Definitions of religion
Let’s begin by defining religion, so that we can at least agree about what phenomenon we are discussing. Which features are shared by all religions, including Christianity and tribal religions along with the polytheism of classical Greece and Rome, and are necessary and sufficient to identify a phenomenon as a religion rather than as some related but different phenomenon (such as magic, patriotism, or a philosophy of life)?
Table 9.1. Some proposed definitions of religion
1. “Human recognition of superhuman controlling power and especially of a personal God entitled to obedience.” (Concise Oxford Dictionary)
2. “Any specific system of belief and worship, often involving a code of ethics and a philosophy.” (Webster’s New World Dictionary)
3. “A system of social coherence based on a common group of beliefs or attitudes concerning an object, person, unseen being, or system of thought considered to be supernatural, sacred, divine or highest truth, and the moral codes, practices, values, institutions, traditions, and rituals associated with such belief or system of thought.” (Wikipedia)
4. “Religion, in the broadest and most general terms possible,…consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” (William James)
5. “Social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” (Daniel Dennett)
6. “A propitiation or conciliation of superhuman powers which are believed to control nature and man.” (Sir James Frazer)
7. “A set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence.” (Robert Bellah)
8. “A system of beliefs and practices directed toward the ‘ultimate concern’ of a society.” (William Lessa and Evon Vogt)
9. “The belief in superhuman beings and in their power to assist or to harm man approaches universal distribution, and this belief—I would insist—is the core variable which ought to be designated by any definition of religion…. I shall define ‘religion’ as ‘an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings.’” (Melford Spiro)
10. “The common element of religion cross-culturally is a belief that the highest good is defined by an unseen order combined with an array of symbols that assist individuals and groups in ordering their lives in harmony with this order and an emotional commitment to achieving that harmony.” (William Irons)
11. “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” (Émile Durkheim)
12. “Roughly, religion is (1) a community’s costly and hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents (3) who master people’s existential anxieties, such as death and deception.” (Scott Atran)
13. “A religion is: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivation seem uniquely realistic.” (Clifford Geertz)
14. “Religion is a social institution that evolved as an integral mechanism of human culture to create and promote myths, to encourage altruism and reciprocal altruism, and to reveal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of the community.” (Michael Shermer)
15. “A religion we will define as a set of beliefs, practices and institutions which men have evolved in various societies, so far as they can be understood, as responses to those aspects of their life and situation which are believed not in the empirical-instrumental sense to be rationally understandable and/or controllable, and to which they attach a significance which includes some kind of reference to the relevant actions and events to man’s conception of the existence of a ‘supernatural’ order which is conceived and felt to have a fundamental bearing on man’s position in the universe and the values which give meaning to his fate as an individual and his relations to his fellows.” (Talcott Parsons)
16. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” (Karl Marx)
Table 9.1 lists 16 different definitions proposed by scholars of religion. Definitions numbers 11 and 13, by Émile Durkheim and Clifford Geertz respectively, are the ones most frequently quoted by other scholars. It will be obvious that we are not even close to agreement on a definition. Many of these definitions are written in a convoluted style similar to the language used by lawyers in drafting a contract, and that warns us that we are treading on hotly contested ground.
As a fallback position, could we skirt the problem of defining religion in the same way that we often skirt the problem of defining pornography, by saying, “I can’t define pornography, but I nevertheless know it when I see it!”? No, unfortunately even that fallback position won’t work; scholars don’t agree about whether to recognize some widespread and well-known movements as religions. For instance, there have been long-standing debates among scholars of religion about whether Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism should be counted as religions; the current trend is to count Buddhism but not Confucianism, although Confucianism was usually counted a decade or two ago; Confucianism is now instead usually termed a way of life or a secular philosophy.
These difficulties in defining religion are instructive. They warn us that the phenomena that we lump together as religions contain several different components, which are variously strong, weak, or virtually absent in different religions, different societies, and different stages of the evolution of religions. Religion shades into other phenomena, which possess some but not all of the attributes usually associated with religion. That’s why there is disagreement over whether Buddhism, usually counted as one of the world’s four biggest religions, really is a religion at all or is “just” a philosophy of life. The components commonly attributed to religions fall into five sets: belief in the supernatural, shared membership in a social movement, costly and visible proofs of commitment, practical rules for one’s behavior (i.e., “morality”), and belief that supernatural beings and forces can be induced (e.g., by prayer) to intervene in worldly life. As we shall see, though, it would not make sense to define religion by the combination of all five of those attributes, nor to label as non-religion a phenomenon lacking one or more of them, because one would thereby exclude some branches of movements widely recognized as religions.
The first of these five attributes is the basis of the definition of religion that I offered to my University of California undergraduate students when I first taught a course in cultural geography. I proposed, “Religion is the belief in a postulated supernatural agent for whose existence our senses can’t give us evidence, but which is invoked to explain things of which our senses do give us evidence.” This definition has two virtues: belief in supernatural agents is indeed one of the most widespread characteristics of religion; and explanation, as we shall discuss later, was among the main origins and early functions of religions. Most religions do postulate the existence of gods, spirits, and other agents that we term “supernatural” because they or their provable consequences can’t be perceived directly in the natural world. (Throughout this chapter, I shall repeatedly use the word “supernatural” in that neutral sense, without any of the pejorative connotations sometimes associated with the word.) Many religions go further and postulate the existence of an entire parallel supernatural world—often, a heaven, a hell, or another afterlife to which we ourselves shall be transferred after our death in this natural world. Some believers are so convinced of the existence of supernatural agents that they insist that they have seen, heard, or felt spirits or ghosts.
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nbsp; But I soon realized that my definition was inadequate, for reasons that are also instructive. Belief in supernatural agents characterizes not only religions but also phenomena that no one would consider religious—such as belief in fairies, ghosts, leprechauns, and aliens in UFOs. Why is it religious to believe in gods, but not necessarily religious to believe in fairies? (Hint: believers in fairies don’t meet on a specified day each week to perform certain rituals, don’t identify themselves as a community of fairy-believers separate from fairy-skeptics, and don’t offer to die in defense of their belief in fairies.) Conversely, some movements that everyone considers to be religions don’t require belief in supernatural agents. Numerous Jews (including rabbis), Unitarians, Japanese people, and others are agnostics or atheists but still consider themselves, and are considered by others, to belong to a religion. The Buddha did not associate himself with any gods and claimed that he was “merely” teaching a path to enlightenment that he had discovered.
A big failing in my definition was that it omitted a second attribute of religions: they are also social movements of people who identify themselves as sharing deeply held beliefs. Someone who believes in a god and in a long list of other doctrines that he invented, and who devotes part of every Sabbath to sitting in a room by himself, praying to that god, and reading a book that he has written himself but shown to no one else, doesn’t qualify as practising a religion. The closest actual equivalent to such a person is hermits who live in isolation and devote themselves to prayer. But those hermits arose from a community of believers who provided the hermits’ beliefs, and who may continue to support and visit the hermits. I’m not aware of hermits who devised their own religion from scratch, went off into the desert to live alone, and refused food offerings and discouraged visitors. If someone should show me such a hermit, I would define him as a non-religious hermit or else as a misanthrope, while others might consider him to be a typical religious hermit except for failing the test of sociality.
A third attribute of many religions is that their adherents make costly or painful sacrifices that convincingly display to others the adherents’ commitment to the group. The sacrifice may be of time: e.g., interrupting other activities five times per day to face towards Mecca and pray, or spending part of every Sunday in church, or spending years memorizing a complex ritual, prayers, and songs (possibly requiring learning another language), or devoting two years to missionary activities as a young adult (expected of Mormons), or joining a crusade or a pilgrimage or visiting Mecca at one’s own expense. The sacrifice may be of money or property donated to the church. One may offer a valuable domestic animal: one sacrifices to God one’s own lamb, not some captured wild animal that cost nothing. Or the sacrifice may be of one’s bodily comfort or integrity, by fasting, chopping off a finger joint, circumcising or subincising (splitting lengthwise) the penis, or spilling one’s blood by cutting one’s nose or tongue or penis or inside the throat or other body part. All of those costly public or painful displays serve to convince other believers that one is serious in one’s commitment to their religion and will even sacrifice one’s life if necessary. Otherwise, if I merely shouted “I’m a Christian!,” I might be lying for personal advantage (as some prisoners do in the hopes of gaining parole), or to save my life. While the second and third attributes (i.e., a social movement and costly sacrifices) seem to me necessary conditions for a movement to count as a religion, they’re not sufficient conditions by themselves. There are also non-religious social movements sharing deeply held beliefs and demanding costly sacrifices of their adherents, such as patriotism.
The next-to-last attribute of religions is that belief in gods and other postulated supernatural agents has practical consequences for how people should behave. Those rules of behavior may variously take the form of laws, moral codes, taboos, or obligations, depending on the type of society. While virtually all religions have such rules of behavior, it is not the case that rules of behavior stem only from religion: modern secular state governments, countless non-religious groups, and atheistic or agnostic citizens also have their own rules.
Finally, many religions teach that supernatural agents not only reward virtuous rule-obeying people and punish evil-doers and rule-breakers, but also can be induced by prayers, donations, and sacrifices to intervene on behalf of mortal petitioners.
Thus, religion involves a constellation of five sets of attributes, which vary in strength among the world’s religions (including traditional religions). We may use this constellation to understand the differences between religion and several related phenomena that share some but not all of the attributes of religion. Patriotism and ethnic pride resemble religion in being social movements distinguishing their adherents from outsiders, demanding sacrifice (even of one’s life) as a display of one’s commitment, and celebrated in rituals and ceremonies such as (for Americans) Independence Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Memorial Day. Unlike religion, patriotism and ethnic pride do not teach belief in supernatural agents. Sports fans, like religious believers, form social groups of adherents (e.g., Boston Red Sox fans) distinct from adherents of other social groups (e.g., New York Yankee fans) but don’t espouse supernatural agents, don’t demand great sacrifices as proof of affiliation, and don’t regulate a broad range of moral behavior. Marxism, socialism, and other political movements do attract committed groups of adherents (like religions), motivate adherents to die for their ideals, and may have broad moral codes, but don’t rely on the supernatural. Magic, sorcery, superstition, and water-witching (the belief that underground water can be located by a divining rod) do involve belief in supernatural agents with consequences for everyday behavior. However, magic, superstition, and related phenomena do not serve as defining attributes of committed social groups akin to believers: there are not groups of believers in the dangers of black cats who meet every Sunday to re-affirm their separateness from non-believers in the dangers of black cats. Perhaps the grayest borderline area involves movements such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism, about which there are varying degrees of uncertainty whether they constitute religions or else philosophies of life.
Functions and electric eels
Religion is nearly universal in humans, but nothing even remotely resembling it has been described in animals. Nevertheless, we can inquire about—indeed, we have to wonder about—the origins of religion, just as we wonder about the origins of other uniquely human traits such as art and spoken language. Six million years ago, our ancestors were apes that surely lacked religion; by the time that the first written documents appeared around 5,000 years ago, there was already religion. What happened in the intervening 5,995,000 years? What were religion’s antecedents in animals and in human ancestors, and when and why did it arise?
A method termed the functional approach has been the commonest framework adopted by scholars of religion since they began studying it scientifically almost 150 years ago. They ask: what functions does religion fulfill? They note that religion often imposes heavy costs on individuals and societies, such as impelling many people to live celibate lives and to forgo having children, to go to the effort and expense of building huge pyramids, to kill one’s valuable domestic animals and occasionally even one’s own child and oneself, and to spend much time repeating the same words over and over again. Religion must have functions and bring benefits to offset those heavy costs; otherwise, it wouldn’t have come into being and couldn’t be maintained. What human problems did the invention of religion solve? A brief summary of the functional approach might be to assert something like this: religion was invented in order to carry out certain functions and solve certain problems, such as maintaining social order, comforting anxious people, and teaching political obedience.
Another approach, emerging more recently from the field of evolutionary psychology, objects: religion surely didn’t evolve and wasn’t consciously invented for any specific purpose or to solve any specific problem. It wasn’t the case that some budding chief got a brilliant i
dea one day and invented religion from scratch, foreseeing that he could more easily hold his subjects in sway if he convinced them of religious reasons to build a pyramid. Nor is it likely that a psychologically attuned hunter-gatherer, concerned that his fellow tribesmen had become too depressed by a recent death to go hunting, made up a story about the afterlife in order to console them and give them new hope. Religion instead probably arose as a by-product of some other capacities of our ancestors and of their own animal ancestors, and those capacities had unforeseen consequences and gradually acquired new functions as they developed.
To an evolutionary biologist like myself, there is no contradiction between these two different approaches to the origin of religion, in effect postulating two stages. Biological evolution itself similarly proceeds in two stages. First, variation between individuals is generated by mutations and recombinations of genes. Second, because of natural selection and sexual selection there are differences among the resulting variant individuals in how they survive, reproduce, and pass on their genes to the next generation. That is, some of those variant individuals turn out to perform functions and to solve life’s problems better than do other variant individuals. A functional problem (e.g., surviving in a colder climate) isn’t solved by an animal realizing that it needs thicker fur, nor by cold climates stimulating mutations for a thicker fur. Instead, something (in the case of biological evolution, the mechanisms of molecular genetics) creates something else (in this case, an animal with thicker or thinner fur), and some life conditions or environmental problems (in this case, cold temperatures) endow some but not others of those variant animals with a useful function. Thus, gene mutations and recombinations provide the origins of biological diversity, while natural selection and sexual selection sieve that starting material by the criterion of function.
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Page 40