Religion

Religion

I
 
 
 
Introduction:
Some General Theories of Religion
 
 
 
New religions are constantly being born. From the most ancient of archaeological records, from the history of the most recent past, and from the millennia in between, rises a ceaseless clamor of new faiths. Every year, about the globe, dozens of new cults add their voices to the cry. They are rarely faiths unique in doctrine and ritual; almost invariably they are composed for the most part of pieces and patterns of older, more routinized, more conservative religions. Their newness resides in an attitude of their membership: their members—few or many—are once-disillusioned, newly inspired people who have forsaken the ways of the world about them, and have banded together to build what they believe will be better selves and a better world. Rarely indulged by the old religions, the new are variously ignored, sneered at, or violently suppressed; a few survive, grow, and become old religions. But all old religions were new religions once.
 
How many religions has mankind produced? If we say that one religion, as an entity, is distinct from another when its pantheon, its ritual, its ethical commitments, and its mythology are sufficiently different for its adherents to consider that the adherents of other religions are, in a general sense, “unorthodox” or “pagans” or “nonbelievers,” then we must conclude that mankind has produced on the order of 100,000 different religions. This figure is based on several assumptions: first, that religion began with the Neanderthals, who about 100,000 years ago were carefully burying their dead with grave goods and building small altars of bear bones in caves; second, that there have been at all times since the Neanderthals a thousand or more culturally distinct human communities, each with its own religion; and third, that in any cultural tradition, religions change into ethnographically distinct entities at least every thousand years. Religion is a universal aspect of human culture. Furthermore, for every religion which has survived and been routinized, either as a small community faith or a “great religion” such as Christianity or Islam, there are dozens of abortive efforts by untimely prophets, victims of paranoid mental disorders, or cranks which are ignored or suppressed by the community.
 
If we understood the process by which new religions come into being, we should be close to understanding other basic processes of human life. New religions have been the inexhaustible fountains from which, for thousands of years, have flowed, in turbulent variety of form and color, the waters which make up the sea of faith. That sea has nourished much of man’s still-infant culture—not merely his theological belief and sacred ritual, but his values, his principles of social organization, even his technology. And it is man’s capacity to create new religions that in large measure has made all chronicles of individual and social behavior chronicles of cyclical decline and renaissance. For new religions are, above all else, movements toward the revitalization of man and society. Periodically, new religions reverse the course of decline by supplying the energy and direction for a new, and often higher, climax of development. Once a plateau has been reached, of course, religion functions as a kind of governor for society, stabilizing its members and correcting the tendency of institutions to wobble or drift. And even when a religion becomes old and crabbily conservative, it will still, despite the reluctance of its priesthood, provide the cultural building blocks for the next religion. Old religions do not die; they live on in the new religions which follow them.
 
The Abiding Interest of Anthropology in the Study of Religion
 
Before going on to suggest what may be the essential nature of the religious process, let us consider the development of anthropological opinion about religion. In this review we shall ignore the extremes of fundamentalist piety and anticlerical iconoclasm. Thus, for us, religion will be neither a path of truth nor a thicket of superstition, but simply a kind of human behavior: specifically that kind of behavior which can be classified as belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces.
 
Anthropology has maintained a tempestuous relationship with religion for over a hundred years; it is still too early to say whether or not this union will ripen into mutual understanding—let alone love. Religion, which should have played the role of the submissive bride, has been enigmatic and shrewish; and anthropology, which fancies itself an irresistible penetrator of mysteries, has not infrequently been locked out, or even rudely assaulted.
 
The early anthropologists placed religion in the center of the stage of culture. E. B. Tylor devoted the major part of Primitive Culture (1871) to the subject of religion, suggesting a still-respectable minimum definition of religion as animism or the “belief in spiritual beings” and developing a useful repertoire of taxonomic concepts and psychological hypotheses. Current anthropological interest has, however—in part, I think, because of the subject’s recalcitrance—shifted from religion to other matters, such as kinship, function, and culture and personality, and the style of anthropological discourse has moved generally in the direction of abstraction. “Religion” is not even consistently to be found now as a chapter heading in elementary texts; not infrequently the topic must be pursued piecemeal among discussions of social organization, ethos, folklore, medical practice, economic behavior, psychopathology, structural–functional analysis, and so forth.
 
Only the ethnographers and historians have kept snapping snapshots of the whole lady in her various costumes, and it is to them that we owe the present availability of detailed descriptions of shamans, pantheons, ceremonial calendars, states of possession, cargo cults, world views, and a host of other interesting phenomena. This body of material today makes possible a sensitive anthropological appreciation of religion as a unitary process rather than as a conglomeration of arbitrary forms and functions and thus should help the two parties to our marriage along the path toward sympathetic understanding.
 
Evolutionary Theories: Religion as an Expression of Stages in Man’s Cognitive Development
 
One major theme in anthropological studies of religion, particularly during the nineteenth century, has been the development of evolutionary theories. These theories are grounded in the idea of progress, which holds it as axiomatic that improvement comes with age. According to evolutionary theories various religious beliefs—cosmology, theology, and even ethics—are generally to be regarded as primitive, prescientific efforts to explain and predict natural events. The events of concern may be physical phenomena; they may be animal and human behavior. In this view, the problem is an intellectual one, and religion is seen as providing one sort of rational solution. Man, facing the unknown, must, in order to reduce cognitive discomfort (sometimes referred to as “anxiety”), generate a formula which yields a satisfying sense of understanding. Although this approach has been roundly criticized for avoiding the emotional aspects of religion and for failing to recognize religion’s dynamic, functional role in society, it has merit, for religious beliefs are cognitive products and deserve evaluation as such. Even primitive peoples ask questions, experience curiosity, and attempt to make order out of the apparent disorder of human experience.
 
E. B. Tylor best represents the nineteenth-century evolutionist’s theories of religion. The feature of religion to be explained was belief rather than ritual. In Primitive Culture (1871), he advanced an interesting hypothesis for the origin of religious belief. Early man, he suggested, postulated the existence of the soul as an explanation for two universally observed human phenomena: dreaming, in which the self seems to leave the body during sleep; and death, in which some vital principle, associated with the breath, appears to abandon the body. Tylor also worked out a rough sequence for the evolution of religion: first, a belief in souls; then animism, a belief in many spiritual beings, including souls and various deities; and finally, the consolidation of animistic doctrines into pantheons containing powerful deities, culminating of course in monotheism.
 
Although Tylor’s suggestion concerning the origin of belief in souls has remained respectable, the evolutionary sequence he worked out was quickly criticized and supplemented by his contemporaries. Marett (1909) suggested that even earlier than the belief in souls came a stage of “animatism.” Impressed by descriptions of the concept of mana (that is, impersonal supernatural power) among peoples of Oceania and of analogous concepts among tribal peoples in other parts of the world, Marett suggested that a logically simpler belief preceded animism. This was the belief that there existed in the world an intangible, invisible, impersonal power (one might think of it as comparable to electricity) which, if incautiously handled, was dangerous, but which could, by one means or another, be controlled by man and used for good or ill. Andrew Lang (1898), on the other hand, pointed out that some very primitive peoples believed in the existence of a high god and were, in this sense, virtually monotheistic. As we shall see, a school of Catholic anthropologists later pursued Lang’s insight intensively. Thus Tylor’s seemingly clear vision into the origins and evolution of religion was clouded by uncertainties as to the actual chronology of events.
 
Tylor’s greatest disciple, Sir James Frazer, carried on the tradition of psycho-evolutionary theory in still another direction. In his celebrated The Golden Bough (1911–1915) and in other works, Frazer developed a clear and precise thesis to explain the evolutionary relationship between magic, religion, and science. Magic, he explained, was of two kinds: imitative and contagious, the former working by a principle of similarity in form or process, the latter by physical contact. In early times, man had no science; instead, he depended upon magic to explain, predict, and control the forces of nature. As time went on, magicians became specialists, performing ritual for the community. In order to explain their powers, ordinary men attributed to them extraordinary spiritual powers and revered their departed souls as deities. On earth the magician gradually became divine king; eventually he became priest.
 
The problem with all such detailed evolutionary theories, of course, lies in the impossibility of their verification. Tylor, Lang, Marett, Frazer, and others could assert plausible—and differing—schemes for the evolution of religious thought among preliterate peoples, but there was no way of proving whose theory was the most valid.