I was a very religious child and despite my Catholic upbringing I always tended to see beauty in other religions as well and despite being an atheist now I am still fascinated by religions, most recently by Taoism and hunter-gatherer spirituality, which stresses the unity of humans and nature and which we can find nowadays in ecological sustainability thinking. One thing that all religions have in common is that they help their followers to find meaning in the world. Apart from that, they have sometimes precious little in common, some religions even lacking the notion of supernatural beings. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously described religion as a 'cultural system' composed of myths, rituals, symbols and beliefs created by humans as a way of giving our individual and collective lives a sense of meaning.
Religions as cultural phenomena have incredible power to shape societies. Hinduism in India favours the caste system, had Buddhism prevailed in India it would long have ceased to exist. Buddhism is built on the belief that all men are created equal. This is why Buddhism rejects the caste system. The Buddha was a fervent believer in the qualities a human had to offer, and not their caste.This kind of fierce egalitarianism can otherwise only be found in hunter-gatherer societies and I have argued that many religious founders had hunter-gatherer genes or were hunter-gatherer types (including Jesus and Muhammad). The caste system, on the other hand, is part of Hinduism itself, which is an amalgam of a herder (Yamnaya) and local farmer religions.
From an evolutionary point of view, early farmers would have valued conformity (including obedience to authority) and tradition. We can see such farmer values in Chinese Confucianism, whereas Taosim would be based on hunter-gatherer values.
A religion can change its culture. Judaism started out as a herder religion, with a focus on achievement and group identity by worshipping only one god, which makes the religion highly ethnocentric and gives it certain rights over other peoples. The traditional religion of the Maasai pastoralists from East Africa, for example, maintains that the Supreme God Ngai has chosen them to herd all cattle in the world, and this belief has been used to justify stealing from other tribes. Similarly, the god of the Old Testament gave the Israelites the right to conquer the Canaanite tribes. Starting with Moses, the Abrahamic religion increasingly becomes a farmer religion with countless rules and taboos and a strong focus on obedience and conformity. Jesus Christ brought this religion into the hunter-gatherer spectrum, with a focus on universal fairness and egalitarianism (including towards women and children).
During the Middle Ages, the Christian church moved firmly back into “farmerland”, which had a strong hierarchy and little tolerance for people with differing views (heretics). By the end of the Middle Ages there were plenty of people who were fed up with the Catholic church and who wanted to go back to the original hunter-gatherer values Christianity spread. Thus, the Reformation was born. It spread mostly northwards, where more freedom-loving forager and herder types live than in southern Europe.
The Reformation spawned more than 45,000 denominations globally, many of which are as oppositional as Buddhism and Hinduism, even among those who came to America to seek religious freedom. The Puritans had clearly strong farmer values. Colin Woodard writes in his 2011 book American Nations:
While other colonies welcomed all comers, the Puritans forbade anyone to settle in their colony who failed to pass a test of religious conformity. Dissenters were banished. Quakers were disfigured for easy identification, their nostrils slit, their ears cut off, or their faces branded with the letter H for “heretic.” Puritans doled out death sentences for infractions such as adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, sodomy, and even teenage rebellion.
Ironically, by doing so the Puritans were quite similar to the Catholics (Inquisition) from who they wanted to distance themselves. The denomination that was probably closest to early Christianity were the Quakers, who were extremely high on hunter-gatherer values:
Quakers spurned the social conventions of the day, refusing to bow or doff their hats to social superiors or to take part in formal religious services of any sort. They rejected the authority of church hierarchies, held women to be spiritually equal to men, and questioned the legitimacy of slavery. From its inception in the 1680s, the Midlands was a tolerant, multicultural, multilingual civilization populated by families of modest means—many of them religious—who desired mostly that their government and leaders leave them in peace.
The Presbyterians, who originated in Scotland, had a religious culture that was much closer to that of the Old Testament:
Living amid constant upheaval, many Borderlanders embraced a Calvinist religious tradition—Presbyterianism—that held that they were God’s chosen people, members of a biblical nation sanctified in blood and watched over by a wrathful Old Testament deity. Suspicious of outside authority of any kind, the Borderlanders valued individual liberty and personal honor above all else, and were happy to take up arms to defend either.
Presbyterian government is by councils of elders. This is also the form of governance often found in egalitarian pastoralists, which when in contact with farming population can take on hierarchical forms of political structure in some pastoral societies, including those based on religious elites, an age-based gerontocracy, patron-client or slave-based tribute systems.
In fact, while the Quakers were the first to oppose slavery, Presbyterians often were among the last to defend it. Alabama minister, the Reverend Fred A. Ross wrote:
“Man south of the Equator—in Asia, Australia, Oceanica, America, especially Africa—is inferior to his Northern brother,” Ross wrote in his 1857 opus, Slavery Ordained of God. “Slavery is of God, and [should] continue for the good of the slave, the good of the master, the good of the whole American family.”
Religions are rarely influenced and dominated by one of the cultures, but rather represent a compromise and a way of living together for all people. And of course, religions can change their culture. European evangelical protestants were typically the most liberal people at their time, with conservatives sticking to Catholicism. Evangelical Protestantism has become the most conservative religious culture in the States.
For more on using the forager-farmer framework in analysing cultures check out my book:
The Three Cultures that Create Civilization
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BGF5P38J
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