The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.
—Steven Weinberg

When an interviewer for the Atlantic Monthly blog asked me “What prompted you to write this book?” I apparently replied, “Deep desire to know everything: what the universe is and where we are in it.” I don’t deny that I said it—it’s just that I would have thought I would have given a more pedestrian reply, because I am a sociologist, with a Ph.D. in my discipline and some 40 years experience as a professor at Harvard and Berkeley. And I am quite aware that early in the last century Max Weber, in a famous 1918 talk called “Science as a Vocation,” warned that “science has entered a phase of specialization previously unknown and this will forever remain the case.” It does seem that he didn’t apply this dictum to himself, but he was talking about the future when huge projects like his own would no longer be possible. So what is this “deep desire to know everything” in a world of super-specialization? When I look at books like Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. and Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, recent books that might seem parallel to my own new book, I can only say Weber was right—these books should not have been written, or, to be charitable, they may be good journalism but they are not serious contributions to understanding.

Weber was certainly right that we are in a world of specialization, and dangerously close to the point where specialized work is only intelligible to other specialists. A few years ago a study found that over half of sociology professors couldn’t understand many articles in the ASR or the AJS. Are we living in a world of ever increasing knowledge and ever declining meaning? In the end all that specialized knowledge has to be put together again if it is to be of use. Yet, as I have suggested many of the books that purport to give the big picture are shockingly shallow, based on tertiary sources that only repeat tired clichés or on novel claims that have not been adequately evaluated. We have an enormous “external memory,” as Merlin Donald calls it. It is potentially part of our very selves if we know how to access it. But therein lies our problem.

I’m sure there will be some who will gladly throw my book on the same heap as those I have criticized, but I will try to show a third way, a way that could possibly overcome the split between knowledge and meaning. This way would be to take Weber seriously about specialization but to follow him in not giving up the search for the big picture. What that means is to try to learn a lot about quite a few things. We have more information available about biological and cultural evolution than anyone has ever had before. We have resources to access that knowledge, but it cannot be done quickly or on the cheap. The resources we now have, and I very much mean the web but also e-mail, and books, ever new books, allow us to become quasi-specialists in at least several fields.

It is now possible not only to find out a lot about many areas, but to find out if the real specialists  think you are crazy or not. Some of these are people in the academic world one happens to know—for example the greatest specialist on Shang China in the world, David Keightley, Professor of Chinese history at Berkeley and an old friend, went over my section on Shang China with a fine-toothed comb and saved me from serious mistakes. I had read Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species when it first came out in 1997 and had been very impressed by it, but when I realized over 10 years later that he actually teaches at Berkeley I went to hear him lecture and got acquainted. He and his group were especially helpful in reading my chapter on religion and evolution, giving me some advice, but telling me I was on the right track.

But when it is a field where you know no congenial specialist, you can make friends on the web. Since I wanted to situate religious evolution in the deep biological past I had to learn a lot of biology—rather late in life to say the least. Stephen Jay Gould’s enormous The Structure of Evolutionary Theory of 2002 was a marvelous introduction to many things for me, but Gould was already dead by the time I got to his book. It turned out that animal play was going to be quite important in my argument and the greatest specialist on that subject, Gordon Burghardt, whose splendid book The Genesis of Animal Play would be invaluable to me, is alive and well at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I have never met him in person but to this day we have a continuing e-mail friendship and, as I note in Chapter 2, Religion and Evolution, he made many suggestions to me about what I wanted to say about play. Equally important for my whole argument is the evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald, whom I have met but who has been especially helpful with e-mail comments. For early Greece Ian Morris, the historian and archaeologist of ancient Greece, but also the author of the stunning and breathtakingly ambitious new book, Why the West Rules—For Now, gave me several pages of single-spaced comments on my chapter on ancient Greece, and since he is at Stanford we did meet for coffee once when he was in Berkeley. Michael Witzel, a Sanskritist at Harvard and a great historian of early India was equally helpful with many pages of comments on my ancient India chapter, where of all the four axial cases I had most to learn, but we have never met in person.

Of course there are people who will turn you down—I have had my share. But what is more surprising is how many busy, productive scholars will help, especially if your questions indicate that you have already prepared yourself in the field. Becoming a quasi-specialist in several fields takes time, but becoming a super-specialist in one field also takes a lot of time. And what are all those juicy monographs waiting for if no one is going to take them seriously enough to show their theoretical and comparative importance? I have 12 case studies in my book, several of the axial age chapters being long enough to be small books in themselves, but I have one case of tribal religion, the Kalapalo of the Amazon Basin, about which there exist exactly two books of only one anthropologist, Ellen Basso of the University of Arizona. I know as much as anyone knows about the Kalapalo, except for Ellen Basso and the members of the tribe itself. But even for my other two tribal cases, the Australian Aborigines (though I did focus on a Central Australian group, the Walbiri), and the Navajo, there are thousands of publications.

So from early on in my book I had to develop strategies that would give me more than superficial knowledge without taking over the rest of my life. Obviously you have to use the best of the most recent books, and if possible, as in the case of the Navajo, consult specialists (and I started out studying the Navajo for my undergraduate honors thesis, Apache Kinship Systems, over 60 years ago). Without any guidance the amount of material available on any one case is overwhelming. Even finding the best recent secondary works often requires help or maybe luck and you also need to look at the classic secondary works. And you can’t just rely on secondary work where good translations are available as they usually are for most cases (Shang China being a notable exception). There you have to find out which are the most reliable, also not an easy task. It is claimed that the Daodejing is the most translated book in the world, but 99% of those translations are worthless. You need to find the reliable ones. When working on ancient China I regularly used five translations of the Confucian Analects because they had different virtues. It also helps to know enough Chinese to check key terms in the translations against the Chinese original. I don’t mean to discourage scholars from pursuing similar studies; I’m just trying to describe what is involved in serious comparative work.

But of course, if you are a sociologist, you are doing more than describing fascinating cases, though you have to do a lot of that as Weber and Durkheim already showed us; you have to have a theory, maybe a multi-stranded theory, since so much is going on in each case and there is no simple one fits all formula. Before discussing my theoretical resources let me give you another example of the kind of work I did in my new book: one of the finest books ever written by an American sociologist is Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies, a book even longer than mine. And Collins is not just talking about Classical Greek and modern European philosophy—he includes Islamic, Indian, Chinese and even Japanese philosophy. I may think he is sometimes wrong but I never think he is stupid. How he read so much while carrying a full teaching load staggers me. I had to retire to write my book, even though retirement is not so retired as you might think. And Collins’ approach is theoretical all the way through. He uses his micro theory of interaction ritual chains amazingly well to understand the macro development of philosophy in a variety of very different traditions. I might have added Collins’s interaction ritual chains to my theoretical took kit, but I have to admit that I didn’t read every last word of this great book until after I had finished my own.

So let me just list some of my theoretical frameworks and address them as thoroughly as I can here.

I start with Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion in his “Religion as a Cultural System,” which I should give in my abbreviated version to clarify what I mean and don’t mean by religion: “Religion is a system of symbols which, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence.”  I should point out that neither Cliff nor I use the terms gods or God. What Geertz meant by a cultural system is very dependent on his reading of Alfred Schutz, particularly his paper on multiple realities or multiple worlds, terms which Schutz took from William James. Besides what Schutz called the paramount reality, the world of daily life, what Weber called “the everyday,” Schutz distinguished the world of science, the world of religion, and the world of art.

After describing what kind of multiple reality religion is, I wanted to look at the major forms of religious representation, the ways in which people engage in religious action and religious thought. Here I turned to the field of child development, not to look at the ways in which children become religious, though some have worked on that, but to look at the way infants and then children acquire the various capacities to relate to the world. Here was another big field to master, but one in which I have long been interested—especially the work of Jerome Bruner, one of my teachers in graduate school, who is the most important cultural psychologist still living and whose categories for the cognitive development of the child turned out to be remarkably relevant for my purposes. Bruner, himself adapting ideas from Piaget, sees the child as moving from enactive to symbolic to conceptual representations. I prefaced these with the idea of unitive events rooted in the original unity of mother and child but emerging later as religious experiences, usefully described by Alison Gopnik of UC Berkeley’s psychology department in her recent book The Philosophical Baby. So Piaget, Bruner, and Gopnik were my anchors but I looked at a lot of other things as well, particularly the work that links cognitive development in human children with comparable development in the great apes and other mammals.

The major stages of ontogeny turn out to parallel the major stages of phylogeny as described by Merlin Donald in Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Donald prefaces his three stages by referring to episodic culture which we share with other higher mammals and that I see as analogous to unitive events in ontogeny.

I should note that in both Bruner and Donald stages are never left behind, but are reconfigured in new contexts when subsequent stages emerge, leading to my general rule that “nothing is ever lost,” by which I don’t mean cultural content which is all too easily lost (most of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, for example) but the cultural capacities themselves, which never lose their essential and indispensible nature. Donald’s three stages are mimetic, mythic, and theoretic, paralleling Bruner’s enactive, symbolic, and conceptual.

I want to describe what Merlin Donald means by mimetic culture because it makes intelligible what happened during a long period of human evolution, most likely the period between the appearance of Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago, and the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens, during the last two or three hundred thousand years. Mimetic culture involves a kind of bodily communication more elaborate than anything comparable among the other great apes, lacking language but probably involving spoken or sung communication, what some evolutionary musicologists call musilanguage. Mimetic communication almost certainly led to ritual, though as yet without myth, which requires language capacities that were lacking.

In modeling the society itself as well as its constituent roles, mimetic culture provided the necessary resources for moving beyond the rather anarchic chimpanzee band to a larger group capable of controlling in-group aggression such that pair bonding and same-sex solidarity in various contexts could result. In-group solidarity did not mean these mimetic-culture based societies were peaceful. There is every reason to believe that they were not, that there was endemic conflict between groups and probably in-group aggression was only relatively successfully controlled.

The limitations of mimetic culture are evident. Donald writes:

Mimesis is thus a much more limited form of representation than symbolic language; it is slow moving, ambiguous, and very restricted in its subject matter. Episodic event registration continues to serve as the raw material of higher cognition in mimetic culture, but rather than serving as the peak of the cognitive hierarchy, it performs a subsidiary role. The highest level of processing in the mimetically skilled brain is no longer the analysis and breakdown of perceptual events; it is the modeling of these events in self-initiated motor acts. The consequence, on a larger scale, was a culture that could model its episodic predecessors.

It is well to remember that we humans are never very far from basic mammalian episodic consciousness, the awareness of the event we are in. Mimetic culture is an event about an event. Narrative, which is at the heart of linguistic culture is basically an account of a string of events, organized hierarchically into larger event units. But the moment when our predecessors first stepped outside episodic consciousness, looked at it and what was before, around, and would be after it, was a historic moment of the highest possible importance. Other higher mammals, although they are social, are more tightly locked each in their own consciousness. They are, as Donald says, almost solipsists. But humans, once mimetic culture had evolved, could participate in—could share—the contents of other minds. We could learn, be taught, and did not have to discover almost everything for ourselves. Mimetic culture was limited and conservative; it lacked the potential for explosive growth that language would make possible. But it was the indispensable step without which language would never have evolved.

Further, mimesis is, though in many respects less efficient than language, indispensable in its own sphere. As Donald writes, mimesis “serves different functions and is still far more efficient than language in diffusing certain kinds of knowledge; for instance, it is still supreme in the realm of modeling social roles, communicating emotions, and transmitting rudimentary skills.”  Maybe not just rudimentary skills, for mimesis is basic for the teaching of quite complex skills in such fields as athletics, dance, and possibly other arts. Finally mimesis remains indispensable in “the collective modeling and, hence, the structuring” of human society itself. That is what ritual does, and if Randall Collins is right, it is micro-ritual moments that make our lives bearable whenever we interact with others.

So far I have been talking mainly about where religion came from so I must say a little about where it was going. Where it was going was toward language, what Donald calls mythic culture, and beyond that theory, though it would take a long time to get there. But remember we are still in the world of egalitarian foragers. Most of my book deals with hierarchical class societies, yet they all derive from egalitarian forager societies. That’s where it all begins and that is where our most basic capacities were formed.

We are so fascinated with ourselves as language users that we think discovering the origin of language is the key to understanding human evolution. It is one of the great virtues of Merlin Donald’s work that he takes culture—the ability to escape our solipsism and connect with a larger shared consciousness—as the key to what makes us unique. It is in this context that his idea that language “piggybacks” on culture makes sense. Language acquisition in the individual is social: even if there were such a thing as a language module, which neither Donald nor I for a minute believe, it could only become operative in a socially provided linguistic context. Isolated children do not learn spontaneously to speak. Jerome Bruner, as Donald reminds us, has shown convincingly that language learning requires an external support system, a linguistic milieu, to be effective. The question is, what was the “external support system” that made language possible in the first place? My answer would be ritual, which provides the security, intensity, and redundancy without which language would not emerge. Donald writes:

Linguistic universals spring from the context in which real-world languages are learned and, more important, in which they evolved. Like any other set of conventions, linguistic conventions are shaped by the situations in which they originated. They have mimetic origins. Thus, once we change our paradigm, the features of universal grammar emerge smoothly from a close analysis of gesture, mime, and imitative behavior. The “language instinct” exists, but it is a domain-general instinct for mimesis and collectivity, impelled by a deep drive for conceptual clarification.

But why this drive toward conceptual clarification? Donald suggests that there was a need for a more coherent representation of the world than was possible through mimesis. “Therefore,” he writes, “the possibility must be entertained that the primary human adaptation was not language qua language but rather integrative, initially mythical, thought. Modern humans developed language in response to pressure to improve their conceptual apparatus, not vice versa.”  Myth is a profoundly ambiguous word, so it would be well to be clear what Donald means by it:

[M]ythical thought, in our terms, might be regarded as a unified, collectively held system of explanatory and regulatory metaphors. The mind has expanded its reach beyond the episodic perception of events, beyond the mimetic reconstruction of episodes, to a comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe. Causal explanation, prediction, control—myth constitutes an attempt at all three, and every aspect of life is permeated by myth.

It is because of, in a sense, the primacy of myth over language that Donald calls the stage after mimetic culture, mythic culture.

Donald, in emphasizing the cognitive role of myth, approaches the view of Claude Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist who, more than any other, has emphasized the intellectual function of myth. Levi-Strauss, nonetheless, does not think of myth as a form of science, or a primitive precursor of it, but as having a different cognitive function:

To say that a way of thinking [myth] is disinterested and that it is an intellectual way of thinking does not mean at all that it is equal to scientific thinking. . . It remains different because its aim is to reach by the shortest possible means a general understanding of the universe—and not only a general but a total understanding. That is, it is a way of thinking which must imply that if you don’t understand everything, you can’t explain anything.

That is a view of myth that would indeed see it as “impelled by a deep drive for conceptual clarification.”  So Aristotle was not wrong when he wrote the first sentence of his Metaphysics: “All humans by nature desire to know.”  And what did Aristotle want to know? Everything. But for him it wasn’t myth but theory that would get us there, and we can see how well we are doing with that right now by looking at the institution in which most readers of this blog are presently situated:  the university.

Given that my current research concerns the effects of Portuguese colonialism on Buddhist literature and culture in early modern Sri Lanka, I propose to structure my comments around, first, what Keane’s book teaches me and, second, what my research might, in turn, offer Keane. I will say here at the outset that I find Christian Moderns to be a stimulating and useful book. Its contributions toward theorizing the relationship between religion and colonialism are numerous and substantial. Since I lack the expertise to speak to Keane’s treatment of the exact semiotic nature of language and culture in Sumba, I will restrict my comments to his anthropology of Christianization. This book contains other subjects of significance, but I happen to find Keane’s discussions of morality and purification between and within religious communities to be particularly noteworthy.

One of the aspects of Christian Moderns that I find most interesting is the contested question of agency that resulted from the missionary encounter in Sumba. One often finds studies of missions that focus on the measures by which the missionaries themselves judged their efforts (i.e., the numbers of converts made). Less common are inquiries into the kinds of cultural conversions that take place alongside or in opposition to Christian proselytization. In other words, mission encounters do not simply result in the conversion of the faithful. They also spark debates over religious truth and cultural understandings. Keane astutely points out that one of the flashpoints in the Sumba missions concerned the question of agency. Who is responsible for action in the world? Whose will is made known? And where does agency lie? Such apparently philosophical questions assumed real-world relevance in the mission encounter, as Christians condemned the local ancestral ritualists for locating religious power in material objects—a practice often labeled fetishism by those who sought to replace such traditions with Dutch Calvinism. Keane analyzes how Christians employed the question of agency to condemn the fetishes of the unconverted Sumbanese. In this sense, Christian—specifically Protestant—conversion was thought to free the Sumbanese from their material entanglements to worldly objects. By mistakenly imputing power and agency to things, the so-called “fetishists” were seen as stricken by false understandings of where true religious power lies. Missionaries thus charged themselves with the task of getting the Sumbanese to locate true agency in the immaterial realm, through the power of God and the internal beliefs and piety of the individual Christian.

The issue of agency, in other words, becomes a point of contestation between missionaries and converts on one side, and the ancestral ritualists on the other. Keane’s insightful analysis points to how debates over religious truth may reside in cultural definitions of what makes us human and what humans are able or required to do. I have no doubt that concepts of freedom and fetishism are salient issues in the mission encounter in twentieth-century Sumba. But it is worth noting, and I’m sure Keane would concur, that mission encounters are not always structured around issues of human agency and the objectification of religious power. My work with Portuguese missionaries in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sri Lanka suggests that different dynamics could also be in play. The Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries sponsored by the Portuguese Crown tended to distinguish the “true faith” of Catholic Christianity from the “heathen” (infiel) traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism. While the latter worshipped images (imagens), such practices were condemned as repugnant not for objectifying religious powers per se, but rather for the fact that they were false images linked to the work of the Devil. Early modern Catholic missionaries were perfectly willing to recognize divine power operating through crosses, holy water, and other material objects. And given the work of Portuguese and Spanish missionaries throughout much of the globe, it may well be that “fetishism” was an exceptional problematic in mission encounters more generally.

Another rich area for reflecting upon religion in colonial and missionary encounters is the manner in which language ideologies produce social difference. Keane’s remark that language ideologies “play a crucial role in producing—in objectifying and making inhabitable—the categories by which social difference is understood and evaluated” strikes me as a very fruitful line of inquiry, according to which the capacity that an individual or group possesses to express and describe what is “true” and “correct” can be used to distinguish and privilege some people over others. Keane goes on to point out how Christian missionaries and reformers in Sumba have often utilized acts of purification in order to make separations and distinctions between persons and things. For Dutch Calvinists and their Christian converts, purification entailed teaching people to abstract the immaterial meanings from material objects, to look beyond the fetishism of ancestral rituals, and to find power in a non-physical God and the interiority of individual faith. In short, acts of religious purification entailed denying material mediations of divine agency. And yet, Keane argues that the aim of complete purification always falls short, since the reliance on semiotic forms always entails some degree of material instantiation, whether it be a creed, a scriptural text, or something else.

Once again, I suspect that this analysis is more effective in the context of Protestant mission encounters than Catholic ones. Portuguese missionaries rejected the objects of so-called “heathen” traditions, but they rarely rejected material mediations as a whole. If the idea of purification is to retain broad currency across the colonial landscape, it may need to be defined differently, more in terms of separating out truth from falsehood, or the divine from the diabolical, than of fixing boundaries between the spiritual and the material. While questions of ontological difference could be salient in Sumba and certain other mission fields, the distinctions drawn between persons and things in acts of purification fail to account for other important distinctions drawn between persons themselves. In other words, it would seem that we should also attend to the creation of hierarchies in the context of missions. In Chapter 8, Keane does address how the Christians and the ancestral ritualists cast aspersions against each other—the Christians being seen as arrogant while the ritualists are cast as superstitious. But, in my view, these charges and exchanges also represent broader efforts to purify the religious field, that is, attempts at purification that are not simply or even primarily made with regard to fetishism and material objects. Other aspects of religious practice and expression that are either immaterial or not susceptible to charges of fetishism can become the source of contention and dispute.

Moreover, while the notions of difference constituted between Christians and “fetishists” may have precluded little, if any, similarity or commonality in Sumba, other colonial settings witnessed moments where efforts to construct difference for the sake of purifying and eradicating it became undermined by shared features and characteristics between groups. For instance, early modern Portuguese writers in Sri Lanka noted similarities as well as differences, and these similarities between Christians and Buddhists clearly gave them pause. One Franciscan missionary recounted how Buddhist monks wear robes, preach, give blessing, and receive alms in ways much like that of his fellow Franciscan brothers. And another colonial writer noted in the seventh century that the Buddha left a code of laws that were similar to Moses’s. But when such writers found similarities between Christianity and Buddhism, they quickly tried to reassert other differences in order to snuff out the threat posed by such likenesses of an erosion of the boundary between “true religion” and “superstition.” As such, the negotiation of similarities seems to be just as important to the missionary encounter as the negotiation of differences. So too is the somewhat ambiguous position of the native convert, an individual who appears both like and unlike the missionary, and whose religious and cultural identities can give rise to conflicts as they attempt to mediate between the colonial and local orders.

It is not my intention to find fault with Keane’s book for not addressing, or not addressing enough, the variety of religious and cultural conflicts in mission encounters around the globe. Rather, I find that it is his provocative analysis of what it means to be both “Christian” and “modern” in Sumba that leads me to want to interrogate further the conditions through which colonial and missionary encounters often transform religious practice and cultural understandings in various places and times. Clearly, we will need to use different lenses to examine how colonial agents worked with—and against—local religious practitioners to produce new identities and ideologies that reshaped cultural worlds over the last five hundred years. Keane’s book, however, shows that such scholarly work is both necessary and fruitful.

What has received less attention is what secular spheres inherit from the sacred in ways less socio-political in nature: not how communities are imagined, ordered and governed, but, to put it simply,  the question of mystery.  By its very nature, mystery is much more difficult to speak about, and certainly to track.  But religious ritual claims to offer mystery as well as sociality. It claims to make the transcendent immanent, and transcendence—whether vertical or horizontal, above or beyond—is the sphere of the sacred, of what is beyond our comprehension, control and use. We can point to it, sign it, and by doing so, evoke it. But that “beyond” is more than we can say, hear, touch, taste or even understand. (For a further discussion of Transcendence, see the collected essays in Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature and Theology Approach the Beyond, the first of which is by Charles Taylor).

Does the mystery evoked by religious ritual survive outside of such ritual? Does mystery have a place in broader cultural spheres? This is the question I address in Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford, 2009). When we drink wine, we can toast “salute,” “cin cin,” in a foreign tongue—but we are only engaging in a debased allusion to the Latin words that effect a miracle in the ritual. We are not changed thereby and we do not hope thereby to change the world.  In contrast, the believer is changed decisively by partaking the host. What do we have beyond ritual that could even begin to address the needs addressed by the Eucharist, for example, to cleanse human fault and overcome death, to achieve communal justice and establish peace?  Ironically, when the ritual of the Mass was under attack and revision during the Reformation, the arts took up the challenge.  Tragedy took on justice explicitly, lyric poetry took on the function of praise and lament that had been the work of the psalms, and even the epic conjured a world full of  divine presence. The arts became the forum for making transcendence immanent.

The reason is not hard to find. Both ritual and the arts share a common denominator: both are activities of sign-making.  In his Epoch and Artist of 1959, David Jones astutely noted that “the term ‘sacrament’ and ‘sacramental’ are apt to give off over-tones and under-tones that for a number of disparate reasons have a kind of narrowing effect. Thus, for Christians and especially for the Catholic Christian, those terms carry a specialized meaning and a special aura surrounds them.  On the other hand, for secularized man in general, and especially for post-Christians or anti-Christians such terms are suspect or uncongenial.  So that in various opposing ways the wide significance and primary meaning is obscured.”  Jones continues, suggesting that the “primary meaning,” is sign-making. “Not only are the arts characterized by the activity of sign-making, ultimately, the very work of the sign implies the sacred.” Why does a sign inevitably evoke the sacred? Because it works by evoking something beyond itself, something that transcends the sign, and thereby participates in transcendence. It is in this sense that Jones believed  “man is unavoidably a sacramentalist and his works are sacramental in character.”

This is admittedly a theological view of human artifice. The modern world has bequeathed to us two radically different ways of understanding human making: in one, humans are instrumental, and the world is used and manipulated, as in a technological vision. In the other, the world is manifest by human productions.  This is the claim of icons—that they are portals to the divine, rather than human achievements.  But that could also be the wider claim of art: that what we make is, at its core, a manifestation of the world, of its mystery.  And that dualism can be challenged when we regard precisely what we make as manifest.

There is another component of sacramentality beyond sign-making: efficacy.  “A Sacrament is a thing subjected to the senses, which has the power not only of signifying but also of effecting grace,” according to the Council of Trent. While the source of the efficacy of art is debated—it is situated in the artist, in outside inspiration, in the work itself—most agree on the ability of art to manifest a world.  (This explains that otherwise audacious comparison of the artist to the Creator, the Supreme Artist).

The theatre does not make the claims of the Mass. The actors may dress in elaborate costumes and perform ceremonial-like acts, but they do not alter the participant or change the world. Nonetheless, theatre is more than mere representation. Usually,  the created theatrical world either depicts wrongs being set right, inviting its audience to celebrate justice (in comedy) or depicts the triumph of wrongdoing, inviting the audience  to grieve over injustice (in tragedy). While it doesn’t fulfill the craving for justice in the world, theatre evinces that craving, and this too, is a kind of efficacy.

Take Puccini’s Tosca, for example, an especially good case because even as it is explicitly anti-clerical, it conveys  much of the power of ritual to stir up ethical responses. The Church is broadly depicted as corrupt and abusive and its head of secret police, Scarpia, not only ruthlessly orders the torture of the brave Mario in order to extract from him the hiding place of the escaped leader of the Republic (and representative of freedom), but unconscionably offers to save Mario from execution in exchange for his lover Tosca’s  favors.  Despising Scarpia, a distraught Tosca nonetheless accepts the terrible terms, asking God why, when she has been so pious, she must suffer so. In return, Scarpia promises to arrange that Mario’s “execution” will be staged with blanks instead of bullets. As Scarpia’s ensuing seduction of Tosca begins, we thrill  to see Tosca drive a knife through Scarpia, “before whom all of Rome trembled.” She has defended herself, been faithful to her love, and defeated evil. Not the corrupt Church, but true Christian values have prevailed. (Perhaps the compromises of this imaginative possibility is why many some New Yorkers recently found the updated version at the Met to be a bit scandalous, with its suggestions of Scarpia’s sexual arousal by Mary Magdalene.)

The final act opens in suspense at dawn: the executioners prepare, Mario writes his final love letter to Tosca and then she arrives.  She explains to Mario that he will be allowed to escape but that he must first go through the charade of the execution to satisfy the law, advising him to fall convincingly before his executioners. At last, the firing squad shoots:  he falls, and Tosca, exultant that she will now be able to leave this realm of corruption, urges Mario to hurry. When he fails to move, she discovers that Scarpia’s treachery extended beyond his grave: the bullets were real.  What does the audience experience at this exquisite moment, one whose terrible tension is accented so dramatically by Puccini’s musical score? We know the truth: that she has been betrayed, that he lies dead.  But held out to us in that moment is her belief in the other possibility—that love has triumphed, that evil does not prevail, that her suffering has been redeemed, that this fundamentally Christian plot could have a happy ending. When it doesn’t, when this vision is abruptly denied, we may not kill ourselves (as she does), but we understand her sacrifice as completely intelligible. When the curtain comes down and Puccini’s mysterious world is withdrawn, how can we not return to the other created world with longing for it to be just? The evocations of sympathy and revulsion, of pity and fear, are evocations of an ethical sensibility, and one could hope that an ethical sensibility would, in turn, inform our world.  This may well be the cultural legacy of the sacramental.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Today we will be discussing the topic of “Rethinking Secularism in a Global Age.” Bob, the idea is to get around to the contemporary situation, the rise of political Islam, the rise of a new kind of religious politics, the whole issue of what is religious and what is secular in the contemporary world, the rise of global civil society and the role of religion there.

That’s where the conversation is heading, but I thought we would begin way back in the time that you are currently working in, in ancient history, with the development of religion and religious evolution—the Axial Age, on which you have recently written an essay that is going to be a part of your new book, which I think will be out fairly soon, about the transition from theoria (the word from which we get “theory”) as religious practice and religious insight into, in Plato and the Greek philosophers, a different perception, a different kind of discovery, which was more intellectual than it was spiritual.

Is this about religion? Is this about the emergence of secularism in this particular time? Or do you want to just avoid using those terms altogether?

ROBERT BELLAH: I certainly think, at this point, both the word “religion” and the word “secularism” are used in such chaotically diverse ways that they are almost useless.

Nonetheless, I think what you are pointing to is relevant. If you go into the deep evolution of the human species and look for where religion is, you find something that’s quite different from much of what goes on today. Today many people, including the harshest critics of religion, like Dawkins, Hitchens, et cetera, think religion is a theory or a set of theories that are simply wrong: science has disproved those theories; therefore, we don’t need them.

The point of the essay that you are talking about is that theory emerged at a certain moment in human history, and before that, it didn’t exist. We can say it emerged a long time ago, in the middle of the first millennium B.C., about 2,500 years ago. But looking at human evolution, it’s extremely recent; it’s the flick of an eye. Probably between 1 million and 2 million years ago humans communicated entirely with their bodies, what is called mimetic culture. We still do. It is never lost. It’s critical. For religion, it’s absolutely fundamental.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: But when theoria developed, at least the way you have explained it—the earlier use of the term was related to something we might call religion.

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes, because—again, in this complex use of the word—everything starts with religion. The key to understanding mimetic culture is ritual. I think ritual is the phenomenological basis of all religion. Ritual, of course, is part of our lives. If you live in the university, you are hemmed in by an extremely elaborate set of rituals. We don’t call it that, we don’t remember that, but that’s what it is.

Then, when language emerged around the period—we don’t know for sure—between 50,000 and 120,000 years ago, we get narratives. Narratives add an enormous amount of information to what was communicated through bodily, or mimetic, exchange. Again, we’re still there. Most of our lives are controlled by narratives, not by logical reasoning, not by science. But rational, logical thought emerges at a certain moment, and that is the so-called Axial Age, more or less around 2,500 years ago.

There, too, it comes out of religious experience. The two examples I gave in that little paper are Plato and the Buddha, two of the great rationalists. People who think Buddhism is some kind of crazy mysticism haven’t read very much. The Buddha could give you very definite reasons for everything that he said—he could convince you rationally. He was, of course, coming out of a profound transformative experience that we would call religious.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: And everything before the Buddha, of course, in the Hindu tradition was ritual, which is about the role of the Brahmins.

ROBERT BELLAH: Well, not everything, because the Upanishads already had the beginnings of something like theoria.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Before that, there were the Brahmins and manipulating the gods and the role of—

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes, certainly, before the Upanishads, it’s all ritual. Hinduism is ritual to this day. Of course, all religions are. That’s why refuting religion as if it were a set of theories is not the point, because you are not getting at what religion is all about.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: But there is ritual without religion. You can say that the way you brush your teeth, the way you comb your hair—

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: We all live through patterned activity.

ROBERT BELLAH: The way you give a lecture. The academic lecture is one of the most ritualized things in the world, a highly formal ritual.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: But at what point, then, do you think of ritual in terms of religion? Is it that it is collective or is it the character of a ritual that points to the transcendent? At one point you had a famous quotation about the definition of religion that talked about the transcendent as being an essential character of what we think of as religion.

ROBERT BELLAH: Again, the transcendent—what the hell does that mean?

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: What does it mean? You’re the guy who used it.

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes. I would say this. The religious side of mimetic culture—“ritual culture,” let’s say, which is an easier term than “mimetic”—is that it’s about the most important things. It’s a way of expressing those important things by a group together. But there is a sense in which every form of ritual is quasi-religious. The university is an institution that we believe in. Some of us are ready to lay down our lives for it when it’s under attack. Family ritual is critical—and in danger. The family meal is a central expression of the common life of the family, and it has a religious dimension. The family is an instantiation of a kind of group that, through its deep ties, is tied into and related to some pretty deep meanings. So you are sliding in and out of what is religious and whatever this word “secular” means.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Still, despite the fact that you can have sex without marriage, people are getting married.

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes. And now gays want to get married because they want to have that right, too.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: They want to participate, yes.

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes, they want that as a possible thing to do. In Europe, you have to be married in a secular setting first. Then you can have a church wedding if you want. But in the United States, we think of marriage primarily in a religious context.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: In the definition of religion that you just used—that is, the kind of patterned activity or thought related to the deepest, most important things in a collective context— marriage, whether you think of it as being religious or not, is religious.

ROBERT BELLAH: It is, yes. I think so. It also, because it’s a powerful force that can compete with other kinds of demands on human beings, can become a negative thing.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Right. So now let’s go back to the Greeks. If theoria is now being taken over by the Greek philosophers as a patterned activity regarding thought or ideas, rather than mimetic activity, is this, in a sense, a kind of new religiosity? Classically, we think of the origins of secularism in the Greek philosophers. Yet we had Wilfred Cantwell Smith for a number of years arguing that philosophia—and he went right back to the Greeks, where you do—began essentially as a religious tradition, only not calling it that.

ROBERT BELLAH: It was very convenient for Christians who wanted to adopt a lot of Greek culture to say, “Oh, that’s philosophy, not religion.”

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Right.

ROBERT BELLAH: But, in fact, of course, it was religious. It always was religious. Pierre Hadot, the great French classicist, speaks of philosophy as a way of life, a total way of life, and certainly always tied into some sense of transcendence. It’s there in Plato centrally, and it’s also there in Aristotle, it’s there in Stoicism. It’s just part of that side of our tradition, and it gets absorbed into Christian theology. Thomas Aquinas, certainly one of the two or three greatest Christian theologians who ever lived, is saturated with Aristotle. So where does philosophy end and religion begin?

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Right.

ROBERT BELLAH: But theoria, in its pre-philosophic meaning, meant to go and look at a religious spectacle and then come back and tell what you saw. In Plato, it becomes the philosophic quest to actually see the form of the good.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Like in the cave.

ROBERT BELLAH: To come out of the cave and see what’s really there, what the truth is, a vision of the truth.

Nonetheless, once you have seen the truth, you look at the normal world in a different way. You see through all of its falsehoods. That gives you the beginning of the chance to use theory in a different way—namely, as a critical form of undercutting accepted beliefs. Certainly, both Plato and Aristotle—Plato was one of the great deconstructionists of all time—he wandered throughout the entire history of Greek culture—Homer, the tragedians, all of Greek poetry—and replaced it with whom? Himself, because he saw the truth and he saw all these people as saying a whole bunch of lies.

That notion of theoria gets into our notion of science. Science takes nothing for granted. It asks questions about everything. There’s nothing that is taboo. We can doubt everything. We can’t doubt everything at once, but at least we can doubt things one at a time. That is a direct inheritance from—the term itself that we use, “scientific theory,” comes from the Greeks.

Download the entire interview here (PDF).

The secularity of modern Asian states has by no means led to widespread social secularity, Taylor’s second secularity, a decline of religious belief and practice among ordinary people. The degree of religious practice varies from country to country, but almost everywhere temples, mosques, churches, and shrines are ubiquitous and full of people, especially during festival seasons. Even in China, where the government actively propagates an atheist ideology and has severely restricted open religious activities, it has been estimated that as much as ninety-five percent of the population engages from time to time in some form of religious practice.  Moreover, throughout Asia there have been impressive revivals and reformations of Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian religious beliefs and practices—Asia is religiously dynamic.

However, this dynamism is of a different kind than that found in the United States, and it cannot be explained in terms of the narrative Taylor uses in the North Atlantic world. Asian religious developments are often misread by both Western observers and Asian scholars trained in the Western social sciences. When Western scholars have looked for religion in Asian societies, they have often looked for it in the form of private faith.  But in most Asian societies, much of religion is neither private nor faith.

It is often not faith, in the sense of a personal belief in doctrines.  In China, for example, there have been literally millions of temples built or rebuilt in the countryside over the past three decades.  Most people doing this rebuilding would be hard pressed to give a consistent and coherent account of the Daoist or Buddhist philosophies that one might think were behind this revival.  Even the rural Chinese Catholics I studied could only give a vague account of the creed to which they were supposed to assent.  Most of the people building temples and churches seem driven by the desire to create a place where they can carry out rituals that would give some order to their lives and their community life.  It can be meaningful to carry out such rituals even if one does not believe in the theology that supposedly underlies them.  For example, in the Chinese Catholic villages I studied—which typically consisted entirely of Catholics who had carried on their identity through many generations—there are many “lukewarm” Catholics who don’t regularly pray, are skeptical about doctrines, and don’t follow many of the moral teachings of the Church.  Yet they still consider themselves Catholics and would still want to be buried with Catholic funeral rituals because that is the way to connect, in life and death, with their natal communities.

Collective ritual, in this and many Asian contexts, comes before personal faith, as do collective myths—stories about gods or spirits or blessed events such as apparitions, healings, or miraculous occurrences. Rituals and myths are public rather than private.  Even when they have to be carried out surreptitiously, out of sight of suspicious government regulators or condescending urban-based mass media, they are, in the local context, public.  Under such circumstances they create alternative public spheres that sometimes complement, but at other times contradict, the public projects of their governing states.

This is a form of religious practice akin to what Charles Taylor calls “embedded religion.” The world of embedded religion is “enchanted,” filled with good and bad spirits.  Religious practices are used to call upon the good and control the bad, as much for the sake of the material health and prosperity as for any otherworldly salvation.  One’s community is under the protection of local spirits—patron saints in the European Middle Ages and ancestors and various local protector spirits in many parts of Asia—and although these local spirits may be imagined to be under the control of a supreme being, much of actual popular religious practice is aimed at getting one’s own local spirits to take care of one’s family and friends in the here and now.

These forms of localized, socially embedded religious practices have by no means entirely disappeared in the North Atlantic world.  But as Taylor shows, they have largely been eclipsed.  A key event in this process was the Reformation, which condemned much of Catholic sacramental ritual as “magic,” to be replaced by personal devotion driven by interior faith.  In the United States the prevalent forms of religion are individualistic expressions of a desire for personal authenticity carried out through voluntary association with other like-minded individuals.

Until relatively recently, scholars in the North Atlantic world have usually assumed that modernization entails the eclipse of localized, socially embedded religion. Just as the American government during the Cold War convinced itself and its publics that governments allied with the USA, even dictatorships, were part of the “Free World,” so did American scholars imagine that societies open to influence from the West were becoming “free societies,” composed of instrumentally rational individuals who had sloughed off communal traditions, especially religious traditions. (If there was any future for religion in such societies, it was assumed that it would be in the form of Christianity, brought by Western missionaries, who were welcomed by most governments in the Free World.) The real processes of social development in Asia, however, usually took a different path.

Through colonialism or through anti-colonial and revolutionary movements that sought national autonomy, wealth, and power by building strong, bureaucratically organized governments modeled on those from the West, national political leaders imposed centralized states upon societies that had not undergone the North Atlantic world’s path to modernity.  In particular, these societies had not radically loosened the ties that bound local corporate communities together—especially the local rituals and myths that generated the enchanted identity of such communities.

Thus, the governments that emerged or consolidated in Asia during the Cold War were imposed on top of societies that were still largely assemblages of corporate groups rather than the voluntary associations of a (Western style) civil society. Popular religion was mostly an expression of the identities of corporate groups—extended families and local village communities mostly, but also in some cases larger-scale ethnic identities, as with the Muslims in the western regions of China.  Religious ritual and myth expressed and reinforced particularistic loyalties within ascriptive communities.  The construction of local temples, churches, and mosques was connected to a wide range of economic, social, and political activity. Places of worship were also venues for commerce and public entertainment, institutions for ensuring trust, mediating disputes, and providing welfare to those in need.  They were also nexuses in regional networks of communities with similar religious practices.  Such communities and their networks constituted a kind of public sphere—a framework of connections within which discussions about local affairs could take place, a system of statuses that marked out paths of social mobility and recognition, a site for common celebrations and shared experiences.  These diverse bubbles of public-ness introduced potential weaknesses into the sturdy foundations upon which authoritarian governments wanted to build their version of public order.

To create national unity, maintain social control, and mobilize large and diverse populations, modernizing governments needed (or thought they needed) to get control over religious practices that fostered particularism, regionalism, and ethnic distinction.  There were two main strategies. One was to suppress religious practice—destroy temples, ban public religious rituals, eliminate religious leaders (by forcing them to change their professions, by imprisoning them, and sometimes by executing them)—and to replace this with a quasi-religious cult of the state and its leader.  This was the strategy of the People’s Republic of China and North Korea.  An alternative strategy was to co-opt religious leaders and to segregate religious communities, the strategy followed by Indonesia under Suharto. There, in the name of “Pancasila,” the regime restricted proselytization among the five main religious groups (Muslims, Catholics, Reform Protestants, Hindus, and Buddhists), and co-opted the leaders of each group by making them members of state-sponsored commissions.  Some countries adopted a mix of the suppressive and co-optative strategies, which was the case in Taiwan under the Kuomindang.

During the Cold War these various strategies seemed to work, at least on a superficial level. Throughout East and Southeast Asia local religions seemed to be tamed and rendered irrelevant to the big issues of the day. In some cases, as in China, religious practices disappeared from sight. In societies that relied less on sheer repression and more on co-optation, religion contributed some vibrant local color, while remaining comfortably within the grip of the state and irrelevant to the politically directed processes that supposedly constituted national modernization. As such they were mostly invisible to Western social scientists.  Anthropologists studied them, but mostly in an attempt to document them before (as it was presumed) they inevitably faded away, or to develop comprehensive theories about the roots of pre-modern religious experience.  Even anthropologists did not generally assume that such religious activities were especially relevant to current political or economic developments. Meanwhile, political scientists, economists, and even sociologists almost completely ignored them.

However, none of these strategies used by Asian states to tame local religions actually destroyed them. The suppression strategies drove the practices underground while in many cases maintaining the communal ties with which these religious practices had been intertwined.  The co-optation strategies helped to reproduce and maintain communal religious identities.

The recent emergence of religion as a visible force in Asian social and political life is at least partially connected with the end of the Cold War, after which Asian states in the “Free World” that had counted on strong support from the USA have found support diminished and at least partially contingent on adoption of democratic reforms.  Such states, including South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia, have been losing the capacity to tame local religions through suppression or co-optation.  Meanwhile, the communist regimes of China and Vietnam have had to loosen some of their social controls to permit economic reforms and integration into global markets.  Throughout the Asian region, a plethora of religious practices have blossomed forth.

It is unclear whether the loss of capacity to tame local religions through suppression or co-optation has actually led to a quantitative increase in religious practice, but the weakening of state capacities to control religion has at least made local Asian religious practices more visible, more energetic, and potentially more politically consequential.  All of a sudden the increased visibility of religion breaks down the imaginary communities of modernizing societies that Western intellectuals had created for themselves. Asian religious transformations now command the attention of all sorts of social scientists.

Thus, like America, Asia is “awash in a sea of faith.”  But the Asian sea of faith is different from the American one. Asian religious practices are less individualistic and more communal, socially embedded, and locally particularistic.  This makes it more difficult to imagine how Asian religions could be accommodated into the standard liberal model for political incorporation (often based on the American experience), which officially considers religious belief a personal preference of individual citizens, who will then form all sorts of different but overlapping private religious associations in an open religious marketplace and expect that these private associations will share enough in common that they will tolerate one another but have enough differences that they will not coalesce into any unified opposition to the state.  We are becoming more aware of the limitations of this liberal model, even in established Western liberal societies like the United States.  How much more difficult might it be for this liberal model to accommodate the local, particularistic, communal religions that are becoming newly visible in Asia?

Probably too difficult. It is not impossible in most parts of Asia to develop moderate, democratic, stable but adaptable polities, but we would have to expect that the paths to such an outcome would be different from the North Atlantic path.  The direction of these paths may depend on the precise ways in which local religious cultures are affected by secularism in the third sense defined by Charles Taylor: of a move to a society in which religious belief and practice are no longer unchallenged but seen as one option among many, and not necessarily the easiest to embrace.  I will discuss this third form of secularism in my next post.

[Editor's note: This post draws from a draft chapter for the SSRC's forthcoming publication, Rethinking Secularism, co-edited by Mark Juergensmeyer, Craig Calhoun, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen.]

By the third or fourth time John McCain invoked this pseudo-populist persona, the makings of a new drinking game was already underway.  Not just at my table but throughout the restaurant, probably the entire country.  With every mention of the name, we shouted, “Joe!!” and lifted our glasses in homage to yet another symbol of an election year that had exceeded its quota of campaign clichés during the primaries.  The game was not really all that spontaneous.  During the Biden-Palin debates—the second most watched debate in history—words like “maverick,” “Joe Sixpack,” and “you betcha” were the focus of drinking games and ad hoc Bingo boards that effectively raised the entertainment factor, not to mention our collective sense of the high stakes involved in the upcoming election.

It is, after all, more than just fun and games that we’re dealing with here.  In the eyes of a weary and cynical nation, this election has a surreal quality that stems in large part from its remarkable unpredictability up to this point.  (Remember that less than a year ago, Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton were considered the frontrunners, and candidates Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Fred Thompson were contenders poised to redefine the entire field).  Even now, no one really knows where this ship is going to land.  In the absence of certainty and the growing instability of public faith, something akin to secular devotionalism steps in to fill the gap.

Devotionalism should not be confused with worship, though they often overlap.  Devotional practices are not strictly characterized by exalting praise.  Rather, they involve studied, self-conscious fixation on specific objects or phenomena endowed with extraordinary significance, typically through ritual acts both individual and collective.  They are commonly associated with religious traditions such as Catholicism or Hinduism, where adherents are called upon to commune with volitional beings—saints, spirits, deities, etc.—distinguished markedly from the realm of the human.  They are practices that highlight distance and interconnectivity between sacred values and pious subjects.  Objects of devotion are materializations of that which is considered to be both immanent and transcendent.  They facilitate the performance of religious virtues and signify the presence of the uncanny in the immediacy of the present.

Where then do we identify devotional aspects in the interactive viewing practices that occur at debate-watching gatherings in homes, civic venues, bars, and college campuses from Williamsburg to Wasilla?  Think about what’s involved in the drinking and Bingo games that I already mentioned.  Such activities are obviously first and foremost expressions of revelry and sociability.  But they serve another purpose: they give people reasons to pay closer attention to what’s happening before their eyes.  They invite participants to focus on words and objects that are supposed to reflect our political will, and they facilitate public performances of political awareness.

In short, the very act of watching televised debates with relatively large groups of people opens up various possibilities for interactive participation through active attentiveness.  This is expressed in repertoires of vocalized and embodied responses: ubiquitous cheers and groans, bursts of delight at every refuted claim or mispronounced word, yelling counterfacts and counterarguments at the adversary of your preferred candidate, shouting exclamations like “Oh my god, did he really say that?” or “You’re not answering the question!!” or “Who did she just wink at?”

Obviously I do not mean to suggest that there is a direct parallel between rituals of political spectatorship and conventional religious rituals, as though the former were simply an extension or transposition of the latter.  Yet there is something to be said for allowing categories normally restricted to the study of religion to be applied to situations where one assumes that religiosity is precluded from the observable frame.  Since early in this election cycle, and in previous posts in this forum, I have argued that the significance of “Religion & American Politics” is not solely restricted to moments when the theology or faith of a particular group or candidate becomes manifest.  Theocrats and witch-hunters notwithstanding, American political culture is nothing if not perennially consumed by the dynamics of sacralization.  The project of national governance comes complete with an increasingly dizzying array of incantations, taboos, fetishes, and ancestor cults that keep us on our toes.  This is why there are so many dogmatic qualities in mainstream political discourse, be it Democrat or Republican, and why so many social mechanisms remain in place to ensure that advocates of “change” rarely digress from a standard liturgy.  And it is partly why rituals of political spectatorship—staged and performed in preparation for our exercise of “real” power in the voting booth—inspire sacralizing tendencies as well.  We ritually embed ourselves in the political process in order to reaffirm or challenge the terms on which sacred values are constructed in the corridors of power and in the mass media.  We seek to undo the uncanny divide between ourselves and those we believe govern by our informed consent.

Election 2008 has inspired uncommon levels of anxious and anticipatory devotionalism.  The media’s unrelenting coverage of the political horserace, and the blogosphere’s endless fascination with every survey, statistic, gaffe and gotcha-moment, has been internalized with intensity by segments of the public that have enough resources or incentives to fixate on each new twist and turn.  For some it has become a daily preoccupation, a habitual obsession.  One friend of mine is so engrossed in all matters concerning the election that he spends much of his day on the web scrutinizing various news items, media punditry, and campaign analyses (like this one, I imagine).  When away from his computer he consults his iPhone, fiddling with its illuminated circuitry as if it were a string of rosary beads.  He’s just one example of many.  We have all experienced the all-consuming aura of this election.  It cannot escape our conversations.  We deliberate its meanings and prophesy its outcome with urgency and conviction.  We relate to the election just as evangelical Protestants relate to the “Word of God”—we study it, we marvel at its mysteries, and we proclaim it…not because we want to, but because we feel that we must.

There is much to be said for the level of popular attention and enthusiasm that this election has generated.  What remains to be seen is what effect this will have on the future of political discourse, and whether the devotionalism of modern spectatorship will ultimately lead to ever-enlightened forms of political consciousness, or whether we will all end up like Joe the Plumber—subjects of symbolic reifications beyond our power to define.

I’m an historian of American Christianity, so my examples will be American, but it should be said that the conversation about neurology and religion has roots in centuries-old reflections in Europe about how to understand and map out the inner contents of the self.  This conversation became intense in the centuries after the Protestant Reformation, when reformers wary of “empty” rituals and old Christian traditions relocated true Christianity in faith and personal piety.  This was a powerful moment of turning to the interior life—toward examining the inner self, probing it, wondering about it.  That we today think experimental studies of personal religious experiences can test the truth of a particular religion is itself evidence of the dominance of this Protestant perspective.  Leigh Schmidt makes this point, in a slightly different way, towards the end of his contribution to this discussion.

So let me turn to a few historical examples to illustrate the point I’m making about Christianity’s adaptability.  Though as a system it seems ridiculous to us today, phrenology initially emerged with the same fanfare that has accompanied neuroscience, for it was a way finally to see with certainty into our inner lives, a method for mapping out elusive dispositions and feelings on the physiological self, especially on the head and brain.  At long last, here was a philosophy of mind that, because it linked mental capacities to physiological structures that could be measured, resolved interminable metaphysical debates about human nature, free will, and the nature and existence of divinity.  All of these problems could be probed by examining the organs of the brain and body.  It was not just scientists and philosophers who were keyed up about this new knowledge.  “If…we can know the condition of the physical organism at any time, we can determine therefrom the condition of the mind,” one American minister wrote.  In this new procedure lay “the mysterious pathway to the court of the soul.”  Others agreed that older philosophies of mind amounted merely to “conjecture, speculation, theoretical abstraction,” and that newer sciences, such as phrenology, promised greater certainty and clarity for pastors and others pursuing self knowledge.

The irony here, of course, an irony not noticed by most who embraced this new science, was that moving the site of experience outside of its mysterious, interior spaces and onto the outer surfaces of the brain and skull did not solve the problem of seeing mental and spiritual things clearly.  This was so because ways of interpreting body and brain were changing too, and, thus, in very short order, phrenological categories and practices took their turn as too imprecise and “speculative.”

The so-called “new psychology” that arose in the 1860s and 70s, essentially modern experimental psychology, was seen as an improvement upon the old way of searching in the body and skull for clues about mind and spirit.  This is a second historical moment worth mentioning.  By the second half of the nineteenth century the correspondences posited by phrenologists had been shown to be erroneous, even if the impulse to localize mental capacities in the brain and nervous system continued in different forms.  (The new psychology shared a methodological assumption with both nineteenth-century phrenologists and today’s neurologists: that all mental events can be located in the body.) New psychologists located the mind not in the brain per se but in stimulus-response patterns that made up nervous processes.  They were interested in what we today would call sensation and perception, in arcs of nervous transmission as they pulsed from initial sensation to muscle contraction, nervous transmissions that in aggregate made up the self.  It was now possible, these scientists thought, to understand and explain complex human behaviors by examining how they were made up of simple stimulus-response patterns.

Again, scientists involved, and some lay observers, predicted a revolution in how Americans saw both human nature and religion.  Finally, human beings were peering with clarity into the deep parts of the self.  In a 1901 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, G. Stanley Hall, son of Massachusetts Calvinists and founder of the new psychology in America, insisted that painstaking experimentation on human sensation and perception would revolutionize philosophical and religious pursuits.  ”Beginning with [studies of] touch,” Hall wrote, “the experimental method has slowly come to include almost every kind of psychic activity.  Imagination, sentiment, reason, volition, and all the rest are taken into the laboratory, and its methods have taught us a sharpness and refinement of introspection and self-knowledge which make these methods almost comparable with a microscope for the soul.”  From painstaking studies of sensation and perception could be built absolutely certain knowledge about all inner aspects of the self-feeling, reason, intuition and faith.  The result, Hall believed, would be that scientific psychology would entirely reorient Christianity, replacing its objective supernatural divinity with subjective psychological truths and maxims about morale and mental health.

The third and final historical moment I wanted to mention is more recent and perhaps more familiar—the biofeedback and meditation studies that began in the 1960s, including those by Herbert Benson, who studied the physiological correlates of meditation and coined a term for these, the “relaxation response.”  This was another situation in which new, psychological tests and technologies “saw” into the physiological self, another situation in which religious conditions and states could be seen and measured in the body.  It also was a situation in which scientists and lay believers predicted (and in some cases worried) that these kinds of new scientific studies would dramatically change American religious practices.

In all three historical moments there were scientists who employed experimental study as a weapon against belief; and in all three situations there were believers who feared that such study amounted to reducing mental and spiritual states to physiological ones.  But both fearful religious predictions and confident scientific proclamations appear to have given way to a different kind of logic in American cultural history—a logic by which everyday American Christians kept their Christianity and harmonized it with scientific knowledge.  The result has been an astonishing proliferation of Christian spiritualities, including evangelical ones, that draw on psychological studies for new insights on human nature, the healthfulness of Christianity and the best ways to foster Christian conversion.

Why have things turned out this way?  Why has the rise of mind/brain science not led to the expected decline of traditional religions or their wholesale transformation?  One reason has been pointed to by Brooks and others in this discussion—that psychological studies often point to the usefulness of religious belief and practice.  It is true that such studies do not authorize specific religious ideas or practices.  But in my experience, this doesn’t matter to most believers.  (Scientific experiments, just because they don’t specifically support one type of belief, do not therefore undercut specific types of belief, do they?)  Like others, I’m not sure why Brooks thinks neurological study might support Buddhism in particular.  Does neuroimaging support specific Buddhist doctrines, texts, gods, revelations, supernatural beings and rituals?  Lopez and others in this discussion have quite usefully reminded us that Buddhism is much more than a regimen of experimentally tested meditative techniques.

A second reason that psychological experimentation hasn’t dramatically altered the American religious landscape is that American Christians borrow selectively and (might I say) ingeniously from psychological work, embracing insights that support their views and resisting insights that seem reductive or are destructive of deeply-held beliefs.  There is a longer story to this, and it is in my forthcoming book, Unsettled Minds—shameless plug—so I won’t give away the whole story here.  A third and final reason that psychological technologies haven’t dramatically altered belief is simply that it is difficult for believers to sustain a living religion either because of pragmatic reasons (it’s good for me) or because experimental results call for it (studies show it is healthy).  Hall expected Christianity to transform itself into a merely hygienic or therapeutic system, but when faced with the choice, most Christians kept the old doctrines, rituals, gods and supportive communities.  They can hang on to all of that and incorporate what they can of newer, therapeutic practices and ideals.  The last one hundred years has shown this to be the case:  It has been at once a century of astonishing psychological growth and power and a time of remarkable Christian (and evangelical Christian) growth.

Has scientific psychology changed nothing, then?  Have new psychological categories, therapies and experiments not influenced American religions at all?

Perhaps the psychological sciences have done one thing: Perhaps they have abetted a growing trend among traditional believers, Christians and Jews and Muslims, toward more universalist religious perspectives and more eclectic devotional practices.  In American Christianity I think this is happening among liberal evangelicals and mainline Protestants in particular.  Perhaps psychological studies, by drawing attention to the health benefits (for example) of all religions, have abetted a new openness to once strange devotional practices such as meditation and yoga.  Certain Christians are incorporating these non-Christian practices.  I am not making a new or startling observation here; there is a lot of evidence that monotheists in America today are cobbling together eclectic practices and beliefs.  The survey data is dramatic; but I recently came across a bit of anecdotal evidence, a Christian review of Herb Benson’s Beyond the Relaxation Response, that illustrates more clearly the religious style I’m identifying:

About a month ago I read the Beyond the Relaxation Response. I decided to try Dr. Benson’s simple technique which is based on the same principles of Eastern meditation. Instead of using a mantra I used a term from the Bible. Immediately I felt like I was right back were I left off years ago. I have now come full circle, adding the Relaxation Response to my Christian faith. As an RN and a lay counselor I see many possibilities for using this technique to bring relaxation and relieve stress. As a Christian I believe this is a technique to help incorporate our prayer time experience with God into our daily lives.

A wonderful example, because it shows what I see all the time in my research—so few qualms, so little stress or strain about incorporating new psychological notions into older, traditional religious systems.  For people on the liberal to moderate Protestant spectrum in particular, I think this kind of spirituality is flourishing.  Perhaps, then, once we’ve registered an appropriate historical caution, there are a few new things afoot—no revolutions, but for a subset of intrepid monotheists, a developing impulse to use scientific insights, selectively at times, to fashion better, more useful and healthy forms of their old-time religion.