IN OUR CURRENT atmosphere of cultural polarization, the term religion has become highly contested. Just how contested was brought home to me in April 2006, when, during a public lecture I gave at the University of Montana in Missoula, a man in the audience sharply questioned my very use of the word. I said that I was simply following a long history of usage, that I knew that some people contrast spirituality, which they see as good, with religion, which they believe is bad, but that I had never found that dichotomy helpful, as spirituality until recently was always considered an aspect of religion, not a rival to it. But he was adamant. Religion, he insisted, is a terrible thing and if I didn’t want to use the term spirituality, I should think of some new word. Like what? I queried. He had no answer but insisted I come up with one. It was his fervor rather than the content of his remark that struck me.

It seems that the biologist Richard Dawkins, the author of the 2006 book The God Delusion, doesn’t just dislike the word religion, he dislikes the very thing, attributing many of the ills of the world to it and advocating its early demise. As one reviewer pointed out, echoing my experience in Montana, it is the strength of Dawkins’s conviction rather than his argument that is striking. Indeed, for a scientist accustomed to arguments based on evidence, Dawkins’s book contains remarkably little in the way of proof. In the case of the man in Montana, I think the problem was that religion to him meant “institutional religion,” that is, churches and such, and institutions are, to his mind, intrinsically alien and oppressive, whereas spirituality is the free expression of individuals. Dawkins’s problem is somewhat different.

Religion for Dawkins is a cognitive system, a kind of science, but bad science with bad consequences. Therefore it should be gotten rid of. For a social scientist, on the other hand, religion is not primarily a scientific theory at all: it is the many ways humans have sought to find meaning, to make sense of their lives. As such, it is an inescapable sphere of life, like economics and politics. Because there is much wrong with our economy—social injustice and environmental degradation, to mention two major effects of our capitalist sytem—can we just abolish the economy? Because there is much political corruption and incredibly incompetent political leadership, can we just abolish politics? Like other spheres of human life, religion—the meaning-making sphere—is often subject to distortion and can become horribly destructive. But getting rid of it isn’t an option. Religion meets a human need, and if you get rid of it in one form, it will come back in another.

Dawkins’s idea of religion as theory is widespread among educated people, and this might partly account for the popularity of his book and other equally silly ones by so-called militant atheists, who are attempting to respond to religious extremism armed only with half-understandings and misconceptions about what religion actually is. After all, they say, isn’t Christianity just a set of beliefs? Christianity has in fact emphasized belief more than any other of the great religious traditions, and Protestantism more than other forms of Christianity, so this understanding has some historical foundation. Yet belief is not the same as theory. Religious belief is not a kind of quasi-science, even though that is how people like Dawkins view it.

Religion isn’t about theory; it’s about meaning. Religious texts and statements are not, in their basic function, about imparting information with which one must agree or disagree. What they impart is meaning, and meaning doesn’t tell us something new; it seems just to be saying the same old thing, though in a deeper understanding it makes sense of the new. Meaning is iterative, not cumulative. If someone in an intimate relationship says to the other, “Do you love me?” and the other replies, “Why do you ask? I told you that yesterday,” we can say that he doesn’t get it. The request was not for information or some new bit of knowledge but for the reiteration of meaning. Similarly, if someone said, “Why do we have to say the Lord’s Prayer this Sunday?—we already said it last Sunday,” again, we would say that the person is missing the point, that he or she is making what philosophers call a category mistake. For Christians, the Lord’s Prayer is not news that we can forget once we’ve heard it; it is an expression of who we are in relation to who God is, and its reiteration is not redundant but a renewed affirmation of meaning, an invocation of a total context.

We are inclined to think that sacred texts, canonical texts, have in themselves an intrinsic meaning and are by nature qualitatively different from other texts, but this is an error. In fact, sacred texts must be read or listened to in the context of a community for which they are sacred: it is in the ritual practices of a living community that they become sacred. Ritual is the place where meaning occurs. Saying “I love you” to an intimate other is indeed a ritual, but it contributes more than we imagine to maintaining the meaning of the intimate relationship, just as the ritual of reciting the Lord’s Prayer reiterates the meaning of our worship of God.

While it is good to regard religion as that sphere of life where we seek to make sense of the world, it is also good to recognize that it is not a neatly demarcated sphere with clear boundaries, even in our society, where we tend to try to separate the spheres more than earlier societies have done. In most societies until modern times, the spheres have largely overlapped. Economics and politics were saturated with religion and vice versa. Because religion gave expression to the meaning of life, it was hard to separate it from a way of life as a whole.

Since religious practices have been central to human life from the beginning of our species, and are really coexistent with our being as a species, they must be considered as a whole. As one of my own mentors, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, put it in Toward a World Theology, they are, historically speaking, singular. This is not to say that all religions are the same. Far from it. Wilfred championed diversity before the word ever became fashionable. His sense that the history of religion is singular does not mean that in their particularities religions are the same. In fact, he didn’t even think the same religions are the same, and therefore he urged the abandonment of such terms as Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and so forth. For Wilfred, it would be absurd to suppose that all people have been religious in the same way: “No two centuries have been religious in the same way; certainly, no two communities, in the end, no two persons.” But while recognizing the variety of humankind’s religious life, he also discerned that this life was contained within a historical continuum. To consider religious practices as historically singular is also “to affirm that they are all historically interconnected; that they have interacted with the same things or with each other, or that one has ‘grown out of’ or been ‘influenced by’ the other; more exactly, that one can be understood only in terms of a context of which the other forms a part.”

It is, of course, obvious that while all religions may be related, the family of religion is not a happy one. Even so, without ever denying the enormous complexities in this field, the recognition that we are all part of a single history, may move us closer to mutual intelligibility, even toward a recognition that we are all ultimately members one of another.

IN HIS ESSAY “The Widening Gyre: Religion, Culture and Evolution” (Science & Spirit, July/August 1999), the evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald postulates that religion emerged out of two developments in the evolution of human capabilities. The first of these involves mimesis, “learning by observing a behavior and mimicking it, acting it out, in our own lives.” Mimesis, he writes, “is a whole-body skill, unique to human beings, whereby we can use our entire bodies as expressive devices. It is the basis of most nonverbal communication, as well as art, craft, dance, and athletics. But more importantly, it is the primordial source of our communal cultural traditions.”

The second great evolutionary event in the background of what we call religion is the emergence of our capacity for speech, probably over 100,000 years ago. Donald describes the consequences:

Oral traditions were the inevitable outgrowth of this capacity for language. These traditions may be viewed as gigantic representational conventions that summarize the accumulated wisdom of a people. Such narratives were a great leap from the older framework of simpler ritualized behaviors that had been put in place by mimesis, and served as a kind of collective governor of values, beliefs, and behavior for every member of the society.

Modern society still preserves much of this structure, and still depends upon mimesis as a sort of elemental social glue. The universal form of traditional religion consists of precisely this: a narrative, a sacred story overlying a deeper core of mimetic traditions—ritual and beliefs whose origins lie in the depths of time. These form a “governing hierarchy” that regulates both individual consciousness and public behavior on much of the planet.

But although the deepest truths of our being continue to be expressed in mimetic and mythic forms, another much more recent evolutionary advance has also to be taken into account: the emergence of theoretic culture, the capacity for objective critical reasoning. The beginnings of theory as a cultural form go a long way back, but the first clear emergence of theory as an alternative to mimesis and myth occurred in the Axial Age, the first millennium B.C.E., in Greece, Israel, India, and China, and have to a considerable degree influenced the religions that derive from that period, that is to say, all the great religions that still survive. But just as mythic thinking did not and could not displace mimetic consciousness, so theory did not and could not replace mimetic and mythic culture. It gave the possibility of critical reflection that, at its best, could prevent distortions of older truths, but always with the possibility of adding new distortions of its own.

Theory can greatly enrich our religious life and has done so in all the great traditions for millennia. But theory can’t replace the older forms of human culture that give religion its vitality. When it tries to do that, it becomes a parody not only of religion but also of the realm of critical reason itself.

An example of this kind of parody occured at a recent conference on science and religion at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. The discussion, as reported in the November 21, 2006 New York Times, apparently took a turn toward a kind of anti-religious scientific evangelicalism:

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church…

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome—and even comforting—than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

What she wants to “teach our children” is not a theory but, as she says herself, a story, that is, a myth. That the universe is incredibly rich and beautiful I have no doubt, but I know for certain that science is not in the business of telling us that and, in fact, cannot possibly tell us that and still be science. Even more clearly, science is not in the business of comforting us with the glorious and the awesome. All of its great achievements would be undermined if it tried to take on that role. In imagining that science can do what only religion can do, we have once again a category mistake, one that messes up science in the process. Further, it is dangerous to imagine that such a thing could be done while leaving behind the mimetic and the mythic, because what is thrown out at the front door will come in at the back door.

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