Religion and State

First, I admit to proselytizing for an idea about religion as I have done in the past. I am not proselytizing for any particular religion nor atheism. However, I am a strong believer in the separation of church and state. Today as yesterday, the struggle continues all over the world to reach this ideal. With that preliminary out of the way, permit me to proselytize a little and argue a point.

Pascal Boyer has done some of the most exciting recent work regarding the nature of religion. He grounds his ideas about religion in research coming from the cognitive sciences. Two of his short articles give a nice summary of his research and conclusions: Why Is Religion Natural?, in the Skeptical Inquirer, and Religious thought and behavior as by-products of brain function (link to PDF document) in the journal TRENDS in Cognitive Science. Both articles cover much of the same territory. His book Religion Explained is not only a break in the traditional discussion of the nature of religious belief, but also a masterful exposition of research in the field and his conclusions from this research.

I will not attempt to summarize his position since has he has already done that in the two short articles I cited. I do want to discuss his conclusion. In Why Is Religion Natural he concludes:

Taking all this into account, it would seem that the "sleep of reason" interpretation of religion is less than compelling. It is quite clear that explicit religious belief requires a suspension of the sound rules according to which most scientists evaluate evidence. But so does most ordinary thinking, of the kind that sustains our commonsense intuitions about the surrounding environment. More surprising, religious notions are not at all a separate realm of cognitive activity. They are firmly rooted in the deepest principles of cognitive functioning. First, religious concepts would not be salient if they did not violate some of our most entrenched intuitions (e.g., that agents have a position in space, that live beings grow old and die, etc.). Second, religious concepts would not subsist if they did not confirm many intuitive principles. Third, most religious norms and emotions are parasitic upon systems that create very similar norms (e.g., moral intuitions) and emotions (e.g., a fear of invisible contaminants) in non-religious contexts.

In this sense, religion is vastly more "natural" than the "sleep of reason" argument would suggest. People do not adhere to concepts of invisible ghosts or ancestors or spirits because they suspend ordinary cognitive resources, but rather because they use these cognitive resources in a context for which they were not designed in the first place. However, the "tweaking" of ordinary cognition that is required to sustain religious thought is so small that one should not be surprised if religious concepts are so widespread and so resistant to argument. To some extent, the situation is similar to domains where science has clearly demonstrated the limits or falsity of our common intuitions. We now know that solid objects are largely made up of empty space, that our minds are only billions of neurons firing in ordered ways, that some physical processes can go backwards in time, that species do not have an eternal essence, that gravitation is a curvature of space-time. Yet even scientists go through their daily lives with an intuitive commitment to solid objects being full of matter, to people having non-physical minds, to time being irreversible, to cats being essentially different from dogs, and to objects falling down because they are heavy.

In a sense, the cognitive study of religion ends up justifying a common intuition, best expressed by Jonathan Swift's dictum that "you do not reason a man out of something he was not reasoned into." The point of studying this scientifically is to show to what extent we can expect religious notions to be stable and salient in human cultures, not just now but for a long time to come.

Should something approximating Boyer’s theory be true, it has very important things to say about the struggle for the separation of church and state.

The United States, which claims to uphold the ideal of separation of church and state, criticizes and battles fundamentalist Islam over this issue. Yet in the United States many religious fundamentalists do not hold that ideal and actively subvert this American tradition. Many would introduce religion and supernatural explanations into the teaching of science, while maintaining the United States is falling behind the rest of the world in science education. Public funding continues to increase for faith-based organizations which discriminate in their employment practices, and also in the distribution of their aid based upon religious belief and personal lifestyle. The United States intervenes for Rahman in his legal fight in Afghanistan based on the principle of separation of church and state, while its leaders, such as President Bush, push for an increasing role for certain religions in governing the country.

Taking Boyer’s advice to heart, that religious belief will be around for a long time, we see the war for separation of church and state will not be won by debating the truth of religious belief. The war will be won by convincing everyone that respect and tolerance for all religious belief via the separation of church and state is the better and safest course for everyone.

The rise of weapons of mass destruction has made this a struggle between life and death. If the United States wants to be a leader for making this ideal universal, it must embrace that ideal at home, and clean up its house before anyone will take it seriously.

Some forces supporting religious bigotry and intolerance in the United States will not be convinced by persuasive argument. That makes protection of the separation of church and state all the more imperative. The cost of defeat will be destruction, tyranny, and death.

The primary issue is not over the truth of religion, but religion’s role in governing the state.