What is "religion?"
...It's both less and more than you think
Religio—from the Latin root ligare, to bind or tie—as it was used in ancient Rome, meant “what binds us together”
It’s the original sense of the word religion; the Romans contrasted it with superstitio, meaning the “unreasonable ideas or beliefs” (of those who were not Romans)
So at the beginnings of what we have come to call ‘the Western world” we find the division between us and them made on the basis of what people believe, along with the practices and rituals that grow up around human beliefs
Only humans can believe; that is, we are the only animals with imagination: we alone are able to picture possibilities, events, outcomes, and connections
Thus it is uniquely human to invest our experience with meaning: we imagine events to have causes, to be intended or even perpetrated
In other words, beliefs propagate a realm of meaning for things; they give meaning to what otherwise is simply a series: one thing after another
Another human trait—related to imagination—is ranking: we privilege our practices over those of others, just as the ancient Romans took their practices and rituals to be “reasonable” and justified, while others’ lives were governed by superstitions, forms of fanaticism
George Washington, in the Farewell Address that he wrote upon the end of his, the first presidency of the United States, says: “The name American… [designates] with slight shades of difference, the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles.”
Washington clearly echoes the ancient Roman conviction that we are bound together by what we believe; and what he meant by “the same religion” was Protestant Christianity
It’s worth recalling that the colonization of the western hemisphere began with the migration from England of religious nonconformists
Once established along the eastern seaboard, these rebel migrants set to work enforcing conformity to the various religious practices they’d brought with them
It’s a corollary of our ranking things that we set about discriminating against those who don’t conform…
But I digress: we were talking about the origins of religion: it begins as a description of one group’s practices and rituals
The Romans had many and their observation was sustained by training each generation in their proper performance
This is a crucial point: practices that are invented by humans are historical; that is, they are affected by time
If they are not taught to the young they cannot last
Just as crucially, the young must agree to perpetuate the practices they are taught or, once again, the practices cannot last
These points hold not only for religion, but also for morality (see March 2021 entry): whatever is customary can be sustained only by the willingness of people to continue the practices
So we arrive at our first conclusion: religions are sets of practices adopted and sustained by a population
There are further conclusions to be reached; let’s begin to develop them in Part II