An attempt to stretch the definition (and accommodate Theravada Buddhism, for example) by replacing “supernatural” with “transcendental,” “supra-empirical,” or “other-worldly” provokes the same questions and makes the inclusion of Marxism—something the advocates of substantive definitions would like to avoid—more likely. Just how empirical or non-transcendental are humanism, Hindutva, manifest destiny, and the kingdom of freedom?
Durkheim suggests another approach. “Religion,” according to his definition, is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things.” Sacred things are things that “the profane must not and cannot touch with impunity.” The function of the sacred is to unite humans into moral communities. Religion is a mirror in which human societies admire themselves. Subsequent elaborations of functionalism describe religion as a process by which humans create a sense of the self and an “‘objective’ and moral universe of meaning”; a “set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence”; and, in Clifford Geertz’s much cited version, “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” Whatever one’s understanding of the “sacred,” “ultimate,” or “general” (Mircea Eliade describes the sacred as a “fixed center” or “absolute reality” amidst “the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences”), it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that every society is by definition religious, that any comprehensive ideology (including secularism) creates and reflects a moral community, and that Osinsky’s luminous faith provides a fixed center in the swamp of subjective experiences and relates humans to the ultimate conditions of their existence.4
In sum, most people who talk about religion do not know what it is, while those who do are divided into those who include Marxism because they feel they have no choice and those who exclude it according to criteria they have trouble defining. Compromise terms such as “quasi-religion” make no sense within the functionalist paradigm (a moral community is a moral community whether its sacred center is the Quran or the US Constitution) and raise awkward questions (Taoism, but not Maoism?) for the champions of the “supernatural.” By extension, states that are “separate from the church” have no idea what they are separate from. The First Amendment to the US Constitution fails to define its subject and violates itself by creating a special constitutional status for “religion” while prohibiting any such legislation. In 1984, a University of California–Berkeley law professor, Phillip E. Johnson, surveyed the field and concluded that “no definition of religion for constitutional purposes exists, and no satisfactory definition is likely to be conceived.” Three years later, he read Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, had an epiphany, and founded the “intelligent design” movement.5
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One reason for the trouble with definitions is the desire to apply the same name to two very different belief systems: one that did not know it was a belief system and one that did—and felt very strongly about it. In the first millennium BCE, much of urban Eurasia was afflicted with an epidemic of reflexivity and self-doubt. The arrival of Zoroaster in Iran; the Buddha, Jain dharma, and the Upanishads in India; Confucius, the Tao, and the “hundred schools” in China; classical tragedy and philosophy in Greece; and the prophetic era in ancient Israel had inaugurated what Karl Jaspers has called the “Axial Age”—an age “of standing back and looking beyond.” They were not all about the “supernatural” in the strict sense, but they all posited an “absolute reality” radically distinct from a world inhabited by humans and their gods and ancestors. They shipped off as much of the sacred as they could to another plane or another time, allowing themselves occasional glimpses; posited an abyss separating humans from their true nature (as expressed in concepts or commandments); and made “alienation” the universal law of existence (leading a lot of people to believe that it had always been so). They proclaimed or implied, in other words, that humans were living incorrectly; that human life was, in some fundamental sense, a mistake, and possibly a crime.6
Ever since, these “Axial civilizations” and their numerous descendants—including Christianity (an offshoot of prophetic Judaism) and Islam (their close relative)—have been preoccupied, above all else, with the tasks of restoration, reformation, and “redemption” (as an escape from a human existence newly revealed to be misguided or meaningless). This has led to the emergence of “reason” independent of social ascription; the perception of the contingency—and, therefore, reformability—of the political order; the appearance of moral communities bound neither ethnically nor politically; the unification and codification of the sacred through written compilations of original solutions; the rise of elites specializing in interpreting the scripture and monopolizing access to salvation; and the possibility of the rise of counter-elites proposing alternative interpretations or entirely new solutions. Different traditions have different conceptual repertoires and escape routes, but all have offered more or less consistent and self-sufficient ways of “standing back and looking beyond.”7
The fact of having lost one’s way suggests the possibility of being able to find it again. All societies and the worlds they inhabit have had their beginnings, but it is only when human life turned out to be a problem that endings became solutions, and thus matters of serious concern. In ancient Greece, they tended to be political, metaphysical, provisional, and unintegrated. In southern Asia, the focus on individual reincarnation and escape allowed the collective resolution to remain remote (or perhaps it was the remoteness of the collective resolution that helped focus individual minds). In eastern and southeastern Asia, Confucian world-improvement and Buddhist and Taoist world-rejection came together to produce a tradition of expecting both at once (occasionally in the shape of an immediate world improvement by means of a violent world rejection). But even as they imagined an eventual return to wholeness and wondered about the effect of human choices on the unfolding of the cosmic drama, most heirs to the Axial predicament continued to expect a perennial cycle of corruption and rebirth. All final solutions were temporary. For the sun to rise, spring to return, hunted prey to submit, and the earth to give up its fruits, the hero had to keep killing the serpent and humans had to keep making mistakes and sacrifices. Holding chaos and its many agents at bay was a daily effort and the closest life could get to having a meaning. Everything was forever.8