Small-scale societies place much less emphasis on world rejection, salvation, and the afterlife than do large-scale, more complex and recent societies. There are at least three reasons for this trend. First, social stratification and inequality have increased, from egalitarian small-scale societies to large complex societies with their kings, nobles, elite, rich, and members of highly ranked clans contrasting with their mass of poor peasants and laborers. If everybody else around you is suffering as much as you are, then there is no unfairness to be explained, and no visible example of the good life to which to aspire. But the observation that some people have much more comfortable lives and can dominate you takes a lot of explaining and comforting, which religion offers.
A second reason why large, complex societies emphasize comforting and the afterlife more than do small-scale societies is that archaeological and ethnographic evidence shows that life really did become harder as hunter-gatherers became farmers and assembled in larger societies. With the transition to agriculture, the average daily number of work hours increased, nutrition deteriorated, infectious disease and body wear increased, and lifespan shortened. Conditions deteriorated even further for urban proletariats during the Industrial Revolution, as work days lengthened, and as hygiene, health, and pleasures diminished. Finally, as we shall discuss below, complex populous societies have more formalized moral codes, more black-and-white emphasis on good and evil, and bigger resulting problems of theodicy: why, if you yourself are behaving virtuously and obeying the laws, do law-breakers and the rest of the world get away with being cruel to you?
All three of these reasons suggest why the comforting function of religion has increased in more populous and recent societies: it’s simply that those societies inflict on us more bad things for which we crave comfort. This comforting role of religion helps explain the frequent observation that misfortune tends to make people more religious, and that poorer social strata, regions, and countries tend to be more religious than richer ones: they need more comforting. Among the world’s nations today, the percentage of citizens who say that religion is an important part of their daily lives is 80%–99% for most nations with per-capita gross domestic products (GDP) under $10,000, but only 17%–43% for most nations with per-capita GDP over $30,000. (That doesn’t account for high religious commitment in the rich U.S., which I’ll mention in the next paragraph.) Even within just the U.S., there appear to be more churches and more church attendance in poorer areas than in richer areas, despite the greater resources and leisure time available to build and attend churches in richer areas. Within American society, the highest religious commitment and the most radical Christian branches are found among the most marginalized, underprivileged social groups.
It may initially seem surprising that religion has been maintaining itself or even growing in the modern world, despite the rise in two factors already mentioned as undermining religion: science’s recent usurpation of religion’s original explanatory role; and our increased technology and societal effectiveness reducing dangers that lie beyond our control and thus inviting prayer. That religion nevertheless shows no signs of dying out may be due to our persistent quest for “meaning.” We humans have always sought meaning in our lives that can otherwise seem meaningless, purposeless, and evanescent, and in a world full of unpredictable unfortunate events. Now along comes science, seeming to say that “meaning” isn’t meaningful, and that our individual lives really are meaningless, purposeless, and evanescent except as packages of genes for which the measure of success is just self-propagation. Some atheists would maintain that the problem of theodicy doesn’t exist; good and evil are just human definitions; if cancer or a car crash kills X and Y but not A and B, that’s just a random catastrophe; there isn’t any afterlife; and if you’ve suffered or been abused here on Earth, it won’t be fixed for you in the afterlife. If you respond to those atheists, “I don’t like to hear that, tell me it’s not true, show me some way in which science has its own way of providing meaning,” those atheists’ response would be “Your request is in vain, get over it, stop looking for meaning, there isn’t any meaning—it’s just that, as Donald Rumsfeld said of looting during the war in Iraq, ‘Stuff happens!’” But we still have our same old brains that crave meaning. We have several million years of evolutionary history telling us, “Even if that’s true, I don’t like it and I’m not going to believe it: if science won’t give me meaning, I’ll look to religion for it.” That’s probably a significant factor in the persistence and even growth of religion in this century of growth in science and technology. It may contribute part—surely not all, but perhaps part—of the explanation for why the United States, the country with the most highly developed scientific and technological establishment, is also the most religious among wealthy First World countries. The greater gulf between rich and poor people in the U.S. than in Europe may be another part of the explanation.
Organization and obedience
The remaining four features of religion that I’ll discuss—standardized organization, preaching political obedience, regulating behavior towards strangers by means of formal moral codes, and justifying wars—were absent in small-scale societies, appeared with the rise of chiefdoms and states, and have declined again in modern secular states. A defining feature of modern religions that we take for granted is standardized organization. Most modern religions have full-time priests, alias rabbis, ministers, imams, or whatever else they may be called, who receive either a salary or else life’s necessities. Modern religions also have churches (alias temples, synagogues, mosques, etc.). Within any given sect, all of its churches use a standardized sacred book (Bible, Torah, Koran, etc.), rituals, art, music, architecture, and clothing. A practising Catholic who has grown up in Los Angeles and visits New York City can celebrate Sunday mass in a New York Catholic church and find all those features familiar. In religions of small-scale societies, on the other hand, all of those features either aren’t standardized (rituals, art, music, clothing) or don’t exist at all (full-time priests, dedicated churches, sacred books). While small-scale societies may have their shamans, and some of those shamans may receive fees or gifts, the shamans are not full-time professionals: they have to hunt, gather, and grow crops like every other able-bodied adult in their band or tribe.
Historically, those organizational features of religion arose to solve a new problem emerging as ancient human societies became richer, more populous, and both obliged and enabled to become more centralized. Band and tribal societies are too small and unproductive to generate food surpluses that could feed full-time priests, chiefs, tax collectors, potters, shamans, or specialists of any sort. Instead, every adult has to acquire his or her own food by hunting, gathering, or farming himself or herself. Only larger and more productive societies generate surpluses that can be used to feed chiefs and other leaders or craft specialists, none of whom grow or hunt food.