groups.
It may initially seem surprising that religion has been maintaining itself or even growing in the modern world, despite the rise in two factors already mentioned as undermining religion: science’s recent usurpation of religion’s original explanatory role; and our increased technology and societal effectiveness reducing dangers that lie beyond our control and thus inviting prayer. That religion nevertheless shows no signs of dying out may be due to our persistent quest for “meaning.” We humans have always sought meaning in our lives that can otherwise seem meaningless, purposeless, and evanescent, and in a world full of unpredictable unfortunate events. Now along comes science, seeming to say that “meaning” isn’t meaningful, and that our individual lives really are meaningless, purposeless, and evanescent except as packages of genes for which the measure of success is just self- propagation. Some atheists would maintain that the problem of theodicy doesn’t exist; good and evil are just human definitions; if cancer or a car crash kills X and Y but not A and B, that’s just a random catastrophe; there isn’t any afterlife; and if you’ve suffered or been abused here on Earth, it won’t be fixed for you in the afterlife. If you respond to those atheists, “I don’t like to hear that, tell me it’s not true, show me some way in which science has its own way of providing meaning,” those atheists’ response would be “Your request is in vain, get over it, stop looking for meaning, there isn’t any meaning—it’s just that, as Donald Rumsfeld said of looting during the war in Iraq, ‘Stuff happens!’” But we still have our same old brains that crave meaning. We have several million years of evolutionary history telling us, “Even if that’s true, I don’t like it and I’m not going to believe it: if science won’t give me meaning, I’ll look to religion for it.” That’s probably a significant factor in the persistence and even growth of religion in this century of growth in science and technology. It may contribute part—surely not all, but perhaps part—of the explanation for why the United States, the country with the most highly developed scientific and technological establishment, is also the most religious among wealthy First World countries. The greater gulf between rich and poor people in the U.S. than in Europe may be another part of the explanation.
Organization and obedience
The remaining four features of religion that I’ll discuss—standardized organization, preaching political obedience, regulating behavior towards strangers by means of formal moral codes, and justifying wars—were absent in small-scale societies, appeared with the rise of chiefdoms and states, and have declined again in modern secular states. A defining feature of modern religions that we take for granted is standardized organization. Most modern religions have full-time priests, alias rabbis, ministers, imams, or whatever else they may be called, who receive either a salary or else life’s necessities. Modern religions also have churches (alias temples, synagogues, mosques, etc.). Within any given sect, all of its churches use a standardized sacred book (Bible, Torah, Koran, etc.), rituals, art, music, architecture, and clothing. A practising Catholic who has grown up in Los Angeles and visits New York City can celebrate Sunday mass in a New York Catholic church and find all those features familiar. In religions of small-scale societies, on the other hand, all of those features either aren’t standardized (rituals, art, music, clothing) or don’t exist at all (full-time priests, dedicated churches, sacred books). While small-scale societies may have their shamans, and some of those shamans may receive fees or gifts, the shamans are not full-time professionals: they have to hunt, gather, and grow crops like every other able-bodied adult in their band or tribe.
Historically, those organizational features of religion arose to solve a new problem emerging as ancient human societies became richer, more populous, and both obliged and enabled to become more centralized. Band and tribal societies are too small and unproductive to generate food surpluses that could feed full-time priests, chiefs, tax collectors, potters, shamans, or specialists of any sort. Instead, every adult has to acquire his or her own food by hunting, gathering, or farming himself or herself. Only larger and more productive societies generate surpluses that can be used to feed chiefs and other leaders or craft specialists, none of whom grow or hunt food.
How did such a diversion of food come about? A dilemma results from the confluence of three self-evident facts: populous societies are likely to defeat small societies; populous societies require full-time leaders and bureaucrats, because 20 people can sit around a campfire and reach a consensus but 20,000,000 people cannot; and full-time leaders and bureaucrats must be fed. But how does the chief or king get the peasants to tolerate what is basically the theft of their food by classes of social parasites? This problem is familiar to the citizens of any democracy, who ask themselves the same question at each election: what have the incumbents done since the last election to justify the fat salaries that they pay themselves out of the public coffers?
The solution devised by every well-understood chiefdom and early state society—from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, through Polynesian Hawaii, to the Inca Empire—was to proclaim an organized religion with the following tenets: the chief or king is related to the gods, or even is a god; and he or she can intercede with the gods on behalf of the peasants, e.g., to send rain or to ensure a good harvest. The chief or king also renders valuable services by organizing the peasants to construct public works, such as roads, irrigation systems, and storehouses that benefit everybody. In return for those services, the peasants should feed the chief and his priests and tax collectors. Standardized rituals, carried out at standardized temples, serve to teach those religious tenets to the peasants so that they will obey the chief and his lackeys. Also fed by food collected from the peasants are armies obedient to the chief or king, with which the chief can conquer neighboring lands and thereby acquire more territory for the benefit of his peasants. Those armies bring two further advantages to the chief: wars against neighbors may enlist the energy of ambitious young nobles who might otherwise scheme to overthrow the chief; and the armies are ready to put down revolts by the peasants themselves. As early theocratic states evolved into the empires of ancient Babylon and Rome and commandeered more and more food and labor, the architectural trappings of state religions became more elaborate. That’s why Karl Marx viewed religion as the opium of the people (Table 9.1), and an instrument of class oppression.
Of course, within recent centuries in the Judeo-Christian world, this trend has been reversed, and religion is much less than before the handmaiden of the state. Politicians and the upper classes now rely on means other than assertions of divinity to persuade or coerce all of us peasants. But the fusion of religion and state persists in some Muslim countries, Israel, and (until recently) Japan and Italy. Even the United States government invokes God on its currency and places official chaplains in Congress and in the armed forces, and every American president (whether Democrat or Republican) intones “God bless America” at the close of speeches.
Codes of behavior towards strangers
Yet another attribute of religion that became important in state societies but that didn’t exist in the smallest societies was to dictate moral concepts of behavior towards strangers. All major world religions teach what is right, what is wrong, and how one should behave. But this link between religion and morality is weaker or absent, especially as regards behavior towards strangers, in the New Guinea societies of which I have experience. Instead, social obligations there depend heavily on relationships. Because a band or tribe contains only a few dozen or a few hundred individuals respectively, everyone knows everyone else and their relationships. One owes different obligations to different blood relatives, to relatives by marriage, to members of one’s own clan, and to fellow villagers belonging to a different clan.
Those relationships determine, for example, whether you may refer to people by their names, marry them, or demand that they share their food and house with you. If you get into a fight with another tribe member, everyone else in the tribe is related to or knows both of you and pulls you apart. The problem of behaving peacefully towards unfamiliar individuals doesn’t arise, because the only unfamiliar individuals are members of enemy tribes. Should you happen to meet an unfamiliar person in the forest, of course you try to kill him or else to run away; our modern custom of just saying hello and starting a friendly chat would be suicidal.
Thus, a new problem arose by around 7,500 years ago, when some tribal societies evolved into chiefdoms comprising thousands of individuals—a far greater number than any single person can know by name and relationship. Emergent chiefdoms and states faced big problems of potential instability, because the old tribal rules of behavior no longer sufficed. If you encountered an unfamiliar member of your chiefdom and fought with him
