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 according to tribal rules of behavior, a brawl would result as your relatives jumped in on your side and his relatives jumped in on his side. A death in such a brawl would spark efforts by the victim’s relatives to kill one of the murderer’s relatives in revenge. What’s to save the society from collapsing in an incessant orgy of brawls and revenge murders?
The solution to this dilemma of large societies is the one used in our own society, and documented in all chiefdoms and early states for which we have information. Rules of peaceful behavior apply between all members of the society, regardless of whether some individual whom you encounter is familiar to you or a stranger. The rules are enforced by the political leaders (chiefs or kings) and their agents, who justify the rules by a new function of religion. The gods or supernatural agents are presumed to be the authors of the rules, codified in formal codes of morality. People are taught from childhood onward to obey the rules, and to expect severe punishment for breaking them (because now an attack on another person is also an offense against the gods). Prime examples familiar to Jews and Christians are the Ten Commandments.
In recent secularized societies, such rules of moral behavior within society have moved beyond their religious origins. The reasons why atheists, as well as many believers, now don’t kill their enemies derive from values instilled by society, and from fear of the potent hand of the law rather than fear of the wrath of God. But from the rise of chiefdoms until the recent rise of secular states, religion justified codes of behavior and thereby enabled people to live harmoniously in large societies where one encounters strangers frequently. Religion’s function in permitting strangers to live peacefully together, and its function in teaching the masses to obey their political leaders, constitute the twin aspects of the often-discussed roles of religion in maintaining social order. As Voltaire remarked cynically, “If God did not exist, he would have to be invented.” Depending on one’s perspective, these roles of religion have been regarded as either positive (promoting social harmony) or negative (promoting exploitation of the masses by oppressive elites).
Justifying war
Another new problem faced by emergent chiefdoms and states, but not by the bands and tribes of previous history, involved wars. Because tribes primarily use relationship by blood or marriage, not religion, to justify rules of conduct, tribesmen face no moral dilemmas in killing members of other tribes with whom they have no relationship. But once a state invokes religion to require peaceful behavior toward fellow citizens with whom one has no relationship, how can a state convince its citizens to ignore those same precepts during wartime? States permit, indeed they command, their citizens to steal from and kill citizens of other states against which war has been declared. After a state has spent 18 years teaching a boy “Thou shalt not kill,” how can the state turn around and say “Thou must kill, under the following circumstances,” without getting its soldiers hopelessly confused and prone to kill the wrong people (e.g., fellow citizens)?
Again, in recent as well as in ancient history, religion comes to the rescue with a new function. The Ten Commandments apply only to one’s behavior toward fellow citizens within the chiefdom or state. Most religions claim that they have a monopoly on the truth, and that all other religions are wrong. Commonly in the past, and all too often today as well, citizens are taught that they are not merely permitted, but actually obliged, to kill and steal from believers in those wrong religions. That’s the dark side of all those noble patriotic appeals: for God and country, por Dios y por España, Gott mit uns, etc. It in no way diminishes the guilt of the current crop of murderous religious fanatics to acknowledge that they are heirs to a long, widespread, vile tradition.
The Bible’s Old Testament is full of exhortations to be cruel to heathens. Deuteronomy 20:10–18, for example, explains the obligation of the Israelites to practice genocide: when your army approaches a distant city, you should enslave all its inhabitants if it surrenders, and kill all its men and enslave its women and children and steal their cattle and everything else if it doesn’t surrender. But if it’s a city of the Canaanites or Hittites or any of those other abominable believers in false gods, then the true God commands you to kill everything that breathes in the city. The book of Joshua describes approvingly how Joshua became a hero by carrying out those instructions, slaughtering all the inhabitants of over 400 cities. The book of rabbinical commentaries known as the Talmud analyzes the potential ambiguities arising from conflicts between those two principles of “Thou shalt not kill [believers in thine own God]” and “Thou must kill [believers in another god].” For instance, according to some Talmudic commentators, an Israelite is guilty of murder if he intentionally kills a fellow Israelite; is innocent if he intentionally kills a non-Israelite; and is also innocent if he kills an Israelite while throwing a stone into a group consisting of nine Israelites plus one heathen (because he might have been aiming at the one heathen).
In fairness, this outlook is more characteristic of the Old Testament than of the New Testament, whose moral principles have moved far in the direction of defining one’s dealings with anyone—at least in theory. But in practice, of course, some of history’s most extensive genocides were committed by European Christian colonialists against non-Europeans, relying for moral justification on the New as well as the Old Testament.
Interestingly, among New Guineans, religion is never invoked to justify killing or fighting with members of an out-group. Many of my New Guinea friends have described to me their participation in genocidal attacks on neighboring tribes. In all those accounts, I have never heard the slightest hint of any religious motive, of dying for God or the true religion, or of sacrificing oneself for any idealistic reason whatsoever. In contrast, the religion-supported ideologies that accompanied the rise of states instilled into their citizens the obligation to obey the ruler ordained by God, to obey moral precepts like the Ten Commandments only with respect to fellow citizens, and to be prepared to sacrifice their lives while fighting against other states (i.e., heathens). That’s what makes societies of religious fanatics so dangerous: a tiny minority of their adherents (e.g., 19 of them on September 11, 2001) die for the cause, and the whole society of fanatics thereby succeeds at killing far more of its perceived enemies (e.g., 2,996 of them on September 11, 2001). Rules of bad behavior toward out-groups reached their high point in the last 1,500 years, as fanatical Christians and Muslims inflicted death, slavery, or forced conversion on each other and on the heathen. In the 20th century, European states added secular grounds to justify killing millions of citizens of other European states, but religious fanaticism is still strong in some other societies.
Badges of commitment
Secular people remain puzzled and troubled by several features of religion. Foremost among those are its regular association with irrational supernatural beliefs, such that each religion has a different set of such beliefs and adheres firmly to them but dismisses most such beliefs of other religions; its frequent promotion of costly, even self-mutilati
ng or suicidal behaviors that would seem to make people less rather than more disposed to be religious; and its apparent basic hypocrisy of preaching a moral code and often claiming universality, while at the same time excluding many or most people from application of that code and urging the killing of them. How can these troubling paradoxes be explained? There are two solutions that I have found useful.
One solution is to recognize the need for adherents of a particular religion to display some reliable “badge” of commitment to that religion. Believers spend their lives with each other and constantly count on each other for support, in a world where many or most other people adhere to other religions, may be hostile to your own religion, or may be skeptical about all religions. Your safety, prosperity, and life will depend on your identifying correctly your fellow believers, and on your convincing them that they can trust you just as you trust them. What proofs of your and their commitment are believable?
To be believable, the proofs must be visible things that no one would or could fake for treacherous gain of temporary advantage. That’s why religious “badges” are always costly: high commitments of time to learn and regularly practise rituals, prayers, and songs and to undertake pilgrimages; high commitments of resources, including money, gifts, and sacrificed animals; publicly espousing rationally implausible beliefs that others will ridicule as silly; and publicly undergoing or displaying signs of painful permanent body mutilation, including cutting and bleeding sensitive parts of one’s body, disfiguring operations on one’s genitals, and self-amputation of finger joints. If you see that someone has made those expensive commitments with lifelong consequences, then they’ve convinced you much more effectively than if they merely told you, “Trust me, I’m with you, I’m wearing the right sort of hat (but I might have bought it cheaply yesterday and might discard it tomorrow).” For essentially the same reason, evolutionary biologists recognize that many animal signals as well (such as a peacock’s tail) have evolved to be costly, precisely because that makes them believable. When a female peahen sees a male peacock with a big tail displaying to her, she can be sure that such a male, capable of growing and surviving with such a big tail, really must have better genes and be better nourished than a male pretending to be superior but with just a small tail.
An interesting example of how religion fosters group cooperation and commitment comes from survival rates of American communes. Throughout the history of the United States continuing into modern times, people have experimented with forming communes where people can live together with other people chosen as sharing their ideals. Some of those communes share religious ideals, and others are non-religiously motivated; many non-religious communes were formed in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. But all communes are subject to financial, practical, social, sexual, and other pressures, and to competition from the attractions of the outside world. The vast majority of communes disband, whether gradually or explosively, within the lifetimes of their founders. For example, in the 1960s one friend of mine was a co-founder of a commune in a beautiful, peaceful, but remote area of Northern California. Gradually, though, the other founder members drifted away because of the isolation, boredom, social tensions, and other reasons, until my friend was the last person left. She still lives there, but now just as a single person, no longer a member of a commune.
Richard Sosis compared the fates of several hundred religious and secular American communes founded in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Almost all eventually dissolved, except for the extremely successful colonies of the religious group known as Hutterites: all 20 Hutterite colonies that were in Sosis’s sample survived. Leaving aside those Hutterite colonies, 199 sampled colonies eventually disbanded or died out, always preceded by a loss of faith in the group’s ideology, and sometimes also by natural disasters, death of a charismatic leader, or hostility of outsiders. However, the annual probability of dissolution was four times higher for the secular communes than for the religious communes. Evidently, religious ideologies are more effective than secular ideologies at persuading members to maintain a possibly irrational commitment, to refrain from deserting even when it would make rational sense to do so, and to deal with the constant challenges of living in a community that holds property in common and that is at high risk of being abused by free-riding members. In Israel as well, where for many decades there have been both religious kibbutzim and a much greater number of secular kibbutzim, the religious kibbutzim have been more successful than the secular ones in every year, despite the high costs imposed on religious kibbutzim by their religious practices (e.g., abstaining from all labor one day a week).
Measures of religious success
The other solution that I have found useful for resolving religion’s paradoxes is the approach of evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He notes that a religion serves to define a human group competing with other human groups espousing different religions. The most straightforward measure of a religion’s relative success is its number of adherents. Why does the world today hold over a billion Catholics, about 14,000,000 Jews, and no Albigensian Manichaeans (members of a formerly numerous Christian sect believing in the dual existence of evil and good supernatural forces locked in eternal struggle)?
Wilson proceeds by recognizing that a religion’s number of adherents depends on the balance between several processes tending to increase the number of adherents and several processes tending to decrease that number. The number of adherents is increased by believers giving birth to children and successfully raising their children in that faith, and by conversions of adherents of other religions or previously non-religious people. The number is decreased by deaths of adherents, and by losses of adherents to conversion to other religions. One might pause at this point and say, “Of course, that’s obvious, so what?—how does that help me understand why Catholics believing in Christ’s resurrection outnumber Jews who don’t?” The power of Wilson’s approach is that it provides a framework for examining separate effects of a religion’s beliefs or practices on those various processes increasing or decreasing the number of adherents. Some of the results are straightforward, while others are subtle. It turns out that religions practise widely different strategies for achieving success.
For example, the American religion known as the Shaker movement was for a period in the 19th century very successful, despite demanding celibacy of its believers and thus lacking completely the commonest method by which religions propagate themselves (by having children). The Shakers achieved their success entirely by winning converts for many decades. At the opposite extreme, Judaism has persisted for several thousand years despite not seeking converts. Not surprisingly, Christianity and Islam, which do proselytize, have far more adherents than does Judaism, but Judaism has nevertheless persisted because of other factors contributing to its demographic growth: relatively high birth rates, low death rates except at times of persecution, emphasis on education to generate economic opportunities, strong mutual help, and low losses by conversion of Jews to other religions. As for Albigensian Manichaeans, their disappearance was only indirectly due to their belief that the forces of evil and of good are locked in eternal struggle. It wasn’t the case that that belief discouraged Albigensians from having children, or that it was so implausible as to prevent their winning converts. Instead, that belief was anathema to mainstream Catholics, who declared a holy war against the Albigensians, eventually besieged and captured their stronghold, and burned all remaining Albigensians there to death.
More subtle reasons emerge from Wilson’s framework for answering one of the biggest questions of Western religious history. Why, among the innumerable tiny Jewish sects competing with each other and with non-Jewish groups within the Roman Empire in the first century AD, did the one of them that became Christianity emerge as the dominant religion three centuries later? In late Roman times Christianity’s distinctive features contributing to this outcome included its active proselytizing (unlike mainstream Judaism), its practices promoti
ng having more babies and enabling more of them to survive (unlike contemporary Roman society), its opportunities for women (in contrast to Judaism and Roman paganism at that time, and to later Christianity), its social institutions resulting in lower death rates of Christians than of Romans from plagues, and the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. That doctrine, which is often misunderstood as the simplistic notion of indiscriminately turning the other cheek, actually proves to be part of a complex, context-dependent system of responses ranging from forgiveness to retaliation. Under certain circumstances, experimental tests carried out by playing simulation games show that forgiving someone who has done you one wrong may really be the response most likely to gain you advantages in the future.
Another example of the use of Wilson’s framework involves the success of Mormonism, which has been among the most rapidly growing religions of the last two centuries. Non-Mormons tend to doubt the claim I cited earlier, by Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith, that the angel Moroni appeared to him on September 21, 1823, to reveal golden plates buried on a hilltop near Manchester village in western New York State and awaiting translation (Table 9.2). Non-Mormons also doubt the sworn statements of 11 witnesses (Oliver Cowdery, Christian Whitmer, Hiram Page, and 8 others) who claimed to have seen and handled the plates. Hence non-Mormons may wonder: how have those apparently implausible claims led to the explosive growth of Mormonism?