The Bonds Of Faith

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Road to the Middle Class

Saturday May 19, 2012

by Christopher Chantrill

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From Hesiod to Plato, when the leap in being has gained the alatheia, the truth of existence, the old myth becomes the pseudos, the falsehood or lie, the untruth of existence which the forbears lived.ⁱ

In our modern age we look back with a certain disdain upon the ways of the ancestors. We regard their ways as ignorant and their faith as superstition. This is nothing new. Plato looked with disdain upon the representation of the gods in Hesiod, and Hesiod disapproved of the gods in Homer. But Eric Voegelin argued that “human nature is constant in spite of its unfolding, in the history of mankind, from compact to differentiated order.”ⁱⁱ We shouldn’t think of the humans of the old order as superstitious or ignorant. Their world and their ideas were merely “compact,” when compared with our modern “differentiated” order. We all understand how this differentiation works in the modern era when we observe the specialization or differentiation of knowledge at the modern university into dozens of departments. It is said that John Milton was the last man who knew everything. But things were more compact in his day.

Many moderns, particularly on the left, today are bold in their assertion that the faith of our ancestors in the Christian God is a superstition, echoing Plato and Hesiod in their disapproval of Homer’s depiction of the gods. But if the gods of old are embarrassing and their believers backward and superstitious, what will save us and our gods from a similar fate? After all, what is it about the gods of equality, or expertise, or evolution and our faith in them that should exempt us and them from the scorn of our descendents? More to the point, What was the point of religion in the old days: what did it do for society back then? Was it merely a question of social control, of the rich oppressing the poor? Or was there something else at work? For according to Roy Rappaport: “No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion[.]”ⁱⁱⁱ

If Voegelin’s policy of toleration for old beliefs has a point, that old beliefs represent a more compact version of our own differentiated beliefs, perhaps we could study with advantage the faith of our mothers and even look further back to the hunter-gatherers, as Nicholas Wade does in The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures.

Wade analyzes religion from an evolutionary perspective. He does not attempt to answer the question of God’s existence. He only attempts to analyze the effects of faith in God on human and social behavior, and the ways of people that belong to religious communities. The telling thing, on Wade’s account, is that if religion is universal, As Rappaport argues, then it is genetic, a wired-in trait that all humans share. Normally, evolutionists argue that traits become universal because they have survival value.

The great question for mankind is the same as for any social animal. How do you develop at once the aggressive ability to defend against enemies and and also develop the cooperative qualities to assist your fellows: how to be fiercely competitive and at the same time caring and compassionate. It is one thing to talk about what’s right, but another thing to do the right thing. It is one thing to talk about the fallen heroes; it is another thing to become one. Religion is at the center of this complex problem. It binds people together into a community. It establishes the rules of behavior towards others. It teaches people to sacrifice for the good of the community; it creates community events at which enmities are buried; it directs the instinctive moral sense with socially constructed cultural memes.

Perhaps mankind can achieve these social goals, at a pinch, through violence. But violence is expensive; humans need to reserve their aggression for enemies rather than people within their communities. Indeed this is symbolized by the universal human practice of dividing the world into the “us” of our community and the “them” of the outsiders, the foreigners. Violence has its costs; even the threat of violence has its costs in fear and in feud. So mankind has found other ways of achieving beneficial social cooperation and control. In part, this social cooperation is achieved by preprogrammed social instinct, in part it is achieved by training the young humans in the approved social instincts. It is religion that binds people together in unity and in achieving the lowered violence needed for a successful community.

One successful strategy for lowered conflict is the concept of divine punishment. “In small societies, the person who takes on the role of enforcer exposes himself to general resentment, not to mention retaliation from the miscreant or his relatives.” It is usually best to get everyone’s agreement and have the miscreant killed by one of his relatives. Alternatively, you can persuade everyone that God will punish miscreants, that God knows everything we do, and will punish misdeeds either in this life or the life to come.

A system of supernatural punishment carries enormous advantages for a primitive society. No one has to assume the thankless task of meting out punishment and risk being killed by the offender or his relatives; the gods perform this chore willingly and vigilantly.^iv

No legislation is needed. No police force is required. And that is probably just as well. The modern state maintains a vast apparatus of policemen, prosecutors and jailers because we can afford it. The primitive society cannot.

If religion can help with discipline and punishment, maybe it can help with the other big social problem, quarrels within and between families. It seems clear that, in hunter-gatherer groups, ritual music and dance are the social solvent that resolve enmity. Anthropologist Megan Biesele argues that, among the !Kung people, the “dance is perhaps the central unifying force in Bushman life, binding people together in very deep ways which we do not fully understand.”^v An Australian aboriginal fire ceremony ritual lasting for 14 days includes a mock battle between the men and the women. “All parties who had a serious unresolved dispute with each other were expected to engage in a symbolic duel with blazing firesticks, after which the matter was never to be referred to again.”^vi

In the face-to-face hunter-gatherer group, the problem of freeloading is limited. Everyone knows how much each contributes, and the women’s gossip network keeps accounts on who gives and who doesn’t. Everyone inside the community is obligated to contribute, and those that don’t may pay with expulsion. But in the modern era it is difficult to know who can be trusted. But how do you identify people that can be trusted to pull their weight? The answer is simple. You impose costs on community members. The higher the cost placed upon a member, the more his is likely to honor his obligations when the going gets tough. This explains why it is possible for demanding religions, such as Mormonism and Orthodox Judaism to thrive when their costs are much higher than those of the mainline Protestant churches or Reform Judaism. As Roger Finke and Rodney Stark assert, “People tend to value religion on the basis of how costly it is to belong—the more one must sacrifice in order to be in good standing, the more valuable the religion.”^vii But there is a payoff from enduring the costs of membership beyond the selfish one of paying a lot in order to get a lot in salvation and the love of God; you signal to the community that you are a worthy person. Nicholas Wade:

A high price of entry also raises the level of trust among its members, because by obeying all the required rules and taboos, congregants signal to one another that they have bought into the religion’s moral code and can be relied on to behave accordingly...

Strictness reduces free riding [and] screens out members who lack commitment and stimulates participation among those who remain.^viii

Wade stresses that church members do not analyze their membership in this way. Most church members if asked will emphasize the personal satisfactions they obtain from religious membership. The science shows that religion works because it changes behavior and turns people into better citizens and their community into a better community.

We moderns inherit the social problems of the ancients, yet must resolve our socialization problems in different ways. The absolute equality of the hunter-gatherer band is not available to the society of strangers that cooperate through the market economy. The loss of a divine enforcer has required the enlistment of a vast army of human law enforcers. The differentiation of society from the compact hunter-gatherer band into a specialized society, with economic activity, political activity, and religious activity institutionalized into separate and competing social sectors creates further challenges. Modern humans have differentiated economic activity, the acquisition of food and shelter, from political activity, the enforcement of social norms, and from religious activity, the establishment and the re-enactment of social norms. Some people specialize in the production of food and shelter; others specialize in politics, and still others specialize in moral/cultural persuasion. In this age religion is no longer a face-to-face activity of the whole community in which moral instincts and reasoning are integrated with habits of food-sharing and instinctive sacrifice for the community in inter-tribal warfare.

Moreover many people predict that religion is on its way out. The death of God variously reported throughout the 19th century has encouraged sociologists of religion like Steve Bruce to predict the end of religion. “I expect the proportion of people who are largely indifferent to religious ideas to increase and the seriously religious to become a small minority.”^ix

Bruce defines religion as “beliefs, actions and institutions predicated on the existence of of entities with powers of agency (that is, gods) or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose (the Hindu notion of karma, for example), which can set the conditions of, or intervene in, human affairs.” Presumably he draws his line to exclude the modern secular faiths, beginning with the French Revolution and continuing with socialism, communism, fascism, and environmentalism. Presumably he does not regard the notion of “progress” or “evolution” as a process possessed of moral purpose that governs the conditions and the changes in human affairs.

Presumably Steve Bruce does not consider his own left-of-center political and ethical beliefs as religion. It that, he joins most of humanity. Most of us do not think of our own beliefs as something set aside, as beliefs or religion. We experience them as an understanding of the way things are, an accurate understanding of the world as it is, and a practical guide for making the world a better place. For a leftist, perhaps, the tidal waves of secular religion that have swept the planet since the official death of God two centuries ago and that have inspired the great secular religious wars of our time are not cataclysmic events at all, but merely the water we swim in, the natural solvent of social progress that is trying to evolve from old, unjust social structures to new structures that are “cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.”^x

Let us attempt to define religion more expansively than Bruce, and get away from the idea that because the idea of a personal God that cares about you and me has declined amongst the educated ruling class that people have ceased to care about value and meaning. Let us define it to include both the transcendental faiths of the past and and the secular faiths of the modern era. Given the notion developed by Wade that religion is a universal instinct that solves the social animal’s problem of socializing its fellows to combine aggression and ruthlessness towards enemies with cooperation and friendship towards members of the community, we assume that humans always need to bind their communities together with a religion that combines a narrative of meaning with a moral program with rituals of community that strongly incentivizes people to observe the social norms.

On this view, if we look at religion today we see it as strong as it ever was. In the world of transcendental religion we see the Christianization of Africa, the spread of Pentecostalism in the favelas of Latin America. We see the house churches of China, the resurgent Islam of the Middle East In the world of secular religion we see the cult of creativity, we see the religion of equality of the elite West that institutionalizes itself in the administrative and regulatory welfare state, in the universities, in the environmental movement and the current enthusiasm for saving the planet through a new asceticism to lower the human carbon “footprint.” There is religion everywhere you turn.

Throughout most of human prehistory and history, religion and community were compact and identical. The hunter-gatherer community was a church of the whole community, a politics of the whole community, and an economy of the whole community. This changed in the agricultural age, where temple religions differentiated from the community of the whole. Instead of the whole community, a priestly class studied the rituals and performed them for the benefit of the political rulers. Ordinary people were kept at a distance. Later, feudal monarchs privileged a specific church as an established church and expected it to serve its political interest. When the Franks drove eastward into Saxony the Church was responsible for conversion and pacification as much as Charlemagne’s chieftains and armies.

In such a culture, those that didn’t conform to the national church were viewed with suspicion as potential enemies of the regime, and they often were. The state saw itself at war with dissenting beliefs, since disagreement with the regime’s religion implied disagreement on the legitimacy of the regime. The moral community was closely identified with the political community. A threat to one was a threat to the other.

But the possibility of dissent from the regime’s established church implies a further differentiation from the unitary culture of the hunter-gatherer group. No longer is the coalition of political and the religious “just the way things are.” People are demanding the right to form groups within the larger community and define meaning for themselves rather than submit to the established meaning set forth in church orthodoxy under the protection of the state, where the church is the established church sponsored by the monarch and the political sector. Freedom, in this religious sense, means the freedom to believe as an act of will rather than as a condition of political membership.

Of course, the people foremost in the struggle were not just making a religious statement; they were also establishing the right to put a distance between themselves and the political regime under which they lived. They wanted to create their own moral community, separate from the regime’s established moral community and un-compromised by reasons of state.

Modern states usually are home to numerous competing religious sects, secular and religious. Denial of full political and economic rights to dissenting sects is usually experienced as a scandal. But that raises the question of which religion and with moral tradition shall inspire the usual legislation of morality undertaken by the legislature and the courts? Without a condominium between different faiths there is a risk of civil war.

Thus to the question: what is the point of religion? the answer is simple. Religion creates the social space between force and self-interest, and it does it by creating communities of meaning. It reduces the incidence and the cost of social force, the weight of policing and punishment, and it creates a community of people that have demonstrated their trustworthiness by submitting to the costs of religious membership. It creates people who are ready to be members of society. This truth was understood by the founding fathers of America. In his farewell address, President Washington asserted that “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” but cautioned against the idea that morality could be maintained without religion.

Here we extend the idea of religion’s role to include the modern phenomenon of secular religion. All moral and cultural communities inculcate in their members a code of virtue. Inspired by that code, people come into society to operate government to keep the peace, to cooperate in voluntary associations to build a society, and to transact business with each other to secure the material necessaries of life. The beliefs they profess define the organizations they inhabit.

iEric Voegelin, Order and History: the world of the polis, p. 71.

iiIbid.

iiiNicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct, p. 4.

ivIbid., p.55.

vIbid., p. 106.

viIbid., p.113.

viiFinke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776 – 1990, p.238.

viiiWade, ibid, p.59.

ixSteve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West, p.43.

xHoward Zinn, The Zinn Reader: writings on disobedience and democracy, p.154.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.americanmanifesto.org.

print view

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The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power then you must limit power.

The Bonds of Faith

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