4. The Moral Function of Religion
Religion and government—Tabu—Sexual tabus—The lag of religion—Secularization
Religion supports morality by two means chiefly: myth and tabu Myth creates the supernatural creed through which celestial sanctions may be given to forms of conduct socially (or sacerdotally) desirable; heavenly hopes and terrors inspire the individual to put up with restraints placed upon him by his masters and his group. Man is not naturally obedient, gentle, or chaste; and next to that ancient compulsion which finally generates conscience, nothing so quietly and continuously conduces to these uncongenial virtues as the fear of the gods. The institutions of property and marriage rest in some measure upon religious sanctions, and tend to lose their vigor in ages of unbelief. Government itself, which is the most unnatural and necessary of social mechanisms, has usually required the support of piety and the priest, as clever heretics like Napoleon and Mussolini soon discovered; and hence “a tendency to theocracy is incidental to all constitutions.”141 The power of the primitive chief is increased by the aid of magic and sorcery; and even our own government derives some sanctity from its annual recognition of the Pilgrims’ God.
The Polynesians gave the word tabu to prohibitions sanctioned by religion. In the more highly developed of primitive societies such tabus took the place of what under civilization became laws. Their form was usually negative: certain acts and objects were declared “sacred” or “unclean”; and the two words meant in effect one warning: untouchable. So the Ark of the Covenant was tabu, and Uzzah was struck dead, we are told, for touching it to save it from falling.142 Diodorus would have us believe that the ancient Egyptians ate one another in famine, rather than violate the tabu against eating the animal totem of the tribe.143 In most primitive societies countless things were tabu; certain words and names were never to be pronounced, and certain days and seasons were tabu in the sense that work was forbidden at such times. All the knowledge, and some of the ignorance, of primitive men about food were expressed in dietetic tabus; and hygiene was inculcated by religion rather than by science or secular medicine.
The favorite object of primitive tabu was woman. A thousand superstitions made her, every now and then, untouchable, perilous, and “unclean.” The moulders of the world’s myths were unsuccessful husbands, for they agreed that woman was the root of all evil; this was a view sacred not only to Hebraic and Christian tradition, but to a hundred pagan mythologies. The strictest of primitive tabus was laid upon the menstruating woman; any man or thing that touched her at such times lost virtue or usefulness.144 The Macusi of British Guiana forbade women to bathe at their periods lest they should poison the waters; and they forbade them to go into the forests on these occasions, lest they be bitten by enamored snakes.145 Even childbirth was unclean, and after it the mother was to purify herself with laborious religious rites. Sexual relations, in most primitive peoples, were tabu not only in the menstrual period but whenever the woman was pregnant or nursing. Probably these prohibitions were originated by women themselves, out of their own good sense and for their own protection and convenience; but origins are easily forgotten, and soon woman found herself “impure” and “unclean.” In the end she accepted man’s point of view, and felt shame in her periods, even in her pregnancy. Out of such tabus as a partial source came modesty, the sense of sin, the view of sex as unclean, asceticism, priestly celibacy, and the subjection of woman.
Religion is not the basis of morals, but an aid to them; conceivably they could exist without it, and not infrequently they have progressed against its indifference or its obstinate resistance. In the earliest societies, and in some later ones, morals appear at times to be quite independent of religion; religion then concerns itself not with the ethics of conduct but with magic, ritual and sacrifice, and the good man is defined in terms of ceremonies dutifully performed and faithfully financed. As a rule religion sanctions not any absolute good (since there is none), but those norms of conduct which have established themselves by force of economic and social circumstance; like law it looks to the past for its judgments, and is apt to be left behind as conditions change and morals alter with them. So the Greeks learned to abhor incest while their mythologies still honored incestuous gods; the Christians practised monogamy while their Bible legalized polygamy; slavery was abolished while dominies sanctified it with unimpeachable Biblical authority; and in our own day the Church fights heroically for a moral code that the Industrial Revolution has obviously doomed. In the end terrestrial forces prevail; morals slowly adjust themselves to economic invention, and religion reluctantly adjusts itself to moral change.* The moral function of religion is to conserve established values, rather than to create new ones.
Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a “conflict between science and religion.” Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and—after some hesitation—the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.