Copyright information: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/press_copyright_and_disclaimer/default.html
Religion Generalized and Naturalized
If religion is not about God, then what on earth is it about (for heaven's sake)? It is about us. It is about manipulating our brains so that we might think, feel, and act in ways that are good for us, both individually and collectively. Religious traditions work like the bow of a violin, playing upon the strings of human nature to produce harmonious relations between individuals and their social and physical environments. Religions have always been about this business of adaptation, and they will always remain so. This is not to say, however, that any particular religious tradition will remain adaptive. Religions sometimes outlive their adaptive utility and occasionally, therewith, become positive threats to human survival.
It is one thing to make bold assertions like this and quite another to back them up. The purpose of this book is to do just that—to show how the ideas, images, symbols, and rituals of religious traditions have been designed to engage and to organize human neural systems for the sake of human survival, and then to examine the contemporary conditions that have compromised their adaptive utility. The three parts of the book attempts to pull together three distinct arguments.
The argument of part one is that a universal human nature exists and can be known by examining our evolutionary story, especially the evolution of behavior. The argument continues by showing how cognitive and emotional systems work together, and how they are conditioned by cultural influences. Part one ends with a transitional chapter on the nature of religion, arguing that religious traditions are best understood in terms of their powers to nurture our cognitive and emotional systems toward the achievement of personal and social well-being.
Part two seeks to validate thisthe theory of religion with references to five of the world’s great religious traditions. The argument advanced in part three is that traditional religious orientations are faced with a dual crisis of intellectual plausibility and moral relevance, and are therefore rendered incapable of nurturing human nature in ways that might prevent unsustainable patterns of human population and consumption from triggering a cascade of global environmental disasters. This argument finally gives way to speculations about the future of religion. An ambitious book, perhaps, but not a very complicated one. Each of the three parts opens with a brief introduction that maps out the territory and summarizes the argument. I encourage readers to page ahead to those sections for a more detailed orientation.
It is already clear that the key factor holding these three arguments together is the theory of religion to be presented at the end of part one. It may therefore be useful to consider what is formally at stake in this theory, and in the process to declare a few personal biases that readers will have to contend with. I will be proposing a general and naturalistic theory of religion.
By a general theory I mean one that tells us what religion is, where it comes from, and how it functions. General theories are premised on the belief that universal properties of structure and function can be found lurking behind the varying details of religious phenomena. The goal of a general theory is to show that all religious traditions may be seen as particular variations on a set of common themes.
By a naturalistic theory I mean one that reduces religious experiences and expressions to the status of natural events having natural causes. As such, a naturalistic theory of religion seeks to understand religious phenomena by using categories, concepts, principles, and methods compatible with the ones normally applied to non-religious domains of human behavior. Briefly stated, the central claims are: First, that it is possible to construct a satisfying general account of religion; and second, that this can be done without invoking supernatural principles of explanation.
Disclaimers
I begin with three important disclaimers. First of all, this book is not meant to be hostile to the idea of God. I will not be arguing either for or against the existence of God. Perhaps there are gods, perhaps not. I will not pretend to know one way or the other. The question of God's existence simply doesn't come into the business of understanding religious phenomena. Both the existence of God and the non-existence of God are perfectly consistent with the claim that religion is essentially about fiddling on the strings of human nature. There is much to be said for the thesis that all theological formulations are equally and utterly dubious for the simple reason that God is inscrutable. The measure of a religious orientation is therefore not whether it gives an accurate account of divine reality, but whether it effectively manages human nature. It could be argued, of course, that religion wouldwill lack the power to manage human nature unless it is believed to offer truths about God. This may be the case, but even so, it is easy to see that belief is the thing, not the reality of any objects of belief. The religious question, then, is completely independent of the theological question.
Secondly, this book is not meant to be hostile to the religious life. Indeed, I hope the opposite message will come through clearly—that is, I regard religion generally to be a salutary thing. Religious phenomena are everywhere present in human life, and will undoubtedly remain so. As far as anyone can tell—and there is plenty of evidence to the point—there has never been a coherent human culture without a religious tradition. Religion comes naturally to human beings. It is a "given," an important universal feature of human affairs, God or not. This book should therefore not be seen as an attempt to undermine religious sensibilities. If anything, it hopes to kindle insights that will enable us to deepen them.
Finally, the thesis of this book is not original. The claim that religion is not about God has been advanced many times in the past, notably by the likes of Kant, Feuerbach, Marx, Durkheim, and Freud. Each of these authors believed, as I do, that regardless of what religion says it is about, it has to do fundamentally with meeting the challenges to a full life. Kant thought that religion was about achieving rational coherence in human experience; Feuerbach believed that religion was a covert way of coming to terms with self-alienation; Marx thought religion was about coping with the dehumanizing consequences of economic exploitation; Durkheim associated religion with a veneration of the social order; and Freud described religion as the projection of deep psychological dynamics. In each of these views the claim is that religion is about us, not about God. This book offers a fresh iteration of the thesis on the warrant that new insights into human nature have cleared a path toward a new theory of religion.
Can Religion Be Generalized?
The feasibility of general theories of religion is open to question, and there are good reasons to discourage the pursuit of such theories from the start. Indeed, the weight of informed scholarly opinion currently favors a moratorium on general theories. In his excellent treatment of these matters, Daniel Pals claims that "the course of the most recent discussions in the theory of religion has only deepened doubts and multiplied hesitation about all general formulations.”1 The sheer diversity of religious phenomena is itself discouraging. In the course of human history thousands of religious traditions have appeared, each with distinctive patterns of meaning. Some speak of thousands of gods, others speak of mere dozens, still others speak of only one, while some recognize no gods at all. Some religious traditions are rich, even baroque, in symbolic and ritual convention, while others are minimalist and informal. Some are militantly dogmatic, others tolerant. Some religious orientations are focused on community, while others center on the solitary individual.
The complexity of religious phenomena is no less daunting. It is difficult to identify any domain of human interest and activity where religious issues are not at stake. Politics, economics, personal morality, health, education, birth, death, sexuality, art, science—all of these, in some measure, affect and are affected by religion. Religion, then, is as large and complex as life itself. Many cultures, in fact, do not possess a word for religion, thereby lacking the means to distinguish religious phenomena from the rest of human experience and expression. Given the extremes of diversity and complexity associated with the religious life, one might reasonably doubt the prospects for a satisfying general theory. Theories broad enough to contain such extremes are likely to sacrifice substance and insight to vagueness, while theories that are specific in describing religious lifeoffering significant content will run the risk of neglecting or distorting relevant facts.
Each and every religious tradition is unique—unique in its cultural setting and historical development, unique in the set of challenges it has faced, and (perhaps most importantly) unique in the experiences and the constellations of meaning it hasthese have generated in the lives of individual men and women. Serious regard for the unique complexity of religious orientations has provoked a scholarly reaction against general theories in favor of a "particularist" approach to the phenomena of religion.2 If I understand the particularist view correctly, it goes something like the following. To have a theory about something is to describe and explain what the thing is about, that is, what it means. Thus, to have a theory of a particular religious tradition is to show what its various beliefs, values, rituals, and symbols mean to those individuals who practice the religion, within their own self-defining cultural context. Such a theory would attempt to capture the internal logic of the symbols and practices, to convey a sense of the "lived" tradition by somehow getting at what it feels like to be nurtured by it.