Heller on religion
The utility of religion
by Michael G. Heller
Published in Social Science Files; January 23, 2025
A detour into the topic of religion can illustrate the reasons why ‘beliefs’ rank lower in the calculations of priorities for survival than security and closure, and lower than decision making mechanisms, conventions or binding rules, and constructed identity.
The beliefs Émile Durkheim focused on were religious. As he observed, “every religion is made up of intellectual conceptions and ritual practices”. His conclusions about the nature of world religions were derived from “the beliefs and rites that make up totemic religion”. Indeed, religion comes to mind readily whenever beliefs are discussed in a historical context.
So let us briefly and realistically consider the effectuality of religion as a ‘bonding’ agent in the broadest terms that may be applicable to all historical societies. The evidence I present suggests that even in spite of the existence of spiritual beliefs and ritualistic practices, which undoubtedly do help ‘bond’ society, the substantive causes of unity or disunity in thought, purpose, and action within historical societies have lain principally in levels of satisfaction with material and sociopolitical conditions.
Whatever the context is, I suggest there are two factors of recurring significance — leadership and legitimation. Even in early societies where no person or persons ‘rules’, some individuals exert greater influence by virtue of age, sex, personality, physique, or intelligence. Even when they cannot regularly or legitimately ‘compel’ others to ‘obey’ by means of power and authority, such individuals become aware that their influence over others is greater and more peaceable when they have opportunities and abilities to harness one or more of a society’s ‘beliefs’ in support of their objectives.
However, they could not sustain this influence over a society unless their ideas and actions generated some of the desired and promised outcomes. No matter how much legitimacy is gained by claiming to act in ‘representation’ of a society’s beliefs, legitimacy will fade in the absence of proof of material or sociopolitical satisfaction.
There is a further consideration to keep in mind. True and false beliefs, and the unity gained by sharing beliefs, can be manipulated in pursuance of other goals. The goals may be entirely legitimate even if the methods and motives for them are far less so.
Moreover, the more intelligent, self-driven and sagacious a person is, the more unlikely they are to believe non-confirmable or simply ‘farfetched’ stories about ultimate causation. By the same token, the more they possess of the endowed but differential individual qualities that seem to qualify them for leadership and influence, the more likely they are to see the advantages gained by feigning a belief in commonly-accepted stories about causation — in order to legitimise their proposals.
There is, in reality, no way of knowing whether a belief is believed, whether it is an insurance policy against the possibility of truth, or whether it is perfidious. Our histories of society reveal that proclaimed beliefs may be highly efficacious for leadership and influence regardless of authenticity and credibility.
There is no doubt that shared spiritual belief and ritualistic practices can be highly efficacious for ‘bonding’. So too for ‘binding’, if Penance and Judgement are included in the evolved practice. But, here also, there is a downside to consider.
It is possible that societies with little if any religion but with average intelligence quotient distributions would have spent less time ritualising for good fortune, rain and abundance, and more time engaged in study of ecosystems and natural causalities.
Early humans studied and discussed interactions between weather, soil, and cultivation, the optimal methods of harvesting and husbandry, the behavioural characteristics of favoured animal prey, and optimal materials and methods for structuring shelter. They had to do so to subsist and stay safe. Rational inquisitiveness about the forces operating in the material world led to productivity gains, and may have curbed the need and desire for magical explanations about the causes and consequences of satisfying subsistence, safety, and shelter.
Durkheim’s arguments about the evolutionary efficacy of world religions were based on studies of aboriginal proxy-primitive societies. Such societies remain in most parts of the world ritualistic, intellectually constrained by the narrow range of their knowledge of true causation, and developmentally frozen in life conditions that date back countless millennia.
In spite of its undoubted comparative advantage for instrumental purposes of social unity, and socially advantageous aspects of the pursuit of personal salvation, religion has not, in comparative terms, been a fitness-enhancing feature of social evolution.
The evolutionary innovations in governance that I focus on can all be explained in purely secular terms. If the epistemic correlations suggested by the developmental stasis of aboriginal societies contain but the merest grain of truth then we should be cautious about evolutionary claims made on behalf of the efficacy of religious beliefs.
Aboriginal societies were leapfrogged in cognitive and socioeconomic terms by societies in which religion was subservient to materialistic and sociopolitical imperatives of stable human social ordering. Progressive kinds of evolutionary change in societies—such as those that enabled agriculture and thriving city polities with markets and legal infrastructure—occurred in spite of religion, or by a subordination or cooption of religion to functions of political theatre and legitimation.
There was a time not so long ago when a religion could become a multinational ‘software state’ whose ministers purveyed coding programs for divine absolutist governance throughout entire continents. Such quasi-commercial offshore religious corporations escaped all control, usurped and surpassed all polities, becoming hyper-efficient machineries for bonding and binding across borders, combining wealth, soft power and expertise in dogma with an unassailable bureaucracy for storytelling and myth making.
In time there was a counter-reaction. Institutionalised separations of the praxis of religion from the praxis of governance restored the predominant historical patterns of faith in the efficacy of sociated decision making, which seeks to balance-and-combine personality, intelligence, rationalism, reckoning, rules, rightness, and representation in devising sustainable and secular techniques for maintaining unity and social order.
There can be no doubt that in every age the firmest foundations for societies have been material and sociopolitical satisfactions.
The Feast of the Gods by Giovanni Bellini then Titian, completed 1529, Italy