Many throughout history have dismissed God as a creation of humans. There is much truth in this interpretation. Yet whether hypocritical or sincere, foolish or wise, our invocation of a higher power has political consequences. It stirs human hearts and provokes action. Sometimes it rallies people as iron filings to a magnet, and sometimes it spurs people to revolt against a corrupt society. It can inspire us to berserk attack, but can also dampen our passions and prejudices. It can enslave us, yet it can also give us meaning and purpose.
Sumerian priest-kings once ruled by divine right, claiming to control the weather and harvest. Egyptian pharaohs claimed descent from Horus, son of Osiris, the god of life and death. The Chinese emperor was also chief soothsayer, and ruled as the earthly representatives of the Storm God. But very early in societal evolution, the governing apparatus of society began to differentiate into palace and temple. The friction between palace and temple was a rudimentary system of checks and balances, and a primitive endocrine system harnessed this tension between the parts for the good of the whole.
From Akhenaton in Egypt in the mid-second millennium BC to Henry VIII in England in the mid-second millennium AD, it has been a monarchical tradition to plunder the priests. But too little tension is just as disruptive: if the priests cuddled up with their monarch, then a social revolution was surely in the post, fuelled by the outrage of the people. And priests often took up arms themselves and became secular rulers: in the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia the priesthood fought the monarch Urukagina. In the disintegration of the New Kingdom in Egypt, the high priests of Amun ruled the south. In the Seventh century AD, a Buddhist priest was a Chinese general against the Turkic nomads. In the European middle ages popes led armies. And monarchs often became religious figureheads: The Zhou dynasty ruled China around the end of the second millennium BC; and centuries later, after its temporal power had gone, the dynasty, now puppets of the warlords, maintained an important ceremonial role. Islamic caliphs began as supreme military leaders, and though they eventually lost this authority they kept immense religious prestige. In Tokugawa Japan, shoguns ruled through puppet emperors who claimed descent from the sun-goddess.
In the long term, despite the exchange between palace and temple, two distinct poles formed. Religion was the only force even remotely capable of checking the arbitrary caprice of the warlords, and in approving or rejecting the temporal ruler, a priestly caste could sometimes dampen the monotonous cycles of violence. This principle was often upturned: either the priests overplayed their hand and were swept away, or else they were co-opted and bought off, perhaps made ambassadors or tax-collectors. And when the written record mentions the inviolable sanctuary of the holy places, it was usually because a violation had occurred. Nevertheless, the tension between the priest and warrior castes was the first effective restraint upon the latter, and is the historical basis of our principles of civilian control over the military and of the separation of church and state. This separation is not the banishment of religion from politics; it is a differentiation within the body politic of specialised organs, each of which has a role to play in government. Whenever society loses this tension it regresses, becoming less stable and more prone to disintegration. If the temporal power gathers to itself all spiritual authority, or the spiritual becomes temporal, delicate balances are overturned. Appropriate to a more primitive stage of societal evolution, such monoliths become disastrous further on. Recent examples of this phenomenon include the military power of the medieval Roman Catholic Church and the state-worship of the Nazis and Bolsheviks.
Religion is not only a tool of government. It can just as often be a vehicle of social protest, challenging the existing order. A debate has raged for a long time, the opposing cases put forth by the great English historians Gibbon and Toynbee. Like the emperor Julian the Apostate, Gibbon maintained that Christianity was among the prime causes of the fall of the Roman Empire: that this great classical society was inundated by imported eastern religions, which stressed individual redemption and undermined selfless service to the Roman state.
Toynbee argued, and I agree, that Christianity was rather an effect of the fall: in a decaying society, religions blossom as a social protest against the corruption of the existing order. And like all successful social protests, Christianity was eventually co-opted, becoming part of the ruling apparatus to begin the cycle again. Studying the Roman Catholic counter-reformation, one may be forgiven for seeing Christianity as reactionary and oppressive. But going back a millennium and a half before that and studying the decline of the Roman empire, one may be forgiven for seeing Christianity as progressive and even democratic – the early bishops sometimes preserved democracy amidst Roman military despotism.
And even just prior to the counter-reformation, the Catholic Church, though monstrously corrupt, cannot be characterised as anti-science. When Copernicus put forth his heliocentric model, an Austrian astronomer explained the theory to the Pope, and Rome did not object. The first reaction against the heliocentric model was led by Martin Luther. He and the other leaders of the reformation, Calvin and Knox, were in many ways an Old Testament anachronism, maintaining that freedom from secular law was the divine privilege of the believer. The popes lurched into a literalist and anti-science counter-reformation in order to compete with the Protestants.
Islam grew up ruling an empire, and for most of their history, Muslims were no more fanatical than Christians, and often less so. All assumptions to the contrary, there is no evidence that religious fervour was a main cause of the wars of conquest by the Arab tribes in the seventh century. Indeed, unlike the relentless persecutions of heretics and Jews that mar Christian history, Islam from the beginning followed the Persian tradition emphasising the co-existence of sects, giving Jews and Christians rights and responsibilities within Islamic society. Under Persian and later Islamic empires, Christians lived under the rule of their own bishops, and became semi-autonomous communal organisations with their own schools and courts. As long as they paid their tax, prayed for the monarch, and outlawed any rebellious Christian subjects, these communities were left alone.
But in the rise of Europe, as Islamic societies vainly struggled to adapt to and catch up with this new power, they took refuge in an ever more puritanical version of Islam. Wahhabi and Deobandi Sunni revivalist movements of the eighteenth century attempted to return to the pure and mythical beginnings of Islam, and became a vehicle of social protest and even revolution against European colonialism, as well as against the Muslim ruling classes who cooperated with the Europeans. The problem is not Islam, but a reactionary strain of fanatical Islam. I have lived among Muslims, sharing food with them and experiencing their hospitality in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, the West Bank, and Egypt; and anyone who says that Islam is an inherently violent religion is spectacularly misinformed.
I've been in Istanbul for the past five years, and in a recent conversation with an Indian friend here, I was struck by the common ground between many western progressives and Muslim conservatives. “I cannot abide,” she said, “the attitudes of you liberal Americans and Europeans towards Hinduism and Buddhism. With your meditation and yoga and acupuncture, you think India and China are some kind of utopia, but they're misogynistic, xenophobic, caste-ridden.”
Despite communal violence in India and Buddhists slaughtering Muslims in Myanmar, many socially liberal westerners do indeed idealise Hinduism and Buddhism. Likewise, many Americans I know heap scorn on Christianity yet are themselves in thrall to New Age nonsense, rejecting evolution and claiming a scientific basis for their theories about aliens who genetically engineered humans. How did these educated westerners adopt anti-science views more appropriate to Christian and Muslim conservatives?
Though the cause was good, some reformers took a wrong turn. Marxists, in a scathing and accurate criticism of capitalism and religion, set up a rival ideology with its own dogma and social control. The New Age movement, reacting against the strictures of Christianity, tipped into a Zen fascism of homeopathy and pseudoscience. Socially liberal academics, breaking down the colonialist, racist, and sexist attitudes prevalent in universities, formed a post-modernist orthodoxy. The physicist Alan Sokal became so fed up with the postmodernist dogma of his colleagues in the social sciences that he devised an experiment: in 1996 he submitted a deliberate parody to academic journals, to test whether the editors would publish an article composed of utter gibberish, if that gibberish was peppered with jargon that flattered their prejudices. One did; and at the same time he published another article exposing the hoax.
It would be futile and churlish to expect the Muslim masses to renounce their creation myth, but we can indeed demand a greater rigour from western self-proclaimed progressives. Those academics who published Sokal's paper, unable to distinguish gibberish from reasoned argument; those Marxists who rejected religion and insensibly became that which they despised; those chunks of the New Age movement who dismiss evolution and take refuge in the most appalling pseudoscience; all these people are no longer seeking the truth. They're not even progressives anymore. Despite their best intentions, they have succumbed to a common pattern, as social protest against old dogma tends towards a stultifying new dogma.
Over our morning coffee, we might catch ourselves shaking our heads at the governments emerging from the Arab uprisings, or clucking at the latest absurdities of American evangelicals and wondering why these people can’t just wake up. But this is too simplistic. However this social force manifests itself in society, attempts to root it out have always ended not only in failure, but in a morass of unintended consequences. A more realistic position is to acknowledge that most people are not ready to slough off their beliefs, and that religion, for all its ills, can help them to lead a dignified and productive life. Ancient whirlwinds are with us yet, and nothing is final