Are Religions Creeds?
The Map and the Territory
Doug Clinton argues that religions are powered by passionate loyalty to non-consensus ideas. When religions become consensus, they decay, as they no longer inspire passionate loyalty. Zealotry thrives in opposition.
As a matter of sociology and anthropology, Clinton’s argument confirms why liberal religion is generally on the decline. Religion needs to be counter-cultural or else it risks being redundant. The more non-consensus a religion is, the more “differentiated” it is. Thus, “extremism” always wins more devoted followers than centrism.
The difference between a cult and a religion, says Clinton, is not a matter of substance, but size—religions are cults that scale.
At heart, it’s true, every community takes certain things to be true about the world. But are shared beliefs the ties that bind? Or is this a Protestant framework that biases the study of religion, following Luther’s anti-Catholic reduction of religion to “faith alone.”
In Jewish thought, belief matters a great deal. The Mishna teaches that those who do not believe in the resurrection of the dead lose their share in the World to Come. Maimonides claims thirteen principles of faith that each Jew must believe. But, by and large, it is observance of the law—not belief—that determines communal belonging. It is possible to be pluralistic and elastic about creed where behavior is the thing that counts.
Of course, belief and practice are inseparable. To use Clinton’s example, it would make little sense for someone to short Tesla stock unless she also believed it was over-valued. But this is where traditional religion, or some expressions of it, diverge from the modern examples of “financial religion” that Clinton cites.
You probably need to believe in God to pray, though not necessarily. One might pray for the ability to believe. One need not believe the Sea of Reeds literally parted to care about the Exodus story and feel compelled to remember it.
One reason literalism may appeal is precisely because it signals loyalty—the more absurd and counter-cultural (i.e, “anti-scientific”) an idea—the more its adherents demonstrate their willingness to martyr their brains for the cause—either openly lying or else self-deceiving for the sake of what they take to matter. But it’s a mistake to conflate the professed beliefs of religionists with the deeper and often implicit beliefs that animate that profession.
The map (creed) is not the territory (the reason one chooses to follow it).
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