Broken Links

Two weeks ago, I wrote an arti­cle on evi­dence for humanity’s old­est forms of reli­gion. In my view, many aspects of issues we face today can be illu­mi­nated by think­ing about their his­tory, and much of that his­tory is reli­gious in nature. That arti­cle didn’t gen­er­ate many com­ments, but those it did con­vinced me this is a topic many of our read­ers would like to think more about. This, then, is the sec­ond in what might become a con­tin­u­ing series on Old Time Religion.

The sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State is one of America’s most cher­ished free­doms. The right to wor­ship as we choose — or to not wor­ship at all — with­out the impo­si­tion of an offi­cial national reli­gion is the very first right listed in the Bill of Rights: “Con­gress shall make no law respect­ing an estab­lish­ment of religion…”

Yet, in an appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion, reli­gion has never been absent from our pol­i­tics or our pub­lic dis­course, and attempts to ban­ish it com­pletely have always failed. We want to wor­ship as we choose; we do not want reli­gion to be imposed; yet we want our elected offi­cials to be reli­gious, and many of our most impor­tant his­tor­i­cal con­tro­ver­sies (abo­li­tion, pro­hi­bi­tion, civil rights, sup­port of or oppo­si­tion to var­i­ous wars, and so on) have often been couched in reli­gious terms.

The rela­tion­ship between faith and soci­ety is com­plex, par­tic­u­larly in west­ern cul­ture. The rea­sons for this com­plex­ity lie rooted in Euro­pean his­tory over the last two mil­len­nia. Exam­in­ing a part of that his­tory can help us under­stand why it is so hard to ban­ish reli­gious ideas and reli­gious moti­va­tions from our pol­i­tics and our gov­ern­ment. It may indeed be impos­si­ble to do so. We may not want to do it even if we could.

In order to begin approach­ing this ques­tion, it’s impor­tant to under­stand what reli­gion is, and what pur­poses it has served in past cul­tures through­out human his­tory. The word “reli­gion” is from Lain re– “again” + leg­ere “to read,” as in “to give a lec­ture,” thus, to teach some­thing again and again. The word became asso­ci­ated with reli­gare “to bind fast,” to link or tie things together. Both of these mean­ings are vital. The “link” involved is the tie between human­ity and divin­ity, between the world and the gods. The thing taught and re-​​taught is that very link. Reli­gion is how humans can seek to touch the face of god.

Please note: I intend at all times in this series to use the word “god” in a non-​​specific form. That is, unless I oth­er­wise make clear, I’m not talk­ing about any par­tic­u­lar god. I most specif­i­cally want to stress that, unless I indi­cate oth­er­wise, I don’t mean to point toward the deity described by the West’s three major reli­gions of Judaism, Chris­tian­ity, and Islam. For instance, for the pur­pose of the point I’m mak­ing on the def­i­n­i­tion of “reli­gion”, the “god” with whom one seeks a link could be the god of the Bible, or Zeus or Erzulie, Wakan Tanka, or Amat­erasu, or any of the other mil­lions of gods and god­desses through our his­tory and across our planet whom humans have worshipped.

This idea of “link­ing” is per­va­sive in reli­gious thought. Take the Eng­lish word I just used at the end of the last para­graph — “wor­ship”. It is from Old Eng­lish, wyrd-​​shape, to shape or form one’s wyrd. The word wyrd came to mean “worth”. but orig­i­nally it was the Old Eng­lish word for “fate”. You “wor­ship” a given deity in an effort to tie your fate to that deity. Your doom becomes entan­gled with that of the god you choose to follow.

Take another word com­monly used in reli­gion: ado­ra­tion. To “adore” is from the Latin adlo­quor. It means, “to speak to”. or “to address”. To give “ado­ra­tion” to a god it is to speak with — in essence, to have a con­ver­sa­tion with, and thus, to form a rela­tion­ship with — that god.

I could go on for a long time on the actual mean­ings of words used in reli­gious con­text. My point at present is that the most basic intent and pur­pose of reli­gion is to cement the ties and rela­tion­ships between the human — the mun­dane (“earthly”) — and the divine (“god-​​like”).

Humans seem drawn to this link. There is no human soci­ety that doesn’t have some idea of reli­gion, and that doesn’t seek to re-​​form that tie. Why does it mat­ter so much? Why did it mat­ter in past soci­eties? Does it still mat­ter today? Why is reli­gion so pervasive?

Let’s put aside for a moment the ques­tion of whether gods are real, whether They are con­scious, think­ing, and feel­ing beings. Per­haps They are lonely, and want the con­nec­tion as much as we do; per­haps, then, the mutual attrac­tion, like two mag­nets, can­not be resisted. But let’s leave that pos­si­bil­ity for an entirely dif­fer­ent forum, because there is no way to test it historically.

What we can do is exam­ine the uses and func­tions of reli­gion in soci­eties through his­tory, and in dif­fer­ent parts of the world. In sim­plest terms, with very few excep­tions (one of which I’ll get to at the end of this arti­cle), reli­gion has been used as a pri­mary vehi­cle of cul­ture. That is, the val­ues of the cul­ture, and even many (usu­ally all) of its most impor­tant fea­tures, are con­tained and described and main­tained within sacred tales. This is how these fea­tures are passed on to later gen­er­a­tions, and how they are kept from being lost.

As an exam­ple: pic­ture a prim­i­tive hunter-​​gatherer soci­ety, one that lives barely above sub­sis­tence, gath­er­ing fruits and nuts in a pri­mor­dial for­est, and hunt­ing deer and other beasts for meat. Such a soci­ety will have a God of the Hunt, whose sacred sto­ries include how this God gave spears and traps to humans, and taught them how to make those spears and traps. There will be a God­dess of the Hearth, who taught how to make fire, and how to pre­pare the meat for din­ner, and the hides for cloth­ing. There will be deities or sprites of the trees, who teach which fruits are nour­ish­ing and which are poi­so­nous. There will be God­desses of Child­birth who inform mid­wives, and gods of the sea­sons who lead the peo­ple to win­ter shelter.

We needn’t dwell too much on whether any of this knowl­edge was actu­ally obtained from divine sources, or through trial and error over hun­dreds of gen­er­a­tions. The point is, the cul­ture will remem­ber how to make spears and traps and fires and cloth­ing, they will remem­ber which berries to pick and which to avoid, because they will remem­ber the sacred tales; and they will remem­ber the sacred tales because they are sacred.

Until very recently, all of human­ity lived on subsistence-​​level gath­er­ing and dirt-​​to-​​mouth agri­cul­ture. When the cul­ture changed and grew, so did its reli­gion. They were tied, linked together. The devel­op­ment of plant­ing leads to farm­ing gods who tell you how to make plows and when to plant. When there are a few hun­dred peo­ple liv­ing together, there are gods of Sacred Assem­blies who tell how to chose lead­ers or how to run the equiv­a­lent of a town-​​hall meet­ing. Gods of Pot­tery will main­tain the knowl­edge of ceram­ics; Gods of the Forge will teach how to smelt iron and make things with it. Thus, the tech­nolo­gies and insti­tu­tions and annual cycles of the cul­ture are shaped and guided by sacred tales and by the rit­u­als which form around those tales.

If you live in any of these cul­tures, you will sur­vive because you wor­ship (wyrd-​​shape, tie your doom to) the gods of the cul­ture. You fate is insep­a­ra­ble from your gods. So is your cul­ture. All are tied, and the tie is the link­ing, reli­gare. Aban­don those gods, and you (or your chil­dren) will for­get how to sur­vive in that envi­ron­ment. Humans sur­vived because they recalled the sto­ries of their gods.

This has been the rela­tion­ship of humans and their cul­ture and their gods, for as long as there have been humans. Depend­ing on where you put the ori­gin of human­ity (forty thou­sand years ago? a hun­dred thou­sand? a mil­lion or more?) that is how long this rela­tion­ship has lasted. The idea of a “sep­a­ra­tion of church and state” would be mean­ing­less — worse, it would be cul­tural sui­cide, pos­si­bly geno­cide — for any soci­ety that tried it.

Only with the inven­tion of writ­ing, and with the devel­op­ment of tech­nolo­gies that allowed peo­ple to store grain for later years, only then could humans con­ceive of sep­a­rat­ing cul­ture from gods. Yet peo­ple still didn’t do it — not for thou­sands of years. Con­sider what we think of as “clas­si­cal” ancient cul­tures: Egyp­tians, Greeks, Romans, Norse, Celts, Aztecs, Mayans, ancient Chi­nese, the Hindu cul­tures of India, Shinto in Japan, and so on. The gods and the pol­i­tics and the soci­ety, the art and thought and daily life, none of this was sep­a­rate from any of the rest of it. Even as late as the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, the Emperor of Japan was thought to be lit­er­ally the descen­dant of Amat­erasu, the Shinto God­dess of the Sun.

Divin­ity infused every aspect of these cul­tures, even though they all had the capac­ity to aban­don it if they chose. They did not so choose, and prob­a­bly couldn’t even for­mu­late the idea. Try to imag­ine it. What would Roman cul­ture be with­out Roman gods? They are utterly insep­a­ra­ble. One defines the other.

This was the rela­tion­ship between the Church and the State for nearly all of human his­tory. The two were syn­ony­mous, even before the con­cepts of “church” and “state” existed.

It began to change around sev­en­teen hun­dred years ago. In fact, the date the change began can be pretty pre­cisely placed. I’ll tell that story in a future arti­cle. For now, I’ll just allude to the out­lines of the process.

Note the cen­tral point of the cultural/​divine con­nec­tion described above. The reli­gion con­tains the cul­ture, pro­vides the means of recre­at­ing its tech­nol­ogy and its insti­tu­tions. The gods and the cul­ture are insep­a­ra­ble. They only make sense in tan­dem with each other.

What would hap­pen if you could impose dif­fer­ent gods upon a cul­ture? What would hap­pen if you could strip away the gods that were there, pre­vent their wor­ship, destroy or de-​​legitimize their sacred tales? What would be the result of mak­ing a peo­ple for­get their gods?

There are only two pos­si­ble out­comes. If the cul­ture has not pro­gressed to the point where knowl­edge of its tech­nol­ogy and insti­tu­tions can be passed from one gen­er­a­tion to another by some means other than sacred tales, then the cul­ture will die. That is one pos­si­ble result. We have seen it again and again when a col­o­niz­ing cul­ture con­quers a “prim­i­tive” peo­ple and imposes its own beliefs. The indige­nous cul­ture dies.

The sec­ond pos­si­bil­ity is a break, a sev­er­ing between the mun­dane and the sacred. Gods will no longer inhabit the hearth and the spear, the plow or the City Assem­bly. At least, the gods that gave us these things will no longer be there. In their place will be what­ever are the new gods, the ones stuck in from the out­side. They won’t fit, because their tales are sto­ries for a dif­fer­ent place and a dif­fer­ent time. They will tell how to con­struct dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies and dif­fer­ent social struc­tures. We will have cul­ture, and we will have wor­ship, and the two will be unre­lated to each other. The actual link — actual religere, an actual sense of the pres­ence of God — will be gone.

It will then sud­denly be pos­si­ble to have a sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State. In fact, at that point the sep­a­ra­tion becomes unavoid­able. It takes a con­scious effort to force them together, to warp one to fit the other, like shov­ing your foot into a glove.

We lose a sense of the con­stant pres­ence of divin­ity all around us, because the things we use in our every­day lives were not the direct gifts of spe­cific gods who were cre­ated along with those objects. We gain the abil­ity to think of soci­ety and belief as two sep­a­rate things. In fact, we no longer are able to see them as con­nected. (Con­sider: there is no god of the auto­mo­bile or the computer.)

This is what hap­pened when Chris­tian­ity con­quered Europe. The gods of Europe were ban­ished, and every­day life in the West lost its sense of direct con­tact with the sacred. A spir­i­tu­al­ity from the Mid­dle East, from a cul­ture and a peo­ple unre­lated to Europe, was super­im­posed. It does not fit. Many of the indige­nous cul­tures of Europe circa CE 300 - CE 1500 have van­ished. What remains is a mis­match of tech­nolo­gies and social struc­tures that do not cor­re­spond to the spir­i­tual beliefs of the peo­ple who use them.

Today, we can­not ban­ish reli­gion from our pol­i­tics, because humans are hard-​​wired to see cul­ture as some­thing that is not dis­tinct from its gods. Yet the gods we have are gods for a dif­fer­ent cul­ture. This cre­ates a cul­tural schiz­o­phre­nia for which we have not yet found a cure.

I can talk about the source of this trau­matic break in a future arti­cle. We can dis­cuss ways to think about the cul­tural psy­chosis it has caused, and ways we can con­sider treat­ing it. Please let me know if this is a con­ver­sa­tion you, Gen­tle Reader, want to have.