Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

A somewhat less obvious design feature was the inclusion of incomprehensible elements! Why would this help transmission? By obliging the transmitters to fall back on “direct quotation” in circumstances where they might otherwise be tempted to use “indirect quotation” and just transmit the gist of the occasion “in their own words”—a dangerous source of mutation. The underlying idea is familiar enough to us all in the (usually despised, but effective) pedagogical method: rote learning. “Don’t try to understand these formulas! Just memorize them!” If you are simply unable to understand the formulas, or some aspect of them, you don’t need the admonition; you have no recourse but memorization, and that reinforces the reliance on strict rehearsal and the error-correcting genius of alphabets. The admonition, however, may well be there as well, as yet another memory-enhancing feature: Say the formula exactly! Your life depends on it! (If you don’t say the magic word just right, the door won’t open. The devil will get you if you misspeak.) To repeat the refrain that should be familiar by now: nobody had to understand these rationales, or even want to improve the copying fidelity of the rituals in which they participated; it is rather that any rituals that just happened to be favored by these features would have a powerful replicative advantage over competing rituals that lacked them.

Note that, so far, the adaptations that we have uncovered as likely contributors to the survival of religions have been neutral on the subject of whether or not we are beneficiaries. They are features of the medium, not the message, designed to ensure the transmission fidelity—a requirement of evolution—while almost entirely neutral with regard to whether what is transmitted is good (a mutualist), bad (a parasite), or neutral (a commensal). To be sure, we hypothesized that the evolution of shamanic healing rituals was probably a benign or mutualist development, not just a bad habit for which our ancestors suckered, and there is a good chance that divination actually helped (and didn’t just seem to help) our ancestors make up their minds when they needed to, but these are still open empirical questions on which we could revise our opinion without collapse of the theory if the evidence warranted. And no one should object, at this point, that we haven’t begun talking about all the good that religion does. We haven’t had to address that issue yet, which is as it should be. We should exhaust our minimalist options in order to lay the foundations for a proper consideration of that question.

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Chapter 5 The obvious expensiveness of folk religion, a challenge to biology, can be accounted for by hypotheses that are not yet confirmed but testable. Probably the excess population of imaginary agents generated by the HADD yielded candidates to press into service as decision aids, in divination, or as shaman’s accomplices, in health maintenance, for instance. These co-opted or exapted mental constructs were then subjected to extensive design revision under the selective pressure for reproductive prowess.

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Chapter 6 As human culture grew and people became more reflective, folk religion became transformed into organized religion; the free-floating rationales of the earlier designs were supplemented and sometimes replaced by carefully crafted reasons as religions became domesticated.

CHAPTER SIX The Evolution of Stewardship

1 The music of religion

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

—Duke Ellington

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The central claim of this chapter is that folk religion turned into organized religion in much the same way folk music spawned what we might call organized music: professional musicians and composers, written representations and rules, concert halls, critics, agents, and the rest. In both cases the shift happened for many reasons but largely because, as people became more and more reflective about both their practices and their reactions, they could then become more and more inventive in their explorations of the space of possibilities. Both music and religion gradually became more “artful” or sophisticated, more elaborate, more of a production. Not necessarily better in any absolute sense, but better able to respond to increasingly complicated demands from populations that were biologically pretty much the same as their distant ancestors but culturally enlarged, both equipped and encumbered.

There is artifice in the design and execution of religious practices, as anyone knows who has ever suffered through an ineptly conducted religious ceremony. A stammering and prosaic minister and boring liturgy, shaky singing from the choir, people forgetting when to stand and what to say and do—such a flawed performance can drive away even the best-intentioned congregants. More artfully celebrated occasions can raise the congregation to sublime ecstasy. We can analyze the artifice in religious texts and ceremonies just as we can analyze the artifice in literature, music, dance, architecture, and other arts. A good professor of music theory can take apart a Mozart symphony or a Bach cantata and show you how the various design features work to achieve their “magic,” but some people prefer not to delve into these matters, for the same reason that they don’t want stage magic tricks explained: for them, explanation diminishes the “wonder.” Maybe so, but compare the uncomprehending awe with which the musically uneducated confront a symphony to the equally superficial appreciation of someone at a soccer match who doesn’t know the rules or the fine points of the game, and just sees lots of kicking the ball back and forth and vigorous running around. “Great action!” they may sincerely exclaim, but they’re missing most of the excellence on offer. Mozart and Bach—and Manchester United—deserve better. The designs and techniques of religion can also be studied with the same detached curiosity, with valuable results.

Consider adopting the same inquisitive attitude to religion, especially to your own religion. It is a finely tuned amalgam of brilliant plays and stratagems, capable of holding people enthralled and loyal for their entire lives, lifting them out of their selfishness and mundane ways in much the way music often does, but even more so. Understanding how it works is as much a preamble to better appreciating it or making it work better as it is to trying to dismantle it. And the analysis I am urging is, after all, just the continuation of the reflective process that has brought religion to the state it is now in. Every minister in every faith is like a jazz musician, keeping traditions alive by playing the beloved standards the way they are supposed to be played, but also incessantly gauging and deciding, slowing the pace or speeding up, deleting or adding another phrase to a prayer, mixing familiarity and novelty in just the right proportions to grab the minds and hearts of the listeners in attendance. The best performances are not just like good music; they are a kind of music. Listen to the recorded sermons of the Reverend C. L. Franklin (Aretha Franklin’s father, and famous among gospel preachers before she recorded any hits), or the white Baptist preacher Brother John Sherfey, for example.¹