Thousands
of years ago, Greeks acted out narratives from what we now refer to as myths.
The word myth connotes a religious
narrative that has long-ago expired from being believed to be actual. Of course, no Christian in
modern times would refer to the Passion as a myth; to refer to the crucifixion
and resurrection as mythic would be insulting. Yet as a society increasingly
secularizes, the events in the religious story gradually give up their
all-embracing signature. As Good Friday or Easter becomes “just another day” for
more and more people in the increasingly secular West in particular, the respective
events lose their hegemony in defining for people in their daily lives what the
Friday and Sunday are about. That is, the events "deflate" from being perceived as all-embracing in the sense of defining
the significance of the days. If sufficiently relegated, the story itself can more
easily be viewed as myth, rather than real.
Notice religion’s appeal here to history or at least empiricism as a validator.
Without such a basis intact, religious events are somehow less real in a religious
sense of meaning.[1] In
fact, a religion’s situs in a society can go from default-status to ultimately
being replaced. Nietzsche’s “God is dead” in the late nineteenth-century prefigured
the rise of secularization—the discrediting of the reigning concept of the
deity by ascribing the vice of vengeance to it inexorably deflating the
Abrahamic religions. Particularly astonishing is not the fact that religions
have lifespans, but, rather, that any given religion in decline can endure an
incredible amount of time at that stage. This phenomenon can prompt a person to wonder whether the religions are not human, all too human.
The process
by which a religious narrative goes from losing its totality “in the real
world” to being replaced, and thus deemed a myth, is not linear or steady, if
Thomas Kuhn’s ideas on scientific revolutions applies. Yet nor is such a life-cycle
short, ending in a sudden collapse similar to how the U.S.S.R. ended. In this regard, I depart from Kuhn's theory in so far it is applicable to religion.
According to
Kuhn, “intellectual progress is not steady and gradual. It’s marked by sudden
paradigm shifts. There’s a period of normal science when everybody embraces a
paradigm that seems to be working. Then there’s a period of model drift: As
years go by, anomalies accumulate and the model begins to seem creaky and
flawed. Then there’s a model crisis, when the whole thing collapses. Attempts
to patch up the model fail. Everybody is in anguish, but nobody knows what to
do.” Then there’s the revolution phase, during which “you get a proliferation
of competing approaches, a willingness to try anything. People ask different
questions, speak a different language, congregate around a new paradigm that is
incommensurate with the last.”[2]
In terms of
Christianity, the “period of normal science” is easy enough to picture. The
Inquisition, for instance, points to that period existing historically in
Europe, and to the enforcement powers that a “normal science” can enjoy. The
loss of such powers goes a long way, I submit, in accounting for the incredible
slippage that takes place once a religion is no longer the normal science. In
the last quarter of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, a
Christian church in Europe had much less leverage with which to “police” members
deemed as heretics; a Christian unhappy with one’s church could simply pick a
different sect or melt into the secular society. Such “model drift” is gradual,
whereas a model crisis is not.
I’m not
convinced that a religion collapses practically overnight in a crisis. Rather,
I suspect that the drift gradually opens an increasingly wide area wherein
other models can originate and take root. As a religion moves off the stage of
normal science and is thus rendered increasingly transparent, questions
naturally arise as the dogmatism of the normal science has been removed. Christians
might begin to ask themselves: Did Jesus really exist? No evidence exists? Does
religion really depend on history for validity anyway? Was God behind the Big
Bang? Is religion overreaching when it tackles cosmology and the natural
sciences more generally? Did we really share a common ancestor with the chimp?[3]
Did a pope really write a letter as an archbishop stating it would be better to
move a pedophile priest to another parish (to become its youth minister) in
Germany than to risk harm to the universal church from a scandal? Does his
ascendency anyway to the papacy implicate the religious organization (i.e., the
Church) itself?
The scandal
of pedophile priests in the Roman Catholic Church is an interesting case, for,
by all rights, the cascading news should have triggered at some point a
collapse of the religious organization; and yet, the status quo that includes
that mammoth Christian sect (i.e., denomination) continued even as a scathing
film, Spotlight, won the Oscar for
best picture in 2016. A religion having enjoyed the status of “normal science” apparently
has reserves of staying-power even in the face of abject hypocrisy occurring on
a systemic basis (i.e., not just a few individuals).
The life
cycle of an established religion is, I submit, quite long, and longer than expected
or anticipated. Besides the power of the vested interests, human beings are too
much like herd animals, especially in organizations, to get up and move to
another pasture unless really prodded hard with a hot iron. Plus, cognitive
dissidence—such as in “the Church can’t be that
bad, or I would not be a member”—can reinforce denial. Lastly, to be an
institution recognized by society is to get loads of legitimacy simply in
existing. Such legitimacy has a way of silently drowning out even true charges
of lewd or sordid behavior—not to mention hypocrisy. None of this even gets to
the broader trajectory of a religion’s lifecycle. It can take a long, long time
for a religion to run its course—and then it may stick around even longer in a
hybrid capacity.
The
longevity is in spite of the fact that the longer a religion endures, the
further the stretch from the context of its origin to the present-day. A
religion gets harder and harder to translate as the world changes from the
world in which the religion first found expression. Texts of a religion coming
out of an ancient agrarian world are not easily translated into a modern, urban
world. Moreover, to the extent that religions tend to be rather fixed, even
rigid, the “inability” (actually choice) not to adapt to changes in not only the
world but also the development of mankind’s understanding of religion itself implies
a limited lifespan. Yet very ancient religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and
Judaism, endure in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, any of these
religions could survive in a limited and perhaps even barely recognized form in
a newly developed hybrid form.
I’m not
convinced that the notion of one paradigm cleanly replacing another applies to
religion. Perhaps over a large enough span of time, very different paradigms
can be identified. Hence we can distinguish the older polytheistic nature
religions from the ancient Middle Eastern monotheist faiths. More narrowly,
closer to a religion’s lifespan and what comes after, however, I suspect that hybrid
paradigms emerge, pick up, and carry on some remnants of the religion. In
Judaism and Christianity, the notion of a remnant (i.e., of a people, and
outcasts, respectively) has a special place.
In the
theory of organizational life-cycles, an organization toward the end of its
decline can spawn a re-energized, or emergent, organization that retains some
of the characteristics without all the bureaucratic baggage. A large
corporation might spin off a division, for instance, that itself becomes a
large company retaining some of the original company’s culture. Similarly,
Christianity in the year 2200 might have left the Passion narrative and
complicated theology behind. Yet Jesus’s teachings themselves, such as in the
Sermon on the Mount, which are relatively compatible with secularity, might
survive in altered forms or even new religions—or even in secular culture itself!
Many Christians in 2016 would remonstrate that such a religion would not really
be Christian at all, given the historical litmus test enjoyed by Christology
(i.e., true belief being the Incarnation). Nevertheless, the retention of
Jesus’s teaching would make the new paradigm quasi-Christian, or at least
“Christ-like.” Indeed, to the extent that the new focus results in less
hypocrisy, the hybrid might actually be more
Christ-like. Beyond the lifespan of such a hybrid it is difficult from the
standpoint of 2016 to speculate on what paradigms might come next. My point is
simply that some of the bath-water will probably be used even after the focus
on the baby has waned. Perhaps a religion is like a slug in that both move
slowly and are not apt to change quickly, and yet both can exist for a very
long time.
[1] Here
I’m relying on ch. 12 of my book, “God’s
Gold.” In that chapter, I contend that religion overreaches in claiming
history for itself. For a religion to use history as a sort of anchor is to
make a category mistake.
[2]
David Brooks, “The
Post-Trump Era,” The New York Times,
March 25, 2016. Brooks is drawing from Kuhn’s text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
