Explaining religion 2 - what is religion?

I now turn to the question of explananda - what is it that explanations of religion are adduced to explain?

Similarly to the general classification I gave before, there are several things that seem to need explaining.

1. The sociological explanandum: the existence of organised religion

Religions are salient objects in modern and historical societies. All of them have social structure, and it is that which calls for explanation. There are basically two approaches here, one tied to Weber's sociology and the other tied to Durkheim's. Weber believed that religion was symbolic, and founded on individual psychological traits resulting in social structures. Durkheim held, in contrast, that religion was "society divinised", founded on the economic and political needs of the social order. Neither is entirely of the extreme view that this is all there is to religion, but they both held some predilection for the kinds of explanation that in the social sciences have been called "methodological individualist" for Weber and "methodological holist" for Durkheim.

Marx's own view, that religion is a way of making exploitation and suffering tolerable is the common ancestor of both views in a way.

2. The experiential explanandum: the spiritual experience

Ever since William James wrote his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience back in 1902, the psychology of religious experience has been an issue. This is tied closely to existential explanations of religion. Individual experience is often regarded as the foundation of religion, as in shamanist stories of the role of the mystic or magic man in village societies. Explanations based on pathologies like epilepsy, schizophrenia are included, but also more general aspects of human psychology such as a feeling of awe and connectedness, particularly in case of meditation and ritual behaviours.

In cases of religions that are largely contemplative or have mystical experiences as their basis, like Buddhism, Dervish and Sufi Islam, Catholic mystics like St John of the Cross or Hildegard of Bingen, the focus is on ineffable experience as a way of communing with god or nature or escaping the snares of mundane experience.

3. The conceptual explanandum: etiology and explanation

One common explanandum is the use of religion to account for aspects of the world. One approach is to treat religion as a kind of pre-scientific cognitive process. Stories of deities and their actions explains factual and moral situations of the believer and their opponents. Hence, and we still see this operating today, a religious explanation of a disaster is seen as divine punishment for failure to act according to the wishes of the deity, while deities are themselves explanations of natural events like spring, the growth of crops, thunder, vulcanism, and so on.

Etiology (origin) stories are a core aspect of this. Every religion seems to have them. Sometimes they explain the privileged status of the religious community (or the subordinate status, with a promise of redemption or future victory). Sometimes they explain the origins of the natural world. Most ancient religions treated the origin of the present order in terms of struggles between deities, and most often this order is made from the bodies of vanquished deities (as in the story of Marduk or of the battle between the Olympians and the Titans). The Hebrew book Bereshit (Genesis) is a "demythologising" of this story - the deity merely imposed order on chaos, and none of the resulting heavenly or terrestrial objects are themselves divine in origin or substance).

4. The historical explanandum: the success or failure of particular religions

To be clear, it pays to distinguish general accounts of religion's existence and action from historical arguments about why this or that religion succeeded where another failed. For example, in the Indus valley, an early religion of a kind was the Carvakist materialists, who held a view very similar to Epicureanism - the gods, if they existed, were indifferent to human affairs. This was supplanted by Jainism and the early Brahmanist forms of Hinduism. Why? Likewise, Islam supplanted Hinduism and other local religions in that region to an extent. These processes require special explanation in terms of the utility, conceptual comfort and social influences in particular cases.

Now, having set out these four explananda, we might ask what it is that theories of religious origins are explaining. In short, what is religion?

The definition of religion is a vexed one. There are a couple of approaches people take here - one is to take the modern world religions as the prototypes of religion and to generalise them, attempting to make Mayan, Polynesian, Australian and so forth rituals, organisations and conceptual accounts fit into a typology based on these "great" religions.

Another is to attempt to specify, usually in the context of one or another preferred account of religion, early, "primitive" or universal forms that tend to cluster under the banner of religion, thus including animist, shamanist and rituals of local spirits as "religious". The major difficulty with this is that the defining characteristics of these forms of behaviour are not unique to what we would ordinarily call "religious behaviour". They also appear in terms of political affiliations, cultural fashions, and psychological types.

So I will make an arbitrary but not random definition of religion here: religion is that form of behaviour that contributes to and is constrained by some social organisation that involves culturally mediated rituals of a non-natural kind. That is, in order for it to be religion, it must have some form of organisation amongst the community and have as its target issues that "transcend" the natural or political or economic order. This is not to say that religion doesn't have a role in explaining or justifying these orders, but that it does so in terms that are non-natural.

This is vague enough that it includes such "political religions" as communism, national socialism, and minor variants. It is exact enough to exclude ordinary animisms, family spirits, and ancestor worship. This things are not religious, so much as protoreligious. The sole reason why animist "religions" have been called religions is because they are shoehorned into the typology based on modern religions, and treating them that way both occludes the causes of religion and does injustice to them as phenomena in their own right.

The word religion itself comes from the Latin "religare", to bind. Religious behaviour is, on etymological and more general considerations, behaviour that is bound in formal ways, and requires of its adherents a certain form of behaviour and belief. This therefore includes "secular Judaism", which has more interest in observing certain rules than in theological doctrine, as well as Buddhist religious behaviour even when no deities are in evidence (not even the Buddha himself).

On this basis, I think that we can say that religion begins when social structures are formed from large-scale agrarian foundations, when there are enough people to permit social differentiation, and when territory is fixed and contested. My reason for this is twofold. One is that I wish to give an account of religion as being an outgrowth of our economic and social development, and the other is that I accept the phenomenon often called the "Axial Age", in which the typical forms of religion developed in the second millennium before the modern era, at or about the time when large scale civilisations appeared, and in particular when the transition from the neolithic period to metalworking occurred, which changed the nature of warfare, conquest and migration, not to mention farming technologies and the subsequent explosion in population size.