To describe faith in progress as a religion, as I’ve done in
these essays numerous times, courts a good many misunderstandings. The most basic of those comes out of the way
that the word “religion” itself has been tossed around like a football in any
number of modern society’s rhetorical scrimmages. Thus it’s going to be
necessary to begin by taking a closer look at the usage of that much-vexed
term.
Such things happen to
civil religions, far more often than they happen to theist faiths. I’d
encourage my readers to keep that in mind next week, as we focus on another
civil religion, one that’s played even a larger role in modern history than the
two discussed in this post. That faith is, of course, the religion of progress.
The great obstacle here is that so many people these days
insist that religion is a specific thing with a specific definition. Now of
course it’s all too common for the definition in question to be crafted to
privilege the definer’s own beliefs and deliver a slap across the face of
rivals; that’s as true of religious people who want to define religion as
something they have and other people don’t as it is of atheists who want to
insist that what they have isn’t a religion no matter how much it looks like
one. Still, there’s a deeper issue involved here as well.
The word “religion” is a label for a category. That may seem
like an excessively obvious statement, but it has implications that get missed
surprisingly often. Categories are not, by and large, things that exist out
there in the world. They’re abstractions—linguistically, culturally, and
contextually specific abstractions—that human minds use to sort out the
disorder and diversity of experience into some kind of meaningful order. To
define a category is simply to draw a mental boundary around certain things, as
a way of stressing their similarities to one another and their differences from
other things. To make the same point in
a slightly different way, categories are tools, and a tool, as a tool, can’t be
true or false; it can only be more or less useful for a given job, and slight
variations in a given tool can be useful to help it do that job more
effectively.
A lack of attention to this detail has caused any number of
squabbles, ranging from the absurd to the profound. Thus, for example, when the
International Astronomical Union announced a few years back that Pluto had been
reclassified from a planet to a dwarf planet, some of the protests that were
splashed across the internet made it sound as though astronomers had aimed a
death ray at the solar system’s former ninth planet and blasted it out of the
heavens. Now of course they did nothing
of the kind; they were simply following a precedent set back in the 1850s, when
the asteroid Ceres, originally classified as a planet on its discovery in 1801,
was stripped of that title once other objects like it were spotted.
Pluto, as it turned out, was simply the first object in the
Kuiper Belt to be sighted and named, just as Ceres was the first object in the
asteroid belt to be sighted and named.
The later discoveries of Eris, Haumea, Sedna, and other Pluto-like
objects out in the snowball-rich suburbs of the solar system convinced the IAU
that assigning Pluto to a different category made more sense than keeping it in
its former place on the roster of planets.
The change in category didn’t affect Pluto at all; it simply provided a
slightly more useful way of sorting out the diverse family of objects circling
the Sun.
A similar shift, though in the other direction, took place
in the sociology of religions in 1967, with the publication of Robert Bellah’s
paper “Civil Religion in America.” Before that time, most definitions of
religion had presupposed that something could be assigned to that category only
if it involved belief in at least one deity.
Challenging this notion, Bellah pointed out the existence of a class of
widely accepted belief systems that had all the hallmarks of religion except
such a belief. Borrowing a turn of phrase from Rousseau, he called these “civil
religions,” and the example central to his paper was the system of beliefs that
had grown up around the ideas and institutions of American political life.
The civil religion of Americanism, Bellah showed, could be
compared point for point with the popular theistic religions in American life,
and the comparison made sense of features no previous analysis quite managed to
interpret convincingly. Americanism had
its own sacred scriptures, such as the Declaration of Independence; its own
saints and martyrs, such as Abraham Lincoln; its own formal rites—the Pledge of
Allegiance, for example, fills exactly the same role in Americanism that the
Lord’s Prayer does in most forms of Christianity popular in the United
States—and so on straight down the list of religious institutions. Furthermore,
and most crucially, the core beliefs of Americanism were seen by most Americans
as self-evidently good and true, and as standards by which other claims of
goodness and truth could and should be measured: in a word, as sacred.
While Americanism was the focus of Bellah’s paper, it was
and is far from the only example of the species he anatomized. When the paper in question first saw print,
for example, a classic example of the type was in full flower on the other side
of the Cold War’s heavily guarded frontiers.
During the century and a half or so from the publication of The
Communist Manifesto to the implosion of the Soviet Union, Communism
was one of the modern world’s most successful civil religions, an aggressive
missionary faith preaching an apocalyptic creed of secular salvation. It shared
a galaxy of standard features with other contemporary Western religions, from
sacred scriptures and intricate doctrinal debates on down to steet-corner
evangelists spreading the gospel among the downtrodden.
Even its vaunted atheism, the one obvious barrier setting it
apart from its more conventionally religious rivals, was simply an extension of
a principle central to the Abrahamic religions, though by no means common
outside that harsh desert-centered tradition. The unyielding words of the first
commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” were as central to
Communism as to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam; the sole difference in
practice was that, since Communist civil religion directed its reverence toward
a hypothetical set of abstract historical processes rather than a personal
deity, its version of the commandment required the faithful to have no gods at
all.
Not all civil religions take so hard a line toward their
theist rivals. Americanism is an example of the other common strategy, which
can be described with fair accuracy as cooptation: the recruitment of the deity
or deities of the locally popular theist religion as part of the publicity team
for the civil religion in question. In this case, a picture is indeed worth a
thousand words:
I hope I don’t need to point out to any of my readers that
the US constitution, that cautious tissue of half-resolved disputes and
last-minute compromises, was not handed down by Jesus to the founding fathers,
and that it’s even a bit insulting to suggest that a document needing so much
revision and amendment down through the years could have come from an
omniscient source. I also hope I don’t
need to point out that most of the founding fathers shown clustered around
Jesus in the painting were Deists who were deeply suspicious of organized
religion—and of course then there’s Ben Franklin, skeptic, libertine, lapsed
Quaker, and sometime member of the Hell-Fire Club, standing there with a
beatific smile on his face, one hand over his heart, and the other doubtless
hiding crossed fingers behind his back.
Still, that’s the sort of distortion that happens when the emotions
evoked by civil religion shape history in hindsight. The Communist Manifesto
and the October Revolution came in for the same sort of hagiography, and
inspired even worse art.
Other examples of civil religion would be easy enough to
cite—or, for that matter, to illustrate with equally tasteless imagery—but the
two I’ve just named are good examples of the type, and will be wholly adequate
to illustrate the points I want to make here. First, it takes only the briefest
glance at history to realize that civil religions can call forth passions and
loyalties every bit as powerful as those evoked by theist religions. Plenty of
American patriots and committed Communists alike have readily laid down their
lives for the sake of the civil religions in which they put their faith. Both civil religions have inspired art,
architecture, music and poetry along the whole spectrum from greatness to utter
kitsch; both provided the force that drove immense social and cultural changes
for good or ill; both are comparable in their impact on the world in modern
times with even the most popular theist religions.
Second, the relations between civil religions and theist
religions tend to be just as problematic as the relations between one theist
religion and another. The sort of bland
tolerance with which most of today’s democracies regard religion is the least
intrusive option, and even so it often involves compromises that many theist
religions find difficult to accept. From there, the spectrum extends through
more or less blatant efforts to coopt theist religions into the service of the
civil religion, all the way to accusations of disloyalty and the most violent
forms of persecution. The long history of troubled relations between theist
religions and officially nonreligious political creeds is among other things a
useful confirmation of Bellah’s thesis: it’s precisely because civil religions
and theist religions appeal to so many of the same social and individual needs,
and call forth so many of the same passions and loyalties, that they so often
come into conflict with one another.
Third, civil religions share with theist religions a curious
and insufficiently studied phenomenon that may as well be called the
antireligion. An antireligion is a movement within a religious community that
claims to oppose that community’s faith, in a distinctive way: it embraces essentially all of its parent
religion’s beliefs, but inverts the values, embracing as good what the parent
religion defines as evil, and rejecting as evil what the parent religion
defines as good.
The classic example of the type is Satanism, the antireligion
of Christianity. In its traditional forms—the conservative Christians among my
readers may be interested to know that Satanism also suffers from modernist
heresies—Satanism accepts essentially all of the presuppositions of
Christianity, but says with Milton’s Satan, “Evil, be thou my good.” Thus
you’ll have to look long and hard among even the most devout Catholics to find
anyone more convinced of the spiritual power of the Catholic Mass than an
old-fashioned Satanist; it’s from that conviction that the Black Mass, the
parody of the Catholic rite that provides traditional Satanism with its central
ceremony, gains whatever power it has.
Antireligions are at least as common among civil religions
as they are among theist faiths. The civil religion of Americanism, for
example, has as its antireligion the devout and richly detailed claim, common
among American radicals of all stripes, that the United States is uniquely evil
among the world’s nations. This creed,
or anticreed, simply inverts the standard notions of American exceptionalism
without changing them in any other way. In the same way, Communism has its
antireligion, which was founded by the Russian expatriate Ayn Rand and has
become the central faith of much of America’s current pseudoconservative
movement. There is of course nothing actually conservative about Rand’s
Objectivism; it’s simply what you get when you accept the presuppositions of
Marxism—atheism, materialism, class warfare, and the rest of it—but say “Evil,
be thou my good” to all its value judgments. If you’ve ever wondered why so
many American pseudoconservatives sound as though they’re trying to imitate the
cackling capitalist villains of traditional Communist demonology, now you know.
Emotional power, difficult relations with other faiths, and
the presence of an antireligion: these
are far from the only features civil religions have in common with the theist
competition. Still, just as it makes
sense to talk of civil religions and theist religions as two subcategories
within the broader category of religion as a whole, it’s worthwhile to point
out at least one crucial difference between civil and theist religions: civil
religions tend to be brittle. They are far more vulnerable than theist faiths
to sudden loss of faith on the grand scale.
The collapse of Communism in the late twentieth century is a
classic example. By the 1980s, despite
heroic efforts at deception and self-deception, nobody anywhere on the globe
could pretend any longer that the Communist regimes spread across the globe had
anything in common with the worker’s paradise of Communist myth, or were likely
to do so on less than geological time scales. The grand prophetic vision
central to the Communist faith—the worldwide spread of proletarian revolution,
driven by the unstoppable force of the historical dialectic; the dictatorship
of the proletariat that would follow, in nation after nation, bringing the
blessings of socialism to the wretched of the earth; sooner or later
thereafter, the withering away of the state and the coming of true
communism—all turned, in the space of a single generation, from the devout hope
of countless millions to a subject for bitter jokes among the children of those
same millions. The implosion of the
Soviet empire and its inner circle of client states, and the rapid abandonment
of Communism elsewhere, followed in short order.
The Communist civil religion was vulnerable to so dramatic a
collapse because its kingdom was entirely of this world. Theist religions that
teach the doctrines of divine providence and the immortality of the soul can
always appeal to another world for the fulfillment of hopes disappointed in
this one, but a civil religion such as Communism cannot. As the Soviet system stumbled toward its
final collapse, faithful believers in the Communist gospel could not console
themselves with the hope that they would be welcomed into the worker’s paradise
after they died, or even pray that the angels of dialectical materialism might
smite the local commissar for his sins. There was no refuge from the
realization that their hopes had been betrayed and the promises central to
their faith would not be kept.
This sort of sudden collapse happens tolerably often to
civil religions, and explains some of the more dramatic shifts in religious
history. The implosion of Roman paganism
in the late Empire, for example, had a good many factors driving it, but one of
the most important was the way that the worship of the old gods had been
coopted by the civil religion of the Roman state. By the time the Roman Empire reached its
zenith, Jove and the other gods of the old Roman pantheon had been turned into
political functionaries, filling much the same role as Jesus in the painting
above. The old concept of the
pax deorum—the maintenance of peace and good relations
between the Roman people and their gods—had been drafted into the service of
the Pax Romana, and generations of Roman panegyrists insisted that Rome’s piety
guaranteed her the perpetual rulership of the world.
When the empire started to come unglued, therefore, and
those panegyrics stopped being polite exaggerations and turned into bad jokes,
Roman civil religion came unglued with it, and dragged down much of Roman
paganism in its turn. The collapse of belief in the old gods was nothing like
as sudden or as total as the collapse of faith in Communism—all along, there
were those who found spiritual sustenance in the traditional faith, and many of
them clung to it until the rising spiral of Christian persecution intervened—but
the failure of the promises Roman civil religion had loaded onto the old gods,
at the very least, made things much easier for Christian evangelists.
It’s entirely possible, as I’ve suggested more than once in
these essays, that some similar fate awaits the civil religion of Americanism.
That faith has already shifted in ways that suggest the imminence of serious
trouble. Not that many decades ago, all
things considered, a vast number of Americans were simply and unselfconsciously
convinced that the American way was the best way, that America would inevitably
overcome whatever troubles its enemies and the vagaries of nature threw at it,
and that the world’s best hope lay in the possibility that people in other
lands would finally get around to noticing how much better things were over
here, and be inspired to imitate us. It’s easy to make fun of such opinions,
especially in the light of what happened in the decades that followed, but it’s
one of the peculiarities of religious belief—any religious belief, civil,
theist, or otherwise—that it always looks at least faintly absurd to those who
don’t hold it.
Still, the point I want to make is more specific. You won’t
find many Americans holding such beliefs nowadays, and those who still make
such claims in public generally do it in the sort of angry and defensive tones
that suggest that they’re repeating a creed in which neither they nor their
listeners quite believe any longer. American patriotism, like Roman patriotism
during the last couple of centuries of the Empire, increasingly focuses on the
past: it’s not America as it is today that inspires religious devotion, but the
hovering ghost of an earlier era, taking on more and more of the colors of
utopia as it fades from sight. Meanwhile politicians mouth the old slogans and
go their merry ways. I wonder how many
of them have stopped to think about the consequences if the last of the old
faith that once gave those slogans their meaning finally goes away for good.
