The Religious Instinct and Modern Civilization- Gary Bennett

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© Gary Bennett

October 22, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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SERMON

Imagine this: you are surrounded by loved ones, without inflated egos or scrambling for rank, wealth and power. Private property is limited to the decorative or personal. There is no “marrying or being given into marriage,” at least not as an economic unit. There is plenty to do, but it is meaningful. You labor until the task is done; then everybody rests or celebrates. You feel pleasantly tired, doing work your body was designed to do, without grinding you down. Fruits and nuts are there to be picked from the trees and bushes; game is plentiful. The land flows with milk and honey in Earth’s Great Garden. Best of all is the sharing with close friends of poems, stories, gossip, jokes; discreet flirtations and wild romances; mountaintop experiences of shared religious ecstasy or the serenity that comes from deep understanding.

This may not be your vision of Paradise, but it has commonly been so for peoples throughout the ages. Some, like the Jews and Greeks, had it as the Golden Age at the beginning of the world; others, like Christians, Moslems and Marxists, made it the outcome at the end of History.

The Greeks might insist Eternity is only for souls stripped of all human traits; Christians might fill up Heaven with activities that bore us silly on Earth. But there is a part of us that deeply craves a proper existence, one we never seem to get in this life, of intimacy, acceptance and meaning. This Heaven also resembles the reality of hunter/gatherer life for millions of years of our ancestors, at least “on a good day;” there were ups and downs, times when the game was scarce, the berries poisoned, the milk soured and the honey got you stung.

The Serpent in the Garden brought agriculture, starting about 10,000 years ago. It did not win because it was attractive to the tribes: the originally nomadic Hebrews called it the “curse of Adam;” and farming cultures have often lived in fear of having their own children “go native.” Agriculture won out nonetheless because it could support far larger populations.

Human nature was shaped in a fiery caldron. Without a strongly cohesive band of adults watching over the young and passing on skills and lore, humans were the most helpless of animal species; with such bonds in place, humans were so successful that they could think about other matters beyond survival. Our normal behavior does not make sense in a usual Darwinian model – why do we spend time gossiping with neighbors instead of foraging for dinner? – unless we understand that it is the result of ages of strong selective pressure for socialization. There were several different genetic adaptations toward this end, including a retooling of sexual behavior and a hard-wiring of language abilities. Religion was also part of this species makeover.

Part of our religious instinct reinforces group bonding. Religious cravings can only be satisfied by group participation. Have you ever wondered why you wonder?

All of us desire to understand our place in the scheme of things. Why am I here? What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? How was the world created? How will it end? Why do evils like drought, scarce food, disease and dangerous animals exist? What are thunder and lightning? Tell me about death and what comes after.

The fact that we consider these questions important is rather odd. No other animals ponder such questions: they do not enhance survival. Yes, all animals attempt to avoid danger and death, but mostly by instinct. Thinking about death, fearing it, obsessing over it, does not make humans more likely to survive; brooding about death may even decrease survival chances.

But our questions cry for answers, and to get them we need other people, if only to reassure us – thus we bond to get something we need. The road to serenity is found in The Mysteries, rituals that promote secret and sure understanding. Today we claim to value scientific knowledge, but science is always tentative, and it does not satisfy the soul. You can’t make a religion out of science, as the content keeps changing, new explanations replace the old, and lack of absolute certainty leads to anxiety.

The Mysteries are sometimes physically addictive. We lose ourselves in them; the sights, the sounds, even the smells stimulate the senses. Sex and mind-altering drugs could enhance the mood of religious ecstasy. In America we have had Jim Jones, David Koresh, Philadelphia’s MOVE and the Comet Cult; each exercised psychic power over adherents to the point of mass suicide.

But for many, serenity itself is the sweetest gift, the “peace that passeth understanding.” And none of this makes any sense whatsoever in conventional Darwinian terms; objective knowledge of the real world should always beat fantasy and thus lead to higher survival rates, while the delusional self-destruct and do not leave progeny behind.

Let’s look at the underlying problem. Selfish behavior will always produce more progeny than unselfish behavior; so it should always be selected for, even in social species. Cheaters should out-breed cooperators; those who live to fight another day should inherit the earth, tearing it from the cold dead hands of the brave and self-sacrificing.

Sociability should be steadily undermined, until it pushes a social species to extinction. Bees and ants found one workaround: cooperation, hard work, altruism and self-sacrifice on the part of workers do not result in fewer progeny, because workers are always infertile; those traits are of value to the queen; so the queen which passes on the most altruistic genes to her workers will have an edge.

Our human ancestors took another path. Perhaps the original method of selection was simple: if your tribe got too anti-social, it would drop out of the gene pool, and leave a niche for tribes that hadn’t. But religion is a more elegant response.

We are wired to carry within ourselves an image of what society and pro-social behavior should be, idealized images from our childhood – unselfish cooperation and affection among members of the group. Some of us may be more tolerant and flexible than others, but all are wired to defer to “elders” who feel and express the “conservative images” most strongly. Reactions are triggered by extremely selfish or antisocial behavior; the group takes action against the deviant, through ostracism, exile or even death, but in any case exclusion from the gene pool. Extraordinary courage and sacrifice are also socially reinforced : “none but the brave deserve the fair,” we say. In hunter/gatherer society, these mechanisms kept human sociability, cooperation and altruism stable over vast ages.

In the change to herding and farming, there were many dramatic changes, but the fundamentals of relationships changed little: it took a village instead of a tribe to raise a child; there was still a rough equality of wealth and status; religion continued to be a shared monitoring for selfish behavior.

But by 3300 BC, cities had begun to appear in Mesopotamia, piling village on village, plus those bereft of any community; in this chaos, tribal mechanisms no longer worked. The first rulers were priest-kings, originally bureaucrats handling religious rites. Religious control became political control. Non-orthodoxy was treason; religion kept citizens obedient. Reciprocity of rights and responsibilities, an integral part of human society from its origins, was gone. Some people became tools to be used by others; and the earliest human governments were among the most despotic that have ever existed.

Thus began “status quo religion,” the use of human religious instincts for the benefit of an elite. Thousands of years later Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, hoping the piety of the Christians would shore up a decaying civil society. Before the American Civil War, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches split nationally, with their Southern branches remaining loyal to slavery and the planter class. And then came the modern Religious Right.

Fundamentalism among evangelical Protestants dates to the early part of the 20th century as a reaction against Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. William Jennings Bryan might be a political liberal; but as the most respected Biblical literalist of his day, he was dragooned into being spokesman for that cause and became branded forever, not as one of our heroes, but as the foolish villain of Inherit the Wind. For all that, fundamentalism was still a fringe movement in my youth. In the “60s Nixon initiated the first “wedge issue” campaign, his “Silent Majority.”

His successors in the “70s brought modern business techniques to creation of a religious right machine: mailing lists were assembled; evangelical ministers and conservative Catholic clergy were courted and tempted with power; conservative denominations like Southern Baptists were hijacked by coups, engineered by new corporate style megachurches. Conservative Protestants and Catholics, whose predecessors had spent the last 400 years trying to exterminate each other, were forged into uneasy political alliance by Radical Right apparachiks. So began the modern campaign to use status quo religion to help forge an American Fascist Movement.

Where the religious instinct originally was used to monitor the behavior of people close to you, wedge issue politics today use modern advertising methods, mass media and coordinated attacks to arouse anxieties and feed off them by generating an endless succession of issues, each painted as a spontaneous reaction to some incredible attack on values. News and entertainment media have long been used to this end; they make grisly crime stories their meat, as the public can be entertained indefinitely in anticipating an equally grisly vengeance, while coming to fear their own communities.

But modern propaganda techniques have also managed to elevate to the highest levels of public importance such things as never ending wars on drugs, wardrobe malfunctions, celebrity peccadilloes, steroids in sports, taking the X out of Xmas, teaching science in science class or sex in health class, and in fact almost anything which might suggest that sex continues to exist and motivate human beings, yea even unto the current generation.

The Terry Schiavo case is wedge issue politics at its most obscene. Her higher brain cells were long dead, and she had been in the limbo of a persistent vegetative state for 15 years. An army of doctors supported this diagnosis; an endless array of judges supported her husband’s right to terminate medical intervention.

But what was the message delivered by television news coverage? Doctored video footage was played over and over, an endless stream of libelous attacks on her husband’s character were shown, all trying to persuade us that this was a vibrant young woman on the verge of waking up, yet subjected to a slow tortured death by inhuman secular liberals. Attacks on the Constitution, death threats against judges, laws riding roughshod over separation of powers and Federal/state divisions, laws aimed at specific individuals; most frightening of all, the total disappearance of any principled opposition in Congress, leaving judicial integrity as the only barrier against government gangsterism.

The roles played by news media and government officials would until recent times have been unthinkable; now they are routine, expected. Some believe the Right overplayed its hand because polls say three-quarters of the American public disapproved; but the experience of recent politics says that the frenzied faithful have long memories and turn out in elections, whereas most of the three-quarters would forget the whole business in a month.

In what was once the world’s premier democracy, these become the stuff of the news and of public discussion, replacing health care, job creation and disappearance, deficits in government budgets and in the balance of trade, Social Security prospects, war, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, population growth and the depletion of the world’s resources.

The point of wedge issue politics is not to solve problems, for a problem solved is an issue lost; it is to keep the passions constantly at a fever pitch and so overwhelm the democratic process. Rational discussion, even on areas of profound disagreement, is the lifeblood of democracy, but it is poison to status quo religion. Your opponents must be painted as deviants and perverts, not even fully human; their very existence fuels your outrage.

If status quo religion were all that remained of our instinct, we might conclude that religion had become a dangerous atavism, that we would be better off in a totally secular world. Many liberals seem to have reached such a position: for them, secular vs. religious means enlightened vs. troglodyte or even good vs. evil.

That’s pretty much what the fashionable blue state/red state thing is all about – people on both sides of the political fence who believe that wedge issue exploitation is the only way that religion can be part of politics. But status quo religion is a perversion, not the impulse itself. The standard by which hunter/gatherer humans judged each other was not just an idealized world of their own childhoods; it was an unchanging image of cooperation, unselfishness and intimacy. History is filled with prophets who judged their societies not by the desires of rulers, but against the ideal vision of life we carry within us.

When the power of a prophet’s voice matches the strength of his convictions, the world trembles, and sometimes it changes. The prophets of ancient Israel attacked their societies in times of social and economic injustice. “Woe unto those who are at ease in Zion,” said one; of others, it was said that they comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.

Judaism gained a commitment to social action it has never lost. Jesus argued for a life built on love and compassion, sought out the company of losers, pariahs, lepers and prostitutes, and announced that it were easier “for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Early Christians often lived in other-worldly hippie-type communes. Much the same happened with early Islam; and social justice has been a central part of that religion ever since, even more so than in Christianity.

In America, the power of prophetic religion has produced major positive changes at least three times. In the years before the Civil War, most Bible-thumpers who tackled the issue at all were against slavery: some courageously faced death in delivering their message.

Two generations later, in a time disturbingly like our own, with both political parties owned by corporate money, with corruption, cynicism and despair everywhere, a young William Jennings Bryan – yes, he of the Scopes Trial – electrified the Democratic Convention of 1896 with a politically grounded, religiously impassioned keynote speech in which he pleaded that his countrymen not let Mankind be “crucified on a Cross of Gold.” He and his followers made common cause with more secular reformers and recreated the Democrats into a party of reform, arcing from New Freedom through New Deal to Great Society before finally losing their way in the last generation, when they stopped speaking to the needs of the whole nation and started seeing only voting blocs, electoral coalitions, corporate financing and a comfortable status quo.

The third example was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and “60s, when Rev. Martin Luther King and others were able to share with America the vision of a great crusade for justice and equality that went beyond group interest politics. The Segregationist Deep South never got that support from its own ministers, and its cause was lost; even white Southerners understood at the deepest levels that their cause was wrong, and so the battle was already half over.

Would we then be better off without the religious impulse at all? It can be positive as well as negative in political impact. When it is a negative force, as in recent American politics, some other group is usually manipulating religious feelings for its own purposes.

But an equally important question: is there an alternative? We throw around the word “secular”: what does it mean? Is it a good or bad force in the world? The secular has probably been around from the beginning, making up our underlying personality traits, over which selected religious behaviors are superimposed. All of us, even the various kinds of saints, live in the mundane world most of the time, even if for saints, the context of that daily life is shaped by great religious life choices. And religion has in any case been more for ordinary folks than for elites, leading Karl Marx to his cynical comment about religion being the “opiate of the masses.”

But there are now whole cities, states, civilizations where public piety is exceptional and religious arguments unimportant in civil discourse. Some of America’s great cities may have reached such a condition. We can certainly see a sharp dividing line between blue tending Austin and surrounding small towns and rural areas of Texas; and similarly sharp lines could be drawn all over the country, as between Philadelphia and small town Pennsylvania.

Nobody questions that Europe has become quite secular. Europeans and Americans seemed to be on a similar path toward secularism after 1870, but have diverged rather sharply since World War II, perhaps because of our higher birth rates; having children around seems to correlate to stronger religious feelings. Are there consequences?

As a whole, European nations have made better political choices than the United States since 1945; most Quality of Life indices rank many of these countries above us and the gap widens each decade. These choices appear to be from secular moral systems. Yet an increasingly secularized Europe after 1871 was a seed bed for materialism, racism, Social Darwinism, militarism, fascism and communism, ending in slaughters running to the tens of millions in World War I, World War II, Nazi Holocaust and Stalinist purges. Like religious societies, secular ones can make good or bad moral choices.

While I am a “blue? in the present culture wars, I am uncomfortable that racist and Social Darwinist ideas from a dreadful past have slipped back into vogue among liberals. Many believe that the greater Kerry vote in blue states occurred because people in those states are intellectually superior. But demographic analysis shows that the most Republican tending groups were the richest and, in general, more educated groups, just as in every other election.

Neither religion nor a secular outlook automatically leads to doing the right thing. If you are concerned about wedge issue politics, as I am, then work to control big money spending, money that buys politicians in both parties, uses lying and manipulative advertising, undermines independent journalism with phony news channels and phony reporters – these corrupt political practices have much more to do with the decline of American politics than the passions of evangelicals do; and those who spend the money are consummate hypocrites. And if money is so out of control that the integrity of American politics cannot be restored in any conventional way – then perhaps we should all pray for a return of prophetic religion inspired politics – the only vision which cannot be bought or corrupted, cannot be lied to or manipulated, and which cuts through all pretenses, all humbug.

Much of religious evolution in the past 5000 years can be seen as an attempt to regain the certainty we enjoyed in tribal life. In the West, the first attempt was polytheism: every village religion was considered true; but where one story of deceit, seduction or cruelty by the god was a sacred mystery, a pantheon of such stories invited contempt and disbelief. So philosophers offered a God from reason; though their logic went unchallenged for millennia, common people never found it religiously consoling. Christianity brought the Infallible Church, which proved to be run by quite fallible human beings; then the Inerrant Bible, passages of which contradict not only science, morality and common sense, but each other.

If there is a religious instinct, is our knowledge of God also hard-wired? No such luck: look at the diversity of religions. On ultimate matters, we are always left with a leap of faith. Here is my own:I don’t know if there is a God, but I have staked my life on three bedrock beliefs: first, God cannot be a deceiver – if we have been given the ability to unravel the universe, it cannot be merely to trick us; secondly, God cannot be a cosmic sadist, condemning us to damnation; thirdly, God does not depend on our adulation. Deceit, vanity, torture: the worst of traits in human beings; they are unimaginable in what God must be. The patient and humble methods of science are a surer guide to truth than are sacred texts of primitive peoples or arrogant men who claim they are chummy with the Almighty. The universe is billions of years old, developing according to comprehensible laws; humans got the way they are over long ages of evolution by natural selection. Intelligent Design may lie behind it all; but this is not science.

If God doesn’t need our worship nor punish unbelievers, then our creeds may not be life’s most important religious task. If finding the right answer were crucial, we should have been born with the tools to find it, not left with as many dogmas as there are people to dream them up. What we must know is hard-wired: we are here to need, accept and embrace one another; there is no better way to love and honor God, Whom we have not seen, than to love and honor our neighbor, whom we have.

The prophets, including Jesus, have said this: “inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” I personally do not wish to go back to the Garden of our hunter/gatherer origins. Western Civilization in the last 500 years has enriched human experience immeasurably by its emphasis on the Individual – and we would be diminished to be forced back into the simple life of the tribe. And competitive capitalist economies have unleashed great wealth and innovation, to which we have become rather addicted.

But if the end result of the path our economy, politics and society are on is to turn the whole world into nothing but a vast competitive arena, a war of all against all, with only buying and selling left as a bond between one person and another, then we are on a path to catastrophe, because we are warring against all that made us human in the first place. We shall see an endless succession of rebellions, fundamentalisms, random violence by the alienated, senseless rage everywhere. What our religious sense never stops telling us, the poet W.H. Auden said best: “we must learn to love one another or die.”

Gary Bennett 2006