Jack Miles is the general editor of The Norton Anthology of World Religions which consists of six volumes each edited by a specialist in those religion traditions. He was asked to write a general introduction and therefore faced the problem of defining religion.
1. An academic definition would have been an imposition on six associate editors, each far more learned about their traditions than Miles.
2. Various competing academic theories of religion defined the word quite differently; no theory, no definition, has acquired universal acceptance.
3. Instead, Miles gave a very commonsense modern notion of religion, however academically objectionable, that would be acceptable to English readers in North America and Europe.
4. He contrasted this modern Western definition with how religion was experienced in antiquity as well as at the present in many cultures around the world by many people.
5. He constructed as plausible a history of the modern notion of religion as he could manage, stretching back to its very beginning in Christianity and forward to the twentieth-first century. The result was an origin story of modern religion.
The general introduction was recently issued as a separate volume Religion as We Know It: An Origin Story. The following Commonweal article was adapted from that work.
For those who do not have access to Commonweal I have outlined the main points is a slightly rearranged fashion below, along with my critique in italics. Direct quotations form Miles are placed in boxes.
Early in my introduction to The Norton Anthology of World Religions, the reader encounters the following deliberately casual and unchallenging sentence: What is religion? The word exists in the English language, and people have some commonsense notion of what it refers to. Most understand it as one kind of human activity standing alongside other kinds, such as business, politics, warfare, art, law, sport, or science. |
When he wrote the introduction to the Anthology, Miles assumed that a majority of Americans valued pluralism and would appreciate a work that described many different religions. Ten years later at the reissuing of his introduction, he has come to recognize that not only do some people not value all religions some challenge of commonsense notion of religion. At lectures he had meet questioners who expressed the notion that Judaism was not a religion but a way of life, that in religion colors all aspects of life in India, and that Native Americans do not see religion as a separate aspect of life as other Americans do.
Through most of world history, in most parts of the world, what we are accustomed to call religion, ethnicity, and culture have been inextricable parts of a single whole. What makes the everyday American understanding of religion objectionable when extended to cultures very different from the American or European can be traced to the phrase “one kind of human activity alongside other kinds.” This ostensibly innocuous phrase has an explosive, disruptive potential because it asserts that religion stands indeed alongside the other activities mentioned—in other words, that it is separable from and distinguishable from them. But this is just the assertion that turns out to be objectionable when applied to “religions” that are practiced in a way or in a context that makes them indistinguishable and inseparable from business, politics, warfare, law, and so forth down a familiar list of human activities, not to speak of such larger background realities as language, calendar, marriage, diet, and nationality. |
Western Civilization, shaped by Christianity, appears to be an exception to the general rule that religion is inseparable from other aspects of life. Well, Christianity was shaped not only by Judaism but also by the Greco-Roman civilization where it initially grew.
How did Christianity begin to become an exception to this general rule? On the one hand, it appropriated a set of Jewish religious ideas—including monotheism, revelation, covenant, scripture, sin, repentance, forgiveness, salvation, prophecy, messianism, and apocalypticism—without adopting the rest of the Jewish way of life. On the other hand, it universalized these Jewish religious ideas, creating a new social entity, the church, through which non-Jews could be initiated into an enlarged version of the ancestral Jewish covenant with God. |
Miles says that a Jew could become a Christian without abandoning Judaism. However, a Greek could become Christian without becoming Jewish. Greeks, Egyptians, Armenians, etc. did not have to abandon their ethnicities to become Christians.
While Miles identifies a new social entity, the church, as a key element in this segregation of Christianity from the rest of society and culture, his primary emphasis is upon religious culture in the form of ideas. As a social scientist I would emphasize the large role of social institutions. It is these more than ideas that segregate people from the rest of society.
In this article Miles does not say anything of the role of prophet who mediates revelation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He does not say anything about the Bible and Koran as written summaries of revelation. He also does not say anything about the Synagogue as a precursor of the Church. Prophets, scriptures and assemblies are all social institutions which separate certain aspects of human life from other aspects
An important foundation for the Jewish Diaspora and Christian organization of religion was the Hellenistic organization of civic life. After Alexander Greek language and educational aspects of Greek culture became the foundation of economic and administrative life in the cities surrounding the Eastern Mediterranean. This educational culture which was separate from Temple cultures allowed for a variety of Temples and gods.
Within this framework Jews organized their religious community around the Synagogue with a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek Septuagint. Greek educational culture gave prominence to philosophy. Now various philosophies were ways of life rather that the abstract ways of thinking that are now present in higher education. These ways of life could be seen as the beginning of secular spirituality organized around education rather than temple worship and revelation. Both Judaism and Christianity interacted with these various philosophies at various times and places/
First, the Jews who founded Christianity began most clearly to abstract the mentioned set of “religious ideas” from the rest of the Jewish way of life in the process of admitting non-Jews to their revised and enlarged sense of the Jewish covenant with God. Yet the embrace by so many non-Jews of these originally Jewish ideas almost certainly had the effect over time of severing those ideas not just from the rest of the Jews’ way of life but also from the rest of anyone’s way of life. To be sure, an almost equally powerful tendency toward reintegration would repeatedly bring about the fusion of Christian identity with the way of life of one nation or another, even one empire or another. Nonetheless a consequential severing took place in principle and could reassert itself at any time. |
Unfortunately, Miles does not explain the reasons for this almost equally powerful tendency toward reintegration. Certainly, a major source was the tendency of rulers to use religion as well as education as instruments to organize and govern society, especially in the form of imperialism, i.e. a military occupation followed by co-opting the local governing classes of various cities, and tribes.
Second, the act of abstracting Jewish religious ideas from the rest of a rich and complex Jewish way of life had the tacit effect of defining the rest of that way of life as somehow not religious. This distinction when first made did not amount to a full-fledged distinction between the religious and the secular, but it laid the egg from which that immensely influential later distinction would hatch. Secularization has been a profoundly transformative cultural process, and yet the transformation has necessarily reinforced the originally Christian notion of religion as separable from the range of other pursuits whose autonomy secularization has so insisted on. |
Third, the early-modern study of world religions beyond the West was at first essentially the study of those religions naïvely taken as exotic versions of a reality whose domestic version was Christianity. That is, it was the uncritical study of the non-Christian religions of the world as if they all routinely understood themselves to be, like Christianity, separate domains open for adoption by any sincerely interested party. In more recent centuries, more sophisticated students of religion have quite successfully challenged this naïve assumption. Thanks to a substantial academic literature, a more integralist understanding has taken hold which posits that religion, culture, and ethnicity are de facto often found in a fusion so seamless and taken for granted that its practitioners scarcely even have a name for it. |