Co-authored with Dr. Ken Baskin.
Few things are more important to human psychology writ large than religion. But what does this concept really mean?
The more deeply we investigate it, the odder Religion1, as a category of human behavior, seems. For one thing, while almost all scholars agree that it integrates myth and ritual in worship practices, Religion has accumulated dozens of definitions, none of which are universally accepted. Why is it so difficult to find a generally accepted definition for a concept we witness every day?
It is also the case that even first-rate thinkers reach odd conclusions when they try to explain why natural selection should allow people all over the globe to invest so much energy into worshipping what they insist is a superstitious fantasy. Richard Dawkins, for instance, insists that Religion might be the result of neurons that misfire.
Similarly, psychologist Ara Norenzayan argues that powerful, punishing “big gods” made large, impersonal societies possible by convincing people they faced divine retribution if they didn’t work together. Yet, one of the largest societies in world history, China, had no punishing big god during its most glorious periods. Rather, that society made the leader of any social network responsible for everything others in their networks did. So, when someone attempted to assassinate an emperor, they could expect that, if they failed, their entire family would be put to the sword.
We could go on discussing these odd conclusions at length. But, by turning to the history of the concept of Religion, we can come to some important conclusions, not merely about human history, but also about some of the deepest challenges we face today. Historically, Religion is much more than worship; it also serves a complex set of other personal and social functions. We can see this by considering the history of Religion.
For the vast majority of human history, the combination of myth and ritual that we think of as Religion were so deeply woven into the fabric of cultural life that most cultures did not even have a word for “religion”. The word first appears in the first century BCE in Roman culture, with the Latin word religio. At the time, it meant “scruples,” the concern that some activity is important enough to be performed carefully. For the Roman writer Cicero, religio referred to people’s duties to the gods, such as following their rules, performing rituals, or taking prophecies seriously.
Rome’s “religion” did not demand that people “believe in” their gods. It was primarily a civic religion, a way to acknowledge the Empire. As a result, at about the time when Cicero was writing, Epicurean Lucretius discussed people being crushed under the demands of religio, bringing “forth criminal and impious deeds” (quoted in Nongbri 2013: 28)2.
With Christianity, the meaning of religio continued to shift. For Tertullian in the early third century CE, the key issue was the difference between “the true worship of the true god” and worship of other gods (Nongbri 29)2. By the fourth century, Lactantius would contrast vera religio (true worship of the one true God) and falsa religio (false worship).
The meaning of this concept would continue to change, as Christians such as Thomas Aquinas began studying Nature to know God better, and the age of discovery brought knowledge of very different ways of practicing Religion. But the great shift to the modern Western understanding of religion occurred during the century and a half of devastating “religious” wars at the beginning of the modern era.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, Religion became a complex system of mythic belief, ritual practice, and the institutions that administer it. It was also understood as separate from other social institutions. John Locke would go so far as to insist that religion ought to be separated out from other social tasks. Moreover, during the Enlightenment, many leading thinkers, Voltaire for example, would celebrate Science as the source of true knowledge and dismiss Religion as mere superstition.
Our point in offering this obviously oversimplified history is that our understanding of Religion today is very different from what it has been through the vast majority of human life. The problems this difference has led to are the key point of our blog. For most of human history, Religion was not merely a matter of worshipping supernatural gods. Rather, it provided what historian David Christian calls, in his book Origin Stories, a “shared map,” the myth by which members of a community could navigate our “rich, beautiful and sometimes terrifying universe.”
This map enabled both individuals and societies to take on tasks such as developing a shared interpretation of the world, a common identity, and a set of behavioral standards. In fact, it was so deeply integrated into society that the first pre-modern scientists—the astronomers of Babylon and Egypt—were priests. “Religion” was not separate from the rest of social behavior; it provided the compass for that behavior.
In Western modernity, these tasks were fragmented. Science provided the shared interpretation; Nationality defined shared identity; and Capitalism offered behavioral standards and coordinated the exchange of goods. As a result, we seem to be playing a game of dueling moral imperatives with existential challenges such as climate change. While Science has explained for half a century that our burning of fossil fuels could destroy society, Capitalism has insisted that only profits matter. Both are matters of mythically validated values.
Our reading of Religion suggests that it will be all but impossible to address these issues unless we can re-integrate our shared map of the universe. Exactly what that map will be like, how people will enact that map, and whether the result will be a single “world religion” or a collection of more locally evolved practices—all these are questions that must be debated, distilled, and filtered, as psychologist Merlin Donald (1991) describes the process of mythic evolution.
We offer this analysis of Religion as a preliminary step in this process. We believe that UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge (Henriques, 2022), can help develop a new way to think about what Religion is and why it plays a central role in human culture. With it, we will be able to see that many in the West have confused Religion with theism (i.e., belief in a personal god). These two concepts are not the same, and we believe much clarity can be achieved by separating them.
References
1. We capitalize "Religion" in this blog because we want readers to be reflecting on the term and be open to shifting its meaning.
2. Nongbri, Brent. 2013. Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven: Yale University Press
Ken Baskin, Senior Partner of Life Design Partners, is an author and consultant on complex systems.
In a future blog, we will explain why it is helpful to frame religion as a kind of "justification system."
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
