The Roots of Religion

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Robert Bellah, one of America's most distinguished sociologists, caps off his luminous academic career with "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age" , a near 800-page magnum opus that delves deep into the roots of humankind's encounter with mystery and the search for meaning. Underwritten in part by funding from the John Templeton Foundation, Bellah's book, out this month from Harvard University Press, has been described as “the most important systematic and historical treatment of religion since Hegel, Durkheim, and Weber. It is a page-turner of a bildungsroman of the human spirit on a truly global scale, and should be on every educated person's bookshelves.” Guided by the latest findings in the biological and social sciences, Bellah identifies the roots of the religious sense in human biology and culture — but by no means reduces religion to a mere expression of biological determinism or cultural preference. He recently spoke with the Templeton Report about his new work.

TR: In contemporary American discussion, “religion” and “evolution” only turn up in the familiar fights over Darwinian evolution. You mean something very different by the concept “religion in human evolution.”  Explain.

RB: I have found that the very mention of the words “religion” and “evolution” sets off a kind of reflex reaction among some, but fortunately not all, contemporary Americans. Among both religious fundamentalists and what might be called atheistic fundamentalists these terms set off a war to the death, with abusive language directed toward the supposed opposition. In that kind of atmosphere any rational discussion becomes impossible. What unites these two groups is the idea that religion and science are essentially the same thing:  sets of propositional truths that can be judged in terms of argument and evidence. What surprised me when I began to read the work of leading scientists in the fields of cosmology and evolution is how many of them rejected this idea and argued instead that science and religion are really two different spheres that may at points overlap but that operate in accordance with different logics. Science operates with scientific method in terms of which different theories can be tested and proved or disproved, though if Karl Popper is right, proof is always problematic and we are safer to stick to disproof. Religion on the other hand is a way of life more than a theory. It is based on beliefs that science can neither prove nor disprove. Its “proof” is the kind of person the religious way of life produces.

TR: What role does play have in the evolution of religion?

RB: Although I believe that religion appears only among humans, I am concerned with what happened, perhaps long before the human species emerged, that might have provided the resources for the evolution of religion. Play is found only among animals that require parental, usually maternal, care, and especially among mammals that emerged over 200 million years ago. That is, mammals are born helpless and unless they are taken care of — fed, kept warm and safe — they will die. Play occurs in what biologists call a “relaxed field,” which means that evolutionary selectionist pressures are minimal. It is only because young animals are protected from such pressures that they can play, an activity whose good is intrinsic to the activity and has no other purpose.

If one believes, as I do, that the earliest form of religion was ritual, one might see how play among humans with cultural capacities might develop into ritual. Ritual has many of the features of play: it has no obvious function, it is an end in itself, it enacts events, but symbolically, as in pretend play, and it takes place in a relaxed field, where hunger, predators and procreation are kept at bay. For example, in the perpetually warring Greek states during the great festivals, such as the Olympic festival to Zeus of which the games were only a part, a universal truce was proclaimed. It is among humans that play processes have exfoliated so extravagantly, and ritual is one of the things to which they led.

TR: From an evolutionary perspective, what made the Axial Age such a landmark event in the history of religion and human culture?

RB: The Axial Age, the first millennium BCE, takes place in societies that are far larger and more complex than the simple egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies in which ritual arose many thousands of years ago. When agriculture, about ten thousand years ago, created a significantly larger surplus than foraging ever could, societies grew larger and the accumulation of surplus was worth fighting over. The old hunter-gatherer egalitarianism was gradually replaced by chiefdoms, and then in the late fourth and third millennia BCE, by the early state, that is by a return of the old dominance hierarchies that we see in the other ape species such as chimpanzees, but with far greater power than any non-human species had ever been able to amass.

These new large-scale societies tried to legitimate themselves by moving the ritual focus from the assembled group to the one man who dominated the whole society and claimed to be the exclusive medium through whom supernatural beings that were now seen as gods could give benefits to humans. In the Axial Age in several parts of the Old World — Israel, Greece, India, and China — new figures, prophets, wise men, and philosophers, arose who criticized the unbridled pursuit of wealth, power, and fame that had come to characterize their societies, and the pretensions of kings to any special relation to transcendent beings.

As Benjamin Schwartz has put it: “It is precisely in the moral orientations of the creative minorities of the first millennium that we find a resounding no to certain characteristic modes of human self-affirmation, which had emerged with the progress of civilization.  For them the divine no longer dwelt in the manifestations of power, wealth, and external glory.” From these figures all the world religions of today have developed.

TR: Your discussion of “enactive representation” — the idea that you have to do a thing to learn about it — suggests that religion can only really be understood from the inside, through its practice — this, as distinct from trying to grasp it as a set of propositions. Is this why secular-minded people have such trouble understanding the religious mindset today? And, if religious truth can only be essentially grasped through enactive representation, doesn’t that mean that there is a limit to what can be communicated across religious traditions?

RB: When I said above that religion is a way of life more than a way of knowing, I was suggesting the importance of embodied practice, in the beginning ritual, as the most basic form of religious action. The emergence of language led to narrative or, if some scientists are right, the need for myth as a comprehensive story of the general order of existence led to language, so myth joins ritual as a fundamental component of religion. When theoretical inquiry joins the mimetic and mythic culture of earlier ages in the religions that develop in the Axial Age, it does not reject ritual and myth but only criticizes inadequate forms of them and makes possible the rituals and narratives of all the great traditions. This has led some religious people and many secular people to think that religion is only another form of theory alongside philosophy and science. But while understanding the theoretical achievements of the great traditions is important we will not really know what they are about unless we make the imaginative effort to see how the world might seem if we lived in the embodied practices and narratives of these traditions, a difficult but not impossible task. Indeed it is the joy of the study or religion to undertake this imaginative task.

TR: You write that families, nations, and individuals know themselves through narrative — that is, through the stories it tells about itself. And you further say, “In connection with the rise of modern science the rejection of metaphor, symbol, and myth became explicit.” How do we hold on to religion if we can only know these stories as “stories” in quotation marks, so to speak? And what happens to social cohesion absent a binding religious narrative?

RB: The first thing we have to do is take the quotation marks off of stories and see that stories are what we are made of. If you tried to describe yourself or someone you love with a set of theoretical propositions how far would you get? And I don’t think anyone was ever converted to a religion by a set of theoretical propositions. The monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, know their God through the stories of how that God has acted in history, through his prophets, for Christians through his Son, Jesus Christ, about whom we know only through the great narratives of the New Testament, where we will find no philosophical theology. If we know that people are themselves defined by their stories and their religions make sense to them through their stories then we need to be very attentive to the stories of all those with whom we interact, be they ethnic groups, nations, or religious believers.

Shared narratives can still have great importance even in societies with diverse religions. I think even unbelievers were moved by the Biblical language of Martin Luther King, Jr., which took his teaching to an ethical level above that of day to day politics. In pluralist societies we must be open to the religious language of others, from whom we have much to learn, and defend their right to use such language in the public sphere insisting, however that no one has a monopoly on such language. In America we must always balance the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of religion with its protection of the free exercise of religion.

TR: In writing this book about religion and the evolution of humankind, you experienced what you describe as “at least a partial conversion.” What do you mean?

RB: In a previous answer I spoke of making the imaginative effort of understanding the religion of others as they practice and understand it. This is the basis of all humanistic knowledge. If you want to teach Shakespeare you can’t just teach “about” Shakespeare, his dates, his social position, etc., etc. You have to get your students to get inside the texts and see the world as Shakespeare saw it — otherwise you are only wasting their time. But what about teaching Plato? If you spend a lifetime reading and rereading the great dialogues of Plato, as I have done, can you possibly escape being something of a Platonist? And if you immerse yourself in the Analects of Confucius or the Pali Suttas of the Buddha, can you really avoid not being changed by what you find? I remember once after a lecture in my sociology of religion class where I was trying to explain early Confucianism, a student left me a folded piece of paper as he left the room. What he wrote was “Scratch one Presbyterian, add one Confucian.” He got what I was trying to say about Confucius but he needed another lecture by me on Calvin to see why he shouldn’t “scratch one Presbyterian.” I think one must have one religious home from which one gets one’s most basic orientation, but I see no reason why one can’t also learn a great deal from other traditions that perhaps see some things to which your home tradition has not always attended.

TR: Many readers will be familiar with the claim, most closely associated with the late Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion address two different and incompatible realms of truth, and as “non-overlapping magisteria,” should be kept cleanly separated. Yet you write that when we set out to tell “big stories about the order of existence,” we have to recognize that there are unavoidable religious implications, even if those stories are scientific ones. Are you saying that religion, understood as an attempt to discern meaning out of observations and experiences, is an ineradicable part of what it means to be human? If so, what is the harm of failing to recognize that?

RB: If religions are concerned with the “general order of existence,” and how we are to relate to it, as Clifford Geertz held, then I do think anyone so concerned will be in some sense religious. I was surprised in reading some of the great cosmologists and biologists at finding them express their own response to their work in ways that I could only call religious. Some of them recognized that and some didn’t and perhaps it would be better in a world of culture wars over religion if those who were speaking beyond science in ways that were to me clearly religious would have recognized that. I think there are, however, people who are just not interested in a general order of existence and we must respect that too. But when I hear a scientist like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg say, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless,” I can’t help feeling that he is disappointed, that he really did want the universe to have a point. Maybe he should look a little longer.

TR: What do you mean by the term “true myths”?

RB: It was Plato who distinguished logos, a true statement, from mythos, a false story, though before him both words just meant stories and were virtually synonymous. Yet, though Plato used the word mythos about stories he didn’t like or believe were true, it turned out that, after all, he needed stories as well as theories. And what does he call his good stories? He calls them “true myths.” Unless we are scholars of mythology, we tend to use the word myth only in a pejorative sense, but since myth in the end only means story we had better go back to Plato and see that there can be true myths after all.

TR: Some contemporary atheists laugh at the way religious believers tend to see God, or less theologically, the Universe, as personal – that is, having personality, or at least able to be related to in a subjective sense by the believer. Yet you maintain that this is a feature of human evolution. How is this so?

RB: I argue, following current thinking about these issues, that human cognitive development was stimulated far more by having to live in a fairly complex society than by the rather mundane activity of chipping stone flakes. We have heard from students of primate behavior about “chimpanzee politics.” Maneuvering one’s way in a dominance hierarchy where a lot is at stake depending on who your friends are and who your enemies are does indeed require a lot of intelligence. Thales, whom Aristotle called the first Greek philosopher, and we could probably add, the first Greek scientist, said, among the few things we have from him, “The world if full of gods.” Probably this would be better translated as “The world is full of spirits,” but in any case, those evolutionary psychologists who think that in societies which did not have an idea of “nature” there were modules in people’s brains for “supernatural beings,” are surely off the mark. Thales also famously said that “magnets have spirits,” a perfectly “natural” thing for someone to say in a culture where the term physis, which we usually translate as “nature,” and which is the source of our word physics, was thought to be alive and to develop by itself over time. We may think that we modern people can clearly distinguish between animate and inanimate matter, and for many purposes we can, yet I think we still expect the biggest questions to be answered in personal terms.

TR: You say that both science and religion are better understood as “ways of living more than ways of knowing.”  What do you mean?

RB: To see science as a way of living would mean to consider it as a practice whose end is internal to the practice and not as the accumulated results of science which is what the term usually means. It is important to remember that science is a kind of practice, often very much embodied practice, and that science is created by scientists, that is, persons, because science doesn’t science itself. For some devoted scientists, discouraged with other options, science can become a way of living that provides them with basic meaning. But science itself is not in the business of providing general orders of existence. Religion is a way of living that does that.

TR: Considering the story you tell about the evolution of religion, it’s interesting to consider how the now highly abstracted and propositional forms of Western religion, especially within Protestantism, have lost felt contact with the unitive, primitive aspects of religions experience, especially as they have downplayed or abandoned ritual and symbol. Thus it seems that modern Christianity — in the West, I mean — is at the elite level more philosophy than religion, and at the popular level primarily a form of lightly-spiritualized therapy. Does this account for the surprising upsurge in Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, even within Catholicism?

RB: I think you are right that Protestants have been particularly prone to think of their religion propositionally or, at least, verbally. Early on they condemned much of what we would think of as sacramental practice as being forms of magic and idolatry, worshipping worldly things rather than God. But in so doing they came close to driving God out of the world and preparing the way for modern atheism. Paul Tillich said the Protestants started by speaking of Word and Sacrament, then went on to speak of Sacrament thought the Word, and ended up only with the Word. There is no question but that the Word is central in Christianity, identified in the Fourth Gospel with Christ himself, but the idea that God is not in the Sacrament as most Protestants other than Lutherans believed, turned the Eucharist, Communion, the most central sacrament in Christianity, into a mere verbal remembrance of something that happened long ago and far away. Even the Word has become simply words. The idea that Jesus is really present in the bread and wine of the sacrament is basic to Catholic, but also Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, and for the most part Anglican piety. Yet a recent study of young American Catholics found that only 40 percent of them knew what “the real presence” means. If religion becomes purely verbal and the sacramental dimension is largely missing then people will turn to any kind of religion that seems to have more vitality than sheer talk.

TR: Finally, you seem hopeful that we may be amid a new Axial Age (if that is not interpreting you too optimistically). As you write, the great figures of the Axial Age, however universalistic their ethics were, believed that they stood for the exclusive truth, or at least the highest truth. Today, though, you identify the emergence of a sensibility that can accept religious pluralism as our destiny, but that doesn’t fall into relativism. How does one manage that? It seems like such a difficult intellectual balancing act that most of us are doomed to fall back onto some form of fundamentalism, or into a content-free form of religion that eventually dissipates. Are most people really capable of believing in their own religion in a binding sense without also believing in the exclusivity of its truth claims?

RB: As I have indicated before, I am nervous about thinking of religion primarily in terms of “truth claims,” which seems closer to what is appropriate in science. Religion provides answers to such questions as “How shall I live?” and “What is the meaning of the universe?” that science has no capacity to answer. But because answers to such questions are incapable of empirical testing by scientific methodology, how can we evaluate the answers that various religions give? As I have said above, the truth of religious beliefs can be seen in the lives of people who live by those truths. And if we see remarkable individuals in other traditions than our own we can accept that they have some kind of truth even if it is not completely the same as ours. When Martin Luther King, Jr. found in Mahatma Gandhi a role model for his non-violent protest he was recognizing the truth that Gandhi always claimed to stand for. King could see that there must be some things of great value in Hinduism to produce such a person as Gandhi, while at the same time seeing that Jesus was also a great exemplar of non-violence, though Christians have long evaded Jesus’s total rejection of violence. So Gandhi helped King to understand another religion while also understanding his own in a deeper way. This is not relativism, nor is it saying all religions are identical. Christianity and Hinduism overlap in some areas but differ greatly in others.

The more deeply we expose ourselves to other religions the more our spiritual horizons are expanded, but often our own faith is all the more deepened. Opening one’s self to other religions is always dangerous because you might get converted — that’s what we ask of those of other faiths when we live our own in their presence. What we need to remember is that this is an immense universe and that there is enough truth to go around without our falling into relativism or losing our grasp on our own tradition. Individuals who hold on to their own faith for dear life and have to deny validity to any other suggest to me that they are deeply insecure and are using their opposition to other faiths to deny the doubts they have about their own.