Tag Archives: religion

Religion and Shamanism: Stress, Uncertainty, Rituals, and the Supernatural

In reading and writing on various topics these past months, I’ve had some straggling thoughts that were coalescing in my mind. The specific topics tumbling around have to do with religion, the right-wing, stress, health, psychology, behavior, and social order (Religion, Spirituality, or Something Else; What does stress do to the mind? And why?; & Working the Reactionary Mind Into a Froth). These are recurring themes in my work. And in recent years I’ve been slowly bringing them together in a coherent picture, maybe even incorporating it all into a meta-theory.

About religion, two points I made. I interrogated the WEIRD social construct of ‘religion’ itself. Many scholars have long suggested that this categorical term may not apply to other cultures, as it specifically formed in the context of Western society during the Protestant Reformation (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science). I just came across a short, if highly informative, discussion about this on the Anthropology subreddit (Are there any known cultures or tribes that had no religion?).

But I also contrasted organized religion proper against spiritual experience. It comes down to defining religion, which is trickier than one might think. And it does seem important to distinguish it from belief in spirits, a spiritual realm, or an immanent spiritual (or animating) force in the world. Indigenous hunter-gatherers, typically as animists, were less likely to separate the spiritual from the material. Their spiritual beliefs, as such, were often proto-scientific attempts at describing and explaining the physical world (species, ecosystems, weather, climate, seasons, etc). And belief might not be the right word, as indigenous religion hews closer to direct experience.

“I think referring to belief in spirits as ‘religious’ is plainly incorrect. To a preindustrial group, what distinction is there between ‘spirits’ and wild animals? Wouldn’t some groups think of an owl as a ‘night spirit’?

“Its more of an inaccurate assessment of biology than religion. Their view of the natural world could be entirely rational and evidence based – but with limited technology, a ‘scientific’ tribesman could rationally conclude, based on available evidence, that some animals could teleport and possess human bodies (after all, parasites can). And if we translate their word for that animal as ‘spirit’, then we falsely call them ‘religious’. Or take the Okapi – Western anthropologists thought this was a ‘magical’ being and part of their religion – until they actually FOUND an Okapi. A lot depends on translation and our definition of what ‘religion’ means.”
~rfmaxson

Part of that same thread, another commenter clarified the point of the spiritual as supernatural or what Westerners would perceive and interpret as the supernatural. Unlike Western religion, animist worldviews are typically referring to concrete realities of a sort, if through a specific cultural lens of interpretation. What’s stated here gets to some other thoughts I have, but for the moment I’ll just plunk it down and let it sit.

“A problem with this is who determines what is supernatural? There are lots of things that can make a person enter an altered mental state, and if you do not fully understand the mechanism, even if you know a direct causal source, they can be are effectively the same as supernatural. The mushroom essence entered you, something was in that animal, and when it bit that person it passed into them.. etc.”
~TheNthMan

As for definition, let’s extend upon what’s already been said. The first commenter also left this next comment. He does name one particular scholar, Morris Berman, who argues for a lack of Western-conceived ‘religion’ in some cases. Also, he once again brings in the practical nature of indigenous spirituality, that of shamanism. The thing is shamans aren’t religious figures in how we think of them. They’re closer to healers and their authority is based on their success in actually healing people, not healing only souls but also bodies; sometimes also healing relationships, communities, ancestral wrongdoings, ecological imbalances, etc. They have to prove their worth by using advanced knowledge of disease, plant medicines, and healing techniques.

“If we define religion more strictly – as belief in an afterlife and/or a divine authority who should be obeyed – then Morris Berman argues that many groups certainly lacked religion (at least before contacting religious groups). He also argues that some modern groups are insincere believers – i.e. they get along easier with their neighbors by claiming Christian/Muslim faith, but it is of little importance in their lives and history. We should remember that to many groups, shamans have knowledge of medicine and philosophy, but NOT ‘sacred authority’. They are not priests. The power of their rituals comes from acquired skill, not divine appointment. This is especially true of nomadic groups, because in Berman’s view, it is agriculture that is the origin of afterlife belief and ‘sacred authority’. He argues for a surprising LACK of religion in cave art – we come from religious culture, so (even if we are atheists ourselves) we see religion everywhere. Of one famous ‘passing into the afterlife’ painting, he asks, aren’t they just crossing a river? Isn’t this just a record of a human migration that actually happened? Where is the afterlife here?”
~rfmaxson

Going into more details about what we mean, one comment broke it down into its components. He throws in an even older scholar, Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), who was one of the earliest to tangle with religion through cross-cultural comparisons. By the way, in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Captive Gods, there is an entire chapter dedicated to Durkheim.

“Ultimately it depends on what you define as religion.

“But I’ll try to be a bit more substantive. If you mean a belief in a supreme being? No, Durkheim a hundred years ago had already noted that not all populations believe in God.

“If you mean a belief in an afterlife (eschatology)? Also no though it gets very complicated very quickly. For example Lienhardt mentions at the end of “Divinity and Experience” about a collective continuation of life, not a personal one. In other words there is an immortality of life itself, separate from divinity, but not of the person. But you also have eschatologies where there is a gradual entropic decay due to, for example, a lack of social dynamism on the part of the dead.

“If you mean religion as having a specialist shaman/priest role? There are plenty of places where virtually all people (or people of a certain gender) are considered shamans in the sense that they all have a shamanic potential whose development is part of a continuous maturation process and/or transcendence of humanity.

“If you mean a lack of cosmological consensus? Then that’s the experience of every anthropologist that does long-duration fieldwork, its a tale as old as fieldwork: “what happens when you die?” “I don’t know I haven’t died yet”. Especially in places like the Amazon where empiricism and epistemological precision is so highly valued, cosmologies are more often than not very lose, mutating frameworks for a continuous debate, nothing remotely resembling a canon.

“The problem is that the secular idea of religion is heavily dependent on a sedimentary view of the world. From this perspective you have different layers (like a cultural layer, a biological layer, a physical layer) each one serving as a basis for what supersedes it. So religion is conceived as a projection upon a common inhuman biological or physical reality, in that sense a society without a religion is just a society that agrees with the observers metaphysics.”
~notenome

To pull out one bit, it’s stated that, “Especially in places like the Amazon where empiricism and epistemological precision is so highly valued, cosmologies are more often than not very l[o]ose, mutating frameworks for a continuous debate, nothing remotely resembling a canon.” I don’t know much about the Amazon region overall. But anyone who follows my writings knows that I regularly return to the Piraha, one of those epistemologically precise Amazonian cultures, as based on linguistic precision that disallows non-attributed claims and abstract generalizations.

[As a side note, the Piraha could be a remnant of a particular kind of culture that was more common before mass genocide and assimilation. They represent a far opposite extreme of WEIRD hegemony. But the indigenous cultures that survived into modernity probably have most often been those that are the least different from imperial conquerors and colonial settlers, those most able to accomodate to the WEIRD and change their cultures to fit into the WEIRD so as to be perceived as less threatening. Any culture that appeared too alien would’ve been targeted for genocidal elimination. The Piraha may have survived simply in being so isolated and so small in number, while in an area with little military or economic interest.]

The Piraha are an example, according to Daniel Everett, of indigenous non-religion but not non-spirituality. They see ‘spirits’ (or what a WEIRDo might interpret as such), if Everett had no idea what they were seeing. In one incident, he and his family, as missionaries, couldn’t see a spirit or else didn’t know what to look for, even when the whole tribe pointed at it across the river. In that case, the Piraha might’ve been referring to a specific species, ecological pattern, the way the light filtered through the canopy, etc that was beyond Everett’s perception and conception. But in any case, the Piraha considered it objectively and obviously real — and out in the open! It makes one wonder that it wasn’t really a ‘spirit’ in at all.

To add to the confusion, it’s not only a problem of Western language being potentially inapplicable to non-Western cultures and their experience of reality. Colonial imperialism and post-colonial globalization have had a massive impact of Westernization. It’s not only that Western language and ideas have been enforced on other cultures but it has altered those cultures as well. So, many religions may have only become such because of Western demands in treating them as religions, and during colonialism legally or even violently forcing them to comply with Western religious norms.

“Yes and no.

“It is incorrect that “even the most primitive” had some concept of a higher power, as the concept of a High God is a remarkably provincial one that was superimposed onto other cosmologies over the last few hundred years. For example, Christian missionaries and proto-anthropologists (and plenty of straight up anthropologists) often encountered the names of ancestors and forces or breaths (short handed in English to “spirit”) and shoehorned them into a Judeo-Christian template. This is something that the northern Ugandan writer/anthropologist/poet, Okot p’Bitek, wrote about in-depth. See here [Decolonizing African Religion: A Short History of African Religions in Western Scholarship] for a link to one of his books about this. Many cultures adapted to this categorizing and so their indigenous cosmologies were transformed.

“Despite this, the whole category of “religion,” whether organized or unorganized, is one that, again, is provincial. It especially comes out of the way Western European life was reorganized during and after the Protestant Reformation. The idea that we can divide up our experiences into secular and religious is a fundamentally modern and Western one, whereas for most of human history the stuff we think of as “religious” wasn’t separate from all the other stuff. To bring it back to the previous ethnographic example, contemporary northern Ugandans don’t consider spirit possession, divination, or mediumship (shamanism) to be religion at all, and their word for religion comes from the foreign Arabic word for religion: dini. The majority of Ugandans will say their religion is Christianity or Islam, but it doesn’t mean they don’t also practice “traditional religion.”

“In short, all peoples have had what we think of as “religiousness. I wouldn’t even call them “belief systems” or “supernatural” ideas because, you guessed it, those concepts are primarily Christian ones. If you want to read more about this intellectual history, one good first stop (but not the last by any means) is the work of Talal Asad.”
~BasicCableHolidayLog

This brings me to another Reddit discussion I noticed (Why do socialists often think religion will wither away in a socialist society?). Karl Marx famously claimed that religion was the opiate of the masses. But he wasn’t arguing that socialists should see the religious as the enemy. The point wasn’t that, once leftists were in power, they should abolish religion. He simply meant that religion was a non-answer to problems that had to be understood in material terms. Once material needs were taken care of, religious answers would offer little or no consolation and attraction. Hence, organized religion would become moot or at least lose its prominence. Certainly, it didn’t represent polar opposition and a totalizing threat to the leftist project.

“From this perspective, many socialists think religion will gradually wither away under socialism for three main reasons:

  1. “Reduction of alienation – If exploitation, insecurity, and powerlessness decline, the psychological and social need for compensatory belief weakens.
  2. “Human powers become visible – Achievements that once appeared miraculous (collective provision, universal care, solidarity across classes) are recognized as human products.
  3. “Ideals become immanent – Moral aspirations previously framed in theological terms are embedded in everyday social practice and institutions.

“That said, your point is important: religion is historically adaptable. Marxists who expect religion to disappear don’t necessarily deny adaptation; rather, they assume that as the social function of religion changes, its distinctively supernatural content becomes less necessary. What may persist are ethical traditions, symbolic language, or community practices, but increasingly detached from strong metaphysical commitments.”
~Ill-Software8713

Though I largely agree, I’d make the additional point that it’s not limited to only class analysis: poverty, inequality, socioeconomic status, dominance hierarchy, power disparity, permanent underclass, worker control of the means of production, etc. Economics is just one aspect of public health and environmental health. Another commenter came closer to my own view, of which I’ve written about lately (What does stress do to the mind? And why?; & Moral Imagination: Conservative vs Traditional, Reactionary vs Radical).

“If some one says “There Are No Atheists in a Trench when it gets bombed” this is a argument against trenches and warfare not for theology.

“If you look at famous examples Luther vowed to become a monk in a thunderstorm. Where he felt powerless. When do people go to religion if they are sick if there loved ones are dying.

“And even in the bible the burning bush, with what does he address Moses? “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.””
~CryptoAktivist

About the abovementioned “strong metaphysical commitments.” That is what’s seen with the Amazonian “empiricism and epistemological precision,” as exemplified by Piraha and other tribes. Such cultures don’t concern themselves with beliefs as overt dogma, theological or mythological, supernatural or metaphysical. If you ask them about god(s), afterlife, survival of souls, or whatever, they’d simply have no opinion on the matter. It’s outside the scope of their experience and they’re not prone to speculation and abstraction, as their language limits themselves to concretely verifiable claims and immediate lived reality.

Having no serious problems, they have no use for prayer and supplication, rituals and priests. In fact, they don’t even bother with shamans, as they lack all figures of authority. That is the interesting point. Animism seems near universal outside of modern civilization of mass urbanization and industrialization, particularly outside of WEIRD culture. But animism doesn’t necessarily lead to shamanism. That emergence of shamanism, as some Jaynesian scholars have argued, represents a step in a new direction.

Shamans might’ve been the first charismatic figures who stood above and outside the communal identity. According to some scholars following in the footsteps of Julian Jaynes, that is the foundation upon which formed shaman-prophets, shaman-chiefs, and shaman-kings; upon which further formed god-kings and god-emperors. Manvir Singh, in Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, argues that shamanism, or at least the potential of it, exists in all humans and commonly expresses in diverse societies. Shamanic initiation and practice involves an active alteration of the psyche:

“There isn’t a good word that captures the transformative effects of shamanic practices. So I propose the term ‘xenize’, from the Greek prefix xen meaning ‘foreign’ or ‘other’. We can say, then, that asceticism, magical surgeries, and death-and-rebirth rituals all xenize a specialist—that is, they apparently turn the specialist into a different kind of entity, one more credibly endowed with special powers” (p. 66).

He clearly demarcates shamanism, in this sense, from religion. A xenized specialist doesn’t require any religious trappings at all. As Manvir Singh, various authority figures, from doctors to tech leaders to demagogues, can come to be perceived in this manner (Moral Imagination: Conservative vs Traditional, Reactionary vs Radical). Hence, no claims of the supernatural are required, nor of divine authority.

If there is no particular reason to suspect shamans would measure higher on social dominance orientation (SDO), Manvir Sing’s version of shamans as xenized experts certainly often merge with the SDO personality. That’s simply because it’s a position of authority, as an early development of power disparity, and those seeking to abuse authority would be attracted to that social role and line of work. Indeed, Singh does mention that it’s not unknown for shaman’s to use their power and privilege for self-gain, including demanding sexual payment from women and sometimes with a threat added (e.g., if they don’t comply, they’ll give birth to a non-human animal).

That’s where we can get to the point about why shamanism and religion takes hold at all. We should go back to the point that, “If some one says “There Are No Atheists in a Trench when it gets bombed” this is a argument against trenches and warfare not for theology.” That is the left-wing argument for public health (How Conditions Change Your Brain; We Need To Talk About Health; A Theory of Societal Retardation; Signaling In Our Body-Mind and Our Body Politic; & Sickly Left-Wing Authoritarians Don’t Understand Health).

The main health factor is nonzoonotic (human-spread) infectious-parasitical disease, as explained according to parasite-stress theory and the behavioral immune system. In many tribal communities, sudden, severe, or unknown diseases are often attributed to supernatural intervention (witchcraft, spirit anger, or sorcery) rather than purely natural causes.

This is why both such diseases, authoritarianism, shamanism, and world religions arise and/or concentrated near the equatorial zone. Like many others, Amanda L. Toth “observed a significant relationship between latitude and the likelihood that a particular culture group is described as exhibiting beliefs in interpersonal magical harm. This indicates that there may be a relationship between beliefs in interpersonal sorcery and parasitic and infectious disease prevalence and richness. It is unknown why only harmful shamanistic magic, or sorcery, was correlated with latitude” (Shamanistic Beliefs and the Behavioral Immune System).

But under bad conditions, the same pattern will occur further north, such as happened in Germany and Russia in the early 20th century. And I’d note that Nazi scapegoating of Jews isn’t all that different in motivation than an equatorial tribe that buries people alive who are perceived as possessed, so that the intruding spirit can’t escape with their dying breath. It’s not only disease, though.

“Here is a crucial clue: shamanism often arises among people exposed to uncertainty. A case in point is the recent rise of shamanism among the Buryat in Upper Mongolia. Following the collapse of socialism in 1989-91, the economic rug was pulled out from under the Buryat. This led to terrible poverty and starvation among a people whose cultural identity had largely been rubbed out over a series of generations. In this existential vacuum, the Buryat shamans blossomed like wildflowers as people sought new ways to control the uncertainty in which they had found themselves.”
~Thomas T. Hills, Masters of Reality

In Shamanism, Manvir Singh agrees with that appraisal: “uncertainty breeds rituals” (p. 48) and “rituals worldwide seem to bring solace” (p. 53) (Moral Imagination: Conservative vs Traditional, Reactionary vs Radical). This is why authoritarian states are sometimes referred to as political religions, as they’re obsessed with rituals and for the same reason (Authoritarian Dance and Music).

Even if that poverty and starvation didn’t cause a disease epidemic, the stress and desperation alone would induce the seeking of security and comfort, as part of norm enforcement, ingroup protection, xenophobia, and philopatry. Within that instinctual impulse of group survival, there is an interesting pattern about uncertainty and it’s perceived cause.

“Overall, an overwhelming 96% of the societies had supernatural explanations for disease, and 92% had supernatural explanations for natural causes of food scarcity. For natural hazards, the figure was 90%. […] Among social phenomena, 82% of societies held supernatural explanations for murder; for warfare, it was 67%; for theft, 26%.”
~Emma Young, Ghosts and gaps: Supernatural beliefs fill similar unknowns across cultures
(in reference to J.C. Jackson, et al, Supernatural explanations across the globe are more common for natural than social phenomena).

Hence:

“Overall, supernatural explanations were more prevalent for natural rather than for social phenomena. Researchers also found that societies with higher social complexity were more likely to deploy supernatural explanations for social phenomena than societies with lower social complexity. [Danica] Dillion thinks that supernatural explanations may be more common in larger, urban societies because it’s harder to discern the causal agents of social incidents in societies with more complex social webs
~Conor Feehly, Why We Believe That the Supernatural Causes Natural Events

The increase of complexity, exaggerated with mass urbanization and industrialization, almost always corresponds to an increase of uncertainty. And it’s undeniable that society at present, between bureaucracy and technology, is more complex than ever in human existence. Combined with other stressors and trauma, this causes everything to feel daunting and overwhelming.

Then as people feel more uncertain from stress (sickliness, risk, threats, danger, poverty, insecurity, scarcity, competition, inequality, etc), they’ll have reduced cognitive function (need for cognition, cognitive complexity, divergent thinking, mental flexibility, perspective shifting, exploratory behavior, etc) — as related to the personality traits ‘intellect’ and ‘openness to experience’ — to perceive, comprehend, analyze, explain, and deal with that complexity. Potentially, it turns into a vicious cycle where problems are permanently entrenched.

This might be the advantage of shamanism, in not merely assuaging anxiety and fear, as happens with religion, but actively promoting the opposite. The use of psychedelics are effective for healing mood disorders, trauma, and addiction; specifically by helping to rewire the brain and reset new cognitive patterns, while increasing ‘openness’. But most modern religions are far less effective, if at all, to achieve this beneficial and transformative end.

Religion, Spirituality, or Something Else

I’m no longer part of organized religion, if I retain an openness to views that aren’t naive realism, reductionist materialism, and simplistic scientism.

To my mind, the world is stranger than we can imagine. It’s easy to realize that truth by trying to wrap one’s mind around modern physics (Matt Strassler, Waves in an Impossible Sea). It’s even more challenging in that we now know quantum physics also applies to the macro level; hence, quantum biology. The way we typically perceive reality is not how reality operates, and as a culture we have yet to come to terms with this (A Paradigm Shift of Paradigm Shifts).

To get to my main point, there is a common distinction made between religion and spirituality, with the two sometimes overlapping in practice. For example, within Christianity, direct experience (anamnesis, revelation, visions, holy spirit, etc) was prioritized and privileged in certain traditions: Paulinism, Gnosticism (or what later got called that by heresiologists), certain strains of Catholicism (mysticism, quietism), certain strains of Protestantism (Pentecostalism, Pietism), Anabaptism, Quakerism, etc.

Experience, though, is a tricky thing. But it’s all we got — there is no escaping it. Even science, ultimately, is just about making sense of experience.

As for religion, I was raised in the Unity Church that is on the far end of the experiential side of the spectrum. Based on a supposed direct relationship to reality, one of the tenets of Unity theology is that every claim should be tested in one’s own mind and life. Nothing is to be taken on blind faith alone! Unity is what’s called New Thought; a mix of 19th century evangelicalism, Swedenborgianism, and Mesmerism.

It attracts many new agey types and so its adherents tend to be open to Eastern spirituality, philosophy, worldview, and practice. The Eastern is more resonant to Unity thought by far than to mainline Christianity and to other conventional varieties of Abrahamic monotheism. For one, Unity focuses on mind, thought, and awareness. The divine is often spoken of in terms of the Mind of God. It’s a short step from there to Buddha Mind or Buddha-nature.

There are a few reasons why I’m thinking on this. I just wrote about why the death of the body, though grief-inducing, can be less disturbing than death of mind, self, and personality as caused by dementia, brain damage, trauma, drug abuse, etc. That led me to bring up some related things about differences in response, what causes grief or not, what disturbs or not, and why.

I find myself often turning to other kinds of cultures, mentalities, and worldviews. I have a particular interest in non-WEIRD dividualism, animism, bundle theory of mind, and 4/5E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, & extended; + ecological). Buddhists ascribe to bundle theory of mind, as opposed to ego theory of mind. Animists have a similar model of psychology. As such, both of them don’t necessarily and entirely share the biases and concerns of  WEIRDos with their inheritance from Christianity.

Maybe that’s why the development of modern Western thought on religion was challenged by these other examples (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science).

These traditions or cultures were not always judged to be ‘religions’ because they didn’t conform to the conventions of monotheism and and ego theory of mind, such as a belief in an unchanging immortal soul. It’s true these non-WEIRD traditions emphasize experience, what could be called ‘spirituality’ or else something else entirely. But it’s not a matter of an experiential focus in a general sense, rather how it’s experienced and how that experience is understood, along with what kind of identity and reality it expresses.

Daniel Everett asserts the animistic Piraha, for instance, don’t have religion; certainly not in the way we understand it. He has good reason for his argument, in having lived among them.

They lack authority figures and hierarchy, commandments and rules of conduct, formal practices of rituals and worship, theology and cosmology, mythological and folkloric narratives (e.g., an origin story), belief in souls and an afterlife, faith in supernatural beings or forces, etc. Like Buddhists, the Piraha are agnostics and atheists in the strict sense, specifically weak atheists (passive lack of  belief in god, but no active disbelief in god). They simply don’t even think about deities, unless a missionary comes around, but even then it has no relevance to them.

Most important, the Piraha are non-believers overall, since belief isn’t an issue. They simply go by what they immediately experience, which does occasionally include what modern Westerners would deem ‘supernatural’. As a case in point, one time Everett heard the Piraha all yelling down by the river. When he arrived, they were pointing to the other side. They all claimed to see a spirit.

Apparently, it was immediately real to their senses and shared perception, whatever it was that they were ‘seeing’. Still, they have no belief about spirits and so wouldn’t have placed a doctrinal interpretation over their direct experience. It’s all purely what they knew firsthand, if Everett couldn’t see anything at all.

The Piraha only accept what they personally experience or what someone they personally know has personally experienced. In fact, with the Piraha language, it’s impossible to make a statement about reality without specifically attributing it to the experiential source of the claim.

This is why Everett, as a Christian missionary, failed to convert the Piraha. He was forced to admit that he had never met Jesus and so, to the Piraha, his Christianity was moot. They have no use for ‘religion’ proper. And a textual scripture meant nothing to them. Or rather less than nothing, as his apologetical blathering just irritated them. Finally, one member of the tribe told him that, though they liked him as a person, he needed to shut up about Jesus or go away. He decided to shut up.

That’s how Everett lost his faith. The experiential atheism of the Piraha was more compelling, not to mention more satisfying. They showed him the emptiness of his ‘religion’ as a reified abstraction.

Buddhism might be a more interesting example for the reason it’s been in dialogue with monotheism for millennia.

The two traditions were already mixing it up in the Mediterranean world at least by early Christianity. Some Christians at the time praised Buddhists for what was perceived as strong morality or principled behavior, although we should clarify that Buddhist compassion is a way of relating, not a dogma. The initial faith of Augustine, Manichaeanism, was a mix of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism. Also, Muslims and Buddhists have been dialoguing for centuries in Southeast Asia (not to mention Islam may have partly formed out of Shiva worship, which means there was already and Eastern element within it).

Some sects of Buddhism are clearly religions in the way modern Westerners understand their own faiths-based institutions and practices. Think of the Tibetan Buddhists with theological, symbolic, and ritualistic complexity rivaling Hinduism and Catholicism. But that isn’t the case for all Buddhism.

At its most bare bones, Zen Buddhists don’t always accept a religious identity. It’s Buddhism mixed with Taoism, or possibly having its deepest roots in Taoism (David Hinton). Zen is a philosophy and practice that can be used by those of any religion or lack of religion. Buddha Mind is not something to be believed in like God, nor is it in competition with God — it has nothing to say about theism at all.

The whole point is to experience Buddha Mind and prove it, to understand and be changed by it. Unlike Christianity, Buddhism is operating on an articulated psychology as its foundation.

This talk of what may or may not be a religion is, obviously, a contentious issue. And many people respond to it with defensiveness, as saying something isn’t a religion can sound dismissive to those who place immense psychic energy in the category. Some argue that to say Zen isn’t a religion is a Western bias. Then again, maybe the problem is the insistence that all of the world has to conform to Western language, categories, and ideology.

On the AskHistorians subreddit, someone asked if Zen is a religion. Yes, historically, it’s part of the Buddhist tradition. Still, that doesn’t really answer the question. Historians have no education and training to understand religion, much less to interrogate religious studies. The entire concept of ‘religion’ is a modern Western construct, specifically one that arose in response to Western religion having entered a period of crisis and critique. That’s the point Appiah makes and he demonstrates how complex a topic it is.

This kind of intellectual complexity appeals to my sensibility, as someone who is extremely high on the personality trait ‘openness to experience’.  In being a radical skeptic and experiential realist, I tend to hold my views lightly and warily. I’m always ready to be challenged and ever prepared to change my mind.

This came up as I read Appiah’s book, Captive Gods. It’s a historical survey and ideological analysis, tracing the lines of influence over the centuries.

Appiah’s careful inquiry brought to light so many cultural biases about the socially constructed category of ‘religion’. It might go beyond if this or that tradition is a religion. The very way of thinking about the phenomenon might be all wrong, misleading, or unhelpful. Worse still, since the modern idea of ‘religion’ has been forced upon Christianity, it’s caused us to lose contact with what Christianity originally meant as a charismatic and ecstatic practice (Stephen J. Patterson, The Forgotten Creed).

As others have noted, until the Axial Age, there wasn’t even a notion that was vaguely akin to ‘religion’. But Appiah argues that religion, in the way we understand it now, wasn’t formulated and used until early modernity. Previous conceptual terms can’t be treated as synonyms because the context of meaning was radically different. We make those differences disappear by projecting modern religious studies onto the past.

Into late feudalism, there was no space between Catholicism and the rest of society, between religiosity and everyday life. It seeped into everything. To be Catholic was immersive, not something that happened in a church or cathedral on Sundays.

Even animism is a WEIRD conception placed upon non-WEIRD experience. Animists, as such, don’t need a separate category for their worldview as they know nothing else. It’s absolute and all-encompassing. The world feels dynamically alive to them and so they couldn’t imagine a society like ours that experiences the world as a corpse and a husk, as inert and mute matter.

It makes me think how paltry, how shrunken down is modern humanity’s sense of self and reality. Even our ‘spirituality’ seems tame, weak, and crippled.

The emergence of religion as a conceptual category isn’t only an intellectual accretion. It represents a shift and rupture in the modern psyche. That is what allows us to speak of a separate spirituality. This likely relates to why ‘religion’ has become a political tool and weapon. MAGA evangelicalism represents an extreme endpoint of this fracture. Such religious identity no longer has anything to do with what Christianity meant before. A large number of MAGA evangelicals don’t even attend church. For them, it’s solely a politicized identity.

The religious right worries about the decline of religion. But maybe it’s precisely that we speak of ‘religion’ at all is itself a factor behind the change. It creates a gap in our psyche and society that inevitably grows into a chasm.