Taylor acknowledges the need for such speculative or otherwise affected—hypothetico-skeptical—distancing as a constitutive element and form of faith under the conditions of secular modernity. Indeed, there is nothing that characterizes modern secularity more than this way of seeing (thinking, doing, judging) things in light of their principal “optionality.” But he does not seem to grant this—as it were, dis-positional—stance any logical or ontological space, let alone normative, weight in the age (or ages) that historically preceded modernity (or that, if a relapse or worse conflagration were to happen, might befall our present secular arrangements and undo what he sees as their advancement of humanity as a whole). There is more separation than there is continuity between the “ages.” And yet the contours and prospects of our future seem more in line and in sync with our present than are those which marked our past.

Taylor’s view of the coexistence or even coextensiveness of engagement and disengagement—and nothing else defines having options or “optionality” more—is not so much one that stresses their simultaneity as it is one that highlights the need and chance for changing roles and perspectives, that is to say, of seeing aspects. As Taylor puts it suggestively, it all comes down to questions of “navigation”:

We all learn to navigate between two standpoints: an “engaged” one in which we live as best as we can the reality our standpoint opens us to; and a “disengaged” one in which we are able to see ourselves as occupying one standpoint among a range of possible ones, with which we have in various ways to coexist.

But we have also changed from a condition in which belief was the default option, not just for the naïve but also for those who knew, considered, talked about atheism; to a condition in which for more and more people unbelieving construals seem at first blush the only plausible ones. . . .

This is not to say that everyone is in this condition. Our modern civilization is made up of a host of societies, sub-societies and milieux, all rather different from each other. But the presumption of unbelief has become dominant in more and more of these milieux; and has achieved hegemony in certain crucial ones, in the academic and intellectual life, for instance; whence it can more easily extend itself to others.

The speculative, retroactive postulation of an age of original immediacy (in which no option, let alone “optionality,” can arise or be seen for what it is) and its modern antithesis, namely the discovery and invention of the secular age (in which options are no longer immediately real, but conditioned by a hypothetical, disengaged, posture that was neither imagined nor quite possible before), thus blend here, once again, with a historical and, more precisely, sociological observation from which it must also set itself aside. The fallback or default option for “societies, sub-societies and milieux,” which are engaged in de facto “religion switching”—and, thereby, give further empirical proof of the cultural and, indeed, ontological as well as epistemic-normative pluralism that Taylor’s grand narrative both reconstrues and advocates—remains that of a “excluvist humanism” or “atheism” even though secularity consists, precisely, in the circumstance that our relation to religious and ethnic origins becomes more and more loosened, relaxed, and variable. Religion, in the modern age, turns ever more global in the sense of worldwide, expansive, extensive, and diversified, on the one hand, and of abstract, thinned out, vague, and absolute, intensive, or, indeed, deep, on the other. And, yet, Taylor claims, secularity holds sway over all persisting or re-found religious affiliations, as if the empirical outlook of things mattered less than the still deeper seated transition, whose origins and consequences no narrative—not even Taylor’s own—can aspire to capture in its essence, that is, in its full scope and effect. As such, the “seachange” in question eludes all temporal and spatial coordinates, just as it resists all narrativization.

It is clear, why this must be so, for what has taken place—and continues to take place with every step we make—is, first of all, a perspectival and near-absolute difference between the “then” and the “now” or between the “here” (among us moderns) and the “there” (among those among whom modernity has not yet announced itself or has not sufficiently sunk in): in one word, a shift that has all the qualities of a Gestalt-switch and plays itself out between minimal differences with potentially maximal consequences (just as massive causes, may have only negligible effects, in turn).

But then, if Gestalt-switch there is—between the ages, but also between the worlds, minds, and things or, indeed, options that (eventually) emerge from them—must it not have all the features of “seeing-aspects” as Wittgenstein understood them, and, indeed, of the dual-aspect theory of reality that Spinoza and, in his footsteps, Stuart Hamsphire theorized? And, as a consequence, must this not necessarily mean that there is, again, nothing optional about the different perspectives (of immediacy and mediacy, participation and separation, engagement and disengagement, transcendence and immanence) after all? For, no matter how much we try, from within one “optional” perspective we cannot see the other at all, or, at least, not at will and while continuing to see the first. Further, it would seem unlikely that we ever stand in front of a variety of open options, without having adopted at least one of them. Which is another of saying that we do not have options in a mode or mood that we could describe as optional.

We could feel tempted to construe a dilemma: either faith is optional and, hence, does not quite live up to its very concept and intention (which imply its potential for being fully immersed or engaged and, hence, an instant or instance of “fullness”), or it is not (and, hence, remains immediate and naïve, a magico-mythical stance or apodictic certainty, both of which require no act or leap of faith at all). In either case, faith is, quite literally, not an option. In other words, we are dealing with either naïveté (albeit it in different degrees) or with a reflective faith that must remain deeply aporetic, that is to say, never quite it, that is to say, full or fullfilled, arriving at some “middle position,” at best. For faith to have consistency, coherence, or even substance and consequence, it would have to be dogmatic, unquestioning, sealed off, blocking us from—blinding us for—the alternative view, thus undermining the very meaning and importance of “optionality.” Faith that reflects upon itself is a mere or pure form, whose invariable—even when we call it “fullness”—remains the unattainable measure and criterion for any historically or empirically espoused belief, that is to say, for any revealed, natural or material, content faith may come to adopt.

It is a consequence Taylor is reluctant to accept even though there is much in what he says that points in this direction, when he says that differences in belief throughout time emerge when we acknowledge that, “all beliefs are held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted, which usually remains tacit…The frameworks of yesterday and today are related as ‘naïve’ and ‘reflective’: because the latter has opened a question which had been foreclosed in the former by the unacknowledged shape of the background.”

But should we accept this much? Can I choose an option as such, that is to say, for what it is under modern conditions (i.e., nothing more than a hypothetical view or practice, among many possible and potentially equally relevant and valuable others) and at the same time live and express it to the fullest extent, without halt or reservation, as “fullness” and “fulfillment” would seem to require? Does the tacit character of background framing—the “taken-for-granted” of which Taylor speaks—differ significantly in the two (naïve and reflective) ages? Or does any belief, any engagement, imply that I, immediately, blot out the very background, precisely since the moment we hold any view or adopt any course of action, however habitualized, at least some things—indeed, a vast majority of things—must be taken for granted, without ever attaining the level of explicitness that a meaningful use of “reflection” or “optionality” would require?

Indeed, we cannot reflect ourselves fully out of our previous or prevalent immediacies and engagements, bringing our background squarely before our eyes. It is as if opting for an “option”—let alone believing, practicing, or living one—operates from within a different time zone, one that escapes all spatio-temporal, that is to say, historico-empirical coordinates and situations. Again, it is as if “optionality” were itself not an option or, in any case, could not be had but reflectively, that is to say, from a metaphysical point of view—indeed, a “view from nowhere” (Thomas Nagel)—never quite attaining the minimal naivité that religious faith (or, for that matter, any belief, practice, or life) requires for its very concept and existence.

Might not a historical shift from “naïve” to “reflective” belief occur one fine (or terrible) day? More cautiously put: might it, one day, be possible or optional, rather than, say, actual or a reality for all? Perhaps, who knows? But all signs indicate that this time has not come yet. In any event, it is almost impossible to imagine what its coming (as in Taylor’s formulation of “coming of age of a secular age”) might mean or imply and, when it comes, excludes in turn. For what would the prize—i.e., the downside or side-effect—of pure reflectivity and non-naïveté be? What will be forgotten or suppressed where “fullness” is attained at long last?

As long as these remain open questions, history has not really begun and its secular age has not yet fully dawned. At the very best, it might very well be in “coming.” But then, this might be the only mode and mood in which we can actually relate to the secular, if at all. To think otherwise would mean to imagine—and practice or live—secularity and its reflexivity, not just as a “default option,” but as the indubitable, near-exclusive “option,” which would mean: no longer as an option at all. The secular would thus be reduced to a fatality and necessity and, thereby, begin to lack all contrast to its putative other, namely “immediacy” and “naïvety.” For, if history allows no more—or, not more than one—option, then it doesn’t allow for reflexivity either. More precisely, whatever reflection it permits in such a (admittedly, hypothetical) mono-causal and unilinear scenario will be at best a near-tautological self-explication from within the given frame of thought and action. Lacking any other option, it will remain self-contained, hence, dogmatic, and leave little to have faith in.

Let’s consider this from another angle. At least in the modern world, resistance takes both a passive or ethical form—renunciation, and an active or political form—revolution. Renunciation and revolution are conceptually twinned since neither affirms the current actual social order or seeks to reform it. Indeed, as most other non-political, non-contemplative modes of social disengagement disappear into modernization’s integrative machinery, these become the most easily imaginable modes of resistance.

But sometime after 1917 (1923? 1956? 1968? 1989?) it became clear that no major modernized, capitalist society would, in all probability, undergo a secular revolution. Perhaps rather surprisingly, the French post-1968 Maoists were those who first absorbed the implications of this for the history of religious renunciation. They did so originally in Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau’s L’ange (1975) and then, more famously, in Alain Badiou’s ongoing work.

By and large the post-Maoists have not been well received in the Anglophone world, and it is not hard to see why. Nonetheless, their’s is not just the most inventive left-wing theo-politics of our time, it’s one of the few bodies of thought that has remained loyal to thorough-going resistance.  (I say this mindful of Leo Strauss’s not wholly dissimilar right-wing irreligious theo-politics, which in the end, however, aloofly concedes to liberal capitalism.)

To simplify greatly, one post-Maoist move is to emphasize the distance between critique and resistance.  The logic runs like this: revolution has become impossible but there are good rational grounds maximally to disengage from, indeed to resist, the democratic state capitalist order. However resistance cannot be grounded just in reason since it requires a leap into another order, into the unknown. So to commit to resistance involves a Pascalian wager. We stake ourselves on a faith that the current situation is temporary and a new order can suddenly and unexpectedly appear.  Resistance demands patience, hope against hope, fidelity: indeed it will be unending since even overturned social existence will gradually become routinized, institutionalized, hierarchized.

What kind of intellectual work can help prepare for the irruption of a new order, an “event” in Badiou’s patois? Mainly not critique in the conventional sense as evidential and situated judgment on what lies to hand: Badiou rejects the “proximity of critique and violence” that Justin Neuman ascribes to Walter Benjamin. Rather, philosophy thought in Platonic (and indeed Straussian) terms as the care for truth and for universals can most help prepare us for the irruption of a future event and help preserve the shards of a past event. For Badiou (and this is a clearly a Maoist move) to live in the true is to live in resistance, while to critique is to tally with and in the system and its untruths. Thus Badiou’s recent polemic, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, which is indeed addressed to the situation at hand, is not critique in any conventional sense but rather a denunciatory naming of the various forms and instances of untruthfulness and anti-universalism (nation, family) that have been made use of by Sarkozy (for Badiou, a Petainist rat-man stoking the politics of fear). This is combined with encouragement to a particular renunciatory ethical stance in relation to the current democratic market-state, and axioms, some philosophical, that are put forward for debate (“Love ought to be reinvented but also simply to be defended”).

In this project, maybe surprisingly, religion becomes an intellectual resource since (as Bellah reminds us too) it maintains memories of styles of comportment through which it is possible to live in resistance. Religious revelations (i.e., prophetic narrativizations of supernatural agents’ interactions with the world) are not true, but this does not detract from religion’s ethical and political commitment to resistance. Thus in Badiou’s remarkable book on St Paul, Paul is converted blindly to Christianity and, in the face of murderous state persecution bravely dedicates himself to building collectives open to anyone at all outside the legitimating forces that uphold the Roman Empire. Paul’s is an inspiring example of militant practice and virtue committed to waiting for a miraculous event, all the more so because, in truth, his trust in Christ is hypothetical or “fictional.” For that reason, his conversion and commitment are motivated by a faith (not quite a conviction) that reminds us of the distance between thought and resistance.

Where does this leave us in relation to Saba Mahmood’s and Stathis Gourgouris’s instructive disagreement?  My sense is that (leaving aside their implicit dispute about the political status of contemporary Islamic theocracies) their debate can be stripped down to an argument about whether religious or secular institutions are the more mystified in regard to their own historicity and situatedness.

From the position of the post-Maoist theo-politics, this is not a debate worth having since beyond history and critique lie domains that are neither religious nor secular (i.e., do not belong to the order of enlightened rational progress). These include what is axiomatically true (like mathematics) as well as whatever is open to total rupture and innovation—what can break with incremental or mundane temporality (e.g., falling in love, or creating a wholly new kind of artwork, or being converted to a faith).

Let me be clear: I do not write this as a committed post-Maoist myself, far from it. But I do think this body of work makes an important contribution to contemporary theory, partly because, in fidelity to the spirit of resistance and in its dismissal of the (divisive and integrative) politics of difference and identity, it asks us to approach religion subtracted from its institutionality and truth-claims and hence from the schema in which the religion versus secular debate is carried out. In doing so it asks us squarely to examine how critique helps us deal with what remains a (maybe the) crucial question of our time: should we refuse capitalism? And it does so without succumbing to the manifold lures of revelation, revolutionary expectations, transcendence, historical progress, eternal life, tradition, philosophy-as-conversation, communicative rationality, social-capital building…

I instantly saw that a great feat in reverse discourse engineering had occurred: we had moved into the era of the “Faith-Based Economy.” Many of us had already developed a certain worry about the place of “faith” in the Bush administration’s weird form of ecumenical evangelism, which had used the idea of faith-based organizations to allow the covert infiltration of a certain brand of religion into American civic life, with a definite bias towards white, Protestant, evangelical forms rather than say, to Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Rastafarian forms.

But now we are in a new Weberian moment, where Calvinist ideas of proof, certainty of election through the rationality of good works, and faith in the rightness of predestination, are not anymore the backbone of thrift, calculation and bourgeois risk-taking. Now faith is about something else. It is faith in capitalism itself, capitalism viewed as a transcendent means of organizing human affairs, of capitalism as a theodicy for the explanation of evil, lust, greed and theft in the economy, and of the meltdown as a supreme form of testing by suffering, which will weed out the weak of heart from those of true good faith.  We must believe in capitalism, in the ways that the early Protestants were asked to believe in predestination. Not all are saved, but we must all act as if we might be saved, and by acting as if we might be among the saved, we enact our faith in capitalism, even if we might be among the doomed or damned. Such faith must be shown in our works, in our actions: we must continue to spend, to work hard, to invest, and, as George Bush long ago said, “to shop” as if our very lives depended on it. In other words, capitalism now needs our faith more than our faith needs capitalism.

Practically, what does this mean?  It means austerity, chosen or imposed: less insane credit-card acquisitions, less whacky mortgage seeking, less obese cars, fewer happy miles on the road, fewer “business expenses” (unless of course we are senior AIG executives). It means leaving our money in the banks and having renewed faith in the FDIC, for if we race to our banks and take our money home in cash, we shall show our lack of faith in the banks, and the banks will suffer, and if the banks suffer, the world financial markets will suffer, and if the world financial markets suffer, the volcanoes will explode, the rivers will flood, the lightning shall strike, and all of us will be reduced to ashes, along with our melted credit cards, our worthless pension funds and our homes with negative equity.

But Faith, it turns out, is not enough. Capitalism, as a master-belief system, reasonably operates on faith. But markets, especially capitalist financial markets, need something more specific: Trust. And that is the second biggest Revelation of the last few weeks. We have a trade deficit, as we all know, but much worse is our “trust deficit.” No one trusts the (financial) other anymore, we are told, and without trust no one lends and without lending the plastic ceases to work and everyday life comes to a complete halt.  This news will come as a shock to all of us on “Main Street,” who trust our friends, our neighbors, our leaders, our churches and our employers as much—or as little—as we did last year. No, trust is not a Main Street problem, it is a Wall Street problem. In other words, banks won’t lend to one another, and that problem in the high mountains of finance is melting down into the valleys and plains of our everyday lives.

Why won’t the banks, the hedge funds, the investment banks and all the other gentlemen-rogues who are part of the banking business trust one another? Have they lost their faith in capitalism? No, not quite. They still believe in the financial markets and in the rightness of the larger principles of profit, speculation and upside risk. What they no longer trust in is—each other! And they don’t trust each other because they have constructed for themselves a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma whereby they fear that each party’s self-interest lies in non-cooperation, and hence in suboptimal solutions, solvable only by a large infusion of cash from the outside to prime the Trust Pump.

The major arguments for the recent bailout still do not quite explain why the trust between banks evaporated when just a few weeks ago, the lending potlatch was in full swing, loans were being made to everyone except known felons, deportees or illegal migrants, and each of us on Main Street was receiving at least ten offers to get new credit cards every week. The banks trusted each other to a fault, and loaned money to one another as if there was no tomorrow. They became pathologically trusting of each other and were in an intoxicated haze of downstream trust-based lending. This orgy of trust was based on reversing Frank Knight’s great insight about risk and uncertainty, according to which uncertainty is what lenders should hate and risk is what they should seek to define and quantify, so they can take measurable risks to increase profits. It turns out that our banks have been pretending to know all about the risks they were taking, through devices which were mostly variations on derivatives.

For Main Street readers, let me offer the following definition of a derivative: a derivative is an instrument which is based on the risk of something happening (or not happening) to another risk, and not to another commodity. And once you do this once, you can repeat the transaction more or less indefinitely, as in risks on other risks, which are in turn risks on other risks, etc. The trust involved in these transactions in derivatives was not based on calculated risk, it was based on multiplying uncertainty, while pretending to develop and operate mathematical models that were calculating risks (ideally to the power of n). And as the uncertainties multiplied, more and more financial transactions were enabled, which allowed vast paper profits to be made as well as vast fees on these transactions, all of which were based on leveraging uncertainty rather than risk. In this vast reversal of the core principles of financial leveraging, the ultimate quarterbacks who anchored these risks (oops: these uncertainties) were the insurance companies who discovered the magical word “re,” which allowed them to insure risks on other risks. (The relationship of risk to performativity and trust is the subject of collaborative work-in-progress between Arjun Appadurai and Benjamin Lee.)

Yes, this is indeed a Ponzi scheme, but it is a Ponzi scheme with a few special twists: it required a certain number of arcane changes in the rules of accounting which allowed banks to disguise totally unspecified uncertainties as calculable (and profitable) risks; it required remarkable suspension of the elementary rules of government oversight over financial institutions; and it required a society that did not mind living with awesome amounts of debt at every level of its functioning. In other words, starting sometime in the 1980s we were already living in an FBE (Faith-Based Economy), in which no financial wannasteal really knew what derivatives were or how they worked, and each one hoped that they would be sitting on a secure chair (presumably in the Bahamas) when the music stopped. The music stopped because of the housing market (and the predictable end of the subprime lending orgy) but the game which stopped was a much larger faith-based system based on the radical replacement of risk by uncertainty.

So we are now officially living in a world where faith, risk and trust have completely redefined their relationship to one another.  First, while religious faith is unevenly distributed in our larger societies and worlds, with a band of old-fashioned believers, a big band of social churchgoers, and a significant minority of yuppy Pascalians (including most professional economists), we have been barking up the wrong tree in regard to the problem of secularization.  Max Weber, Durkheim and the other giants of early social science watched with concern as the march of industrial capitalism, science and the division of labor appeared to erode religious belief and we seemed to be well on the way to a “disenchanted world.” But the Iron Cage turned out to be a Pandora’s Box.

In the 1950s, sixties and early seventies, the general social science consensus was that modernization after World War II was sure to replace religion with faith in science, bureaucracy, law and education.  But the world turned out to be a perverse place and, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, it became evident that religion was not on the retreat.  Evangelical Protestantism was born again in the United States, Islam became the very paradigm of an expansive and aggressive religious ideology, Roman Catholicism was quick to fight back in its own favored climates and constituencies, notably in Latin America, Eastern and Southern Europe and in various parts of Asia and Africa. Even Hinduism and Buddhism, normally seen as quiet and sleepy, went global with a renewed energy and pushed their interests into various national and diasporic public spheres with scary effect in many parts of South and South-East Asia. As migrants began to carry their religious affiliations with them through the internet, television, telephone and the press, many world cities, from Detroit, London and Berlin, to Sao Paulo, Cairo and Seoul, began to be the sites of multiple religious movements, conversions, cults and churches, representing every variety of global evangelism and many varieties of indigenous tradition. The story of the Korean Protestant aid workers kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan recently is only the most bizarre in a worldwide drama of leveraged conversions or duelling evangelisms. And quite a large number of people seemed to be interested in being soldiers (and cleansers) in religious wars.

And capitalism itself in the last decades of the twentieth century has been observed to be tied up with numerous forms of hysteria, panic and mystery. Local entrepreneurs in sites as different as Lagos, Taiwan and Guatemala connected new forms of gambling, speculation and scam to the related languages of salvation and millennial profit. These new forms of re-enchanted capitalism have generally been tied to the capitalist badlands, where traditions of fetish, phantasm and spectre have frequently surrounded money and its reproduction. It is hardly news, especially to anthropologists, that the repressed fetishes of the commodity are always part of the lunatic edges of modern capitalism, thus giving rise to many brands of casino capitalism, evangelical entrepreneurship and proletarian life-wagering.

We are now in a position to recognize the convergence of Bush capitalism and bush capitalism. In the very belly of the beast, in the heart of capital’s empire, we are witnessing the complete remaking of the Weberian allegory of the journey from predestination, to election, to proof, to works, to rationally governed bourgeois life, to entrepreneurial risk. This was the allegory of the prefiguring and powering of Puritan risk-taking by Calvinist rectitude.

Now this allegory is repeating itself in reverse. The appetites of the beast require restoring uncertainty to its more calculable form as risk, as a first step in restoring trust between lenders, so that they will move money to yet others, so that in turn the wheels of commerce can begin to turn and our faith in the eternal mysteries of capital can be restored. Among these are the mysteries of debt as the virtuous bride of consumption, money as capable of begetting more money, and profit for the few as the key to the welfare of all. The cardinal mystery of the market, of course, verily its Spirit, is the Invisible Hand. For the Invisible Hand to move again, it needs a Helping Hand from us, the wretched of Main Street. And in lending this helping hand, in the biggest bailout in human history, we are asked to show our Faith in the Economy. For once, and perhaps for the last time, capitalism needs our Faith as much as we need its mysteries. The global economy will never be secular again.

[For more on the current economic crisis, see the SSRC "President's Question," where Craig Calhoun asks, "What do we know about the bailouts?"---ed.]

To begin with, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg’s brain-imaging studies of meditation, highlighted by Brooks, can easily be used to confirm rather than disprove a materialist worldview. Newberg’s finding that people who are meditating have measurable decreases in parietal lobe activity fits perfectly with the idea advanced by Richard Dawkins and others that religious experience is a product of altered or abnormal brain functioning. Contrary to the popular view that Newberg’s research supports religion, it can readily be taken as supporting the “militant atheism” Brooks wants to reject. The mind may, as Brooks says, have “the ability to transcend itself,” but we didn’t need Newberg’s SPECT scanners to tell us that.

Scientific research on “universal moral intuitions” is sure to appeal to a social conservative like Brooks, and he’s correct that evolutionary psychology has made big advances in our understanding of attachment, bonding, and pro-social emotions. Of course, these were the staple themes of early 20th century psychoanalysis, so I’m leery of calling this a “revolution” (for more on “disciplinary amnesia” in the psychology of religion, see Jeremey Carrette’s essay in this collection). In fact, Brooks leaves out the other half of the psychological equation, which Freud and Jung understood all too well: the anti-social instincts of aggression and xenophobia. In addition to showing that “love is vital to brain development,” contemporary neuroscience is also revealing how deeply primed humans are to react with hostility toward those whom we view as “other.” Given that most religions have been, and continue to be, guilty of prejudice, discrimination, and violence against perceived outsiders, I find only modest theological comfort in the latest findings of cognitive science. Brooks betrays perhaps too much confidence that the atheist cause is doomed to irrelevance.

This leads to the boldest claim made by Brooks, that “the cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.” From my perspective, he’s got it exactly backwards. Our growing knowledge about the nature and functioning of the human brain-mind system is revealing the importance of cultural influences (like the Bible) in the development of our “highest” mental faculties, while at the same time challenging traditional monotheistic belief in a single universal deity.

Regarding the Bible, I imagine Brooks means that a fundamentalist belief in the literal meaning of scripture can no longer be held. Once again, we didn’t need neuroscience to tell us that. Setting aside Creationism and other scientifically invalid claims in the Bible (and in the Qur’an, for that matter), what remains is a valuable collection of teachings about history, morality, and collective meaning-making. This is where cognitive science becomes relevant, because researchers are finding that the most sophisticated aspects of human mental functioning (language, memory, reason, imagination) are dependent on cultural influences shaping our minds from the very beginning of life. Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, a leader in the study of cognitive science and religion, has taken to speaking of “embedded cognition” to emphasize the dynamic interplay of cultural and psychological factors in the growth of each individual mind. In sum, the cognitive revolution is giving us new ways of understanding why people’s faith in a cultural system of meaning-making like biblical religion remains so strong and is sure to continue despite its apparent incompatibility with modern science.

And what of God? Brooks speaks eloquently of God as “the unknowable total of all there is,” a formulation similar to Newberg’s “absolute unitary being” as the apex of all religious experience, whether it be Christian, Buddhist, or secular. There’s a superficial appeal to this kind of “neurotheology” (Newberg’s term), but it founders on one problematic fact: Religious experiences are more different than they are the same.

Consider the research of Nina Azari and colleagues, who performed PET scans of evangelical Christians praying to the words of Psalm 23 and found, contrary to Newberg, heightened activation of a frontal-parietal region of the brain associated with sustained reflexive evaluation of thought. Consider, too, the research of Hans Lou and colleagues, who used PET to study the brain functioning of a group of highly experienced yoga teachers during a relaxation meditation called Yoga Nidra, which includes a series of visualization exercises. Their PET results showed heightened activation in exactly those brain systems corresponding to the guided imagery tasks, which are different than the brain systems involved in praying to Psalm 23 or the types of mind-emptying meditation studied by Newberg.

The point is that there is no single model for religious experience. Humans are capable of many different modes of being religious, and the brain subserves them all in predictable and measurable ways. Brooks may follow Newberg in advocating belief in a single totalizing deity, but the actual findings of neuroscience are pointing in the opposite direction. What’s emerging is a new appreciation for the radical pluralism of religious experiences that humans are capable of generating. As better brain imaging technologies come online, we will begin to study a wider variety of spiritual phenomena (not just what occurs when people are sitting perfectly still in a laboratory), revealing new multiplicities of cognitive processing involved in different modes of religiosity. This research will not support traditional monotheistic faith in God, though it may spark a renaissance of spiritual exploration by researchers of a poly- or pantheistic bent. That’s the cultural-scientific revolution we may yet live to see.