Note: I am being considered for a full-time teaching position at a two-year college to teach history, mostly World Civilizations and U.S. History. But an intriguing prospect is that I might have to teach a World Religions class that is cross-listed with Religious Studies. This is my philosophy of such a class and, ideally, would be part of an introductory lecture, or perhaps a challenge to students as the class starts, a touchstone for the duration of the course to test for accuracy. Some of the original ideas were first posted here.
The chief problematic of the study of religion is that it crosses a number of boundaries, many of which cannot be seen until after they are transgressed. If we are to treat religion on its own terms, we are forced to admit that it does not exist, that religion proper is an abstract, a genus in scientific terms, that contains members sharing general characteristics, members who can mate, though with varying success. Yet it is an abstract induced from the very real practices of very real people. In that sense, we might then say that while there are real religions, religion is a construct, just as there are real dogs, but no Canes. Accepting this, we are then forced to deal with each faith individually, regardless of the commonalities they share, especially the commonality of ancestry. This will not do, so we posit the notion- a very useful notion- of religion as a separate discursive space in which Christianity and Islam, animism and deism, henotheism and atheism, can all be studied as members of the same genus. But the boundaries between religions are real boundaries, whose crossing often causes discomfort, and the creation of religion as a category of analysis exposes us to the risk that we will confuse the model with reality.
If, then, we admit the futility of examining "pure" religion is there anything to say that can render it useful? Assuming there is, we must approach the topic from the bottom up, addressing the origins of religious belief and working our way to individual religions and beyond. At the deepest level religion, with all the caveats listed above, is a cultural phenomenon and culture, I argue, is an outgrowth of biology. Darwin recognized this, at least in part, when he posited that morality and religions were the products of selection. "No tribe," he wrote, "could hold together if murder, robbery, treachery & c., were common; consequently, such crimes within the tribe are branded with everlasting infamy." This insight led him to suppose that sympathy, an evolved trait, was the glue that held societies together, and that a perceived lack of morality in so-called primitive peoples was due to a lack of sympathy for those not in the tribe. He even suggested an early scheme for the evolution of religion when he suggested that belief in unseen agents could easily become belief in one or more gods.
This is not, however, a class about Darwin; it is a class in the history of religion. But our starting premise is that religion is a product of men and societies, and that culture, like biology, is subject to selective pressures and that, again like biology, it does not evolve to an end. And it is this organizing premise that, I hope, will prevent this class from being a mere recitation of data points about religions through history. We will discuss religion in historical and anthropological terms, tentatively adopting as our framework for both the classification of religions offered by sociologist Robert Bellah: primitive, archaic, historic, early modern and modern. These are not static categories and, as we shall see over the course of this term, religions evolve. They are also not meant to privilege one "stage" over another, a fact which Bellah, when he proposed this classification, was at pains to remind us, stating, "primitive man is as fully religious as man at any stage of existence." The categories are more about the interaction with the exoteric culture than they are an evaluation of the advanced nature of a religion.
How do religions evolve? Culture, the geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza has suggested, "enables us to accumulate prior discoveries and helps us profit from experience transmitted by our ancestors- knowledge that we would not have on our own." Just as biological evolution arises from the accumulation of new genetic information, culture evolves as it responds to novel circumstances through the accumulation of cultural genes. This is not a completely blind process, as human agency is involved, but the end is almost always and only survival, not arrival at some new and improved form. Those arise by accident. Still selection will tend to favor customs and rules with real social utility.
Religion will tend to evolve in the same way. Just as organisms evolve by recombination of genes and genetic drift, so do cultural artifacts. Imagining a religion as an organism, we can theorize the beliefs and rituals as genes and, having done this, we can postulate how recombination might affect them. Systems that are relatively closed will evolve by cultural drift, analogous to genetic drift, through slow, random change brought about by imperfect transmission. In a group of this kind a religious ritual, or other cultural artifact, would have little impetus to change once its utility is established, all other things being equal. A group-level adaptation, it would be especially resistant to change except in response to competition from other groups. It would be most resistant to change from within, since in such circumstances individual adaptations tend to undermine the group and are usually suppressed.
What about when groups, and their religious systems, come together? Relatively few groups endure for long in complete isolation from others, and it is in the places where they meet that changes will occur. Darwin noted that while isolation was good for slow improvement and better assured the survival of a species, the fastest adaptations occur when species of the same genus come into contact. So when religions meet and compete with each other, we should expect to see the greater change and the change will be greatest when the religions are already structurally similar. The exchange of cultural genes in religion is the root of syncretism and it is the most important aspect of this course. No religion is entirely an original product and, as we examine each, we will see how it arose from what came before it, and follow its traces as it meets others.
This does not mean that all religions converge on a single point. In addition to acknowledging the debt any particular religion owes to others, we will also examine those aspects that are original to it. Whatever currents feed the stream of a given religion, each arises in its own cultural and geographic milieu. So each religion we study will be considered also on its own terms. We will examine the core tenets of each faith we encounter, and take the faith claims of its believers seriously as best we are able to access them. We will attempt to understand how each establishes its core beliefs and deals with deviance. We will trace the impact of each religion on the world, by placing it in history.
Whatever our individual creeds, religious belief has been a powerful force in our lives. It has helped to shape human civilizations as human civilizations have shaped it. It is my goal in this course neither to disparage nor to encourage any individual belief, merely to show the trajectories of the major world religions, from their origins to the present day, and to provide, however limited, a means of gauging their importance to the societies that created them and which they, in turn, created.
