The “Missing Link” in Religious Studies:

The average western person is very likely to possess a number of metaphysical priors and assumptions that they do not even recognize as being metaphysical. These assumptions have usually been absorbed passively from the cultural environment of the 20th and 21st centuries, and they’re often very stubborn because the modern “ambient ideology” has a nasty streak of arrogance against historic cultures, an arrogance which it justifies by citing the immense increase of physical quality of life and material wealth seen in modernity.

In the course of my studies I have come to believe that religion cannot be seen as a discrete set of actions and assumptions populated by different specimens to be compared and contrasted. Instead I believe that the religious impulse and the varying practices which arise from it are inherent “organs” of the human being, perhaps not of his individual biology but certainly of his eusocial and “composite” nature. This theory is not particularly new, but from what I have seen it never seems to lead to a satisfactory conclusion; It tends to be put forward by people who are overall dismissive of the actual claims of any given religion, people who are looking to explain religion away instead of truly explain religion.

Exoterica: Religions’ Social Utility

Now, if we want to understand religion, let’s start with the visible and accessible parts of it, the immediate, practical effects that religious rites, rules, and communities have on both individuals and their societies. This is actually a challenging place to start because this is where religions tend to differ most. This presents the added difficulty that much of the existing sociological or psychological research on religion exists entirely within the christian or post-christian paradigm of the West and fails to distinguish what is inherent to human religiosity from what is unique to christianity or the other Abrahamic sects (for example, the laughable “conflict theory” of religion).

The most obvious function that most people are aware of is social. Religion structures social life by determining or justifying people’s positions relative to each other and the obligations, rights, and privileges that accord with these positions. An extremely important and ancient example is hospitality, the ethical standard of behavior between host and guest. This ethic was communicated and preserved in the myths of many, if not most, cultures. The Greeks tell a story of Zeus and Hermes disguising themselves as wanderers to test the hospitality of humans, punishing the inhospitable and rewarding the kindness of Philemon and Baucis who finally hosted them graciously despite their poverty. The Norse tell of the god Heimdall receiving hospitality from three families of differing means and rewarding each with offspring, as well as several myths involving the wanderings of Odin. This social function of enforcing the ethic of hospitality was extremely important to premodern people for whom journeys were long and dangerous. Without this ethic the extensive trade networks that facilitated the complex ancient economy would not have been possible, nor would there have been the cultural exchanges that influenced philosophy and religion over the years. 

Moral Causes, or Material?

Hospitality is only one example, though, and not even the one that most people would first think of when considering the social effects of religion. There are also the “family values” that, at least theoretically, determine the shape and function of the average family unit in a culture. This is a messy line of inquiry or justification, though, because family formation is also very subject to material influences. For example, the American two-parent household of only immediate relations, and increasingly the American split or single-parent family, did not emerge from any religious doctrine. The “immediate” family was a simple adaptation to the economic reality that Americans often have to relocate in order to pursue careers and so extended families end up spread across a large distance. Single or split-parent families are likewise a simple adaptation to the introduction of women to the workforce and the resulting reorganization of society. We can extend this logic and recognize that the huge families of the past were largely an adaptation to agricultural life and the large amount of cheap or free labor required for it. Despite the raw economic or sociological forces at work here, though, “religion” does still play a role – but often more as a coping mechanism than an organizing principle. I use religion in quotes because we have to acknowledge religious impulses and tendencies as something that goes beyond specific creeds and is ambiently omnipresent as the value-making faculty of culture. American families were not necessarily immediate and patricentric because of protestant faiths, but these traits weren’t independent from those faiths either. Those churches, both through doctrine and through social example, inculcated an expectation in people across generations of what a family looks like, and people then went on to mimic that model. When those churches were dominant cultural forces, that model of the family was dominant as well. 

The same process is at work in the fact that Catholic and diaspora Orthodox Christians often maintain tight extended family groups even when they are non-practicing “cultural christians.” Their example is also useful because it’s easy to see how ethnic and economic considerations intersect with religious ones; catholic doctrines are not more “pro-grandma” or “pro-cousin” than protestant ones, but most American catholics are catholic due to their ancestry, and that ancestry usually hails from ethnicities that both have more clannish cultures and also tended to be less socioeconomically advantaged than “old-stock” WASPS. 

America’s Hidden Religion: “Ex-Christianity”

If these two specific creeds accompany and/or encourage specific family formations, then for split/single-parent families we should also expect to find some religious or para-religious ethic connected. And this ethic is none other than the current state religion of America itself – materialistic “ex-christianity.” Here, certain elements of religious ethics remain vestigial but are rapidly decaying without their metaphysical basis. The most important characteristic of this philosophy is that it lacks any way to truly justify making tough sacrifices. The sacrifices that are necessary to keep two people committed to each other and to their children are very steep. The loss of a cultural ethic of sacrificing personal comfort, wealth, and ease for the sake of benefits beyond this life (whether that means heaven or simply the lives of your descendants) coincides with material and cultural developments that have truly called into question the value of the possible rewards. No matter how much you sacrifice for your children, they are growing up in a culture where most media is subtly or blatantly encouraging them to disrespect you and your beliefs, to view you and your culture as either obsolete or repressive. And what TikTok doesn’t destroy, divorce court, the IRS, or a downturning economy might. These are all by no means insurmountable obstacles, but they are non-negligible risks. As birth rates plummet (and yes, the factors causing single parenthood heavily overlap with the causes of birthrate decline) almost every western or westernized individual will have to face these risks head-on in their own lives. To do this, people will require a much stronger ethic than what American ex-christianity has to offer.

The Individual and the Collective

Now, here we get into the territory of the inescapable fact that whatever impact religion has on social matters, it can only create by having an equal and corresponding impact in the hearts of individual people. In fact all community-defining or community-creating powers and rules are subject to this same law, because society grows out of individuals like the trunk of a tree growing from its roots. So from here on out, when considering religion’s social functions, we also have to consider its personal functions. 

Taboo

Firstly, let us consider taboo. Taboo – and the tools of ostracization or violence that enforce it – is a crucial way of aligning social priorities with the individual’s decision-making process. Taboos emerge into a society from a number of different origins. Often they serve as limiters on social “arms races,” like with norms about the permissible number of sexual partners. Many taboos derive from natural human instincts, such as disgust, fear, or jealousy. Taboos often attempt to minimize the intrusion of negative instincts into social life by preventing people from triggering them in each other or by instilling internal discipline over them. Historic rituals of initiation into manhood, for example, often served the purpose of teaching an initiate to manage fear. Despite often having violent content or increasing a man’s potential for effective violence, these initiations increased safety within the society by improving a young male’s ability to adhere to taboos against internecine violence because violence is often triggered by fear or disgust. Even simple taboos against speaking rudely to strangers or against stealing serve the vital function of encouraging general social goodwill. Taboos have an inherent duality in that they are created and enforced socially, externally to the individual, but individuals can internalize them in the course of living in society and so often observe them even when alone.

Taboo is especially relevant and interesting because of modern society’s strange relationship to it. With the fundamental basis of our value system being replaced over only a few decades, the West has demolished its old taboos and established new ones with astonishing speed. The speed of this transformation has allowed us to witness some very interesting things about taboo and about culture-making in general. 

Status & Coordination

Firstly, taboo is absolutely, inescapably inevitable. It is a basic and foundational function of culture. We can now be sure of this because our culture’s rapid development of new taboos has only come after an attempt to shed the very idea of taboo itself in the decades between roughly 1960 and 2010. These decades saw us indulging in “post-scarcity” and attempting to set up a social order to match, where only the most fundamental restrictions on behavior were seen as justifiable. In some sense this was natural, since many taboos do indeed exist for the sake of preserving material stability in a scarce environment. Market and supply volatility and climate anxiety have now largely reversed that sense of optimism, and now we see taboo return with a vengeance in the form of “cancel culture” and related phenomena.

Secondly, though blatant punishment is a big factor in taboo, we can now see that culture and its taboos are actually mostly constructed by relative status and by peoples’ desire to attain higher status by modeling the behavior of more powerful people. Role models determine what is acceptable and unacceptable, and if morals change then they either only change after a culture’s role-models accept the change or because they made that change. The most powerful deterrent to a behavior is not punishment – plenty of people broke the law even in much more draconian ages. The most powerful deterrent to behavior is to connect that behavior to being low-status. Make people think that something is for nerds, creeps, or dirty poors, and they will crawl through broken glass to avoid it. But if people think something is for the rich and beautiful then they will even risk corporeal punishment to do it. A very easy example of this in our own time is tobacco and marijuana. Anti-smoking campaigns have connected cigarettes with poverty and physical unattractiveness – this is the crux of their strategy far more so than informing people of health risks. Meanwhile, rich and famous rappers, comedians, and actors have been publicly praising marijuana for decades now and it has continually increased in popularity despite (rather inconsistent) legal suppression. Compare this modern state of affairs to that of the 1930s, when tobacco was a mark of high society and marijuana was reviled for its association with discriminated-against groups. 

The Role of Role Models

This may be difficult to hear if you are not already “unplugged”, but most cultural opinions are established through this sort of elite fiat and associative logic. Most people never have and never will have deeply held convictions about most things. There is just too much information to filter on our own, so we observe what positions are affiliated with high status versus low status and then conform to the higher status position. We outsource our opinions according to a small set of heuristics for establishing who to trust, and popularity is the most important of those heuristics.

There is a chicken-or-the-egg question to consider with celebrities and role-models, because usually people become celebrities by embodying some aspect of a culture’s existing values. For instance, take Old America’s industrial pantheon of Ford, Carnegie, etc. People in that now-dead entrepreneurial America genuinely admired these titans of industry because the cardinal value of that society was productivity and wealth. But today’s culture is centered on entertainment, and so although billionaires exert just as much influence as they used to, people are more likely to resent them than to take them as role models, instead admiring musicians and actors and “content creators”. 

In traditional societies, role models usually have some spiritual dimension to them, whether they’re saints or demigods. I will actually contend that the cultural faculty of elevating role-models is itself religious or para-religious, and the people who are elevated as role models by a culture reveal much about its religion. Role models like Henry Ford or Kim Kardashian don’t indicate an irreligious culture, they just indicate that a culture’s religion is materialistic and presentist – they have performed the rites of the market properly and received the rewards, and this is aspirational for people. It’s so aspirational that it puts such elites in a position where they can change peoples’ values because whatever they do is seen as a good model of how to carry out the “rites.” The basis of these role models’ influence is not their wealth, it’s their superiority. The wealth is only perceived as important because it’s the justification of these elites’ superiority, but in other social orders different factors – for example, bravery or piety – are viewed as the basis of superiority, and therefore the populace value those factors over monetary ones.

Making Meaning: How Religion Coordinates Our Values

Now, recall earlier our mention of two things: That taboo aligns individual peoples’ incentives with the priorities of society, and that religion can only organize society by influencing the individuals of that society. This discussion of role-models and aspiration leads us back to that. We now must discuss what I believe to be the central function of all religion and truly a distillation of its essence: Its power of curating and organizing meaning. Religion provides a framework for assigning meaning and value to every part of life and for ranking those parts in a hierarchy of priorities. Religion usually elevates some non-materialistic considerations above purely physical ones, and this is valuable because it lengthens the “time-horizon” of a society, i.e. the distance into the future that society orients itself around. The hallmark of advanced culture is a long time-horizon, where great consideration is paid to whether decisions will benefit future generations. Having a long time horizon requires being able to forego immediate gratification, and foregoing immediate gratification, behaviorally speaking, can only be encouraged in two ways: Either one must have faith in greater gain in the future, or one must value something immaterial like honor or purity more than one values the gratifying object. Doctrines regarding the afterlife or reincarnation encourage a long, indeed eternal, time-horizon for individuals. Doctrines of ancestor-veneration encourage a similarly long time-horizon on the social scale by reminding people of the sacrifices their forebears made and assuring them that their own sacrifices will be honored by their descendants in turn.

Meaning and Narrative

Meaning isn’t just about the future, it’s also integral to the past and present. The very word “history” means “narrative” or “story” – when we study “history,” we are not studying raw facts, because raw facts are way too overwhelmingly abundant to be meaningful in themselves. We can only study the past by organizing facts into narrative structures that assign meaning to agents and their actions. This is why, for ancient societies, myth and history were inseparable. Take Homer for example: Archaeologists are fairly confident that the Trojan War was a real historical event, yet the structure of the Iliad and other mythological sources regarding the Trojan War have been found to closely mirror the narrative structures of “ur-myths” that can be reconstructed by studying the similarities of myths from various related Indo-European cultures. What happened in this case is that bards and poets, in the course of recounting historical events, attached these events to corresponding mythical tropes because these mythical tropes carried metaphorical or spiritual meaning that these poets wanted to attach to the historical events. 

This “meaning-ization” of history is absolutely indispensable because it shapes a culture’s self-conception of its strengths, weaknesses, and values. And this is another facet of religion that American Ex-Christianity is not exempt from despite its arrogant airs to have transcended it: Its myth, which it subordinates all of its investigation and recounting of history to, is the myth of “Progress” which allows us to flatter ourselves with the idea that we are uniquely free and uniquely moral when compared to the people of the past. 

Immanent Mythology

We are also always in the process of mythologizing our individual life stories. Our religious impulses and habits inform how we assign meaning to every event that happens to us. Let’s take the example of a teenage love affair – was your first high school boyfriend or girlfriend an important rite of passage that helped you learn what you want out of a relationship, or was it a forbidden romance that threatened your relationship with parents and relatives or left you feeling impure and conflicted? Let’s also take the example of losing a loved one, or, more specifically, recovering from that loss – Were you spurred to take fuller advantage of life while you have it? Did you come to understand or appreciate spirituality? Or did it seem senseless and meaningless and send you into depression? Every single one of these reactions is conditioned by personal sensibilities that I believe must be considered religious because they all deal with value and “value-management.”

This faculty of organizing raw facts into meaningful narratives is inherent to our day-to-day experience of life, too. In fact, psychologically, we do not perceive objects “in themselves” – we perceive the meanings we associate with them, which is why two objects that share very little physical resemblance can both register to us as “chairs” or “tables.” This is a behavior inherent to homo sapiens, and if it’s not intentionally and pro-socially harnessed by a religious framework then it will run amok and cause social discord until a religious consensus emerges out of the aggregate or is imposed by outside actors. This is the process America has been undergoing for the past few decades.

Sacred Barriers and Controlled Attention

The basic tool of harnessing this meaning-making power is sacralization. This is how religion curates and manages values: It sets aside items, symbols, spaces, and time periods as sacred, separate from the normal; para-normal, if you will. Sacralized objects, places, and times serve as “mandalas” that command deep attention, and this attention creates connection, which is the basis of all meaning. Often the symbols that serve to direct our attention and attachment are derived from things that relate to concrete needs and attachments, transmuting our connection to things like sustenance and shelter into attachments with higher realities. Almost all religions involve sacrificing or sanctifying food or drink in some manner for this reason. The christian sacrament is a good example of this sublimation. This logic is also why funerals and marriage ceremonies are religious affairs. “Till death do us part” is an extension of a sexual relationship’s time-horizon and a reminder to the participants that their personal, corporeal attachment to each other is not independent of their spiritual attachment to each other.

This curation of meaning and value and relation is inescapable, all individuals and all societies do it, and if this is how we are going to define religion then we will have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that all societies are and must be religious. Some say religion is a social construct – well, here I am to say that society is a religious construct. There is no way to eusocially organize people into a shared entity without organizing their attachments and their perception of meaning.

If there is resistance to this idea, it can only be because of an unjustifiably narrow view of religion – which is understandable, because the very idea of cordoning religion off into an isolated corner, like placing an animal in a cage for observation, is thoroughly modern and was only brought about by a religious conversion from theistic christianity to atheistic ex-christianity. Historically no religious value-system really considers itself in the terms of a closed and isolated machine – it simply considers itself the truth. Other systems can be dissected and studied because there is emotional distance. but generally one’s own beliefs are not examined that way because to subject them to examination implies that the value-system of examination is superior to the value-system being examined. Observe how, today, we accept science and scientific inquiry as the arbiters of truth – we (sometimes) accept critique of a scientific idea when the critique is framed in terms of science itself providing different evidence, but we are supremely uncomfortable with any suggestion that the scientific worldview itself may be flawed or that the institutions that curate its meaning-making power might be problematic. 

Sources of Meaning

So, if religion curates our relationship with meaning, then what inputs determine the meanings that religion establishes and encourages? i.e, what is the actual source of meaning? The difficulty of this question is that any possible answer that could be given would carry an implicit value-structure within itself. To say that meaning develops by the same mechanism as biological evolution, for example, is a statement of faith in the evolutionary value-structure, a declaration that this value structure can explain the origin of meaning. Likewise to say that meaning derives from the divine is a statement of faith in a theist cosmology. And so how on earth do we evaluate what system of evaluation we should buy into? Really the only possible answer is experience, because meaning itself is the experience of connection. And this now becomes our beachhead for attacking the above question: we must address the nature of experience.

Experience & Epistemology

Even the most abstract beliefs or values have their roots in experience. It’s impossible for them not to; the very act of holding a belief is an act of experiencing the awareness of that belief (or at least of its effects or causes, since our beliefs can certainly be quite opaque to us). And indeed the act of experiencing awareness is life itself – “cogito ergo sum.” Now, the currently dominant religious meaning-curating model, materialism, would like to be able to prove that this awareness is an emergent property of biology. The problem with this, though, is that there is no way to scientifically measure consciousness in order to evaluate its presence, absence, or qualities. You can do so with cognition, sure, but cognition and brain activity are only things that awareness witnesses. We simply privilege them because our awareness witnesses the “objective” world through them. Neuroscience could be solved down to the final electron and still not offer any answers about consciousness that are more sound than what Buddhism has claimed for millennia.

Of course an epistemological model that limits itself to measuring material quanta will try to account for qualia by literally just guessing that there’s some physical, quantitative mechanism that creates qualia and that we just need bigger microscopes and bigger grants to find it. And this manner of approaching experience, like all manners of approaching experience, carries in itself the seed of how meaning will be derived from what is experienced. If experience is presupposed to be material then all meaning depends on the material as well. This functionally collapses our time horizon down to a single lifetime, or even less. It’s no wonder why the therapeutic use and recreational abuse of drugs go hand in hand today – the basis of our entire value structure is the relationship between physical objects or experiences and pleasure. Sure, you can jury rig a longer time-horizon out of this value structure by educating people about how painful addiction or poverty are, or informing them about the material benefits of social cooperation and goodwill, but any system that relies on people being “rational” actors en-masse relies on their rationales being culturally conditioned to carry similar considerations and priorities. And these priorities cannot be made to be similar unless they are immaterial, because material conditions are volatile and material interests will always conflict. Basically, you cannot solve the civilizational-scale “prisoner’s dilemma” without taking “Pascal’s wager.”

Experience vs Abstraction

So, returning to the question of experience – perhaps it sounds strange to claim that the basis of religion is experiential. Christianity relies on a scriptural tradition and clergy to justify its curation of meaning, and the scientific process and the conclusions drawn from it are monopolized by the mechanisms of funding allocation via government or industry. In both cases, believers rely on a layer of abstraction (arbitration of an authority) between experience-input and meaning-output. All religious systems have this mechanism, to different extents, because it is a necessary adaptation to large-scale society where huge numbers of people have to coordinate. But it can be easy for people who are living under the very institutionally developed phase of a religion to forget that these massive institutions grow over a foundation that was almost always laid by a much smaller, more intimate group of people; Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha’s small retinues, for the example of some of the largest current religions. And the foundation laid by these small groups is always based on the ground of their own experiences and actions. Furthermore, the continued growth of their systems is always dependent on the reproducibility of their experiences. Nobody would have been a Buddhist 10, 100, or 1000 years after Gautama’s death if nobody was able to reproduce his experience of transcending suffering for themselves by following the process he laid out. And nobody would still be deferring to scientific authorities if they didn’t value the reproducible experience of having a phone, microwave, and penicillin. This accounts for why periods of growth for young religions usually coincide with or accelerate the degradation of older ones and why religions can find their momentum broken at the seeming height of their influence – the layers of abstraction and authority needed for coordinating a large body can cannibalize the actual original purpose of that system, which is to evoke religious experience.

Making Meaning out of Experience

So; you have a religious experience – now what? How does meaning come from this? And how do meanings congeal into the coherent web of interrelation that constitutes a cosmology, the map of the order that turns the raw experience of a vast universe into a knowable, meaningful whole? Once an experience is had, what is next necessary is to compare it with other experiences and then arrange these experiences. There are different methods for achieving that sortition, but the most prominent one, the only one I will bother discussing in our limited space, is a logical technique of tracing causation and dependency. Religious thinking usually attempts to sort things in a hierarchy of causes, with things higher up the scale of causation being considered more holy or more sanctified. In Abrahamic religions, this culminates in God being the most holy and most divine thing because God causes all things and is either uncaused or self-caused. For the Buddhists, various schools disagree on whether there is an “ultimate reality” or whether all existence is co-dependent. In each case, metaphysical and ethical doctrines depend on tracking causation and dependence. 

With an order and hierarchy of Being established, the meaningfulness of everyday objects and events can then be determined according to their relation or correspondence to that hierarchy. For example: The meaningfulness of a minimum wage job depends on its relationship with money, and the meaningfulness of money in turn depends on the meaningfulness of the shelter and sustenance it buys. The meaningfulness of shelter and sustenance then depends on the meaningfulness of the body and the experience of suffering. Now we reach a crossroads – does our religious attitude and thought-process stop here with the experience of suffering being meaningful for its own sake, or does it go further and establish a greater meaning that can give context to suffering? If, for instance, we view the meaningfulness of the body and its experiences as derivative from the meaningfulness of an immortal and incorporeal soul, then we establish a context for suffering that can make us much more resilient and less fearful. If we don’t have this further context, then suffering remains king and we remain stuck in a “personal cosmos” that is organized around pain as its highest principle. This brings us to an important aspect of meaning itself, which is that meaning is exclusionary and, to an extent, “zero-sum.” For there to be any meaning there has to be a highest meaning, and this highest meaning gives value to lesser meanings by determining what isn’t meaningful. In the above example, orientation towards the soul devalues bodily suffering, and this devaluation is why that orientation is liberating. A religious hierarchy of meaning doesn’t just burden us with the responsibilities that are anathema to a modern mindset, it unburdens us from the negative attachments that modernism either doesn’t have an answer for or even actively encourages.

Conclusion

So, we have established some of the principles of “religion”: Religion provides an organizing principle to large-scale societies that is necessary for coordinating a population. Religion’s ability to shape society is derivative of its ability to shape the behaviors and thought processes of individuals. Religion operates on this individual substrate by organizing what the individual finds meaningful and desirable (of course employing social tools like status and mimicry to do so). Anything that works to shape a person’s conception of meaning is inherently religious, no matter what trappings it wears. Without this key piece of the puzzle, any discussion of religion is bound to spin its wheels in a mire of systemic minutiae. Such discussion is also likely to completely mischaracterize the most important religious development of the last few centuries, viewing secularization as an abolition of religion instead of as a total revolution in the way a society nurtures and organizes the inherent religious impulse.

Tackling the secular religion is of utmost importance because if people continue to be unaware that it is a religion, and continue to be unaware that they are subjects of it, a critical element of our own humanity is at risk of being buried: The ability to orient ourselves holistically, to know what is worth sacrificing, and, by extension, to fulfil our telos as “political animals,” members of a civilization that is the full flowering of man’s earthly nature as an image of our heavenly nature – for our heavenly nature is too great to fit into a single body, and so Zagreus is dismembered by the titans whose ashes become our flesh. All men are Bodhisattvas because the primal Man is a Bodhisattva with his heart and limbs sewn up in Zeus’ thigh. A healthy religion will hasten his re-constitution, and a corrupt one will delay it.