Christians think, falsely, is an ancient precept of their religion. Later in the
century, the Church of Christ, Scientist (Christian Science) was organized by
Mary Baker Eddy, while the Watchtower Society institutionalized into the
Jehovah's Witnesses.
Christianity has shown a nearly infinite capacity to multiply and morph to fit
its environment; it can accommodate or integrate almost any influence.
Sometimes, the result can be frightening, as with the Ku Klux Klan and the
Christian Identity movement (see http://www.kingidentity.com), which blend
religion with racism. Fractious and dangerous politics can mix with Christianity,
as in Dominionism/Reconstructionism (see http://www
.chalcedon.edu/blog/blog.php) and many "militia" organizations. Sometimes, the
result can be hopeful, as with the "social gospel" of the nineteenth century and
the "liberation theology" of the twentieth. Sometimes, the result is just wacky, as
in the "prosperity gospel" of Oral Roberts, Joel Osteen, T. D. fakes, and the
aptly-named Creflo Dollar; the Church for Men (for a more manly Christianity:
see http://www.churchformen.com/index.php and http://www.godmen.org/); the
Scum of the Earth Church, for freaks and misfits
(http://wwwscumoftheearth.net/); not to mention Christian rap (please watch
"Banging for Christ" at http:// wwwyoutube.com/watch ?
v=o5WLdvVEkpw&feature=related) or Christian rock, even a Christian version
of "Guitar Hero" called "Guitar Praise." The current "megachurch" phenomenon
is an adaptation to the suburban and corporate lives of many modern Christians;
in the 1992 film America's Folk Religion, the leaders of one megachurch talk
about marketing their "product" to their "target demographic." Most startlingly
of all, Christianity can apparently even accommodate the nonexistence of its
god, as in the "death of God theology" (an oxymoron if there ever was one)
promoted in the 1960s.
All of these variations of Christianity roughly represent one possible tactic,
which we will call rrming: the religion is reinvented for its specific time, place,
and audience. A second tactic involves retreating, withdrawing from the
cacophonous modern world into some protective religious reality. The Amish are
one mild example, while contemporary "fundamentalism" is another not-always-
so-mild case. In fact, some retreats are tactical retreats, preparing for a coming
assault, as with the Reconstructionists or even the more mainstream Religious
Right, which aims explicitly to (re)conquer American society for Christianity. As
Pat Robertson himself stated:
The mission of the Christian Coalition is simple.... [It is] to mobilize
Christians-one precinct at a time, one community at a time-until once again
we are the head and not the tail, and at the top rather than the bottom of our
political system.... [T]he Christian Coalition will be the most powerful
political force in America by the end of this decade. We have enough votes
to run this country ... and when the people say, "We've had enough," we're
going to take over!32
Ironically, retreating religions almost unavoidably reform at the same time: even
the most fundamentalist forms of Christianity gladly incorporate modern tools
like television and the Internet, and they would have no success if they didn't.
CONCLUSION: SO MANY CHRISTIANITIES, So LITTLE REASON
All told, by some estimates, there are as many as thirty-eight thousand sects and
denominations of Christianity in the world today (we have not even had the
opportunity to mention non-Western versions of Christianity or pseudo-Christian
cults in this chapter). Many are not only incompre hensible but literally
anathema to each other: many Christians deny that Mormons are Christians,
while others condemn rap and rock as inappropriate or evil corruptions of their
religion. But, by taking the notion of culture seriously, we have exposed some
crucial facts about Christianity in particular and religion in general. Religions
may think they are universal and eternal, but they are not. Religions may think
they are special, but they are not. And, with the help of the missiologists, we
have solved the mystery at the opening of this chapter: Christians are not easily
reasoned out of religion since they are not usually reasoned into it. Christians,
like other religionists, are not so much convinced by arguments and proofs as
colonized by assumptions and premises. As a form of culture, it seems
selfevident to them; they are not so much indoctrinated as enculturated. Weak
analogies like "religion is a crutch" or "religion is a lens" do not convey the
depth of the process. As I have written elsewhere:
Like a pair of glasses, humans see with culture, but they do not usually see
culture. Computers do not know they are running a program; they simply
follow the instructions. Seeing your glasses, recognizing your program, is a
rare thing, achieved by few individuals in even fewer societies. It demands
a certain amount of "freedom," a certain amount of distance from oneself. It
is also probably not an entirely desirable or beneficial ability: taken-for-
grantedness is adaptive in a strong sense. The very opaqueness and
"obviousness"... of the human world spares us from having to remake the
same conclusions and judgments over and over; as some anthropologists
and sociologists have emphasized, culture provides us with a set of
"frames" or "scenarios" with familiar and predictable patterns and
outcomes. These frames or scenarios get the average person through the
average life with little uncertainty and little remainder, but only so long as
the conditions in which they were forged persist.
Some atheists and other critics of religion like to use the analogy of a
crutch for religion-that it is something that the weak use to get them
through otherwise difficult situations. The implication is that, if they were
stronger (like us) they could dispense with the crutch and walk independent
and free. [But] you cannot pull a crutch froin underneath a cripple and
expect him or her to walk. Rather, they will fall and then probably blame
you for the accident. The real point is more profound but perhaps more
discouraging: religion for the religious person is like culture for the cultural
person-it is glasses, not crutches. And these glasses are not prophylactic-
they do not help the person to see "better." They make seeing at all possible.
Maybe an ultimate analogy for culture in general and religion in particular
is not glasses but the very eyes themselves. You could not expect to pull
someone's eyes out and have them see better, any more than you could
expect to take away someone's culture and have them understand and act
better.33
Religions like Christianity-or rather, their specific local versions-are not so
much "belief systems" as, like the missiologists said, worldviews and embodied
realities. Each is opaque and foreign to the nonmembers, and each is largely
>
invisible to itself. Hiebert explains that "so long as we live in our own culture,
we are largely unaware of it. When we enter new cultures, however, we become
keenly aware of the fact that other people live differently.... [W]e learn that there
are profound differences in beliefs, feelings and values. Finally, we begin to
realize that there are fundamental differences in worldviews. People in different
cultures do not live in the same world with different labels attached to it, but in
radically different worlds."34 With the information presented in this chapter, and
in this book, it is impossible for Christians to remain unaware of their own
religion or of the differences between religions. The hope, and the obligation, is
that once people recognize the diversity, plasticity, and relativity of religion, they
will see little merit in it: that which is no longer taken for granted is often not
taken at all.
NOTES
1. Jack David Eller, Cultural Anthropology: Global Forces, Local Lives
(London: Routledge, 2009).
2. For example, see Charles H. Kraft, Anthropology for Christian Witness
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997); Paul G. Hiebert, Transforming
Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008); Sherwood G. Lingenfelter, Transforming
Culture-A Challenge for Christian Mission, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Academic, 1998); Paul R. Gupta, Breaking Tradition to Accomplish Vision:
Training Leaders for a Church-Planting Movement.- A Case from India (Winona
Lake, IN: BMH Books, 2006); and most offensive to me and my discipline,
Stephen A. Grunlan and Marvin K. Mayers, Cultural Anthropology: A Christian
Perspective, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1988).
3. Ralph D. Winter and Steven C. Hawthorne, eds., Perspectives on the World
Christian Movement, 3rd ed. (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1999).
4. Charles H. Kraft, "Culture, Worldview, and Contextualization," in Winter
and Hawthorne, Perspectives, p. 385.
5. Ibid., p. 387.
6. Paul G. Hiebert, "Cultural Differences and the Communication of the
Gospel," in Winter and Hawthorne, Perspectives, p. 376.
7. Kraft, "Culture, Worldview, and Contextualization," p. 388.
8. Hiebert, "Cultural Differences," p. 379.
9. Michael Welton, "Cunning Pedagogics: The Encounter between the Jesuit
Missionaries and the Amerindians in 17th-Century New France," AdultEdu-
cation Quarterly 55 (2005): 102.
10. Ibid., pp. 102-103.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 107.
13. Ibid., p. 109.
14. Ibid., p. 112.
15. Ibid., p. 113.
16. Jean Comaroff, Body of Power Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and
History of a South Africa People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985),
p. 80.
17. John L. Coinaroff and Jean Coinaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The
Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991), 2:9.
18. Ibid., p. 31.
19. Ibid., p. 189.
20. Ibid., p. 282.
21. Ibid., p. 292.
22. Ibid., p. 296.
23. Ibid., p. 127.
24. Kraft, "Culture, Worldview, and Contextualization," p. 388.
25. David Eller, Atheism AdvancedFurther Thoughts of a Freethinker
(Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2007); see especially chapter 8,
"Religion and the Colonization of Experience."
26. Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (New York: Random House, 1995), p.
10.
27. Ibid., p. 87.
28. Ibid., p. 89.
29. Ibid., p. 65.
30. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans.
George Lawrence (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 290.
31. Ibid., p. 574.
32. The Christian Resistance, "World Politics," http://www.freewebs.com/
christianresistance/worldpolitics.htin.
33. David Eller, Natural Atheism (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press,
2004), pp. 124-25.
34. Hiebert, "Cultural Differences and the Communication of the Gospel," p.
377 [emphasis added].
y father died in a climbing accident when he was fifty-nine and .1
was in my mid-twenties. In one of our last deep conversations before his
thousand-meter misstep, he expressed his abiding hope that I would "get right
with God." Dad was the son of Italian immigrants, all Catholics, who got
converted by door-to-door Pentecostals some years after their arrival in Chicago.
As far as I know, he never questioned his belief that the Bible was the literally
perfect word of God and that Jesus died for his sins. And yet of his six children
three of us, according to those beliefs, are now slated for eternal torture. To us,
his religious certitude is an oddity in an otherwise rigorous engineering mind.
How should we understand it? What are the implications for our own lives?
This question could not be more important. Religious belief is one of the most
powerful forces in our world. Almost half of Americans insist that humans were
created in their present form sometime within the last ten thousand years,
because the Bible says so.1 In the Middle East, Sunnis and Shiites split over
theological differences that seem trivial to the rest of us but that in their minds
create tribal boundaries worthy of lethal conflict. In the United States, religion is
the best predictor of political party alliance-with enormous implications for
international relations, medical research, population policies, and resource
management. Believers think that belief has the power to save us all.
Increasingly, doubters fear the opposite may be true.
Why is Christian belief so widespread and powerful? The traditional answer
is: because it's true, and people who haven't hardened their hearts recognize this
when God's plan of salvation is presented to them. But cognitive science offers a
new way to look at this question, not from a moral or theological vantage but
from a practical vantage. What is the mental machinery that lets us form beliefs?
What are the roles of reason and emotion? How well do beliefs tend to relate to
external realities?
The more we learn about the hardware and operating systems of the human
brain-the more we understand about human information processing-the more we
glean bits of insight into the religious mind. For example:
• We humans are not rational about anything, let alone religion.
Certainty is a feeling, not proof of knowing. It can fail to materialize even
when evidence is enormous, and can manifest itself independently of any
real knowledge.
• The structure of thought itself predisposes us to religious thinking. Given
how our minds work, certain kinds of religious beliefs are likely and others
are impossible.
• The "born again" experience is a natural phenomenon. It is triggered by
specific social and emotional factors, which can occur in both religious and
secular settings.
Before looking at the evidence behind
these statements, it is helpful to
understand why belief is so important in Christianity. For traditional Christians,
belief is the heart of the Christian religion. As they conceive it, believing that
Jesus Christ died as a "propitiation" for your sins matters enormously to God. It
is the toggle that sends people to heaven or hell. Only if you believe correctly do
virtue and service become relevant. The creedal councils, canonization of
scripture, inquisitions, purges, and centuries of conversion activities can be
understood only in this context.
This focus on belief is not characteristic of all religions. In the ancient Near
East, the birthplace of Christianity, pagan religions placed little emphasis on
belief. The existence of a supernatural world was broadly assumed because there
seemed to be little other way to explain the good and bad things that happen to
people and natural events like storms, earth quakes, illness, birth, and death. But
the point of religion wasn't belief; it was to take care of the gods so they would
take care of you and your community. The word "cult" (Latin cultus, literally
"care") is related to the word "cultivation." We talk about cultivating ground so
that it will bear fruit. These days, nonprofits talk about "cultivating donors." This
kind of cultivation was what pagans thought gods cared about, and so it was the
heart of their religious practice.
From the beginning, Christianity was different. Jesus worshippers cared
tremendously about right belief, also known as orthodoxy. Bart Ehrman's Lost
Christianities offers a fascinating window into the struggles that went on during
the first and second centuries as groups with different beliefs about Jesus
criticized and competed with each other and one of them won out.' Some groups
(e.g., Ebionites) believed Jesus was a fully human Jewish Messiah and thatJesus
worshippers must follow the Jewish law. Others (e.g., Marcionites) believed
Jesus was a being from the spirit world who only took on a human likeness. Still
others (e.g., Gnostics) believed that the human Jesus was inhabited by a divine
"Eon" during the years of his ministry-revealing to his followers secret
knowledge that would let them escape this corrupt mortal plane. Others
subscribed to the Roman or "proto-orthodox" version of Jesus worship, which
led to the views of Christians today. What all of these groups agreed on was that
it was tremendously important to believe the right thing about who Jesus was
and what Christianity should be.
This emphasis on right belief was and is unique to monotheism. For this
reason, Christianity's exclusive truth claims and emphasis on right belief helped
it to out-compete other religions in the Roman Empire. Polytheists can be quite
agreeable to adding another god to their pantheon. Christians could persuade
pagans to add the Jesus-god and then could wean them off the others. Today, in
India, for example, evangelical missionaries are much more likely to target
Hindus than Sikhs or Muslims who would have to immediately abandon their
primary religion in order to embrace the idea of Jesus as a god.
Eastern religions do not share Christianity's concern with belief. Their
emphasis is more on practice or "praxis"-spiritual living, self-renunciation,
insight or enlightenment-and, among ordinary people, a sort of cult or caretaking
of the gods like that practiced by Western pagans. Right belief isn't what lets you
move up through cycles of reincarnation or attain Nirvana. Nor is it what gets
you the favor of supernatural beings.
Just as biological organisms have many different adaptive or repro ductive
strategies, so religions compete for human mind-share in different ways. An
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