mention just a few examples, Mormons are expected to contribute 10% of their income to their church. It’s estimated that traditional Hopi Indians devote an average of one out of three days to religious ceremonies, and that one-quarter of the population of traditional Tibet consisted of monks. The fraction of resources in medieval Christian Europe devoted to building and staffing churches and cathedrals, supporting the many orders of monasteries and nunneries, and underwriting crusades must have been large. To borrow a phrase from economists, religion thus incurs “opportunity costs”: those investments of time and resources in religion that could have been devoted instead to obviously profitable activities, such as planting more crops, building dams, and feeding larger armies of conquest. If religion didn’t bring some big real benefits to offset those opportunity costs, any atheistic society that by chance arose would be likely to outcompete religious societies and take over the world. So why hasn’t the world become atheistic, and what are those benefits that religion evidently brings? What are the “functions” of religion?
To a believer, such questions about religion’s functions may seem nonsensical or even offensive. A believer might respond that religion is nearly universal among human societies simply because there really is a God, and that the ubiquity of religion no more requires discovering its supposed functions and benefits than does the ubiquity of rocks. If you are such a believer, let me invite you to imagine, just for a moment, an advanced living creature from the Andromeda galaxy, who races around the universe at a velocity far exceeding the speed of light (considered impossible by us humans), visits the universe’s trillions of stars and planets, and studies the diversity of life in the universe, with metabolisms variously powered by light, other forms of electromagnetic radiation, heat, wind, nuclear reactions, and inorganic or organic chemical reactions. Periodically, our Andromedan visits Planet Earth, where life evolved to utilize energy only from light and from inorganic and organic chemical reactions. For a brief period between about 11,000 BC and September 11, AD 2051, Earth was dominated by a life form that called itself humans and that clung to some curious ideas. Among those ideas: that there is an all-powerful being, called God, which has a special interest in the human species rather than in the millions of trillions of other species in the universe, and which created the universe, and which humans often picture as similar to a human except for being omnipotent. Of course the Andromedan recognized those beliefs to be delusions worthy of study rather than of credence, because the Andromedan and many other living creatures had already figured out how the universe really had been created, and it was absurd to imagine that any all-powerful being would be especially interested in or similar to the human species, which was much less interesting and advanced than billions of other life forms existing elsewhere in the universe. The Andromedan also observed that there were thousands of different human religions, most of whose adherents believed their own religion to be true and all the other religions to be false, and that suggested to the Andromedan that all were false.
But this belief in such a god was widespread among human societies. The Andromedan understood the principles of universal sociology, which had to provide an explanation for why human societies persisted despite the huge drain of time and resources that religion imposed on individuals and societies, and despite religion’s motivating individuals to inflict on themselves painful or suicidal behaviors. Obviously, the Andromedan reasoned, religion must bring some compensating benefits; otherwise, atheistic societies not burdened by those time and resource drains and those suicidal impulses would have replaced religious societies. Hence if you, my readers, find it offensive to inquire about the functions of your own religion, perhaps you would be willing for a moment to step back and inquire about the functions of New Guinea tribal religions, or to place yourself in the frame of mind of the Andromedan visitor and inquire about human religions in general.
Definitions of religion
Let’s begin by defining religion, so that we can at least agree about what phenomenon we are discussing. Which features are shared by all religions, including Christianity and tribal religions along with the polytheism of classical Greece and Rome, and are necessary and sufficient to identify a phenomenon as a religion rather than as some related but different phenomenon (such as magic, patriotism, or a philosophy of life)?
Table 9.1. Some proposed definitions of religion
| 1. “Human recognition of superhuman controlling power and especially of a personal God entitled to obedience.” ( |
| 2. “Any specific system of belief and worship, often involving a code of ethics and a philosophy.” ( |
| 3. “A system of social coherence based on a common group of beliefs or attitudes concerning an object, person, unseen being, or system of thought considered to be supernatural, sacred, divine or highest truth, and the moral codes, practices, values, institutions, traditions, and rituals associated with such belief or system of thought.” ( |
| 4. “Religion, in the broadest and most general terms possible, …consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” (William James) |
| 5. “Social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” (Daniel Dennett) |
| 6. “A propitiation or conciliation of superhuman powers which are believed to control nature and man.” (Sir James Frazer) |
| 7. “A set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence.” (Robert Bellah) |
| 8. “A system of beliefs and practices directed toward the ‘ultimate concern’ of a society.” (William Lessa and Evon Vogt) |
| 9. “The belief in superhuman beings and in their power to assist or to harm man approaches universal distribution, and this belief—I would insist—is the core variable which ought to be designated by any definition of religion…. I shall define ‘religion’ as ‘an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings.’” (Melford Spiro) |
| 10. “The common element of religion cross-culturally is a belief that the highest good is defined by an unseen order combined with an array of symbols that assist individuals and groups in ordering their lives in harmony with this order and an emotional commitment to achieving that harmony.” (William Irons) |
