The Faith Instinct (40 page)

A second challenge to religious belief emerged from the nineteenth-century practitioners of higher criticism who showed that the Bible, far from being the inerrant product of divine inspiration, was cobbled together by a number of different human hands whose varied stitching, once pointed out, was all too visible. In other words the Pentateuch, as one affronted cleric summarized the charge, was not Mosaic but mosaic.

Higher criticism was particularly painful for Protestant faiths. Catholicism and Judaism had always emphasized their official interpretations of the sacred text rather than the text itself. But a major element of the Reformation was Luther’s belief in the literal truth of the Bible, a tenet firmly endorsed by the Puritans.

Catholics and Jews, after the initial shocks had worn off, adap
ted to the challenges from higher criticism and science by interpreting parts of the
ir sacred texts metaphorically. They were followed by liberal P
rotestants. But the conservative wing of the Protestant movement, instead of hedging
its commitment to the literal truth position in light of all t
his new information, opted to double down its bet. Fundamentalists owe their name to
a series of essays called The Fundamentals: A Foundation of Tr
uth, which were published between 1910 and 1915 with the help o
f a large grant from Lyman Stewart, the head of the Union Oil Company of California.
The five basic tenets of this position were the inerrancy of the scriptures; the vi
rgin birth and the divine nature of Jesus; the doctrine of aton
ement; the resurrection; and the authenticity of Jesus’ miracles.
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By the beginning of the twentieth century it seemed to many intellectuals that industrial societies like those of Europe and America would inevitably become more secular and that the role of religion would fade, perhaps to nothing. This prediction has turned out to be correct only in part.

Religiosity, as measured by church attendance and questions about the importance of religion, is consistently highest in agrarian countries (like Uganda and Peru), lower in developing industrial countries (like Mexico and Turkey) and lower still in advanced industrial countries (like France and New Zealand). This confirms the notion that religion tends to wane as countries modernize.

Further confirmation can be seen in the figures for religious participation in Europe, as measured by the proportion of people saying they attended church once or more times a week. Some 22 percent of the French population did so in 1975, a figure that had dwindled to 5 percent by 1998. Church attendance in Ireland fell from 93 percent to 65 percent over the same period, in Germany from 26 percent to 15 percent.
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Belief in God has also declined but not to nearly as low levels
as church attendance. The proportion of the public saying they
believed in God declined in Sweden from 80 percent in 1947 to
46 percent in 2001. In France the drop was from 66 percent to 56 percent over the sa
me period. In the United States, ever the exception, 94 percent of the population sa
id they believed in God in 1947 and exactly the same percentage did so in 2001.
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These fluctuations are easily explicable under the thesis presented here, that the capacity for religious behavior is inherent in human nature. The presence of the capacity does not mean it will always be fully exercised. People evidently feel less need to participate in religious activity when, as Norris and Inglehart propose, they grow up in Scandinavian-style states that are not threatened by war and that operate highly efficient welfare systems.

Conversely, a higher expression of religious behavior would be expected among populations that have endured severe stress, and in countries like the United States where there is a vigorous competition among churches for members.

Despite fluctuations, religious activity seems unlikely to disa
ppear as long as the propensity for religious behavior is genet
ically embedded in the human neural circuitry. Moreover, even if only a small fracti
on of a population is highly religious, its values may still be shared by most other
people and remain embedded in the national culture. “Alt
hough only about 5% of the Swedish public attends church weekly,” write Norris
and Inglehart, “the Swedish public as a whole manifests a distinctive Protestan
t value system that they hold in common with the citizens of ot
her historically Protestant societies.... Today, these values a
re not transmitted primarily by the church, but by the educational system and the ma
ss media.” The result is a homogenization of values across different religions
in a country, with the values of Dutch Catholics, say, being m
ore similar to those of Dutch Protestants than to those of French or Spanish Catholics.
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The ancient function of religious behavior, to bind the in-group in defense against the out-group, seems likely to endure, even if fewer and fewer people attend church. And with the convergence of values between different branches of the same religion, the in-group/out-group polarization of society can occur on a scale that transcends the tribe or nation-state, that of a whole civilization.

The global politics of the twentieth century were long dominated by the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the West. With the collapse of this ideological struggle, new divisions have surfaced, notably a rekindling of the differences between Islam and the West, and a looming tension between China, a resurgent power, and its neighbors.

At first glance, these global fault lines have nothing to do with religion, as if this ancient coordinator of human societies had no role to play in a global economic order founded on rational pursuit of self-interest. But in fact religion, in some observers’ view, has turned out to be more critical than either economics or ideology in shaping the highest level of political alignments.

In a 1993 essay in Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington predicted that the principal political divisions of the world would revert to being those that delimit civilizations. Since the Peace of Westphalia that separated church and state, Westerners have been used to thinking of nation states as the chief actors on the world stage. Tensions now occur across much larger groupings which are in effect those of civilizations, Huntington argued. A civilization consists of people who view themselves as belonging to a common culture. A civilization transcends two of the usual binding forces of nations, language and ethnicity. The binding force it does not transcend, and which is therefore most central to it, is that of religion.

“Religion is a central defining characteristic of civilizations,” Huntington writes.
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He sees the world as divided into seven principal civilizations—Western (Europe and the United States), Confucian (China), Japanese, Islamic, Hindu (India), Slavic-Orthodox (Russia) and Latin American. These civilizations, he says, “are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion.”
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These differences are of long standing and far more fundamental than political differences. The fault line that divides Western Christianity from Orthodox Christianity goes back to the great schism of 1054. Islam and Western Christianity have been at war, on and off, for 1,300 years. “The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations,” Huntington writes.

He lists eight characteristics that define Western culture. These are the legacy from the civilizations of Greece and Rome; Western Christianity in the form of its two main branches, Catholicism and Protestantism ; European languages; the separation of church and state; the rule of law; social pluralism; representative bodies; and a tradition of individual rights and liberties.

Why is Slavic-Orthodox civilization so different? Because none of these characteristics are familiar to it with the exception of the classical legacy, and even that was bequeathed through the Byzantines with different overtones. The eight Western features are also alien to other civilizations, particularly that of Islam, which does not recognize any separation between church and state.

Despite the profound differences between Western civilization and the others, Americans often assume that their political values of democracy, pluralism and individual rights are universal and urge that they be adopted everywhere. “What is universalism to the West is imperialism to the rest,” Huntington observes.
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War between two or more of the seven civilizations is far from inevitable, but the polarizing effect of religion-based cultures causes many tensions to emerge as tensions between civilizations.

The centrality of religion to these arrangements is no surprise, given the arguments developed in the preceding pages. Human societies have several kinds of linkage but religion is the only one that binds people on an emotional level, signaling who has common values and whose values are alien. Language and even ethnicity can be split—a person can be bilingual, or half French and half Dutch—but religion confers an indivisible identity; it’s hard to be half Catholic and half Muslim.

Each society adapts its religion to its own needs, so it is no surprise that religion does not play the same leading role in every civilization. In China, unlike in Christendom or the Islamic world, a single ethnic group, the Han, constitutes a majority of the population and dominates all other ethnic groups. Ethnic cohesion among the Han is strong and it matters less if they share no particular religion or ideology. Indeed the Chinese government, officially atheist, has long regarded religions as potential sources of opposition and has not hesitated to bring them under control by whatever means necessary. The Falun Gong movement, a Buddhist-tinged mixture of morals and breathing exercises, has been severely persecuted by Beijing since the mid-1990s. Even the fading of communism in China has so far posed no obvious threat to stability, whereas the erosion of the same ideology in the Soviet Union led to that empire’s disintegration into units shaped by the traditional cohesive forces of ethnicity, language and religion.

The cohesive powers of religion should be of particular interest to nations and civilizations in which other kinds of social bonds are being eroded, such as Europe and the United States. Europe is engaged in th
e bold experiment of integrating nations that have fought one another for centuries into a structure that will make serious internal wars much less likely. The shared heritage of Christianity would be a common bond. But the modern disdain for religion is evident in the new constitution of the European Union, which does not even mention Christianity, the historical creed of all member countries and an indelible part of their culture and history.

Religion continues to play a central role in the Islamic world, though not altogether happily. Islam began as a religion of empire, a seamless web of authority for a prophet-ruler, and for most of its history has been a highly successful religion. But in recent centuries most Islamic nations have failed to adapt to the more productive European model of competing centers of power within a state.

For the Islamic world, a civilization that until the Renaissanc
e exceeded Europe in science, military strength, economic power
and religious tolerance, decline has been steady and painful. “By all the sta
ndards that matter in the modern world—economic development
and job creation, literacy and educational and scientific achievement, political fre
edom and respect for human rights—what was once a mighty civilization has inde
ed fallen low,” writes the Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis.
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Many would blame Islam itself for some of this decline. The religion’s grip on law and politics has been little modernized. Women are relegated to an inferior position in most Islamic countries.

Lewis, however, argues that Islam itself is not the problem, asking: “If Islam is an obstacle to freedom, to science, to economic development, how is it that Muslim society in the past was a pioneer in all three, and this when Muslims were much closer in time to the sources and inspiration of their faith than they are now?”

But if religion is the “central defining characteristic of civilizations,” as Huntington asserts, Islam or the way it is interpreted seems likely to have something to do with Islamic decline. That is certainly the analysis of Islamic fundamentalists who believe the error has been to stray from the way the religion was practiced in the seventh century. Mustafa Kemal, the revolutionary founder of the Turkish republic, also believed Islam had played a central role, except that he saw the religion as the source of all backwardness and a central factor in the Ottoman empire’s decline. From opposite extremes, Islamic fundamentalists and Kemal are agreed on the power of religion to shape society for good or ill.

In the progression from tribe to nation to civilization, religion has remained the most fundamental and distinctive of all social binding mechanisms. Rationality and security may moderate the expression of religious behavior. Warfare and uncertainty may fill the pews. Religion remains the essential means whereby people associate in solidarity with one another and in defense against their adversaries.

THOMAS HOBBES
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R
eligion expresses a society’s collective wisdom, past and present, as to how its members should best behave in order to enhance the society’s survival. During the 50,000 years since modern humans left the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa, religion has guided people’s actions at almost every turn. Among Australian Aborigines, month-long ceremonies absorbed almost every free moment. In archaic states ruled by priest-kings, religion and government were inseparable. The church played a leading role in the politics of the later Roman empire. It preserved Western civilization through the Dark Ages and was in the forefront of European politics until the seventeenth century and beyond.