John Stuart Mill long ago issued a warning regarding the need to defend “religion:”

The utility of religion did not need to be asserted until the arguments for its truth had in a great measure ceased to convince. People must either have ceased to believe, or have ceased to rely on the belief of others, before they could take that inferior ground of defence without a consciousness of lowering what they were endeavouring to raise. (The utility of religion)

In yesterday’s short article on the moral animal in the NYT, Jonathan Sacks does lower what he is endeavoring to raise, or at least claim as a sort of permanent walking stick for ailing (Western) humanity. He asks why religions have lasted as long as they did: “the great faiths last milleniums.” The “s” of “milleniums” is a bit of a leap of faith in itself, as the “great faiths” are actually about two and a half millenia old. Still, let’s grant that the basis for their claim to continuity is impressive, compared to that of political systems, and follow Sacks’ reasoning. Religion, he claims in the first part of this opinion piece, would be a sort of mental utility or mechanism through which things speculatively and leisurely contemplated for a time by the prefrontal cortex might be eventually grafted deeper in our brains as the source of automatic, fast, reflex actions. One instance would be altruism. This part of the argument supposes that things don’t go the other way—as claimed by socio-biology if I understand it correctly—meaning that altruism is actually a deep-seated reflex that is given a broader, more reflexive base by moralizing humans. In any case, let’s go along for a moment and suppose this kind of utilitarian function is one of the benefits of religion. I do believe that what we call religion (a recent word in the modern acception) keeps alive the possibility of going beyond the circle of those we normally recognize as potential other selves and therefore may broaden the possibility of exercising compassion and broadening its range. But does it automate it and make it reflex? The massive failure of a thoroughly religious Europe (however “badly baptized”) not so long ago alerts us to the naïveté of such theorizing. So, when Sacks proposes that religion “binds individual into groups through habits of altruism,” and is the “most powerful community builder the world has known,” I hesitate to go along. Yes, I’m often led to think the same things regarding Christianity, Buddhism, or especially Islam at the present time when reactionary thinking stresses the destructiveness of its extreme varieties and avoids seeing its social-building side. But the cohesion of religious diatopic and diachronic communities has often enough harbored the seeds of division and conflict, for instance Christianity in the XVIth c. or European XXth c. wars. It may well be that “through the rituals we perform, the texts we read and the prayers we pray,” some thin layer of civilization is reapplied time and again to a “wild” humanity, or grafted onto it (the grafting metaphor is used in the opposite direction by Paul in the Letter to the Romans: wild stock unto domesticated). Sacks refers to Putnam’s book, American grace, in which religious communities are shown to be places “where social capital could still be found.” Social capital! That is, nodes of cooperation that appear to deny or at least delay the “creative destruction” that capitalist systems have been wreaking in all other areas of life for upwards of three centuries. I think that this social capital is paper thin.

I would like to believe that “religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age.” As said above, religion does offer resistance to egotistic, destructive behaviors, as any kind of cooperative living does. But doesn’t that correction pale in regard to the dynamics that certain religious concepts have unleashed in the past? A historical perspective on religion, or at least Judaism and Christianity, indicates that the formation of the individualism on which modern capitalism thrives owes its shape and power to the religious framing of the individual’s salvation by the likes of Paul, Augustine, and especially Luther and Calvin or their modernizers (among which I include the Reformed Judaism versions since the beginning of the of the XIXth century in Germany). In other words, one should look at the modern religious behaviors defended by Sacks in this article purely as defensive corrections of a deeper and more fundamental revolution started in the “axial” age by the likes of the prophets and their heirs, especially Jesus, and expanded in unforeseen directions. Religion is not where those waving the religious flag think it is.

To summarize: Sacks makes two feeble arguments regarding the continued relevance of religion. One is utilitarian-progressive and claims to fit the Darwinian view of human evolution (though it could be claimed the direction of the argument should be reversed). The second one is defensive. The need to raise the second argument is actually revealing of the problem entailed by the first.

What is needed is a more subtle, all-encompassing view of the continuous dynamics of humans’ theorization of their situation, across the fields of human behavior (language, instrumentalization, social grouping, and value or pricing), not simply of the so-called “religious” dimension. And a more exact appreciation of where we are. For instance, talking of “altruism:” how do we explain the massive development of modern social security and taxation systems? Isn’t that what institutional religious groupings of today need to theorize, support, and guide? Isn’t it in our taxation systems, financial mechanisms, and social institutions that altruism could truly reside? This is all too often unrecognized or conveniently compartmentalized by the professionals of rituals, texts, and prayers.

At the end of Sacks’ short article, the game is up:

The idea that society can do without it [religion] flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology. This may go to show that God has a sense of humor. It certainly shows that the free societies of the West must never lose their sense of God. (my emphasis)

This prescription is hardly convincing. Why such a narrow perspective (a capitalized, masculine, thoroughly anthropomorphized God; the West)? What is the word religion catching here, or hoping to catch? The arguments given by Sacks make it more parochial and ancillary than ever, with its cloisonné rituals, texts, prayers, and altruistic behaviors commanded from above (or below: i.e. part of our evolutionary march to domination of everything else)?