Religion as Social Technology

Religion has been notoriously difficult to define. We tend to think of it as the church on the corner—as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Judaism. But we forget that religion existed long before the popular denominations of today. In many instances, religion has been characterized too narrowly.

Renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz offered a more expansive definition: religion is “a system of symbols that, 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.”² One may notice that this description applies to a surprisingly broad range of human activities, some of which may not traditionally be associated with religion at all. We shall explore this thought further.

In his magnum opus Religion in Human Evolution, sociologist Robert Bellah illustrates this broader conception of religion by drawing on a wide array of biological, archaeological, and anthropological research.³ He demonstrates that religion was not merely an important phase of our evolutionary development, but is actually one of the “conserved core processes” that contributes to our ongoing survival⁠—part of our very nature. He traces its emergence in our evolutionary predecessors and identifies several necessary components that preceded it.

One of the first components Bellah emphasizes is empathy. Primatologist Frans de Waal theorizes that empathy probably began with the parental care required in mammals, who are born before they are functionally mature. As de Waal writes in The Age of Empathy:

During 200 million years of mammalian evolution, females sensitive to their offspring outreproduced those who were cold and distant… . Empathy is part of a heritage as ancient as the mammalian line… . The capacity arose long ago with motor mimicry and emotional contagion, after which evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors not only felt what others felt, but understood what others might want or need.⁴

Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy argues that this empathy was amplified by cooperative breeding, when our ancestors began depending on tribal support in raising their children.⁵

Another critical component is what Bellah calls “relaxed selection”—the idea that when genetic controls under the pressure of natural selection are relaxed, the interplay between conserved structures and innovative variations may be enhanced. Parental care among mammals shelters newborns from direct selective pressures and allows things like play to develop, which, over the long term, can yield benefits that eclipse even direct adaptations.

Gordon Burghardt identifies several essential features of animal play: it has no immediate purpose other than relieving boredom; it is pleasurable in itself; it borrows behaviors from everyday life (fighting, chasing, wrestling) but strips them of their ordinary aims; it is performed repeatedly but not rigidly; and it occurs when an animal is well-fed, healthy, and free from stress⁠—in a “relaxed field.”⁶

What makes play especially significant for human development is “pretend” play, which children engage in before they can even speak. Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik describes this as the creation of “possible worlds.” When she says that “human beings don’t live in the real world,” she means not that we do this all the time, but that we spend a great deal of time in “dreams and plans, fictions and hypotheses”⁠—the products of hope and imagination.⁷

Bellah reminds us that the opposite of play is not seriousness. Play can be very serious. He quotes Freud: “Every playing child behaves like a poet, in that he creates a world of his own… . The antithesis of play is reality, not seriousness.”⁸ But then Bellah presses further: “If the child is a poet, is poetry not real? Is King Lear not real? Far more real than an unfortunate domestic breakdown reported in the daily paper?” He concludes: “Possible worlds, multiple realities, have consequences we could not live without.”⁹

This brings us to a critical juncture in Bellah’s argument:

Bellah stresses that human culture develops incrementally. While it may advance to new phases, it always retains elements of the previous ones. He identifies three broad phases: mimetic (in which primitive humans communicate primarily by mimicking and gesture), mythic (in which language enables narrative), and theoretic (in which old narratives are questioned and reorganized, old rituals and myths replaced with new ones).⁹

Among these phases, myth—or narrative—deserves special attention. Myth literally means “story,” especially, in the context of religion, stories about transcendent human experiences. Contrary to the popular understanding of the word, myths are not untrue. They may be based on historical events—and often are. But their power is not derived from their historicity. It comes from their being compelling motivational narratives that remain relevant long after the historical incidents that inspired them have faded. Even myths that are obviously fable still contain overarching moral truths that help to order a people’s worldview.

Myths are symbols that point us beyond our present everyday concerns toward an overarching purpose. They bring meaning to our lives. And as human beings, we crave meaning⁠—we want it so badly that we create it where it wasn’t before. The most compelling created meanings are the ones that tend to endure the longest.

This insight leads to a crucial observation: in many instances, the secular narrative has taken on religious functions. Despite undergoing rapid change, religion today is alive and well—and shows up in some unexpected places.

Religion blogger Nathaniel Givens provides a vivid example:

One prominent and oft-cited example of this is the secular religion of environmentalism. The degree to which the green movement recapitulates all the high notes of Christianity is so brazen that it is ripe for parody. We all existed in a state of natural bliss and union with nature until the serpent of modern technology entered and we partook of the forbidden fruit of industrialization, thus causing us to be expelled from Eden… . It’s basically Christianity without Christ.¹⁰

Givens is careful to add that none of this calls into question the science of anthropogenic climate change. The point is that the issue has social weight not primarily because of the science⁠—practically no one understands complex climate models⁠—but because of the narrative. As he puts it: “We are disaffected… . Something is missing, and we need a narrative to plug the hole. Environmentalism fits the profile. Whether or not it is factually true is beside the point.”

Givens shares another example from the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre: rather than turning to religion to assuage grief, twenty-first-century newspapers extensively covered plans to study the killer’s DNA. Scientifically, this was meaningless⁠—“as relevant as reading entrails or casting bones, and that’s precisely the point: science is increasingly being cast to fill the role that religion once filled.”¹⁰

This tendency extends to science’s most celebrated popularizers. Mary Midgley identifies two frequent pitfalls scientists fall into when discussing the broader implications of their discoveries: “cosmic optimism” and “cosmic pessimism.”¹¹ Robert Bellah shares examples of both.

As an instance of cosmic optimism, consider Eric Chaisson in Cosmic Evolution, calling for what amounts to a new universal creation myth⁠—a “powerful and true myth” grounded in scientific discovery, which “people of all cultures can readily understand and adopt.”¹² Bellah responds with sympathy but also criticism: Chaisson “is, in fact, calling for a new church to go with his new religion.” The problem is the implicit claim that this myth is uniquely true, which “leads perilously close to the implication that all the other religions are false.” Chaisson would have avoided this error, Bellah argues, had he acknowledged that “myth is not science. Myth can be true, but it is a different kind of truth from the truth of science and must be judged by different criteria.”¹³

At the other extreme stands Jacques Monod’s cosmic pessimism, in which humanity must “wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation.”¹⁴ Bellah notes that Monod, “although a distinguished scientist and one of the founders of molecular biology,” has entered “the world of metaphysical speculation” and constructed, as Midgley puts it, “a drama in which Sartrean man appears as the lonely hero challenging an alien and meaningless universe.”¹⁵

Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson offer more recent examples. Sagan tells us, “We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”¹⁶ Tyson proclaims that “we’re all connected, to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, and to the rest of the universe atomically.”¹⁷ These are breathtaking and inspiring narratives. But let us be clear: in these moments, these scientists are not engaged in science. They are making meaning. This does not diminish the value of what they are doing⁠—far from it. But we stand to benefit from a clearer and more open acknowledgment of where science ends and meaning-making begins.

Nietzsche made a similar observation about philosophers in Beyond Good and Evil, noting that they “all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic,” when in fact they are defending prejudices “which they dub ‘truths’⁠—and VERY far from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself.”¹⁸

Bellah concludes his discussion on an ecumenical note:

I also believe that, in spite of our differences, we do not need to fall into culture wars in which we denounce and anathematize those with whom we disagree. This is a big universe; there is room for all of us.¹⁹

Let us return to Geertz’s definition of religion as “a system of symbols that, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations.”²⁰ This definition calls to mind William James’s landmark essay, “The Will to Believe”:

The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest… . Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life’s evils, is set free in those who have religious faith. For this reason the strenuous type of character will on the battle-field of human history always outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the wall.²¹

Religion, according to Geertz, Bellah, and James, is whatever narratives and shared rituals are capable of provoking this strenuous mood⁠—this impulse that inspires human beings to collective action toward desired goals and outcomes. In this sense, religion can be understood as a social technology: one that comes from so far back in our evolutionary past that we are often not used to thinking about it that way. But by recognizing it for what it is, we can draw clearer distinctions between religious and scientific modalities, better understand the value and pervasiveness of religion, and perhaps learn to use it more effectively⁠—whether or not we call it religion at all.