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94 • Moral, Believing Animals But for those of us who have not succumbed to this story, we may hold out some hope, perhaps even the conviction, that life and the cosmos really are significant, that in the fabric of reality there really is out there The Story, of which some of our stories are but telling echoes. FIVE ON RELIGION What is religion? And why are so many people in the world religious?

These are old questions, in answer to which much ink has been spilled in recent centuries. To some extent they are simply impossible questions, incapable of being answered satisfactorily. For quite a while now, many scholars have been weary of the "definition of religion" debate. And even more scholars have simply jettisoned the "origins of religion" question. It has all come to seem so antiquated, so futile. Yet religion is simply too fascinating a thing to let sit, to not coQtinue to probe fundamental questions about it. We pretty well know what peo­ ple are up to, and why, when they labor to produce goods and services for consumption. We know why people engage in political life to make collective decisions.

We know why they build armies, form families, write laws, and educate youth.

But why do people, very many people, engage in religion? Why do they take seriously realities that are unseen? What induces people to give away time and money and perhaps much more for intangible things "spiritual"? What are people doing when thq pray, and why are they doing it? What is it that gets people out of bed every Sunday morning for their entire lives? Or to abstain from food and sex during daylight hours for an entire month every year? Nobody is finally making people do religion. It does not produce any obvious material benefit. In much of the world, religion 95 '

i t~. ' .. ~l ., ~~· ,~I ''J ·: ) !i 'l ~t ~ {4S ~i .. ~ .. ;-;t> ''ti ';.1 ~~. ~ ··~t ,;-" <-' ~· l .., t .. , ;.

'" ~-,. )f l ;l( 96 • Moral, Believing Animals is entirely voluntary. In other parts of the world it is actively suppressed.

And yet billions of humans profess and practice religion anyway. What an interesting phenomenon.

Not only that, but religion-this thing apparently based finally on nothing empirical-actually seems very ?often significantly to influence people's lives in various ways. It can reall(matter in real outcomes in life. Studies of religion are recurrently discovering that religion often affects people's health, beliefs, attitudes, practices, affiliations, and behaviors. Re­ ligion actually appears to cause things to happen.

What is going on here? What is this thing "religion"? Why does it engage people so? What role does it play in human existence? How do we explain its influence in life?

What Is Religion?

The definition-of-religion question has frustrated many scholars because of the recurrent problems of categorizing and of drawing boundaries around "religion" that it inevitably raises. Is Confucianism a religion? Is nontheistic Buddhism a religion? Is Scientology a religion? Is Marxism a religion? Is the Carolina-Duke basketball rivalry a religion? Is religion defined by the substance of things supernatural or divine? Or by the par­ ticular social functions it supposedly serves? 1 We can help to deescalate this line of impossible questioning somewhat by not thinking about religion in essentialist terms, as if we were positivist scientists discovering the natural laws of Religion. Instead we should ap­ proach things "religious" as historically and culturally particularistic nar­ ratives, beliefs, experiences, practices, and traditions that are interesting and important and need interpreting in their own right. There is no one thing out there, "religion," in any general sense. The specific "things" we call "religions" are not mere instances of some larger, universal property of social reality, Religion. It does appear that human communities have since their beginnings engaged in various practices that we now normally 1. Daniele Hervieu-U:ger has written a very interesting (yet in my view ulti­ mately unsatisfying) recent inquiry into conceptualizations of religion in her Re­ ligion as a Chain of Mem01y (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000). On Religion 97 call religious, but that does not mean that there is some standard social property, Religion, the social equivalent to an element on chemistry's pe­ riodic table, that the investigator identifies and researches. Indeed, many scholars claim that the idea of "religion" itself as a general human expe­ rience and practice is the conceptual invention of certain Western thinkers in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries who were trying to come to terms intellectually-including theologically-with a wildly diverse, non-Christian, global cultural reality then being discovered through ex­ ploration, trade, and colonialization. 2 Furthermore, it is helpful to remind ourselves that as inquirers we can never investigate religion from a neutral and generic perspective, or even think and talk about religion using neutral and generic "Language." Rather, we necessarily approach things religious specifically as secularists, Roman Catholics, Buddhists, and so on who have been socialized either in the United States, India, or elsewhere and who think and speak not in "Language" but in English or some other particular native tongue. And all of those particularities inevitably shape how we can and do think about religion, including ways that it might be useful for us to define religion.

Having said that, I do not think it would be a constructive move for social scientists to abandon the concept of "religion" altogether. For we do find what appear to be certain common features across the kind of narratives, beliefs, experiences, practices, and traditions that we commonly call "religious," and we can and do find it analytically useful to categorize 2. See, for example, Jonathan Z. Smith, "Religion, Religions, Religious," in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms in Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269-84; Tala! Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Gustaaf Houtman, "How a Foreigner Invented 'Buddhendom,' "Journal for the Anthropological Society of Oxford 21 (1990): 113- 28; S. N. Balagangadhara, "The Heathen in His Blindness": Asia, the West, and the Dynamics of Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994); David Pailin, Attitudes to Other Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Philip Almond, The British Dis­ covery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Lionel Jensen, Manufacturing "Confucianism": Chinese and Western Imaginings in the Making of a Tradition (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995); Murray Wax, "Religion as Universal: Tribulations of an Anthropological Enterprise," Zygon 19 (1984): 5- 20. r .. 98 • Moral, Believing Animals them together under this single concept. 3 But what is it that religions share in common, or at least that we commonly think of them as sharing in common? What in our thinking and speech sets apart things religious from other social practices and institutions? I think it is most helpful to think about religions in this way: ·religions lire sets of beliefs, symbols, and practices about the reality of superempirical orders that make claims to or­ ganize and guide human life. 4 Put more simply, if less precisely, what we mean by religion is an ordinarily unseen reality that tells us what truly is and how we therefore ought to live. This idea needs some unpacking. First, religion for us concerns a "su­ perempirical order," an ordered reality that is not normally observable with the five human senses. Religion affirms that such an order is real and consequential, even though it normally cannot be directly seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. Second, this approach intentionally empha­ sizes the "superempirical" rather than the more commonly referenced "supernatural." This is because supernatural implies that the unseen order, the "spiritual," is not a part of nature, and that nature consists only of physical matter. Yet some religions understand the unseen order as very much part of nature, a reality inhering in the world or cosmos; some religions also understand nature, the world, the cosmos to be a whole reality comprising both the empirical and superempirical together. 5 Third, 3. Donald Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), 139. At the very least, we should be able to formulate a nominal and particularistic defini­ tion of religion that keys on common term usage, instead of a realist definition seek­ ing to demarcate what out there is truly religious from nonreligious. On this, and the point above about not speaking "Language," see John Sommerville, "Resurrecting Religion in a New (Hermeneutical) Dimension," Fides et Historia 30 (1998): 20-31. 4. In this and the next paragraph, I closely follow the argument of George Thomas, "Religions Engage Everyday Life" (unpublished manuscript, Department of Sociology, Arizona State University, 2001). Thomas himself follows, though revises, Roland Robertson, who described religion as "that set of beliefs and sym­ bols (and values derived directly therefrom) pertaining to a distinction between an empirical and a superempirical, transcendent reality; the affairs of the empirical being subordinated in significance to the nonempirical." Roland Robertson, The Sociological Interpretation of R~ligion (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), 47. 5. This approach also avoids using the concept "transcendent" (in Robertson's definition in the previous footnote), since, as Thomas ·explains, "In many religions On Religion 99 distinguishing the empirical from the superempirical in this way does not mean that the empirical cannot represent or communicate about the su­ perempirical. The distinction is not absolute nor unbridgeable. Indeed, humans, as embodied, sensory animals, normally come to learn about and relate to superempirical orders at least in part precisely through em­ pirical means-through texts read, narratives heard, chants sung, bread and wine tasted, icons beheld, water and ashes touched, suffering endured, and so on. Furthermore, most if not all religions hold that in particular circumstances the superempirical may be physically seen, smelled, heard, tasted, or felt-through epiphanies, visions, angelic appearances, miracles, incarnations, ecstatic experiences, demonic possessions, and so on-which many people historically and alive today profess to have witnessed. 6 Fourth, the approach here emphasizes the decidedly normative concern of religion. Religion is not simply about providing humans with infor­ mation or knowledge but also, viewed sociologically, about the proper organization and right guidance of life. Religion tells people not only what is real but also consequently what are good, right, true, wise, and worthy desires, thoughts, feelings, values, practices, actions, and interactions.

Religion tells us what for us ought to be, in light of the superempirical (e.g., Hinduism) the superempirical is not transcendent (above and distinct from * the empirical) but rather immanent (hidden in the empirical)." Thomas, "Relig- ions Engage Everyday Life." Also see ]. Milton Yinger, The Scientific Study of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 15-16. · 6. See, for example, Christian Smith, Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 173-77; M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie (New York: Simon and Schuster), 182-211; Kenneth Woodward, The Book of Miracles (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Roni!ld Finacane, Miracles aJ1d Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Little­ field, 1977); Anthony Finlay, Demons (London: Blanford, 1999); John Warwick Montgomery (ed.), Demon Possession (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1976); Jess Bryon Hollenback, Mysticism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); D. Scott Rogo, Miracles (New York: Dial Press, 1982); Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Mystical Experience (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973). According to a 2000 N~wsweek poll, 48 percent of Americans report that they have personally experienced or witnessed a miracle (see Woodward, The Book for of Miracles). "What Miracles Mean," Newsweek 135 (May 1, 2000): 54-60. ·~ A '""'!, .,, j:. • ,. q r f 100 • Moral, Believing Animals reality that is. William James suggested this very point in saying that "the life of religion ... consists of the belief that there is an unseen order ' and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto." 7 If this is what religion is to us, then what is nonreligious or secular?

These may mean the conscious denial that ~~y superempirical order ac­ tually exists-the corollary to the positive affirmation that the only and total reality that actually exists is that which humans can empirically ob­ serve on a regular basis {"There is no God; existence is nothing but the natural operation of energy and matter"). Or these may mean that people simply have never seriously considered whether or not a superempirical reality exists, because they have been socialized in an areligious or anti­ religious context (such as parts of communist China or Soviet Russia). Or these may mean a passive belief that a superempirical reality may exist but a fundamental indifference to the normative claims that the super­ empirical order makes about the proper organization and guidance of life ("Sure I believe in God, who don't? But that don't make much difference how I live one way or the other"). Note, however, that to be nonreligious or secular does not mean that one is not a believer, that one does not continually place one's faith in premises, assumptions, and suppositions that cannot be objectively sub­ stantiated or justified without recourse to other believed-in premises, as­ sumptions, and presuppositions. Everyone-the secularist and nonreli­ gious included-is a believing animal, ultimately a person of faith (as I contended in chapter 3 ). Indeed, the belief that the only and total reality that actually exists is that which humans can empirically observe is itself a statement of faith, whether or not its adherents recognize and admit it as such. Note, too, that to be nonreligious or secular does not mean that 7. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Touchstone, 1997 (1901-2]), 59. James's focus on an "unseen order" comports with the ap­ proach of this chapter, although nearly all of the rest of his book focuses instead, and much less helpfully, I think, on subjective individual experience, and not an unseen ordered reality, as the basis of religion. To be clear, furthermore, I do not mean the emphasis on the moral here to reduce religion to mere ethical systems, as strains of liberal Protestantism have often done. By moral, I mean something much bigger and thicker than mere ethical teachings. On Religion • 101 one's life is not fundamentally organized and guided by a larger moral order above and beyond oneself. Everyone-religious and secular alike­ is a moral animal, is constituted, motivated, and governed by the moral order(s) existing inside and outside of themselves (as I contended in chap­ ter 2). What distinguishes religious people from nonreligious and secular people, therefore, is not that the former are moral, believing animals while the latter are not.

What distinguishes them is that the former significantly believe in and are governed by moral order(s) grounded in some super­ empirical reality, while the latter believe in and are governed by moral order(s) grounded in some ordering reality that is not superempirical but immanent (or at least that they presume to be so). 8 All humans are thus, at bottom, really quite similar in most of these respects. Where they differ tremendously is in the particular cultural moral orders to which they commit their lives.

Even so, it is worth recognizing that religion can-though it not always necessarily does-profoundly influence the lives of nonreligious and sec­ ular people. Precisely because all moral orders are orders, and not simply individual ideas or preferences, those moral orders that are grounded in superempirical realities can very well organize and govern the lives of people who do not as individuals espouse any belief in superempirical reality. It can do this in one or both of two ways, internally or externally.

Religion can influence the lives of nonreligious people "internally" by forming in their subjective (mental, emotional, volitional) selves moral perceptions, dispositions, values, and commitments that in fact have def­ inite religious sources but that the individual cannot or does not con­ sciously justify by appeal to those sources. In such cases, it is often difficult to sort out accounts of sources anq justifications. But, for example, when an agnostic who was raised a devout Methodist so happens to rest every single Sunday and feels vaguely guilty (not just annoyed) when he has to work on Sundays, the old religious moral order that once shaped his self is still operative within him. Apd when the Roman Catholic who has unhappily left the Church and thinks of herself as a moral relativist of sorts nevertheless finds herself opposing abortion, the death penalty, and 8. Which, again, may be distinguished from immanent religions, in which the superempirical reality is not transcendent, but immanent, hiddenly present in the empirical. '; 102 • Moral, Believing Animals euthanasia, it is likely that she has not left elements of her former faith far behind. R~ligi~n can also influence the lives of nonreligious people "externally," by ~~stoncally forming social institutions t.P~t create social roles, oppor­ tumtles, and constraints that affect peoeJ~'s actions and outcomes, :Vh~ther .the institutions continue to do so with reference to the religious JUstificatwns that historically generated them, or not. Again, attributing such causal formations and influences is tricky. But, for instance, when American gays and lesbians find it difficult to secure recognized civil un­ ions and the accompanying insurance benefits enjoyed by married het­ erosexuals, significant outcomes in their lives are in fact being influenced by historical and perhaps current religious beliefs and interests-whatever anyone's own religious commitments may or many not be. Likewise, when Americans of any religious conviction find themselves the beneficiaries (or victims) of innumerable hospitals, colleges, orphanages, and other vol­ untary and reform organizations that were begun by religious activists in the wake of.historical revivals and awakenings, their lives are still being affected by religiously grounded moral orders that have reached into the future. In fact, many social institutions that serve various publics have religious origins, regardless of how secularized they have since become including tl1e United Way, Habitat for Humanity, Amnesty International:

the Salvation Army, Oxfam International, the YMCA, Peace Brigades In­ ternational, and Greenpeace. 9 Often such internal and external religious influences combine in in­ t~resting ways .. Thanksgiving, for instance, is no doubt celebrated by as h~gh ~ proportiOn of nonreligious as religious Americans, although its h1stoncal reference is religious-the Pilgrims wanted to give thanks to 9. Jackie Smith, Ron Pagnucco, and Winnie Romeril, "Transnational Social Movement Organizations in the Global Political Arena," Vo/untas 5, no. 2 (1994):

121-54; Lowell Livezey, "U.S. Religious Organizations and the International Hu­ man Rights Movement," Human Rights Quarterly 11 (1989): 14-81; Alvin Schmidt, U1:der the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization (Grand Rapids, M1ch.: Zondervan, 200 I). For a more general treatment of this theme, see William Clebsch, From Sacred to Profane America: The Role of Religion in American History (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); also see Willis Glover, Biblical Origins of Modem Secular Culture (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984). On Religion • 103 their God for his blessings on their venture in the New World. As an "external" religious influence, in this sense, Thanksgiving has become (since the nineteenth century) a veritable institution that compels people's participation and celebration. "Internally," millions of nonreligious Amer­ icans genuinely feel some significant sense on this holiday of being thank­ ful for the good things in their lives. Thankful to whom exactly is not clear, but thankful nonetheless. In any case, if it were not for the theistic Pilgrims who did have someone to whom to be thankful, and nineteenth­ century activists to memorialize it, none of us would be taking the time to be with family, eat turkey, watch football, and reflect with thankfulness on our lives. These influencing processes can, of course, work in the opposite di­ rection. The normative imperatives of nonreligious moral orders may also internally form the subjective selves and externally shape the institution­ ally governed practices of religious believers. Since few, if any, religious believers live in fully encapsulated, "total" religious worlds-even the Amish have to sell and buy some produce and products-we should ex­ pect this nonreligious influencing of religious believers to be significant, perhaps extensive. To what extent this is a problem for religious com­ munities depends on the degree to which the influencing nonreligious moral order is a competitor of or antithetical to the religious moral order. When an American Catholic imbibes capitalism's rational risk manage­ ment by purchasing costly life insurance (rather than, say, simply trusting the future to God and the Church), it is not too difficult for her to reconcile that action with the moral order of her faith. It becomes more difficult when the same American Catholic becomes influenced by (what some observe to be) America's pervasive "divorce culture" and divorces her infuriatingly self-centered husband; or agrees under advice from doc­ tors, insurers, and "ethics boards" to withdraw life support from her brain-damaged child. And when this American Catholic woman decides not to divorce her husband (in the short run) but instead decides that together they should join their city's polyamorous swingers dub and ex­ plore all manner of sensual experimentation with a variety of others, this nonreligious moral influence on her life has indeed become quite a prob­ lem for her religious community. Of course, drawing and maintaining or renegotiating such boundaries is a continual challenge for religious com­ munities, particularly those that do not culturally and institutionally dom- 104 • Moral, Believing Animals inate the larger social order. This is precisely what generates so much discussion and conflict in religious communities.

Understanding religions in this way-,-as superempirically referenced wellsprings of moral order-helpno ex!?J~in both how secularization can happen, and why secularization will prob~bly never get very far. All hu­ mans are moral, believing animals who must be embedded within and acting out moral order, simply to be human. However, those moral orders need not be directly grounded on superempirical reality but may rather be ones with strictly empirical references. Typical candidates here include secularized liberal, democratic capitalism; Marxist communism; nonreli­ gious expressive, Romantic individualism; and cynical nihilism. And be­ cause humans are fairly adaptable creatures culturally, at least in the short run, they can live within and act out such nonreligious moral orders quite functionally. As nonreligious moral orders displace religious moral or­ ders-either internally, externally, or both-the world becomes more sec­ ularized. Instances of this are well known.1o But lo and behold, it seem~ that many human animals are recurrently attracted to superempirically grounded moral orders. The exact reasons i for this rec~rrent attraction no doubt vary by time and place, but they appear to mclude some of the following. Compared to immanently grounded, secular moral orders, many superempirically grounded ones often carry much more weight and authority as long, historical traditions; they seem to provide "deeper roots" than many nonreligious alternatives.~~ Moreover, religious moral orders seem to answer certain recurrently press­ ing, core existential questions better than nonreligious ones do. How should one meet death? What is the meaning of tragedy? What is the significance of love? What is the basis of obligation? 12 The empirically 10. See, for instance, Christian Smith (ed.), The Secular Revolution: Power, Con­ flict, and Interest in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Steve Bruce, "Christianity in Britain, R.I.P," Sociology of Religion 62, no. 2 (2001): 191-203. Also see Mark Chaves, "Secularization as Declining Religious Authority," Social Forces 72, no. 3 (1994): 749-75. 11. See, for example, Lynn Davidman, Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 12. Daniel Bell, "The Return of the Sacred?" in The Winding Passage (New York: Basic Books, 1980). One nonreligious response is to deny or change the On Religion lOS grounded moral orders of science and socialism and procedural ~emoc­ racy seem limited in their ability to speak profoundly and reassunngly to these questions. Furthermore, the thought that the entire human story is in fact by chance floating around in a cold and empty universe without purpose or significance, to be extinguished in time, and leaving no judg­ ment or care or remembrance whatsoever, is an idea that appears to have limited appeal to most human animals. Whether true or not, ideas, such as that there does exist a personal, loving God who deeply cares for us, or perhaps that a pervasive Supreme Being or Life Force is drawing us and all differences toward eternal unification in peace and harmony, prove much more attractive to most people. And then there is the question of morality itself. What would be the real basis of any morality if it is not grounded in the reality of a superempirical order? How in an objectiv~ly meaningless universe can merely humanly constructed, culturally and his­ torically relative beliefs about morality be really and truly morally valid and binding? 13 Moral philosophers, of course, perpetually debate such questions. But the average human person often seems to find it hard to believe that morality could be ~orality if it we~e not rooted in an ~rder~ that transcends the contingencies of our expenences and constructions. ' For these and probably many other reasons, it appears that moral, be­ lieving animals are not likely anytime soon to cease believing in the su­ perempirical orders that ground the narratives, experiences, and practices of religious life.

In summary, religion is not always about belief in the supernatural or only about things considered sacred. The concept of supernatural is too confining. And humans treat many things in life as sacred that are ar­ guably not very religious. Rather, religions are moral orders rooted in beliefs about superempirical realities. Religion is a particular type of hu­ man moral order, one conveying a strong sense of being foundational, questions themselves ("Death and tragedy just are, they have no meaning, there is nothing one can do about them"), but this solution appears to hold limited appeal for many. 13. George Mavrodes, "Religion and the Queerness of Morality," in Robert Audi and William Wainwright (eds.), Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Com­ mitment, 213-26 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); Glenn Tinder, "Can We Be Good without God?" Atlantic Monthly 264, no. 6 (1989): 55--{57. /~. 106 • Moral, Believing Animals ~cosmological, secure. Religions are also normally aspects or components of some large: ~oral orders: of which they are contributing parts. Why then does rehgwn causally mfluence human lives in various ways? Be­ cause, as I ~rgued in. chapter 2, human ..,I9;otivation to action is profoundly morally onented, directed by the nor-m~tive imperatives to affirm and enact moral. order. W~y then does religion not entirely and consistently g~vern the hves of believers? Because most people live their lives negoti­ atmg the demands of multiple religious and nonreligious moral orders­ compro~isii~g here, synthesizing there, compartmentalizing elsewhere. In such a s1tuatwn, religion can exert a significant, though not total, influ­ ~n~e. in human life. Understanding when, under what conditions, and why rehgwn does and does not shape human consciousness and action is thu . k s a maJOr tas of the student of religious life. Religious Origins But is. there any m.ore th.at m~y be said about the origins of religion? Early Ame~lC~~ academic socwlog~sts believed that religion was an expression of.pnmlttve fear and ignorance. 11 Many nonreligious people I know toda th~nk that religion is ultimately only about life after death, hence, in thei~ mmds, finally about fear and ignorance as welL Are these adequate ac­ counts of the sources of religion?

. Western scholars have for some centuries debated the origins of reli­ giOn. The task has proved impossible in historical terms, because evidence a:bout the earliest religions is simply lost in the mists and shadows of pr~historic human life. All we know is that we find traces of what we thmk of as religious consciousness and practices in the historical remains of the earliest human communities. So, as far as we can see, it does not appear th.at r~ligion is something humans invented partway through their ~own ~Istoncal experience on earth, as we did irrigation and automo­ bil~s: Th.ts confirms the suspicion, implied in the preceding section, that rehgwn IS somehow very basic to, perhaps constitutive of, the life of hu­ man animals. 14. Christian Smith, "Secularizing American Higher Education: The Case of Ju<.JUJlJl:v." The Secular Revolution. On Religion 107 Having despaired of locating the historical origins of human religion, many other scholars have instead explored the social, functional, or psy­ chological origins of religion. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim and the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud are famous among the classical writers. 15 And after some decades of an apparent lack of scholarly interest in religious origins-indeed, of a complete theoretical stagnation in the field-recent years have seen a surge in new books purporting to explain the ultimate source of religion, two of which I take the time to mention ·here. 16 Fordham University anthropologist Stewart Guthrie, for one, ar­ gues in his 1993 book Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion that religion is the result of an anthropomorphizing strategy that is rational (even if deceiving) in an uncertain, ambiguous world in need of inter­ pretation: We animate and anthropomorphize because, when we see something as alive or humanlike, we can take precautions. If we see it as alive we can, for example, stalk it or flee. If we see it as humanlike, we can try to establish a social relationship. If it turns out not to be alive or humanlike, we usually lose little by having thought it was. This practice yields more in occasional big successes than it costs in frequent little failures. In short, animism and anthropomorphizing stem from the principle, "better safe than sorry." 1 ' Guthrie's theory, in other words, is an evolutionary version of rational choice theory that emphasizes the limits of human perceptions and hu- 15. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1915); Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Religion (New York: Harmondsworth Penguin, 1985). 16. Others include Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1994); Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evo­ lutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001); John Schu- maker, The Corruption of Reality: A Unified Theory of Religion, Hypnosis, and Psy- ~ chopathology (Amherst, Mass.: Prometheus, 1995); Michael Winkelman, Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing (Westport, Conn.,: Bergin and Garvey, 2000); Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg, "The Neuro'­ psychological Basis of Religion, or Why God Won't Go Away," Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 33 (1995): 187-201. 17. Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5. r:! 7 ,.( • -~~ 'o Y!<~ /! =~ ~~ ;:~ tii ;; ' ,. •' l ~ tt " ;;. 'l t~: "I t ~~ ~i :r, ... :r :{,: 11 ~:I f 108 • Moral, Believing Animals man tendencies toward risk aversion, which together caused early humans to "attribute humanity to the world" by making god in the human imag e .

. Another .recent work reviving the quest for the origins of religion is Elizabeth C1ty State University sociolo$i§t James McClenon's 2002 book ":'ondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human.ljvolution, and the Origin of Reli­ gton. McCl.enon a~vances a theory that he claims is based on evolutionary neurophysiOlogy, IS subject to empirical evaluation, and integrates the most important aspects of all previous theories. He argues, in short, that h.uman religious belief has evolved from the success of ancient healing nt~als that employed hypnotic suggestion to reduce stress and suffering, which eventually generated therapeutic shamanistic rituals involving ver­ bal. suggest~on. Since early humans practiced these ritual healings for a penod of time sufficiently long that "genes associated with hypnotizabil­ ity" were "selected for" through processes of natural selection, their hu­ man decedents (us) have inherited a ''biological propensity for religious belie~ .and ritual." For this reason, McClenon says, human religious pro­ pensrtles have an ultimately biological basis and have been formed in us through evolutionary processes. Js The back cover of McClenon's book claims that it is "controversial and daring." The back cover of Guthrie's declares that his "explanation is rad­ ical" and that he "argues persuasively." I myself find neither of them to be any of those things. They are not controversial, daring, radical, or persu~s~ve. If readers today so happen to find them plausible and impor­ tant, It IS not because tl1ey have resolved any of the empirical or intellec­ tual problems that beset the many similar theories that preceded them. ~or is it because they advance any great theoretical breakthrough or in­ Sight.'9 Rather, it is because they conform so well to the two major the­ oretical traditions in ascendancy in academia today: neo-Darwinian evo­ lutionis~ an~ ratio?a~ choice theory. Indeed, these books are remarkably conventiOnal m the1r Implicit and explicit reliance on the assumptions of natural selection, functionalism, rational egoism, and atheism. 18. James McCienon, Wondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). Quotes are on pp. 4, 45.

19. On Paul Boyer's Religion Explained, see Paul Griffiths, "Faith Seeking Ex­ planation," First Things 119 (January 2002): 53-57. On Religion 109 Here, by contrast, is a theory that would be truly controversial, daring, and radical: human religions have existed and do exist everywhere because a God really does actually exist, and many humans-especially those not blinded by the reigning narratives of modern science and academia-feel a recurrent and deeply compelling "built-in" desire to know and worship, in their various ways, the God who is there. Try publishing that, and we will find out who is controversial and daring. Of course, that theory, while not empirically verifiable, would certainly explain a lot. It is a most par­ simonious theory. But prevailing assumptions of know.ledge production rule it inadmissible. So we stick with other theories no more empirically verifiable or intellectually coherent but that at least fit our dominant nar­ rative. The sociology of religion is a field currently divided between two dis­ puted paradigms, 20 neither of which, it turns out, has much helpful to say about religious origins. The theoretical tradition that has come by default to be labeled the "old paradigm" is perhaps best represented by Peter Berger's book The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Re­ ligion. 21 In all fairness, Berger never explicitly claims to be trying to ex­ plain the origins of religion per se-although the first third of his ar­ gument very much reflects this interest. In it, Berger conveys what very many people, myself included, take to be an eloquent and insightful so­ ciological ~ccount of the basis of human culture, habit, organization, so­ cialization, and ideological legitimations. But what is strange for a book about religion is how abruptly and without explication religion simply plops into the book. Having set a very interesting theoretical stage with its discussion of world-openness, meaning, chaos, order, externalization, objectivation, internalization, legitimation, and so on, "religion" suddenly shows up on pag~ 25 with the simple ~eclarat~on: "~eli~ion is ~he hu~~n J. enterprise by which a sacred cosmos IS estabhshed. Bemg qmte familiar with the existence of religion, we readers accept its introduction thus and read on. 20. Steven Warner, "Works in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sod­ ology of Religion in the United States," American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 5 (1993): 1044-93. 2l. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Re­ ligion (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Books, 1968). 110 • Moral, Believing Animals But I suggest that we would do well to go back and consider thi . h s quest10n: w y does the world that Berger elaborates in pages 1-24 ever need or invent the religion that drops in on page 25? Why is there an necessity for this thing "religion"? Wha} is clear in Berger's account is why the world he describes needs and cre;t{~ order in the form of human!~ constructed culture. But, given all of Berger's premises and arguments there is no apparent reason why that order would need to have anythin ' h h . . g ot er t an unmanent sources, referents, and legitimations. Why could not humans in the course of their evolutionary history simply construct "re­ ality" as a bulwark against the terrors of chaos-without reference to anything sacred-and pass on that immanently, empirically grounded "re­ alit( t~' th~ir .chi~dren with different versions of the legitimating expla­ natlOn This 1s srmply the way things are"; and then socially control throug~ punishment those few who do not conform? Why in Berger's theoretical system should religion have ever arisen among socially con­ structing humans in the first place? The closest Berger ever gets to answering this question is indirectly through his brief observation that religions provide a certain ultimacy to ideological legitimations. It is somehow more convincing, apparently, to say that our reality has been ordained by the gods than to say that our reality is simply the way thing are. But that only raises the q~estions of why or how in a world actually without gods the idea of "the gods" would have ever ~opped into anyone's head; and why such an empirically groundless Idea would enjoy such widespread credibility so as to be able to provide the ultimate legitimation of reality itself. Such an account sug­ gests that religion was perhaps the invention of the powerful to defend their own status and privilege; or perhaps of the powerless to·explainto themselves and make sufferable their own deprivation (Marx lurks just below the surface here). But my questions remain. Why in a spiritless and godless world would people ever conceive of spirits and gods in the first place? And why ever embrace nonempirical constructions that function to exclude one from the empirical goods of the powerful and privileged?

It is hard to believe, if the need for ultimacy in legitimation was religion's a~tual origin, that religion would have continued to be as strong and Widespread as it has in the modern world (unless, perhaps, this is where the "selected upon" genetic propensity toward religious belief comes in, On Religion 111 which changes the discussion entirely). Durkheim (the atheist) was not wrong in arguing that something as powerful as religion could not be based finally on an error. 22 But that is not all, for this reading of Berger's account of religious origins faces yet another theoretical difficulty. It is a well-known fallacy of functionalist theories to argue that because something serves a partic­ ular function that that functionality itself explains why the thing exists.

My wife serves the function of keeping me somewhat humble, but that is not why she became and is my wife, why our marriage exists. And the mere fact that religions may have at times and places legitimated the privileges of the powerful-which, not incidentally, it does not always do 23 -does not itself necessarily explain religion's existence. It only leaves us in speculation .. To be clear, none of this is necessarily a critique of Berger per se, since, as I said, he does not claim to explain the origins of religion.

It is merely an observation that The Sacred Canopy actually offers no convincing account for why humans are so chronically and pervasively religious. One suspects that, as he was operating out of the Lutheran tradition, Berger's own thinking on this point may have finally resorted more to a theological than radically constructionist framework. Up against what is now labeled the old paradigm has arisen a conten­ tious "new paradigm" in the sociology of religion, represented in part by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke's book Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human 22. "It is an essential postulate of sociology that a human institution cannot rest upon an error and. a lie, without which it could not exist. If it were not founded in the nature of things, it would have encountered in the facts a resistance o~er which it could never have triumphed .... In reality, then, there are no relig­ ions which are false." Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 14-15. 23. See, for example, Christian Smith (ed.), Disruptive Religion: The Force of Faith in Social Movement Activism (New York: Routledge, 1996); Christian Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Charles Marsh, Gods Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princec ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); Matthew Moen and Lowell Gustafson (eds.), The Religious Challenge to the State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). .. ,J~ _____ ....., 112 • Moral, Believing Animals Side of Religion. 24 The book-as I myself say in a blurb on its back cover­ has very many fine merits, in my view, as does the new paradigm as a who.le. But explaining the origins of religion is not one of them. In fact, I thmk Star~ and Finke fail badly at it1" ~nd it is worth considering how ~nd wh~. (Smce. I understand that Stark,~ the lead author of the chapter m questiOn, I Will hereafter refer to him alone as its author.) Stark's theory of religious ongms is explicitly grounded on the as­ sumptions of rational choice theory: "Within the limits of their infor­ mation and understanding, restricted by available options, guided by their preferences and tastes, humans attempt to make rational choices .... It ~akes sense to model religion as the behavior of rational, reasonably well mformed actors who choose to 'consume' religious 'commodities' in the same wa!. th~,t they weigh the costs and benefits of consuming secular ~om~odrtres. In the old days, when religion was readily dismissed as rrrat10nal fantasy, ~t was easy to explain the origins of religion as arising from the fear and Ignorance of savages. Stark handily dispenses with such nonsense, however, and asserts instead that religion is no less rational than any other human activity. So far so good. But that leaves Stark with a new difficulty to explain: why rationally self-interested calculators of costs and benefits would freely choose to sacrifice for and invest in non­ empirical. beings offering only unverifiable and chronologically distant re­ wards. Grven all of the options, is that a rationally self-interested move ) to ma~e? Stark's answer is yes, because certain rewards for which humans ) have hrgh demands are unverifiable and available only in the distant fu­ ture. Religion, in other words, reaUy is just another source of rewards and benefits that people seek to maximize or "satisfice" through social ex­ changes. The only difference is that religion offers a particular kind of demanded reward, and to get it one must exchange not with humans but the gods .. Ot~e~se, .religion is like any other product, activity, service, or commodrty: 1t exists m a market to satisfy human preferences and desires.

Let us caU this the Starkian world.

But what then is the actual source of human religion? Where does it 24 .. ~odney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Reltgron (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). The following quotes are from pp. 38, 42-43. On the unverifiability and future distance of religious rewards, see p. 88. The "evil gods" quote comes from p. 98. On Religion 113 come from? Why do people conceive and demand it? Like Berger, ironi­ cally, Stark never explains. Just as with the archetypal work of the old paradigm, religion simply plops theoreticaUy into Stark's theory, on pages 88-91: "Otherworldly rewards are those that will be obtained only in a nonempirical (usually posthumous) context .... Supernatural refers to forces or entities beyond or outside nature that can suspend, alter, or ignore physical forces .... Gods are supernatural 'beings' having con- sciousness and desire .... Religion consists of very general explanations of existence, including the terms of exchange with a god or gods." There is nowhere in this discussion any explication of where religion or gods or supernatural came from, no explanation for how they ever got into the Starkian world in the first place. Particularly baffling is how and why "evil gods"-which "intend to inflict coercive exchanges or deceptions on hu­ mans, resulting from losses for human exchange partners" -ever make their way into the Starkian world. Would rationally self-interested people invent costly evil gods if they did not actually exist?

Whether or not Stark's theory works if one presumes that people are religious or that gods actually do exist, it certainly does not work as an account explaining why people are religious. Even more than in Berger's meaning-and-order-oriented theoretical world, there is no apparent rea­ son why in a Starkian exchange-and-reward-oriented world, given its ra­ tional choice assumptions, humans would generate and sustain this thing we call religion. Consider the following problems. The feasibility of Stark's theory depends on rational people concocting the existence of spiritual beings that are, in a presumably materialist world, in no way a part of their actual reality. Why would rational people do such a thing? Because, Stark says, they have a demand ·for particular rewards that only such nonexisting spiritual beings can supply. But why would rational people ever conceive of and continue to demand a reward that actually does not exist and that they in fact cannot and will not enjoy? I, for example, imagine that I would find it immensely rewarding to go to the next Olym­ pics and win five gold medals, but that is in fact an impossibility; and to the extent that I am a rational person I realize this and construct my reward expectation structure in a way that does not even consider the possibility of competing successfully in the Olympics. To be able to win the five medals would be a tremendous gain. But the fact that I cannot is not a terrible loss. It simply is. Likewise, people in a purely materialist 114 • Moral, Believing Animals world might find the idea-if indeed they could first conceive it-of eter­ nal life in heaven, for example, very attractive. But if they are rational materialists they would realize that such a thing is an impossibility and will revise their reward expectations accordingly (as many people that I know who do believe that we live in a materialist world have done). They will focus instead on chocolate and skiing and sex and careers, which actually can be rewarding. To persist in sacrificing for and investing in an impossibility would be quite irrational-at which point the Starkian world begins to melt down. Perhaps the reward rational people seek in religion is not heaven itself, but only the comfort of imagining and anticipating heaven? Perhaps. But that solution also cuts the legs out from under Starkian rationality, resuscitating the view of religion as an escapist illusion of foolish daydreamers that Stark had so nicely dispensed with. In order to hold onto rationality at one level (self-interested reward maximization), Stark must either posit irrationality at another level (invention of [non­ existent] good and evil gods) or concede explicitly that the gods really do exist (which, given our dominant academic narrative, is itself a form of irrationality).

If the new rational choice paradigm in religion has an essential, perhaps fatal problem-an intellectual "original sin," so. to speak-it is not its premise that religious actors are rational. It is rather its premise that re­ ligion is essentially and ultimately about. acquisition and satisfaction through exchange. Once this assumption is posited, a number of problems ensue, only one of which is rational choice's inability to explain the origins of religion, despite its sustained attempts to do so. This is because humans are not at bottom calculating, consuming animals. They are moral, be­ lieving animals. And rational choice theory is incapable of making ade­ quate sense of moral, believing animals. A different approach is n_eeded. How else, then, might we understand religious origins?· What account could make sense of the fact that so many people in the world have been and are religious? Let us begin by considering the theistic theory men­ tioned earlier: human religions have existed and do exist pervasively be­ cause a God really does exist, and most humans feel a recurrent and deeply compelling desire to know and worship, in their various ways, the God who is there. How does this explanation fare? First, the theistic assumption ) in this theory is not empirically verifiable. But then again, neither are the ) evolutionarily "selected-upon" religion genes that allegedly generate hu- On Religion 115 man propensities toward religious belief and practice that today purport to explain religion scientifically. More broadly, this old model of ~eo~et­ ical science as proceeding solely on empirical verification and falstfica~wn is philosophically defective and theoretically outmode~. 25 Second, smce not all scholars are theists, the proposed theistic theory vwlates the precept that scientific inquiry and knowledge should be universal and neutral­ accessible to any scholar whatever his or her own personal belief com­ mitments. But then again, the alternative theoretical explanations pro­ posed by sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, exchange theory, an~ ra­ tional choice currently in ascendancy in the academy are also netther neutral nor universal but similarly require commitment to sets of par­ ticular ontological assumptions and beliefs in order to be remotely plau­ sible. And many scholars, this author included, cannot and do not a~cept those assumptions and beliefs. More broadly, we know that no scten~e operates as a universal and neutral enterprise, that all science necessarily relies on particular pre~uppositions, paradigms, and research programs 25. In brief, Sir Karl Popper, among others, successfully criticized the tradition running at least from Francis Bacon to logical positivism claiming ~at scientific truth requires verification through inductive generalization, by argumg (~)- that infallible foundations of knowledge are not accessible, since human capacities of perception and intellect are restricted to bounded comprehe~~ions of_ ou~ world; (b) that since verification of a universal theory requires a positiVe fin~mg i.n every case, most of which remain for_ever in the inaccessible future, venficat10n can therefore never be achieved with certitude; and (c) that the verification standard itself could not be verified, so it does not qualify as meaningful according to its own requirement. See Karl Popper, The Logic of Scien~fic ?isco_ve'! (~ew Yor~: Basic Books, 1959 [1934]). Yet Popper's own theory of faislficat!Omsm -that_ Is, of reliance on deductive falsification to identify "correct" theories as those which have not yet been proven wrong-was subsequently largely discredited, since (a) it provides no logical grounds for preferring one theory over ano~her, as an as yet unfalsified theory is just as capable of being actually wrong than 1ts recently falsified forerunner; and since (b) falsificationism does not represent the actual history of scientific discovery, in which theory and data often do. n_ot easily cor­ respond and in which some very good theories have appe~red ongmally to have been falsified. See George Couvalis, Tlte Pltilosoplty of Sctence (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1997); lmre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and tlte Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). i,;; '-~ ·,·: :' ~ ,"I, ~~ " ~:' ;,~; ,. ~~ f 116 • Moral, Believing Animals that are believed in and committed to by specific scholarly communities of practice. 26 Third, the theistic theory proposed earlier will violate the cultural sensibilities of many modern academics and so create controversy and divisionP Perhaps. But so what? Sociobiology, evolutionary psychol­ ogy, exchange theory, and rational choic€ ~iolate the cultural sensibilities 26. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1975); Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1, ed. John Worrall and Gregory Currie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revo­ lution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Robert Proctor, Value-Free Science? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Sergio Sismondo, Science without Myth: On Construction, Reality, and Social Knowledge (Albany: State Uni­ versity of New York Press, 1996); Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith, and Society (Chi­ cago: University of Chicago Press, 1946); Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966). 27. Aside from other concerns, some may think that theism is known philo­ sophically to be irrational or nonsensical, yet that is now a philosophically dis­ credited view; see, for example, William Alston, "Knowledge of God," in Marcus Hester (ed.), Faith, Reason, and Skepticism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); William Alston, Perceiving God (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1993); Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (eds.), Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983); Nich­ olas Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd­ mans, 1976). Even Richard Rorty has conceded this change in views of theism: "Plantinga's God and Other Minds is quite convincing on many points, and I admire Wolterstorff's Reason within the Bounds of Religion .... I admire them both as remarkable philosophers ... [who] show why we atheists should stop praising ourselves for being more 'rational' than theists. On this point they seem to me quite right" (quoted in Stephen Louthan, "On Religion-A Discussion with Rich­ ard Rorty, Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff," Christian Scholar's Review 27, no. 2 [1996]: 179). On Religion 117 of many academics, this author included, yet that does not preclude their serious consideration as theoretical explanations. Moreover, concern about the creation of controversy and division is simply an irrelevant factor in determining the merits of a theoretical explanation. Or do we think that Galileo should have buried his proposed astronomical system in order to avoid controversy and division? It is true that a theistic theory of religious origins is ruled inadmissible by the currently dominant narrative of science and is profoundly out of step with the last, say, 120 years of related American scholarship. 26 But the reasons for that at this stage of our understanding of science and human knowing seem to have much more to do with cultural, political, and perhaps emotional disapproval of the. ide~ than actual and compelling ~ intellectual objections to it. And so I am mchned to leave the matter here and maintain the parsimonious theistic explanation as my proposed the­ ory.29 28. See Robert Shepard, God's People in the Ivory Tower (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1991). In historical terms this is a novel situation, however, since, for most of human history there simply would have been no need to explain religious origins nontheistically. Only in a modern, secular, Enlightenment context would explaining religious origins non theistically be a meaningful and pressing problem. See J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987); Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Call_1bridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); Frank Manuel, Tl1e Changing of the Gods (Hanover, N.H.: Brown University Press, 1983). But for centuries in the West before that, the question of the wellspring of religious faith, including diversities of religious faiths, would have been most often answered in theistic terms. See, for example, Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered, In Faure Parts (London: Printed by William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1613); Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation; or, The Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature (London, 1730). · .

29. Stated in somewhat different, if philosophically disputable, terms, th1s ap­ proach suggests that the objects of human desires are normally existent, and that human desires derive at least in part from their need for or serious interest in the objects of their desires. For example, the object of hunger is food, and pe~ple f:el hungry because food exists and people need it to live; the object of erot1c d~me is sex, and people feel this desire because sex exists and people both need 1t to ;:; ~ 'r ~ ~ll ,-~ c~ '{} ' ~ f, ;t· l;:

ii ~, h ;; l· •.,. ' ' ., 1 ' r· " ,;, I ., ~ ·' ~~ * ,. ;t '·. 'ii 118 • Moral, Believing Animals For the sake of a more inclusive discussion, however, I will attempt here to articulate a not-incompatible theory of religious origins perhaps more accessible to a broader audience. What follows hinges not only on the model of moral, believing animals developed earlier, but also (as did the account of human morality in chapter 2) on the centrality of the problem of human transcendent self-cons'ciousness in a finite, non-self­ interpreting world, perhaps best expressed in Reinhold Niebuhr's 1938- 40 Gifford Lectures. Niebuhr was the leading American liberal Protestant theologian of the mid-twentieth century, yet his thinking on this point fundameritally followed that of the 1901-2 Gifford Lectures by the non­ theist William James. 30 First, moral, believing, narrating animals-as opposed to both ra­ tional, acquisitive, exchanging animals and genetically adaptive and gov­ erned animals-are the kind of creatures about whom it is not odd to think that they would develop beliefs, symbols, and practices about the reality of a superempirical order that makes claims to organize and guide human life. As moral animals, humans are inescapably interested in and guided by normative cultural orders that specify what is good, right, true, beautiful, worthy, noble, and just in life, and what is not. To be a human person, to possess an identity, to act with agency requires locating one's life within a larger moral order by which to know who one is and how one ought to live. Human individuals and groups, therefore, must look beyond themselves for sources of moral order that are understood as not established by their own desires, decisions, or preferences but instead believed to exist apart from them, providing standards by which their desires, decisions, and preferences can them­ selves be judged. As believing animals, human faith in superempirical procreate and want it for pleasure. This suggests-and to be dear, only suggests­ the possibility that the persistent, recurrent, and widespread human desire to know about, communicate with, and worship or make sacrifices to gods or a God sug­ gests that an object of that desire exists-which, perhaps through the "implanta­ tion" or otherwise building-in of that desire-itself generates the felt human desire in question. See Robert Holyer, "The Argument from Desire," Faith and Philosophy 5, no. 1 (1988): 61-71. 30. As shown by the 2001 Gifford Lectures of Stanley Hauerwas, published in With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2001). On Religion • 119 orders that make claims to organize and guide human life is not cate­ gorically different from the fundamental and continual acts of presup­ posing and believing in all of the other assumptions and ideas that make the living of life even possible. The standard distinction between faith and fact is a false dichotomy. What we take as facts are always de­ pendent on and meaningful in terms of worldviews that ultimately rest on empirically unverifiable belief commitments and suppositions. So humans being religious-that is, believing in and living their lives with reference to the superempirical orders that define religion-is episte­ mologically more in continuity with the living of ordinary human life as a whole than not. lt is typically believers in certain modern, Enlight­ enment narratives that construct reality in ways that obfuscate the faith­ based character of human existence who insist on the (erroneous) faith/ fact distinction. Finally, as narrating animals who experience life as lived through time and who seek to make meaning of life and self through life-constituting and orienting narratives of many sorts, the superempir­ ical orders of religion provide humans with compelling narratives link­ ing cosmic, historical, and personal significance for individuals and communities across time. Humans most typically know about their su­ perempirical orders through religious traditions passed on through time in narrative form. The enlightenment of Buddha; the revelation to Mo­ hamed; the Exodus from Egypt and ascent to Mount Sinai; the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth; the works of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva; the creation and o~;dering of the world by the Shinto Kami, Izanagi-no-mikoto and Izanami-no-mikoto, and so on are narrative em­ plotments of truth and worth that derive from superempirical orders. In sum, the human condition and the character of religion quite naturally fit, cohere, complement, and reinforce each other. ,--- Yet this anthropologically referenced account still oniy so far suggests that it is plausible that the kind of animals I have described humans to be· could very well be religious in the terms I have described religion to be. I have, however, not yet suggested why humans would or should work out their moral, believing, narrating character in specifically religious terms. Do we have good reason to think that religion would "show up" in the world that I have in this book described? Again, provisionally set­ ting aside a theistic account answering this question, how might we ex­ plain the specific need or interest or desire of moral, believing animals to ' :_ ~ l ·~ ;r L L ., "I, ,:: ;f -,_: :.! "> ,! ,,; 1' ~~ 120 Moral, Believing Animals inhabit orders that are not only moral but also superempirical in their sources of the moral?

The short answer to that question, I suggest, is that self, life, history, and the world are not self-interpreting in_meaning. In order to make sense of the meaning of self, life, history, and tbe world, one has to get outside of them, to "transcend" them, and interpret them within horizons and frameworks of perspective derived from beyond the object of interpreta­ tion.3' I have already argued the point with regard to the human self. Individual humans are not self-generating, self-defining, self-understand­ ing creatures. Individual humans only, always, and can ever enjoy life, identity, and significance by locating themselves within stories and cultural orders outside and beyond themselves, in terms of which their lives have place and purpose. This is an elementary sociological insight. But the same -;:. ~is true for life, history, a~d the world. They are not self-interpreting. They need a transcendent honzon or framework of understanding derived from above and beyond themselves to be given significance.

Again, in this I am directly following Reinhold Niebuhr, who em­ phasizes the tension inherent in the paradoxical human experience of simultaneous finitude as material animals and transcendence in self­ consciousness: The human spirit has the special capacity of standing continuously outside itself in terms of indefinite regression. Consciousness is a capacity for sur­ veying the world and determining action from a governing center. Self­ consciousness represents a further degree of transcendence in which the self makes itself its own object in such a way that the ego is finally always subject and not object. ... The self knows the world, insofar as it knows the world, because it stands outside both itself and the world, which means that it cannot understand itself except as it is understood from beyond itself and the world.n 31. For an informing discussion of the concepts of horizons and frameworks, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 16-52.

32. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964 [1948)), 13-14. The following quotes come from pp. 164-65, 141, 14. On Religion 121 The transcendence inherent in this human self-consciousness creates con­ ditions that for meaning require interpretive frameworks or perspectives that transcend the object of interpretation and the interpreter him or herself: Implicit in the human situation of freedom and in man's capacity to tr~n­ scend himself and his world is his inability to construct a world of meanmg without finding a source and key to the structure of meaning which tran­ scends the world beyond his own capacity to tra~sc~nd it .... Th~ probl~m} is not solved without the introduction of a prmc1ple of meanmg wh1ch ( transcends the world of meaning to be interpreted .... If the effort is made to comprehend the meaning of the world through the principle of natural causation alone, the world is conceived in terms of a mechanistic coherence which has no place for the freedom which reveals itself in human con­ sciousness .... Furthermore a mind which transcends itself cannot legiti­ mately make itself the ultimate principle of interpretation by which it ex­ plains the relation of mind to the world. In this way, history itself can have no meaning except through int~rpre­ tative understandings that come not from within but beyond history, which are always acquired through believed-in presuppositions of one kind or another: It is ... impossible to interpret history at all without a principle of inter­ pretation which history as such does not yield. The ~ari~us princ~ples. of interpretation current in modern culture ... are all pnnCiples of h1stoncal interpretation introduced by faith. They claim to be conclusions about the nature of history at which men arrive after a "scientific" analysis of the course of events; but there can be no such analysis of the course of events which does not make use of some presuppositions of faith, as the principle of analysis and interpretation. The life of the individual human self, too, needs a framework of inter­ pretation or understanding that comes from beyond, yet is related to and through, empirical history: The meaning of life transcends the meaning of history .... History, however meaningful, cannot give life its full meaning. Each individual transcends and is involved in the historical process. Insofar as he is involved in history,. ~ ~·~ ;;; ~~ If ) t). '"it ------.JL~ji,; 122 • Moral, Believing Animals the disclosure of life's meaning must come to him in history. Insofar as he transcends history, the source of life's meaning must transcend history. 33 This situation inherent in the tension and paradox of finite yet self­ conscious humanity thus leads humans naturally, according to Niebuhr, toward nonempirical orders of religion