appreciate how religious systems operate, we do not have to fully apprehend this process, although this is an important area for future work. We do know that rituals spontaneously emerge when communities are under threat. The ethnographic literature on cargo cults offer abundant examples and ethnographers, including Sosis and W. Penn Handwerker writing in “Psalms and Coping with Uncertainty” (2011), have detailed ritual practices that have emerged during times of war, such as psalm recitation. But it is clear that community threat is just one avenue through which ritual behaviors arise; new technologies, social movements, ecological changes, and demographic factors are among the many potential avenues that need to be explored further.

While we await future work that examines these external forces, it is important to recognize that the structures of rituals themselves play a role in their emergence. Specifically, successful ritual behaviors, that is, those that are performed and passed on to future generations, require cognitive support. As McCauley and Lawson (2002) have noted, humans have implicit understandings of how rituals are supposed to work, and it is likely that rituals that are successfully motivated (i.e., brought to life) are those that are consistent with these implicit understandings. Put simply, some rituals are more compelling than others; those rituals that take a form that is congruent with cognitive expectations are likely to be more compelling than rituals that are more difficult to mentally process.

It is useful to distinguish between proximate motivations that can explain the emergence of ritual behaviors within a group from proximate motivations for continuing

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The Religious System

Environment (Social, political, economic,

ecological, religious)

Cooperative & Coordinated Behavior (CCB)

Social Norms (Naturalized)

Individual-Level Effects

Physical Emotional Cognitive Psychological Artefacts

Human Inaction

Successful Proximate Motivations (Cognitive support; social learning;

social pressure; rationalization)

Group-Level Effects Shared: ethos, cognitive schema, symbolic meaning, material culture,

historical memory, identity

Positive Mating/Reproduction

Effects

Positive Health Effects

Negative Mating/Reproduction

Effects

Negative Health Effects

Myth Authority

Taboo

Meaning

Moral Obligation

Supernatural Agents

Sacred

Ritual

Energy/Information

(Human action)

Religious System Dies

UnsuccessfulUnsuccessful Proximate MotivationsProximate Motivations

RevitalizationRevitalization Movement

Positive Feedback Negative Feedback

Successful CCB Failed CCB

Figure 14.1. Religious systems begin with a group of socially engaged individuals, who can enter as well as depart from the group. Like all communities, the group is influenced by external factors, and these external factors, as well as the internal social dynamics of the group, motivate human action in the form of ritual behavior. The power, or energy, that drives the religious system to function is ritual behavior. The religious system transforms the energy and information of human ritual behaviors into human cooperative and coordinated behaviors. RICHARD SOSIS. ADAPTED FROM SOSIS, 2016.

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ritual behaviors that previously have stabilized within a community. Mechanisms for the continuance of ritual behaviors include social learning, as noted by Joseph Henrich (1968–) in “The Evolution of Costly Displays, Cooperation and Religion” (2009); social pressure, as discussed by Sosis in “Why Aren’t We All Hutterites?” (2003), and rationalizations about the efficacy of the ritual behaviors, as outlined by Sosis and Handwerker in “Psalms and Coping with Uncertainty” (2011). Significantly, as Alcorta and Sosis explain in “Ritual, Emotion, and Sacred Symbols” (2005), critical developmental windows appear to facilitate the generational transmission of ritual knowledge.

It is somewhat misleading to describe energy entering religious systems in the form of ritual behavior, because in fact ritual manifests its full character only through its interactions with other elements within the system. More accurately, human action enters the system and is transformed into ritual through its interactions with other elements of the system. Subsequent inputs into the system take the form of the behavior transformed into religious ritual. Once energy enters the religious system through ritual behaviors, the elements that constitute the system interact with ritual behavior in feedback loops.

Within religious systems, for example, ritual behaviors become associated with supernatural agents. Supernatural agents can take on various roles in ritual performance, such as the recipient of sacrificed food or the target of petitionary prayers. Whether supernatural agents are seen as receivers, creators, or enforcers of a ritual performance, once such agents become linked to a ritual, desires to please or appease the agents can proximally motivate the ritual performance. Indeed, the human action that emerges from the social group that provides the seeds of the system will be transformed into what we recognize as religious ritual once it interacts and incorporates the elements of the religious system.

The interaction of the religious system’s core elements results in five primary individual-level effects: physiological, emotional, cognitive, neurological, and technologi- cal effects. The first four are internal responses of ritual performers. These responses span the entire gamut of human experience and likely vary significantly, depending on whether the base rituals are dysphoric, such as Hindu fire walking, or euphoric, such as Sufi dancing. In addition to these internal effects on individuals, the religious system also produces a primary external effect, or what can be considered an extended phenotype (see Purzycki and Sosis, 2013), in the form of ritual objects. These artifacts include masks, mats, beads, pipes, attire, and countless other items fashioned by individuals immersed in their religious system.

These primary individual-level effects yield various group-level effects. Specifically, group-level effects include shared cognitive schema, ethos, symbolic meaning, material culture, historical memory, and group identity. Group-level effects are an emergent property of the religious system, and they can powerfully shape individual lives. Indeed, group-level effects produce societal order by creating structured and stable social worlds— often fantastically imaginative—that individuals inhabit and navigate. They generally are the most salient features of religious systems and illustrate why religions typically are characterized as a collective phenomenon. These effects also give form to the initial population, providing the basis for sustained communal engagement. According to Whitehouse in Modes of Religiosity (2004), in some religious systems, most apparent in the major world religions (i.e., religions with a global reach), it is at this level that local communities can become connected to larger anonymous communities. It is in this way, for example, that members of a local church see themselves as part of a larger fellowship of Christians worldwide.

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SOCIAL NORMS OF RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS

What emerges from these group-level effects are social norms; specifically, expectations and patterns of behavior that characterize communities. This is no small matter. Humans are able to conceive of alternative ways of engaging, understanding, and organizing life. Consequently, our social norms—that is, the way we pattern our lives—are always at risk of modification. As Roy Rappaport (1926–1997) argues in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999), this potential instability is minimized because our social norms become internalized and naturalized. One of the extraordinary features of human experience is that individuals view the norms in which they are entwined as a natural part of their existence. Indeed, it is only when one is in tension with societal norms, such as facing away from an elevator door, that norms feel unusual or extraordinary.

Although rituals create and support religious systems, rituals also produce other social constructions, such as governments, kin networks, sports teams, and libraries. In other words, rituals spawn many systems; our focus specifically on religious systems should not obscure the role that these other systems play in the manifestation of social life. Ritual, sometimes within religious systems and sometimes in other systems, provides the stable grounding of social institutions. Although not all institutions or their products, such as collective norms, are directly associated with ritual performance, social institutions are interlocking (e.g., consider how library systems are connected to monetary, educational, and other systems), and it appears that all foundational institutions (e.g., governments, legal systems) engender and sustain rituals. Indeed, this may be one of ritual’s defining features. It is plausible that rituals inevitably emerge in such institutions because these physical acts provide the sanctity and grounding for our abstract construction of social reality. Rappaport (1999), consequently, sees ritual as the basic social act; ritual provides the source for the naturalization of social norms; thus, he maintains, social life would not be possible without ritual performance.

COOPERATION AND COORDINATION OF RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS

Religious systems generate diverse social norms through ritual, but the norms that sustain religious systems involve community-level cooperation and coordination. The cooperative and coordinated behaviors that are produced via these norms are, in evolutionary terms, the ultimate goals of religious systems. The success of religious systems in motivating cooperative and coordinated behaviors goes a long way toward explaining the emergence and perdurance of this complicated social institution.

The energetic output of religious systems is cooperative and coordinated behavior. It is worth bearing in mind that the religious system is a stunningly convoluted way to produce such behavioral responses. Other social organisms have devised ways to achieve collective goals that are less complicated and mysterious. Selection, however, operates on available traits, and the religious system was built on the existing cognitive and behavioral foundation. Also, human language has necessitated complex solutions for sustaining cooperation and coordination. As Rappaport (1999) observes, the symbolic nature of language means there is always the possibility of deceit and lying because the relationships between signs and their significata are arbitrary. Ultimately, actions (i.e., rituals) speak louder than words.

The religious system is cybernetic in the sense that feedback is inherent to its structure. Successful cooperation and coordination supports the group through the successful acquisition of energy, which feeds back into the system. Unsuccessful cooperation and

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coordination also feeds back into the group, and this lack of energetic input informs the group of failure and warns them of impending resource challenges. In addition to these energetic feedbacks, information about health, mating, and reproductive effects also feed back into the group, informing them about group vitality and offering proximate cues about the value of engaging in ritual behavior.

This information about health, mating, and reproduction emerges from individual and group-level effects. The individual and group-level effects that affect health can potentially be positive, as numerous studies noted by Harold Koenig, Dana King, and Verna B. Carson in the Handbook of Religion and Health (2012) on the health benefits of religion attest. They also can be negative as many rituals are dangerous, including subincision and scarification ceremonies in unhygienic environments, ritual club fights, and fire walking. Moreover, both individual and group-level effects can affect mating and reproduction, again both positively and negatively. Religions are associated with some of the highest fertility rates in the world (e.g., Hutterites, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, etc.), as well as the lowest (e.g., celibate monks, Shakers).

Within religious systems, when the balance of feedback is positive, individuals perform ritual behaviors, which feed the system with the necessary energy it needs to be sustained. When the balance of feedback is negative, proximate factors will not motivate ritual behavior, which will drive the system down one of two possible pathways. If conditions warrant, the group will undergo a religious revitalization. This revitalization generally requires an individual (or group of individuals) who emerges as an inspirational authority that can reinvigorate the group and motivate ritual action. Without the emergence of such a figure, the religious system is likely to die, which has been the fate of the majority of religious systems that have existed in human history. Obviously, most religious systems spend much of their existence fluctuating between periods of success, stasis, failure, and revitalization. Ultimately, religious systems either die or transform beyond the recognition of the old system.

ADAPTABILITY OF RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS

Religion’s ability to change, that is, its ability to adapt, turns out to be one of its most extraordinary, and most misunderstood, features. Religious claims are rarely stagnant or offer permanent truths about the world; they are flexible and respond effectively to changing socioeconomic and ecological conditions, as noted by Alcorta and Sosis in “Ritual, Emotion, and Sacred Symbols” (2005); Purzycki and Sosis in “The Religious System as Adaptive” (2009); and Sosis in “The Adaptationist-Byproduct Debate on the Evolution of Religion” (2009). Religions are adaptive systems that not only are responsive to changing conditions but also are instrumental in facilitating social change, such as the ghost dances among the Sioux and Pawnee, and African American churches in the civil rights movement.

If religions are responsive to changing circumstances, why do religions often appear to be so resistant to change? Why is religion often viewed as a conservative social force? One of the remarkable features of religion is its ability to adapt to local environmental conditions while adherents experience partaking in an eternally consistent and changeless tradition. Rappaport (1999) argues that religion achieves this through a hierarchy of religious discourse, for there is an inverse relationship between the material specificity of a religious claim and the durability of the claim. Religious ideas are hierarchically organized within communities and at the apex of a community’s conceptual hierarchy is what Rappaport refers to as ultimate sacred postulates, such as the Shahada, Shema, or Vandana Ti-sarana for

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Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist communities, respectively. These ultimate sacred postulates lack material specificity and are highly resistant to change. Below ultimate sacred postulates in the religious hierarchy are various cosmological axioms, ritual proscriptions, command- ments, directives, social rules, and other religious assertions that do experience varying levels of change, depending on their material specificity.

Although the rules of religions change throughout time, Rappaport (1999) observes that those who experience such adjustments consider them as an intensification of their own religious acceptance. Religions rarely invalidate the old completely: change occurs by adding to previous practices and beliefs, as well as by elaborating on them, whereas other beliefs and practices slip away unnoticed. Once sacralization is internalized, it is indeed difficult to convince adherents that something consecrated is no longer holy. Hence, when undergoing change, religions often retain the most sacralized elements and augment them. For example, Jewish prayers are part of the Catholic Mass, and when proselytizing to indigenous populations, missionaries often retain the dates of indigenous ritual celebrations and tolerate the continued commitment to indigenous ancestral spirits. As a result, change for adherents is not experienced as something radically new. It is rather experienced as an increased acceptance of eternal and personally relevant truths that, for the practitioner, have always been part of their religious tradition.

RELIGIONS AS COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

Anthropologist have long discussed religion as a system; indeed, arguably two of the most influential anthropologists to study religion in the past fifty years, Clifford Geertz (1926– 2006) and Rappaport, both approached religion as a system, although they did so in very different ways. One of Geertz’s most celebrated articles, “Religion as a Cultural System” ([1967] 1973), embeds the study of religion in the nexus of a hermeneutic approach to culture, whereas Rappaport’s magnum opus, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999), describes religion as a cybernetic system, that is, a system with feedback loops.

Despite their influence and continuing scholarly engagement with their work, the anthropology of religion has not taken a systemic turn. In fact, many anthropologists likely would be suspicious of attempts to generalize religion as a system. Nonetheless, advances in the study of complexity over the past several decades suggest that religion not only possesses systemic features but also can be characterized as a complex adaptive system. This begs the question: what precisely is a complex adaptive system? The best way to answer this question is to first clarify what each term means independently.

Let’s first define system. The dazzling array of systems with which we are all familiar, including economic, digestive, and library systems, might suggest a lack of core attributes, but systems can all be described as a set of interacting or interdependent elements that form an integrated whole. Complex is a term that also carries colloquial meaning, but it holds a specific meaning in the context of complex adaptive systems. When the elements within a system are interdependent such that removing one of the elements significantly undermines the behavior of the system, the system is complex. In Complex Adaptive Systems (2007), John H. Miller and Scott E. Page observe that systems that are complicated can be reduced, but complex systems cannot be reduced without killing them. They offer the following example: if you remove the seat of car, it makes it less complicated; if you remove the engine, it makes

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it less complex. Last, complex adaptive systems are adaptive in the sense that they are flexible and they respond successfully—in terms of the system’s survival—to social and ecological conditions.

Trying to explain what complex adaptive systems are by defining the words that constitute its taxonomic label is not sufficient, and in fact, highlights a key characteristic of actual complex adaptive systems: they are more than the sum of their parts. Complex adaptive systems possess a number of defining features; the following section describes these features and then discusses how they are manifest within religious systems.

RELIGIONS AS COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS: PRIMARY FEATURES

Emergence. Emergence is a difficult and sometimes heated topic among complexity scientists. As is often the case, competing definitions have inflamed debate and complicated rather than clarified matters. Nonetheless, most scholars would agree that emergence is exhibited in cases in which properties result from the interactions of a system’s components that are not in evidence among the components themselves. Emergence implies that phenomena cannot be explained from linear interactions among the system’s components.

Religious systems exhibit emergent properties, including group identities, shared symbolic meanings, and other group-level features discussed previously. When the core features of religious systems coalesce, social phenomena are created, specifically group-level properties, which are not in evidence independently among religion’s core elements. For example, a child’s belief that ghosts reside in her closet does not produce shared symbolic meanings, but the belief in ghosts embedded within an animist religious system will generate many group-level effects.

The emergent nature of religious systems has significant implications for how we understand religious beliefs. As Sosis and Kiper explain in “Religion Is More Than Belief” (2014), the complex systems approach to understanding religion emphasizes that religious beliefs are not independent propositional claims about the world. Religious beliefs emerge from within a cultural system, and they must be understood within that system. In other words, religious belief, as an element of a larger religious system, cannot be analyzed independently of the system in which it is embedded. To do so is like evaluating a symphony when you can hear only one instrument. Moreover, similar to a symphony, religious systems have emergent properties, and thus religion cannot be reduced to independent propositional claims.

Consider another point concerning emergence: because religions exhibit emergent properties, studying the core elements independently as though they are not embedded within a religious system can result in misleading conclusions about religions. Because religions are complex and the result of nonlinear interactions of its components, they simply cannot be broken down and easily reassembled. According to Sosis (2009), it is the interaction between components of the system that must be understood. We will return to this issue in the following section.

Self-Organization. Complex adaptive systems spontaneously self-organize, that is, they do not require top-down or bottom-up orchestration to develop; they emerge inherently from the interactions of the system’s components. One of the fascinating characteristics of religious systems is that they seem to arise naturally wherever humans live as a community.

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As countless commentators of communist China and Russia have remarked, they even arise in the face of social and political forces that are designed to prevent their emergence. Equally intriguing, secular groups who distance themselves from religious dogma nonetheless often adopt the features of religious systems, and some might be considered quasi-religious. Greek fraternities at US universities, for instance, often generate unverifiable mythic narratives, intense ritual routines, and unfalsifiable ideologies concerning brotherhood. Likewise, successful secular terrorists, similar to their religious counterparts, employ features of religion, such as emotionally evocative symbols, rituals, and myths. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) movement, for instance, used Hindu symbols for purposes of recruitment and relied on the language of religious martyrdom to justify and reward the sacrifice of suicide attacks.

Self-organization does not imply a lack of hierarchical structure. Although some complex adaptive systems, such as bird flocks, lack central organization, others, such as the nervous system, develop central controls. Religious systems appear to require hierarchical organization—notably, religious leaders in the form of magicians, shamans, healers, gurus, prophets, and so forth emerge—despite countless attempts to build perfectly egalitarian religious communities.

Unconsciousness. Constituent entities within complex adaptive systems are unconscious of the process of self-organization. The design of complex adaptive systems can appear to observers to be ingenious, such as the functioning of biological cells, but no intelligence is required among constituent entities, in this case, ribosomes, lysosomes, Golgi apparatus, and so forth. Moreover, constituent entities are often completely unaware of the entirety of the system; their information is limited to their local environment.

Although religious systems self-organize without top-down or bottom-up orchestration, like most complex adaptive systems, the agents (i.e., humans) lack complete information about the workings of the systems they enliven. Their interactions, which result in the formation of religious systems, generally are not consciously aimed at creating religious systems. Indeed, one of the successful regulatory mechanisms of religious systems appears to be its ability to shelter agents (i.e., adherents) from the functioning and goals of the system itself. Accurate insight into the workings of religious systems actually might be a destabilizing force; mythic narratives and supernatural rewards and punishments, reinforced through ritual routines, tend to be better motivators than mundane incentives. Of course, there are explicit attempts to create religions, such as Pastafarianism, in which individuals seem to have some understanding and insight about the system they are creating. Nonetheless, just like no chess master knows every possible game of chess, neither scholar nor layperson has complete information about any religious system and its effects.

Decentralization. As mentioned, complex adaptive systems typically lack central control. This does not mean that all constituent entities play an equal role in the emergence and functioning of a complex adaptive system. Indeed, complex adaptive systems often are organized hierarchically and that seems to be the case for most religious systems. Importantly, complex adaptive systems that exhibit hierarchical organization maintain their structure despite the constant flow of agents through the system. Cells within the human body are ephemeral, firms succeed and fail within economic markets, and popes are chosen, and ultimately either resign or pass away, even while the hierarchical structure of these respective systems endures.

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Regulatory Mechanisms. Complex adaptive systems require regulatory mechanisms that enable them to respond adaptively to changing environmental conditions. Our discussion of the hierarchy of religious discourse describes one of the regulatory mechanisms that enable religious systems to adapt to changing environmental systems. Moreover, the nature of the feedback loops in religious systems is such that when a system is not producing cooperative and coordinated behavior, or group members experience negative health or reproductive impacts, this information affects the potential performance of ritual behaviors. Accordingly, the system itself will adjust by possibly revising rules, weaving new motivational myths, or even imagining novel supernatural worlds; otherwise, the system will die.

Openness. Although complex adaptive systems are integrated wholes, they are open systems. That is, they have fuzzy (i.e., not well-defined) and porous (i.e., easily crossed by agents) boundaries. Religious groups vary in how open or closed they are. Some religions proselytize and seek outside members, such as most forms of Christianity, whereas other religions, such as Judaism, discourage new members from joining. Furthermore, individual mobility varies significantly across religious landscapes. For example, in the United States, where religions are experienced as free market commodities, there are much higher levels of denominational switching than in European countries where state-supported religious monopolies exist. Considerable differences also exist between world and indigenous religions in their openness; major world religions tend to be much more open. In many indigenous communities, the only way to join the religious community is to participate in the local initiation ritual; as Whitehouse (2004) explains, there are no anonymous members in distant lands.

Amplification of Random Fluctuations. Positive feedback loops direct complex adaptive systems toward divergent evolutionary pathways; in other words, small random changes that are not necessarily adaptive responses to environmental conditions can result in substantial differences across systems. Because interactions among agents are nonlinear, small fluctuations in input can have considerable impacts on output, which has significant consequences for understanding religious systems. Any casual consideration of Christian, Muslim, or Jewish communities worldwide reveals extraordinary intrareligious diversity (food, dress, greetings, language) that is a product of the local sociocultural environment. But how and why communities initially settled in a particular area is often the result of a fortuitous decision of a religious leader—a ship simply landing where the winds took it, myths of golden streets, and countless other random factors that are not adaptive responses to environmental conditions. But these factors result in astonishing differences among communities over time. Consider religious holidays that mark a historical event. Jews, for example, observe four minor fast days to commemorate tragedies in their history, or in one case a tragedy narrowly averted, but the dates themselves are the incidental consequence of history. Yet, once the fast days were canonized as part of the Jewish calendar, the shape and rhythm of the Jewish year and the lived experiences of Jews were altered. The amplification of random fluctuations suggests that researchers must be cautious when analyzing religious systems not to overinterpret their adaptive nature; adaptive responses are often built on random fluctuations.

History. One implication of the amplification of random fluctuations for complex adaptive systems is that historical contingency is always partially responsible for present behavior.

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Thus, historical analyses will play an important role in understanding any complex adaptive system, and religious systems are no exception. Indeed, it would be impossible to understand why any religion takes the form it does without understanding the historical factors that shaped the religion accordingly. For example, there is nothing inherent in Sunday that makes it a day of rest for Christians, but an explanation for this tradition emerges by understanding that early Christians, after initially sharing Saturday as a Sabbath with Jews, established Sunday as a holy day to distinguish themselves from Jewish communities. Some scholars, similarly, have argued that to distinguish themselves from Jews and Christians, early Muslims chose Friday for Jumu’ah, the most important collective Muslim prayer of the week. Other scholars have noted that Friday may have been a logical and pragmatic response to local economics. In Medina, where the practice emerged, Friday was the weekly market day because Jews purchased supplies in preparation for their Sabbath. In “The Origin and Nature of the Muslim Friday Worship” (1959), S. D. Goitein explains that merchants and customers already had congregated, and thus it was a natural day for public worship.

Unpredictability of Agents. Within complex adaptive systems, it is generally difficult to predict the behavior of specific agents, even if it is possible to predict the behavior of the system itself. In other words, the averages of agents’ behaviors lend themselves to predictability, whereas the behavior of specific agents is unpredictable. As any social scientist will readily admit, even when group-level behavioral patterns appear to stabilize, it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict individual lives. For example, we can confidently anticipate a gathering of parishioners at a local church on Sunday morning, but even regular worshippers will fail to attend occasionally because of illness, travel, or mood, factors we are unlikely to foresee.

Disequilibrium. One of the most interesting and significant features of complex adaptive systems is that they do not operate at equilibria conditions. This does not mean that they do not experience moments of stasis, but their responsiveness to changing environments keeps complex adaptive systems nearly in constant flux. This fact is important because it implies that religious systems are continuously evolving. As discussed, although religious systems give the impression to adherents and outsiders that they are eternal and stable, religious systems in fact are adjusting constantly to local socioecological conditions. As Bulbulia writes in “Charismatic Signalling” (2009), a historical glance at any religion will reveal both surprising stability (e.g., the Lord’s Prayer) as well as extensive change (e.g., the language in which it is recited).

IMPLICATIONS OF THE COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS APPROACH

This chapter might be considered a long definition of religion, as the complex adaptive systems approach to religion offers an alternative perspective from other inquiries into religion. Consider the cognitive science of religion. Many researchers within the cognitive science of religion claim that religions do not really exist and therefore to study them, as religious studies scholars have always done, is misguided.

As Whitehouse discussed at the 2014 Conference for the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion, the in vogue methodological approach among cognitive

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science of religion researchers is fractionalization. Fractionalization refers to the reductionist research strategy that seeks to understand elements of religion by breaking them down and isolating their features for scrutiny. For example, it is argued that to study ritual we need to isolate (in experimental labs) the various common components that constitute ritual, such as body movement, synchrony, singing, attire, and so forth. To be clear, fractionalization has its value and such an approach already has advanced, and will continue to advance, our understanding of religion and the human condition. But such reductionism is just a first step in any analysis of complex phenomena.

Ultimately, the pieces must be put back together, and drawing implications about religious systems from the results of analyses that focus on one corner of the system can be misleading. Even more problematic for fractionalization is that religious systems exhibit emergent properties, as discussed. Religion cannot simply be broken down and studied in isolated fragments with the hope that by understanding the constituent parts we are gaining insight into the workings of the whole system (e.g., see Purzycki, Haque, and Sosis 2014; Sosis 2009; Sosis and Kiper 2014). Viewing religions as complex adaptive systems demands a more holistic analysis.

COMPARING THE COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS APPROACH WITH OTHER SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVES ON RELIGION

The complex adaptive systems approach may help resolve some current debates between cognitive scientists of religion and cultural evolutionists who study religion. For example, there is considerable debate concerning the transmission of religious beliefs and the relative importance of content and context biases. Although cognitive scientists of religion have focused on how successful religious ideas exhibit particular forms that are memorable, Will M. Gervais and Joseph Henrich note in “The Zeus Problem: Why Representational Content Biases Cannot Explain Faith in Gods” (2011) that cultural evolutionists have emphasized the importance of local environments in explaining the transmission of particular religious beliefs. One key insight that emerges from the complex adaptive systems approach is that the success of religious traits will be related to how well they are integrated into the religious system.

Religious beliefs cannot be understood in isolation; they are but one element within a complex system. Their emergence and maintenance is not simply the result of ecological pressures or cognitive mechanisms that generate supernatural beliefs but rather are the product of cultivation and the interaction of multiple elements within the religious system in which they are embedded. The complex adaptive systems approach predicts that religious beliefs interconnected to other elements within the religious system, such as myth and ritual, are more likely to be transmitted to the next generation than religious beliefs that are not connected, or that lose their connection, with other elements within the religious system.

For example, the Talmud contains discussions and descriptions of numerous spirits and demons (e.g., Niddah 17a, Pesachim 110–113) that are no longer entertained by Jewish communities, even those for whom Talmudic study is a daily practice. But belief in some spirits has been retained. Consider ruach ra’ah (literally “evil spirit”), which remains relevant in some Jewish communities. In contemporary Orthodox Judaism, it is believed that the ruach ra’ah clings to one’s hands upon awakening, thus requiring a ritual washing to cleanse, or more accurately, purify one’s hands. Interestingly, the rabbis have offered various reasons for the handwashing ritual, known as negel vasser, performed

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immediately upon awakening. These reasons include that one’s hands likely became dirty during the evening by incidentally touching one’s genitals; that the Kohen washed his hands before his service at the Temple in Jerusalem, and thus one also should wash before prayer; and that, upon arising, it is as if an individual becomes a new person and washing is appropriate. For many religious Jews, the most compelling rabbinical rationalization for negel vasser is that the ruach ra’ah clings to one’s hands upon awakening.

Cognitive scientists of religion suggest that concepts such as ruach ra’ah will be particularly salient and memorable, and thus successful, because of their minimally counterintuitive structure and their association with danger and impurity, which evokes the hazard precaution system. However, believing that an evil spirit inhabits humans when they sleep, and that a trace of their presence remains upon awakening that a ritual washing can remove, are not ideas that naturally spring to human minds. Such beliefs are learned, culturally shared, and require social cultivation. Importantly, belief in ruach ra’ah is part of the Orthodox Jewish religious system. It is supported, endorsed, and evoked by (1) ritual handwashing that requires pouring a defined minimum amount of water in the proper order (first right, then left, then right, then left) and number of times (three times each hand); (2) taboos on speech, movement, and touching; (3) mythical narratives (e.g., Pesachim 111a); (4) extensive halachic (Jewish law) discussions in the Talmud and Shulchan Aruch (indeed, there are too many associated laws to discuss them all here); (5) afterlife beliefs such as the ruach ra’ah that are associated with death; (6) feelings of purity and impurity; and (7) authoritative endorsement by religious leaders (i.e., rabbis). Not only is the concept of ruach ra’ah elicited daily, but because water must be prepared in the evening before retiring to bed, observant Jews encounter the ruach ra’ah twice each day. All of these factors facilitate internalization of belief in ruach ra’ah and highlight how the various elements of religion interact to support each other. Moreover, this belief illustrates the emergent qualities of a living religious system.

RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS ARE LOCAL PHENOMENA

One source of confusion that has hampered attempts to define religion is the taxonomic labels we use to categorize religions. We use labels such as Catholicism, Zen Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and so forth to describe what we imagine to be particular religions. As is hopefully evident by this point in the chapter, religious systems are local affairs and the taxonomic labels that we ascribe to religions actually consist of multiple and often diverse religious systems. Religious systems that fall under the same taxonomic label are linked in the minds and even actions of those who identify with the label. These linked systems, in other words, are part of the environmental input that affects individuals within a system. Interestingly, as John Holland writes in Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (1992), complexity scientists appreciate that taxonomic labels can influence system dynamics.

Religious taxonomic labels often are contested with significant implications for human welfare and lives, especially since the rise of nation-states. For example, because Israel guarantees citizenship to Jews, claims by residents in developing countries of Jewish identity, such as the Feres Mura communities in Ethiopia, are sometimes met with suspicion. Notably, the broad taxonomic labels, particularly of major world religions, should not be confused with religious systems; religious systems are defined locally and world religions consist of many varied religious systems.

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THE CHALLENGE OF PREDICTING HOW RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS CHANGE

Religious systems are clearly organic. The coalescence of various cognitive, neurological, behavioral, affective, and developmental aspects of humanity has resulted in self-sustaining and cross-culturally recurring systems in which individuals, interacting through signaling mechanisms, bring life to these systems. One of the most important lessons of the complex adaptive approach to religion, and vital messages of this chapter, is that altering one part of a complex adaptive system, such as religious systems, has significant effects on other parts. Those effects, notably, are difficult to predict even for those most familiar with religious systems, including scholars and religious leaders.

For example, sociologists Rodney Stark (1934–) and Roger Finke (1954–) have argued in Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (2000) that when the Second Vatican Council in 1962 repealed many of the Catholic Church’s prohibitions and reduced the level of strictness in the church, it had unforeseeable consequences. The Vatican Council was an attempt to regain the commitments of wavering Catholics, but it inadvertently initiated a decline in church attendance among American Catholics and reduced the overall enrollments in seminaries. In “American Jewish Denominations: A Social and Religious Profile” (1979), Bernard Lazerwitz and Michael Harrison note a similar reduction in commitment is associated with the purging of ritual obligations in Reform Judaism as well.

These examples strongly caution against treating religions as if they were simple ways in which people view the world. Religions are complex adaptive systems, and our understanding of them is incomplete. Like other systems in nature, religions are dynamic, emergent, and difficult to predict. By recognizing religions as complex adaptive systems, when compelling reasons emerge to control or reform religions, students, scholars, and policy makers will better appreciate that naïve policies seeking change likely will have unintended consequences. This does not mean that societies are simply at the mercy of religious exigencies, but it does suggest that effective engagement with religions will require an appreciation that they are dynamic complex systems, and all that this implies.

Summary

Religions consist of cognitive, neurological, affective, behavioral, and developmental traits that form a complex adaptive system. The underlying adaptive goal of religious systems is to foster cooperation and social coordination within communities. The workings of religious systems are intricate, and even convoluted, but at their core, they maintain eight primary interdependent elements: authority, meaning, moral obligation, myth, ritual, sacred, supernatural agents, and taboo. These features exhibit independent phylogenetic histories, but at some point in human history, they began to regularly coalesce across human populations. Like all systems, religious systems require energy, and they are fueled by ritual behaviors. Ritual’s interactions with other core elements produce individual-level effects, including physiological and affective responses, which in turn yield group-level effects, such as shared cognitive schema, ethos, and identity. These group-level effects result in a sense of communal order and produce social norms, most important, norms that encourage cooperative and coordinated behaviors among community members.

Further investments in ritual, which sustain the religious system, depend on the success of these collective behaviors. Specifically, religious systems maintain positive and negative

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feedback loops that inform individuals about the system’s success, or lack thereof, in terms of collective outputs, mating opportunities, reproduction, and health outcomes. When cooperation fails, or mating, reproduction, or health suffer, the religious system generally will adapt to its current environmental conditions accordingly, sometimes subtly without notice among adherents, and sometimes through significant revivals that reinvigorate ritual participation. Religious systems that are unable to adapt cease to function as living social institutions that bring order to individual lives.

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