Dearest Roberto,
How fondly I recall our long afternoons together! Those were happy hours, when we would ruminate on everything under the heavens.
Do you remember our last meeting? It was last summer after a wedding. We sat together on a sunny hilltop estate east of San Francisco and surveyed the rolling brown hills, which were dotted with oak trees and lazy, grazing horses.
We ourselves were ruminating like horses. You were sipping a flavored hard seltzer, and I was devouring day-old wedding cake. Once our lower appetites were satisfied, our minds turned to higher things. You asked if I were familiar with the Reddit finance guru @ImClipperMike, who proselytized for obscure cryptocurrencies like dogecoin or exhorted his followers to have “diamond hands!” as they all bought the same stock to push up its price.
Didn’t I think, you continued, that these gurus were like religious figures? Perhaps they and their followers even constituted a religious sect. Certainly, they had a strong group identity, a specialized vocabulary, and strange, unshakeable beliefs. What else did a religion need?
What else indeed.
It’s a Religion! And so Is Everything Else!
There is a whole sub-genre of think-pieces we might call “X is a religion!” articles. Qanon is a religion. Crossfit is a religion. Wokeness/social justice is a religion. Communism is a religion. Wokeness/social justice is a religion. Health food is a religion. No, really, wokeness/social justice is a religion.
If you’re starting to suspect that the definition of religion is unsettled, you’d be right. I did not admit this last summer, but now I will reveal the dirty little secret of the religion department: they do not know what a religion is. There is no agreed-upon definition.
More exactly, there are too many definitions. A book published in 1912 listed more than fifty. None of them have won universal assent, and now there are many more. Think about it a little while, and you will see why. A decent definition ought to draw boundaries around a thing or subject, clearly allowing us to separate instances of the thing from its pretenders, but each definition of religion includes too much in its orbit, or too little. Both commonsensical and academic definitions of religion quickly run into trouble. Make the term’s criteria too narrow (like “belief in God”) and you end up excluding various forms of Buddhism, or Jews who are both ritually observant and a-theistic. Broaden it a little (“belief in supernatural forces”) and you include ghost hunters but exclude various indigenous American peoples who did not make a natural/supernatural distinction. Make its criteria too broad (a vast system of symbols orienting people to some transcendent end), and you end up including Soviet communism and American patriotism and suspecting that the word has no useful meaning, as it would not exclude any form of human community.
The real question, as far as I am concerned, is why we are inclined to include so many different things under the umbrella of religion in the first place. As the great scholar J.Z. Smith was fond of pointing out, “’Religion’ is not a native term; it is created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define.” By following the historical development of religion, both as a word and as an object of study, we can uncover its common “intellectual purposes”—and see if it might suit any purposes of our own.
A Brief History of This Thing, Whatever It Is
Religion comes from the Latin religio. It literally meant “to re-tie” or “bind together.” It also had the broader meaning of something like scrupulous devotion, or a feeling of deep obligation. As such, religio could be directed at the gods, but it could also be directed toward family, country, or empire. Oftentimes, these loyalties overlapped. Rome, for instance, was full of rituals and festivals that did double or even triple duty as celebrations of family, civic, and divine obedience. There was not a sharp division between what most moderns would call sacred and secular spheres of life.
The old meaning of religio survived through the middle ages. Church, state, and society were still so interlocked that it would have been difficult to pluck one out and define it apart from the others. Of course, people knew that Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Pagans believed different things and worshipped in different ways. But when learned men considered these faiths as tokens of some more general type, they categorized them as different fides (articles of belief) or different lex (moral and/or ceremonial laws). For the most part, religion still meant an interior state of devotion.
The change began during the 16th century. As a result of the Reformation and the European discovery of the Americas, the word religion took on a more and more expansive meaning. In the process, it became a subject for polemics, and a way of comprehending a newly baffling world.
The importance of the Reformation cannot be understated. First, Dr. Martin Luther divided the world into Two Kingdoms: the Kingdom of God, and the earthly kingdom. The obvious implication of Luther’s division was political. Namely, the Roman Pope had no authority in worldly affairs. Less obviously, but more important for our purposes, the division between secular and sacred made it easier to identify what was religion, and what was not. Second, as the Protestant sects argued amongst themselves, and with the old Roman church, they drew hard and clear lines between different denominations, rigorously distinguishing between sets of beliefs, creeds, and rituals. It was common for Protestants and Catholics to accuse each other of idolatry, either through unflattering comparisons to ancient Biblical pagans, or through comparisons to contemporary pagans in the Americas. Through these polemics religion was, to use the historian Guy Strousma’s phrase, “externalized.” No longer primarily an internal disposition, it was becoming a set of beliefs and practices, separate from and comparable to others. The very idea of religion, in its modern sense, was developed in a context of calling other peoples’ religions false.
If I may hop forward in time a little: these polemics continued, in a slightly altered form, in the Enlightenment. Especially in the French Enlightenment, philosophes argued that all religions were false, misplaced devotions, and forms of primitive thought. When the Baron d’Holbach compared beliefs from around the world, he wanted to show that they were all untrue. To wit, “Christians of every sect regard as silly stories the incarnation of Vishnu, the God of the Indies; they maintain that the only true incarnation is that of Jesus, son of the God of the universe, and of the wife of the carpenter.” Enlightenment polemics, I contend, were mostly Reformation-era arguments, secularized and universalized.
About those American pagans, though. Back during the 16th century, the second major development was afoot. Or perhaps a-sail. Travelers like stout Hernán Cortes returned from the Americas with tales of new peoples, their beliefs, and their rituals. European authors started to compose great encyclopedias with titles like Pansebeia: or, A View of all Religions in the World with the several Church Governments, from the Creation till these times and Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places discovered, from the Creation until this Present. These encyclopedia writers usually used “religion” to refer to an inward devotion, but the term was becoming more capacious, too, as existing categories failed to make sense of the author’s observations. Encyclopedia author Edward Brerewood, for example, puzzles over a group of “Mourduites” who “are both baptized like Christians, and circumcised like Mauhumetans, and withal worship Idols,” like pagans. The term religion started to serve as a catch-all, an overarching framework to make sense of a newly baffling world.
These encyclopedias often served polemical purposes, too. The authors, mostly Protestants, railed against wayward Protestant sects and even more so against “the Paganisme of Antichristian Poperie,” to quote Samuel Purchas. Despite these outbreaks of polemical bile, however, they are not on the whole mean-spirited books. On the contrary, the authors often marveled at human variety, calling it a providential blessing. One encyclopedia writer, Joannes Boemus praised God for having made “such difference and variety in kingdomes [sic] and countries.” As I read Boemus cataloguing hundreds if not thousands of unique beliefs and rituals, I detect a desire to understand the difference and variety of human religiosity better.
But how should this diversity be understood, aside from a sign of God’s providential blessing? The next fateful step was taken by Sir Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, a 17th-century polymath and knight. In addition to being foundational to the modern study of religion, he had the honor of being both the brother of George Herbert (one of the finest poets ever to live) and the subject of my dissertation, which you will surely want to peruse at your leisure. He wrote yet another encyclopedia but, crucially, also claimed to have found five “common notions” shared by all of these religions, in all times and in all places. These were: 1) the existence of a supreme deity, 2) the necessity of worshipping this deity, 3) chiefly through the cultivation of virtue, 4) repentance for wrongdoing, and 5) rewards and punishments in the next life.
Here, at last, was a theoretical definition of religion. It looked through the outward trappings of them all and into the common core (or so Herbert claimed). With a theoretical definition in hand, defining religion becomes easy. If the object of your study included these elements, it was a religion. If it didn’t, it wasn’t.
Lord Herbert was offering what scholars in the religion biz call a substantive definition of religion. It defines religion by its content. That is, by its one true essence or by a discrete number of essential elements. Over the next four hundred years, scholars came up with many substantive definitions. In the 19th century, Edward Tylor defined religion as “belief in spiritual beings.” Early in the 20th century, William James called religion “belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” The mid-20th-century anthropologist Clifford Geertz, like Lord Herbert, identified religion with five key features: “1) a system of symbols which act to 2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivation in men by 3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and 4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that 5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” You could take any of these definitions, Roberto, and use them to measure the religiosity of the cult of @ImClipperMike. Do he and his fans satisfy their criteria or not?
Now, substantive definitions of religion are legion, for there are many of them. But there are also functional definitions of religion. These define religion not by what it is, but by what it does, either for people or in society. I would say that these sorts of definitions emerged mostly in the 19th century. To take one famous instance, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” Durkheim’s definition has substantive elements, particularly the sacred/profane dichotomy, but the most important part, for him, is the unifying function of religion. Religion binds the community together. (Careful reader that you are, Roberto, you will have noticed that Durkheim’s definition returns religion to its Latin roots!)
Other famous functionalist definitions include Marx and Freud’s. To Marx, religion functioned like an opiate, it served to dull the common people to the pain of their existence and mystify the workings of the economy as God-ordained. To Freud, religion functioned like a big daddy, both punishing and rewarding human behavior and, by doing so, assuaging the anxiety that the human animal might feel before a cold, indifferent, immoral universe. Less polemically, the sociologist Max Weber studied the internal dynamics of religious movements, arguing that charismatic founders must eventually give way to routinization, which is the growth of an institutional or bureaucratic system that can bottle and transmit the founders’ authority through time and space. He wanted to understand how religions functioned internally.
Functional definitions are usually the ones that draw in large-scale social phenomena, like political movements and patriotism. For instance, if Durkheim was right to say that “the totem is the flag of the tribe,” we could equally say that “the flag is the totem of the nation.” Both bring together communities under a ruling symbolic order through festivals and spectacles, like 4th of July parades and the pageantry before football games. So, if you were to take a functionalist approach to @ImClipperMike, you might ask yourself how his beliefs and symbols have drawn isolated people, each formerly alone in front of their keyboards, together into a tight community.
Definitions of religion are inescapably theories of religion, and theory comes from the Greek theoria, for far-seeing. What substantive and functional definitions and theories of religion share is an attempt to see through the veil of disparate phenomena and into the heart of things, either into their essence or into their functions.
To polemicize and to know the truth beneath appearances—these are the main intellectual purposes of religion, as a category. The polemical and truth-seeking purposes sometimes fit together, as when Marx tries to dispel religious belief by revealing its earthly purpose. In most contemporary think-pieces, though, I contend that polemics get in the way of more profound forms of understanding.
“X Is a Religion!” Answers the Wrong Question…but We Might Ask a Better One
Frankly, most popular articles of the “X is a religion!” variety are theoretically naïve. The author has a vague notion of what religion is, but seldom bothers to define the term, and then compares the object in question—health food, cross fit, a political movement—to that ill-defined intuition. As a result, when someone cries “X is a religion!” they usually mean nothing more than “X shares several features with Y, and therefore X is a Y!” You could say the same thing about me and elephants, or me and the solar system. It would be true, but trivial. These authors skip over the difficult question of which features are relevant or necessary for the comparison to hold, or teach us anything interesting about the objects being compared. The articles reveal nothing so much as the authors own pre-theoretical intuitions.
The modern polemicists are the worst offenders. A recent example is the linguist John McWhorter, whose Woke Racism—a polemic against social justice political movements like Black Lives Matter—says that an “anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of anti-racism.” He quotes no anthropologists of religion. Doing so would involve him in their competing theories and definitions, of which he appears innocent. Instead, he says that the woke have an “elect,” “superstitions,” “original sin,” and so on, confusing religion as a whole with a kind of American evangelical Protestantism that he can be sure his readers will abhor. It will not help the reader see very deeply into the subject.
Better articles on the same subject have been more historical. There was one connecting antiracist authors and seminar leaders to a large, formerly Unitarian publishing house, and another tracing the roots of consciousness raising activities like “The Privilege Walk” to Re-evaluation Counseling, which in turn grew out of early Scientology. Still, one longs to read historical research married to a theoretical framework. With a few notable exceptions, this is rare. Its proper question is not whether social justice politics or @ImClipperMike are or are not religions. The right question is which theoretical tools, wielded by a creative and knowledgeable theoretician on a body of historical data, will most convincingly open up the inner workings of these movements.
For instance, I have sometimes dreamed of conducting a comparative study of campus upheavals: Yale during the second Great Awakening revivals (1795-1802), Bethel Bible College during the birth of Pentecostalism (1901), UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement (1964-5), and Yale during the Great Awokening (2018-?). Through the comparison we might learn what distinguished the two avowedly religious movements from the secular ones, but that would be a secondary consideration. Instead, I would like to know, drawing from Durkheim, how all these movements began in great collective passions, and how their unifying symbols form identities, and then, drawing from Weber, how this energy was routinized through institutional bureaucracies into durable, globe-spanning movements. I suspect that the key player would be the circuit riding preacher/anti-racism consultant, those peripatetic figures who travel from one sympathetic institution to the next and revive them each in turn. Thus does routinization enable further outbreaks of charisma, ensuring the survival and growth of the movement.
You might write a similar study on your crypto-prophets. Perhaps you would compare them to traditional religious figures, like prosperity gospel preachers. Perhaps you would compare them to more traditional financiers like hedge fund managers. I am not sure which theoretical approach you would take. I can only tell you that finding one that suits your temperament is great fun, like a musician settling on a favorite instrument, or a wood carver selecting a favorite set of tools.
Coda: Instead of Laborious Madness
Alas, I shall never write that book. Even the most adventurous theorist requires data, great amounts of historical information to feed the theoretical machine, and I simply do not have time to collect and digest it. The requirements of professional and family life are simply too great for anything other than a little pleasure reading and, of course, writing to you.
On some days, this makes me sad. On others, I take comfort from the great fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, who pointed out that “It is a laborious madness and an impoverished one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”
And why stop at pretending? Based on certain quandaries in quantum mechanics, eminent physicists and philosophers have speculated about the existence of the multiverse, which contains an unknown and potentially infinite number of universes, each one realizing a different possible outcome of interacting matter and quantum decay. I admit this sounds far-fetched, but a philosopher whose work I admire, though admittedly cannot follow, has concluded that “evidence for a multiverse is hard to escape.” If the multiverse is real, nobody knows how many universes it contains, but it potentially realizes every possible outcome of every possible moment. The books we imagine, if not impossible, may well be written on some other timeline by authors very much like ourselves, and so our summaries would have their corresponding realities elsewhere, inaccessible to us but real enough.
It reminds me of another Borges story, “The Library of Babel.” In that story, a narrator describes a library that contains not only every book ever written, but every book that could be written; ie, every possible combination of letters going on for every conceivable length. Its inhabitants generally go mad or despair as they search for particular volumes, or a book that is “the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books” [emphasis in the original].
Some find the idea of a multiverse upsetting, especially the idea that there are people who look almost exactly like them but are leading different lives. Not me. I find it quite comforting. There are, potentially, innumerable people very much like you and me, who have had all the time they want to study their respective interests, all the time they need to delve deeply into them and then return to the surface like divers bearing treasure. In an untold number of universes, those authors very much like us are exchanging whole manuscripts instead of letters. Or, better yet, they are preparing to meet each other tomorrow, perhaps on the hills east of San Francisco, to talk it all over again.
Until our timelines cross next,
Paul