Help Thou My Unbelief

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 103
Daniel L. Pals, Nine Theories of Religion, and
Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: the Eight Rival Religions That Run the World

Everyone knows the religion they believe, or anyway the religion they rebel against. But what is religion as an overall phenomenon, an apparently common aspect of the human experience? What is religion when you strip away one denomination’s specific beliefs? There you hit a much thornier aspect of humanity. Attempting to understand “religion” without parsing individual beliefs leads to an interdisciplinary academic field which American scholars call “religious studies,” and the British call “comparative religion.”

In his survey textbook, Daniel Pals provides a brief overview of the history of religious studies, and the nine most important theories yet devised to explain human religion. (That’s his nine, so the selection obviously isn’t without controversy.) In a short introduction, Pals explains that religious studies began in the 19th Century as an effort to justify Christianity. However, the field quickly transitioned into something more scientific and secular. The scholarly drama is almost biblical.

Early sociologists and psychologists, like James Frazer and Sigmund Freud, assumed religion was an ancestral hanger-on from humanity’s pre-rational days. Karl Marx believed the wealthy used religion to pacify and control the masses. Even Ėmile Durkheim, less actively hostile to religion than his peers, assumed religion served an essentially socializing purpose, channeling humans into an organized society. Funny enough, these early sociologists, psychologists, and economists all saw religion as a sociological, psychological, or economic phenomenon.

You get well into the Twentieth Century before anybody considers religion as a religious phenomenon. But once you do, the transition is remarkable. When serious scientists like Mircea Eliade or Clifford Geertz attempted to understand religious behavior through believers’ own eyes, they reached remarkably diverse conclusions. These more sympathetic general theories of religion are harder to apply, because they’re more ephemeral and require larger bases of evidence. But they reflect religion as it materially exists.

Most importantly, these general theories solve nothing; even the most recent theories make assumptions that serious critics have credibly attempted to refute. No single theory, from any scientific discipline, has ever successfully explained religion, not without excluding swaths of evidence. But by surveying multiple theories, we readers can selectively apply their various insights to real-world circumstances and better understand particular religious choices. Just don’t let any single theory become some form of new secular dogma.

The single most insidious prior assumption is probably the conjecture that all religions are identical, that all lead equally to salvation. This presupposition has confounded secularists, who don’t bother separating conflicting claims, and also religious people, especially Christians who want to resist their religion’s universalist assertions. But as Boston University religious historian Stephen Prothero writes, all religions can’t possibly lead everyone equally to salvation, since salvation is a uniquely Christian claim. All religions aren’t interchangeable.

Contra this feel-good globalism, Prothero posits a need for familiarity with humanity’s many religions. Toward that end, he conducts overall looks at the eight religions he considers most influential in today’s international milieu. (Again, it’s Prothero’s eight.) The three Abrahamic religions, the four most widespread “Eastern” religions, and the Yoruba tradition, which became global owing to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. These eight religions, in distinct ways, exert diverse pressures on politics, economics, and lifestyles daily.

Many outsiders often assume certain transcendent claims describe all religions. Not so, says Prothero. Many precepts absolutely necessary to Christianity, like God or an afterlife, don’t exist in other religions. Some religions, like Confucianism, are entirely this-worldly, while others require some separation from this world, like Buddhism and Daoism. And even seemingly unitary religions like Judaism disagree wildly on important points: not all Jews agree on an afterlife, or even God’s literal or symbolic existence.

Prothero isn’t a theorist. But he postulates a simple heuristic for understanding how religions work: they identify a problem, offer a solution, construct a path to achieve that solution, and offer human or superhuman exemplars of how to follow that path. This theory isn’t airtight— it could apply to the Marine Corps, for instance— but he makes a persuasive case that, to understand various religions’ incompatible claims, we must see them on their own terms.

These two books aren’t simple bedtime reading. Between them, they cite many sources, offer occasionally incompatible evidence, and drop so many names, I recommend taking notes. However, if you hope to understand religion as a humane phenomenon, they provide plain-English introductions to complex topics which often aren’t explained in ordinary language. And both include enough source notes continue self-guided beyond the introductory level. They raise more questions than they answer, but they’re good, important questions.